MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pizlonator | 2025-10-02 00:35:35+00:00
Fil-C absolutely does fix uninitialized memory.

It’s on my list to solve division. It’s easy to do and also not super important for the security angle that I’m addressing. But with doing precisely to provide clarity to these kinds of discussions.

I’ve mostly tackled signed overflow. I’ve fixed all the cases where signed overflow would let you bypass Fil-C’s own bounds checks. It’s not hard to fix the remaining cases.

In short: any remaining UB in Fil-C is just a bug to be fixed rather than a policy decision.

The reason why C has UB today is policy and memory safety.

Its a goal of Fil-C to address memory safety violations by panicking because:

- That’s the most secure outcome.

- That’s the most frantically compatible with existing C/C++ code, allowing me to do things like Pizlix (memory safety Linux userland)
by treyd | 2025-10-02 00:35:40+00:00
I haven't experienced this. Rust's build system allows you to automate most of the pain in building/bundling those dependencies, so it's just up to the builder to have the right headers (if they're not bundled). That makes it no worse than meson C/C++ builds.

In Go, it doesn't have any of that so it depends on the end builder of the binary to be aware of all the C dependencies and manually manage integrating the cgo configuration into their build process.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-02 00:36:59+00:00
>The majority of Americans think that the border situation/immigration has improved since Trump was elected

Okay, I ask again. What benefit has he provided for the people? Did the jobs come back? Is it safer to walk on the streets? has land value increased? Are groceries less scarce?

Border patrol seems to have long forgotten what the end goal is for the americans, and no one can seem to answer thta question anymore (for what I see are clearly obvious reasons).

>Trump also appointed the judges that got Roe overturned

Same question. Is illegal abortion improving the lives of everyday citizens.

>but Republicans don't approve of the ACA

Same question. Where's that money going that benefits the americans?

This is the whole issue. We can't point to lives being improved, only fears that were manufactured by the same rich elite being quelled. A society powered by fear isn't a democracy.
by mjrpes | 2025-10-02 00:38:30+00:00
Access's database is fairly limited and prone to corruption, especially using in a (local) network setup. The better solution would be to have real backend database and use ODBC to sync in data to Excel and Access. Maybe back in 1995 it made more sense but that's before my time.

Access was pretty amazing on its own back in its day, ignoring its multi-user limitations. It glued together a relational database, visual query builder, GUI/Form Builder, and reporting. You could create forms with sub forms that linked tables together. Also had a datasheet view. All of this without touching VBA code, but VBA was there when you needed it.
by DocTomoe | 2025-10-02 00:38:46+00:00
Oh, usenet was as strongly or weakly moderated as you wanted it to be - the moderation was done by yourself. This is much preferable to some underpaid kid with questionable understanding on how the world works deciding what reaches your eyes for you.

I remember the time when it was en vouge for subreddits to ban people for participating in subreddits they personally disagree with (automated, regardless of how that participation took place).

You cannot have a free exchange of ideas with a centralised thought police. You can only have truly free communication if you yourself decide what you read, and what you block out.
by mericson | 2025-10-02 00:39:50+00:00
Years ago, I used to use a program called FolderShare, which was later purchased by Microsoft and renamed umpteen times to match the branding strategy of the moment.

I’ve always been amused by how the Wikipedia article starts off: “Windows Live Mesh (formerly known as Windows Live FolderShare, Live Mesh, and Windows Live Sync) is a discontinued free-to-use Internet-based file synchronization application by Microsoft …”
by dwattttt | 2025-10-02 00:39:58+00:00
You mandate it like you mandate anything else in C. You don't.

You pick C because you want a language that doesn't require a variable to be initialised before mutably referencing it, and you write your defer statements or "destructors" defensively, expecting that a variable could be in any state when it comes time to dispose of it.

Or if you find that unacceptable, you accept that C isn't the language you want. There's many other choices available.
by treyd | 2025-10-02 00:40:44+00:00
> Literally just not being able to easily and efficiently express interior mutability completely changes how you design both code and APIs.

The issue is that fundamentally interior mutability is hard to reason about. It requires a lot more temporal reasoning to make sense of and ensure the safety of. Leaning into the type system Rust has does make interior mutability harder when you have "temporally based" safety arguments. It's a lot easier to reason about correctness in the model Rust uses.

Have you looked at the godot-rust bindings? They've gone very far to make the Godot object system work well going between C++ Godot code and Rust. I would love to see that model adapted to Gtk.
by sergiotapia | 2025-10-02 00:40:52+00:00
>The winners will not be the ones who maintain the biggest vector databases, but the ones who design the smartest agents to traverse abundant context and connect meaning across documents.

