MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kibwen | 2025-11-13 23:40:07+00:00
> Because it's not a silver bullet.

It does look like a silver bullet, actually. In the context of software engineering, "silver bullet" inevitably leads to Fred Brooks:

'"No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering" is a widely discussed paper on software engineering written by Turing Award winner Fred Brooks in 1986. Brooks argues that "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."

Reducing memory-safety vulnerabilities by 5000x compared to the prior approach is not just a silver bullet, it's an arsenal of silver bullets.

> the compilation time for code with equivalent semantics is an order of magnitude greater

The time it takes to write and run the comprehensive tests for C and Zig code to demonstrate anything even approximately in the ballpark of what Rust gives you for free is a multiple orders of magnitude greater than whatever time you spent waiting for the Rust compiler. Why care about the time it takes to compile trivially incorrect code, rather than caring about the total time it takes to produce reliable software, which is demonstrably lower for memory-safe languages like Rust?*
by Joker_vD | 2025-11-13 23:40:39+00:00
The strtoul()/strtoull() also have a somewhat strange semantics regarding the leading '-': it will apply it to the (unsigned) result, so e.g strtoul("-40", ...) happily returns 18446744073709551576.

Also, the wording of the standard suggests that using strtol()/strtoll() to parse the string representation of LONG_MIN/LLONG_MIN is UB, since it kinda has to go through un-negated LONG_MAX+1/LLONG_MAX+1 which can't be represented in the return type?
by dgacmu | 2025-11-13 23:41:20+00:00
Rust is more difficult to learn the basics of than C, but I'm not sure it's more difficult to learn to write memory-safe code in Rust than in C. It's also not clear to me it's that much harder to learn Rust than it is to learn how to write equivalently-high-level code in C++ _unless you end up in one of the areas where Rust is really hard_. But a lot of systems code doesn't end up in those areas. Some does, and then you have to go fishing for a crate that does things for you. C++ just has a lot of corners you can get sucked into, and the legacy mix of multiple generations of C++ coding styles / OO stuff makes for some really tangled messes out there.

(fwiw, I teach undergrad systems programming in C, I use Python at the startup, and I use a mix of C/C++/Rust in research.)

I would personally much prefer to use Rust for code exposed to external untrusted input than to use C. I have substantially more confidence that I would not add exploitable bugs given the same time budget.
by esafak | 2025-11-13 23:42:11+00:00
If I understand correctly, polars relies on delta-rs for Delta Lake support, and that is what does not support Deletion vectors: https://github.com/delta-io/delta-rs/issues/1094

It seems like these single-node libraries can process a terabyte on a typical machine, and you'd have have over 10TB before moving to Spark.
by Zambyte | 2025-11-13 23:43:01+00:00
Zig in spirit is essentially Go without GC. If GC is not reasonable for your usecase Zig seems like an awesome choice. Unfortunately it's probably about 5 to 10 years out from being stable enough for most people being able to write serious applications in it though (notable exceptions being Bun and Ghostty, but they have solid effort behind them keeping them up to date with Zig).
by bonsai_spool | 2025-11-13 23:43:18+00:00
> Are you unable to engage with the full context of the situation?

Absolutely. I am also able to

- Not make attacks at the person making arguments.

- Not assume that the OP's mother received nitroglycerin

> Simple logic, see if you can follow:

You are assuming facts not in evidence, buddy.

> This is malpractice.

This is the absolute definition of a straw man.
by AngryData | 2025-11-13 23:43:53+00:00
Well if what he said is true it wouldn't matter because he would have a school that profits off of training supposedly in-demand skill sets. Unless of course he is lieing and mechanics are paid like garbage but he needs someone to blame for the poor reliability of current Ford vehicles and is angry he can't get more people fixing them despite them often making below the median US wage.
by noname120 | 2025-11-13 23:44:13+00:00
As an open-source developer, is there a way to have my apps pass Gatekeeper without paying the $100/year Apple ransom and notarizing them? I think it’s the crux of the problem.