So if one were building say a memory system for an AI chat bot, how would you save all the data related to a user? Mother's name, favorite meals, allergies? If not a Vector database like pinecone, then what? Just a big .txt file per user?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-02 00:40:54+00:00
I agree, we're doomed. Yes, I see even in this post I see people cheering on the closing of hospitals and the burdens of workes increasing just because billionaires don't want to pay taxes. So I can't by default assume that "they'll get backpay anyway it doesn't matter" isn't uyet another dismissal.

I also agree. We're doomed at this rate.
by jcranmer | 2025-10-02 00:41:38+00:00
I must disagree.

The most important thing to understand about peasant farmers is that their economic prospects are tied to the availability of land, and land is a finite resource of which there is not enough and no more can be had. Most pre-modern societies are set up to extract every possible extra amount of food produced, which basically means that in times of plenty, you get more people who have no work available for them (which means they up and leave to the cities, the only places which have the sufficient labor pool).

> People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant.

Oooh boy. There's a vast array of different socioeconomic statuses varying through time and space, but broadly speaking, most peasants did not own their own land, and even the majority of people who did own their own land did not own enough to feed themselves from their own land. And even if you did own your land and enough of it to feed your family, you probably still need to borrow the plow and oxen teams, and other farming implements, from your local lord. And since you are perennially on borderline starvation, you're not independent and self-reliant, you're entirely reliant on the village communal support to help you get through those times when your fields were a little bare.

Pretending that medieval peasantry was some sort of idyllic lifestyle is exactly the kind of Victorian-era fantasy you're decrying.

What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability. Peasant life may suck, but at least you knew what you were in for. If you moved to a city (let alone further away), you left your support network, you left everybody you knew, maybe for a shot at a better life... but with essentially no recourse if anything failed. Or you could stay, where things wouldn't get better, but they also wouldn't get worse. Unless there were a major calamity and staying wasn't an option.
by davidmckayv | 2025-10-02 00:41:59+00:00
This glosses over a fundamental scaling problem that undermines the entire argument. The author's main example is Claude Code searching through local codebases with grep and ripgrep, then extrapolates this to claim RAG is dead for all document retrieval. That's a massive logical leap.

Grep works great when you have thousands of files on a local filesystem that you can scan in milliseconds. But most enterprise RAG use cases involve millions of documents across distributed systems. Even with 2M token context windows, you can't fit an entire enterprise knowledge base into context. The author acknowledges this briefly ("might still use hybrid search") but then continues arguing RAG is obsolete.

The bigger issue is semantic understanding. Grep does exact keyword matching. If a user searches for "revenue growth drivers" and the document discusses "factors contributing to increased sales," grep returns nothing. This is the vocabulary mismatch problem that embeddings actually solve. The author spent half the article complaining about RAG's limitations with this exact scenario (his $5.1B litigation example), then proposes grep as the solution, which would perform even worse.

Also, the claim that "agentic search" replaces RAG is misleading. Recent research shows agentic RAG systems embed agents INTO the RAG pipeline to improve retrieval, they don't replace chunking and embeddings. LlamaIndex's "agentic retrieval" still uses vector databases and hybrid search, just with smarter routing.

Context windows are impressive, but they're not magic. The article reads like someone who solved a specific problem (code search) and declared victory over a much broader domain.
by jrowen | 2025-10-02 00:42:18+00:00
Then how do we know that Freud was "wrong" or "inaccurate" or "just made up" or "a fraud"?

It's definitely a lot more murky and there are massive gaps in our understanding between biology and neuroscience and psychology, and fundamental differences and limits on methodology that we may never surpass, but his work still has its place on the timeline of progress does it not?

What about something like phrenology? It's easy to laugh at it now and consider its proponents charlatans or lunatics but at a time it was considered a worthy avenue of exploration, that turned out to be a dead end, but that's part of science.
by Analemma_ | 2025-10-02 00:43:27+00:00
Yeah, I'm always annoyed at how blasé people are about these transition periods, where they seem to think the ends justify any means, and any chaos which happens as a result of the means.

You see this all the time when some new technology, especially an information disintermediation technology, gets compared to the printing press. "The printing press broke the monopoly on knowledge and brought Europe out of the Dark Ages!" Yeah, but first it killed millions of people in a century of warfare. Do the people in an equivalent position now get a vote, or are they acceptable casualties for the glorious hypothetical future?
by baobun | 2025-10-02 00:44:11+00:00
HN and other online forums with strangers are not equipped to give you good advice on your (apparently primarily mental) illness. Even if they say so.

Psychosomatics, paranoia, and maybe schizophrenia sound like your bigger issues to me but again, I'm also just a stranger on a forum you shouldn't really be listening too much to.

> in the homeless shelter at ...

Suggestion: Edit and remove this part while you can. No need to share your detailed location in public these days. I flagged your comment but more for your own sake.