As I’m writing these lines, Homebrew has 7656 casks in the official cask tap[1]. I’m not sure exactly how many of those are unsigned but if we assume 4000 then signing them all would be an additional $400,000/year extorted by Apple from the open-source community.

Defining HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS=--no-quarantine in my shell configuration was a good way to avoid this issue without having to manually run dozens of xattr -d every time I run brew upgrade.

Now my only option left is to pull the trigger and make my system globally less secure: sudo spctl --master-disable

Unfortunately, disabling Gatekeeper doesn’t just allow unsigned apps to run: it also completely disable all verifications for signed apps: notarization checks, revocation checks, trust evaluation checks.

[1] curl https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.json | jq 'length'
by whoaoweird | 2025-11-13 23:45:17+00:00
> Ey calm down now

I don't think anyone here is not calm?

I'm suggesting the set of names to draw from is large. There's tons and tons of names that could be chosen. The of the potentially dozens or hundreds of names that are hugely influential, the first two picked were from the SS?

You could name it Neil, Alan, John, Yuri, Valentina, Katherine, Konstantin, Buzz, Mae, Sally, Sergei, Maxime, Margaret, Katherine, or Mary.

All of whom are well established critical figures in rocketry history. And not members of the SS.

> Not everything is about nazism

Of course not! But sometimes it does involve literal Nazis, in which case it's not not about nazism.
by Barrin92 | 2025-11-13 23:45:34+00:00
>life that really is that simple.

It definitely isn't. Here in Germany I could redirect you to a dozen small businesses in the trades I personally know that are starved for young people and that pay better than a decent chunk of degrees, but vocational and blue collar work even here, and this is in my experience even more common in the Anglosphere, is just deemed unattractive by a significant chunk of the workforce.

It's so bad that I know a handful of people who'd even pass the business on because their own kids didn't want to stay in the trades but go to uni.
by josephg | 2025-11-13 23:46:27+00:00
> The way it should work is that before even writing code, you design a modular acceptance system that runs full suite of tests …

Sometimes. It depends on what you’re working on.

Part of the fun challenge in writing software is that the act of programming can teach you that you’re wrong at every level. The syntax can be wrong. The algorithm you’re implementing can be wrong. The way you’re designing a module can be misguided. And you might be solving the wrong problem entirely! Like, maybe you spend weeks adding a feature to a game and it makes the game less fun! Oops!

Tests formalise beliefs about what you want your code to do, at some level of abstraction. But if those beliefs turn out to be wrong, the tests themselves become a headwind when you try and refactor. You want those early refactoring to be as easy as possible while you’re learning a problem space.

Now, some programs don’t suffer from this as much. If you’re implementing a C compiler or drop in replacement for grep, you have some clear acceptance tests that will almost certainly not change through your project’s lifecycle.

But not all problems have clear constraints like that. Sometimes you’re inventing a programming language. Or writing a game. Or making a user interface. In my opinion, problems that are fully constrained from the start are some of the least interesting to work on. Where’s the discovery?
by electroly | 2025-11-13 23:46:30+00:00
A very simple black-to-white gradient can only be, at most, 256 pixels wide before it starts banding on the majority of computers that use SDR displays. HDR only gives you a couple extra bits where each bit doubles how wide the gradient can be before it starts running out of unique color values. If the two color endpoints of the gradient are closer together, you get banding sooner. Dithering completely solves gradient banding.
by aeblyve | 2025-11-13 23:47:20+00:00
It's worth commenting to me that MeshCore performs much better than Meshtastic at scale and as an emplaced deployment. We have a very active network of about 60 nodes in the Boston area which feels similar to iMessage in deliverability and speed.

But yes, it can't realistically be compared to something like a "real" MANET system with $10k radios that can do something like 100mbps data rates. It is dramatically more accessible and deployable though.
by VHRanger | 2025-11-13 23:47:25+00:00
> A great deal of LLM-generated content shows up in comments on social media.

True, but going after classifying the source (user's commenting patterns) is a better signal than the content itself.