Hopefully you will somehow get to see a good and caring doctor (psychiatrist?) that can help you align your inputs, outputs, and internal processes. Be well.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-10-02 00:44:57+00:00
"This is revisionism."

Is it? I've never actually seen or heard exactly how Python became popular with survey data at many institutions. If it exists, I'd like to read it sometime.

Most languages got popular due to a specific project or product getting popular or a specific company marketing them.

I've heard it was UNIX/C, Browser/JavaScript, Sun/Java, Microsoft/many (esp C#), Google/Go, Apple/Objective-C, Apple/Swift, Ruby/Rails, and so on. I've heard variations of C++ being like this but also useful building on C ecosystem.

Some were really great at a specific thing they made easy. PHP might be like that. I don't have its history, though. Flash was definitely like that.

So, did Python have a killer app or library that caused it to take off industrially? Or did that not matter? You mentioned NumPy/SciPy in academia.
by manquer | 2025-10-02 00:45:16+00:00
You couldn’t run that on the edge though .

The point is to be reliably run it on the edge , nobody sane would want their heart rate monitor to be run via the cloud with the uptimes and reliability that come that would come with any remote service plus the extra challenges of llm inference .

The goal would be running on the edge in addition to standard rules based detection which already these machines have and add advanced pattern detection that llms can provide to reduce alert fatigue and also detect new class of complex patterns which these sensors typically don’t.
by jsnell | 2025-10-02 00:45:21+00:00
> Where I suspect LLM output won’t help much. [...] Low level infrastructure code the kind I’ve spent my whole life on

That's just wishful thinking.

First, that kind of code is one of the things that's most valuable for AI to get good on, so a lot of effort will be directed to that. More efficient low level systems help with recursive self-improvement. Writing JS frontends doesn't.

Second, systems programming is a domain with objective quality metrics that makes it a good RL target.

Third, the models are already very good in that domain. They obviously don't have perfect taste yet, so having an experienced systems programmer with a vision guiding the model will be much better than fire and forget.

When implementing a new optimisation is 10% the cost that it used to be when done manually, the tradeoff for which ones are worth implementing changes.

But in addition it's way easier to justify exploration and speculative ideas when they're so cheap to test out.
by bipopular | 2025-10-02 00:46:22+00:00
Location: United Kingdom

Remote: Available

Willing to relocate: Yes given a grace period

Technologies: Go, C, Linux admin and Free/OpenBSD admin

Resume/CV: https://h5law.com/cv.pdf

Email: harry@h5law.com

I am mainly looking for something permanent ideally firmware/driver related but I am open to working in any industry. However I don't have frontend experience.

I am experienced with decentralised systems having worked in the blockchain space for the last 3 years. But also, have extremely low-level experience with my projects I have undertook using C99 (usually without any dependencies) such as a chess engine with graphical and multiplayer (still a WIP) as well as a libc implementation (for arm and aarch64) later to be used in the following project, a bootloader, kernel and userland (currently archived while I reorganise their structure).

I am a fast learner and ready to get back to full time work.
by justupvoting | 2025-10-02 00:46:34+00:00
I hope, at least, you managed to watch the films before you had an opinion on them. Tarantino's, I mean.

The Road is not a violent or pessimistic book, tho there is violence and pessimism in it. Don't confuse the set and the setting.

Why write about, 'the worst among us'? Some art (and Cormac tottered over the line between wrought and overwrought plenty) is about finding meaning in the margins, in the edge cases. The statistical noise at the outerbands of anything might make it an impossible endeavor for meaning-making, but that's why art. You try anyway. Some writers are skilled enough to make the mundane sing and that's great, but McCarthy obviously didn't seem to care for that approach.

I think I can see why Child of God put you off enough for the thoughts of others to prevent any further effort, but I'd suggest you give him another go.

I'd save blood meridian for later tho; If you don't get too distracted by the setting of the road, it's a perfectly optimistic book.

As the poet said, something in us does not erode (free pun!)
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-02 00:46:59+00:00
Access control.

Here's a struct that maintains an invariant - say, that field a is less than field b. That invariant should be set when it is created.

You find a bug where a is greater than b. Where is the bug? With a struct, it can be anywhere in the code - any line that touches the struct. But with a (well designed) class, a and b are private, and so you only have to look at lines of code within the class. The surface area where the bug can be is much smaller.

The bigger the code base and the more well-used the class is, the more this matters.
by scottlamb | 2025-10-02 00:47:19+00:00
> The argument for using Rust instead of a memory safe implementation of C is all about performance. And that’s not a bad argument! But we should be honest about it.

I think it might also be that people mostly consider languages from the perspective of what they'd write a greenfield codebase in. And if I'm gonna pay the GC cost, I'd much rather work with language/library body that doesn't have tons of ownership idioms that are basically irrelevant with a GC. So it's not Fil-C vs Rust directly; it's Fil-C vs Go (Go wins), then Go vs Rust (more interesting decision).

But for existing large C projects that are ancient enough that running on modern hardware far outweighs the new GC cost, and that are mature/minimally maintained so the development costs for a rewrite/translation won't ever pay off in future maintenance, I think Fil-C is an intriguing option.

btw, IMO Rust has more going for it than just the borrow checker.
by _heimdall | 2025-10-02 00:49:02+00:00
That isn't the a good comparison. You are describing two pathogens that can both be found to be highly correlated to risk of lung cancer in isolation. A smoker with no known asbestos exposure is still more likely to get lung cancer than a nonsmoker, and visa versa.

I don't think anyone would argue that inflammation is a cause of heart disease. Inflammation is always a body's response to some underlying condition. The cholesterol hypothesis argues that dietary cholesterol is the important factor causing heart disease.

My argument specifically is not that inflammation causes heart disease and dietary cholesterol does not. That seems to be what you were arguing against.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-10-02 00:50:51+00:00
The idea is that users can circumvent IT policies which explicitly have not enabled or banned such products. Microsoft is hoping to sneak under the tent to enable more subscriptions directly from users if they cannot get companies to pay.

Which is a bold play. At my company, were I to try and smuggle data out to a third party-that is normally an insta-termination level offense.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-02 00:51:48+00:00
> as one of my favourite quotes (albeit that it's now a bit overused), from Miyamoto Musashi, puts it: “Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.”

From https://www.way-of-the-samurai.com/miyamoto-musashi-quotes.h... :

> Musashi did not say this. This comes from a less than accurate “interpretation” of Musashi’s life and work by D. E. Tarver who repeats several fictions and myths about Musashi (hiding under bodies for 3 days at the battle of Sekigahara etc). He includes this line, “Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie” in the final paragraph of the Fire Scroll introduction. No such Miyamoto Musashi quotes appear in the Japanese, nor in any of the credible English translations.
by munificent | 2025-10-02 00:52:25+00:00
I agree, the terminology is confusing. It is extra confusing because the intent is to capture both:

1. Different autistic people may vary in which symptoms are most severe while all still being autistic.

2. Different autistic people may vary in the overall severity of all symptoms and how much it impacts their quality of life. (At the same time, there is still a distinct cut off where you are not considered to have autism if it doesn't manifest significantly in your life.)

The latter point is why "Asperger's" is now simply lumped in with ASD. But that tends to obscure the former point which is also important.

Perhaps "cluster" would have been better, but here we are.
by viewtransform | 2025-10-02 00:53:08+00:00
<it's not like 8 million tons of soybeans per month are magically getting created in Brazil>

Brazil increase in production this year is 5.3 million metric tons. So looks like Brazil can replace US exports to China without affecting existing customers.

Brazil’s 2025/26 Soy Crop Seen Growing 3% Versus the Previous Cycle

https://www.agriculture.com/partners-brazil-s-2025-26-soy-cr...
by moregrist | 2025-10-02 00:53:41+00:00
> We expect huge swaths of non-programmers to learn R to work with data.

I’ve worked in academics and industry around biologists, chemists, physicists, statisticians, bioinformaticians, and all varieties of engineers.

I’ve never seen “huge swaths” of anyone expected to learn R for anything outside of a few niche areas in statistics and bioinformatics.

What people are expected to know is how to use a spreadsheet. What people are often given is Microsoft Excel, and essentially nothing else. A lot of companies wouldn’t dream of letting random employees install or use R or Python.

It’s not ideal. But some battles can’t be won and aren’t worth fighting. Which is why people use Excel for so many things.
by bigwheels | 2025-10-02 00:54:11+00:00
We containerized an egg, scaled to a dozen on k8s, rewrote the chicken in Rust, and still couldn’t crack PMF—turns out all we needed was a shell script.

Anyone else into pink flamin' eggs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHzVHmmHHPk&t=65s

---

Related reading:

Eggquations https://matheminutes.blogspot.com/2013/03/eggquations.html

Mathematically Designing an Egg https://konfou.xyz/docs/mathematically-designing-an-egg.pdf

Equation of Egg Shaped Curve II (Egg Shaped Curve proposed by Mr. Itou) https://nyjp07.com/index_egg_by_Itou_E.html
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-10-02 00:54:28+00:00
This was just a regular company, I just happened to be the person who was responsible for stopping the credit card testing attacks.

In this case I posted the info in our company slack, where everyone could see it. I did manage to stop the attack. As far as other action goes, that wasn't really my call, so i'm not sure if any further action was taken.

The Philippines is a notoriously corrupt country, so its likely that even if authorities there got involved, no real action would get taken, assuming those responsible for the attack had enough pesos to pay bribes.