That said, for us (Kagi) it's a touchy area to, say, label reddit comments as slop/bots. There's no doubt we could do it better than reddit (their whole comment history is only 6TB compressed) but I doubt *reddit* would be pleased at that.

And it's a growing issue for product recommendation searches -- see [1] at last section for example on how astroturfed reddit comments on product questions trickle up to search engine results.

> Another interesting trend is false accusations of LLM use as a form of attack.

Fair again, but the question of AI slop is much more about "who is using the tool how" than the content of the output itself.

Also we're looking to stay conservative. False negatives > false positives in this space.

> And the big state actors who are known to use LLMs in misinformation campaigns are battling the US for AI supremacy and so have an incentive to attack the US on AI since it's currently in the lead.

Not wrong, we're especially going after the deluge of low effort slop, and cleaning up the internet for our users.

Highly sophisticated attacks are likely to evade detection.

> Especially if you're relying on volunteers, this seems prone to abuse in the same way, e.g. Reddit mods are.

The human labelling/review aspect is expected to stay small and from trusted users.

The reporting is wide scale, but review is and will remain closed trust based group.

[1] https://housefresh.com/beware-of-the-google-ai-salesman/
by ademking | 2025-11-13 23:47:29+00:00
This library allows you to create custom directives similar to React's "use client" or "use server". Directives are special string annotations that trigger custom transformations during the Vite build process.

You could create a "use analytics" directive that automatically injects analytics tracking code into your components, or a "use debug" directive that adds logging functionality. Or even a "use feature-flag" directive that conditionally includes code based on feature flags.

The possibilities are endless!

Just "npm i use-nemo" and create your own directive.

Github: https://github.com/Ademking/use-nemo
by andai | 2025-11-13 23:48:49+00:00
I guess only some games are amenable to this, but I automated mining in Terraria by just programming AutoHotkey to automate the keyboard and click specific coordinates. The player is always in the middle of the screen, so you can mine specific blocks by just offsetting the coordinates relative to that. So you can mine sideways, downwards, diagonally...

The only issue I ran into was that it was blind and would keep going so I'd look away from the screen and when I came back I had fallen into a pit of monsters or something.
by rrwright | 2025-11-13 23:49:12+00:00
I agree with what I think you meant: it is not a bug in Claude. However "javascript on the backend" is exactly what Claude Code is! It's a node.js implementation of automation components that feed and pull from the Claude model.

I have a VERY hard time believing that they only use JSON serialization between the model and the TUI. If they're seriealizing JSON between agents, tools, or other components, then this problem is going to continue to persist for a very long time.
by observationist | 2025-11-13 23:50:00+00:00
5 years full copyright, 5 years noncommercial unrestricted fair use with mandatory attribution, then straight to public domain. Berne Convention be damned, and multigenerational copyrights can go straight to hell as well.

Software patents are stupid, and even more so with AI soon to be able to take arbitrary compiled code and produce readable, well composed source in a target language with documentation and optimizations.

Studios and platforms and funds and giant corporations that "own" terabytes of IP are a cancer.

We're going to have to fix copyright. Until then, pirate everything.
by kodt | 2025-11-13 23:50:03+00:00
I didn't meant to say no-one saw it theatrically but I probably did undersell it there.

The DVD was such a huge seller and coincided with the format really catching on. The Matrix was the "must have" DVD to show off the format and for many was likely one of the first DVDs they ever purchased.

It was also the go-to movie to show off DivX rips.

The popularity of The Matrix is closely linked with a surge in DVD popularity. IIRC DVD player prices became more affordable right around 2000 which opened it up to more people.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-13 23:50:20+00:00
> your stuff in the gym's locker aren't the gym's "assets"?

A key component of bankrutcy is figuring out what belongs to whom. You say the stuff in your locker is yours. A credit may claim the company stored its idk staplers in a neighbouring locker. Usually, the gym would moderate that dispute. But given they're bankrupt, what you want to avoid is the creditor hiring a dude to empty out the locker of staplers into their storage locker opening your locker and doing that to it.
by SauciestGNU | 2025-11-13 23:50:23+00:00
Giving the minority (Christian extremists in flyover states) too much power has caused them to start revoking the rights of everyone not them. Forget about protecting minority groups from having too little power, the main concern now is wresting control of our government in line with the principle of "one person, one vote" instead of "hectares of corn and churches take precedence over people".
by shkkmo | 2025-11-13 23:50:33+00:00
> That may be the only reason they are hoping for a barge naming. Not everything is about nazism.

Even with the good faith assumption that is not why these names were suggested, I don't think it is appropriate to commemorate these people by naming stuff after them.

Von Braun had a history of bending the truth to minimize his membership in the Nazi party and climb up the ranks of the SS. It is hard to take him at his word that he did so purely to advance his career.

It is also worth noting that the career that led to him being promotoed 3 times by Himmler had as it's key accomplishment the development of the novel V2 rocket weapons that killed an average of 2 civilians per launch. Von Braun oversaw production in slave labor camps that killed even more people building the rockets than the rockets killed on impact.

There's many heroes of the space industry to name stuff after who weren't also literal nazis who directly used slave labor to advance their career.
by jojobas | 2025-11-13 23:50:35+00:00
Febrile seizures have no long-term consequences in almost 100% of cases, pericarditis/myocarditis are significantly worse.

The reason I know and care is that my wife will probably require dialysis for the rest of her life.

We've been duped into accepting an experimental drug for a disease with minor consequences for otherwise healthy people.
by thwarted | 2025-11-13 23:50:37+00:00
> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on Generalized Continued Fractions and their Series Transformations and was awarded a Patent

A good portion of the perception and use around patents is the word "awarded", which implies that there was some evaluation, either objective or subjective, by an expert in the topic and that the invention met some high level of… something that made it worthy of being "awarded" for the "work" that it took to invent. Most parents are not evaluated like that today, and software patents specifically probably never have been.
by computerdork | 2025-11-13 23:50:38+00:00
Was thinking about that. It is interesting how they got so much working in just two launches compared to SpaceX, which works so incrementally.

Still, am wondering though if SpaceX's highly iterative approach is a better way, because with Blue Origin's more standard approach of getting everything right the first time, you may need to over engineer everything, which seems like it may take longer.

On the flipside, SpaceX's approach might tax the engineers, because they have to deal with launching so often, and maybe if they had done less launches, they might have actually gotten falcon and starship out quicker...

...But, then again maybe at Spacex, the "launch" engineers are really the ones that have to deal with getting the rockets ready for launch, while the core design engineers can focus on building the latest version. And all the launches are used to test out different ideas and gather real life data). Hmm, for my part, am leaning towards the spacex way of doing things.

(maybe SpaceX and Blue Origin engineers could share their thoughts if they're reading this??)
by kibwen | 2025-11-13 23:50:53+00:00
> That being said, it would be pretty easy to implement some pointer semantics even in C that can do 95% of what Rust does.

Making a language with memory-safe pointers isn't hard. Making a language with memory-safe pointers that doesn't rely on sandboxing, a virtual machine, or other dynamic checks which produce runtime overhead--thereby disqualifying one from being considered for this domain in the first place--is nontrivial.
by amatecha | 2025-11-13 23:51:05+00:00
2013: "Linux and open source are the future of gaming" https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-linux-and-open-source-ar...

SteamOS was released in that year as well: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/commit/0aad7085a1a9...

All of their hardware released since then seems to be aligned with this concept and they have clearly put a huge amount of R&D and funding into this approach.
by MildlySerious | 2025-11-13 23:51:25+00:00
Even if they are off by a factor of 100 it's a huge win and the point stands.

It's fair to point this out and worth the mention. Still, I'd like to think that the engineers behind this can at least gauge the benefit of this endeavor with some accuracy despite the discrepancy in available data, and stating the data that is available only makes sense.
by antod | 2025-11-13 23:52:47+00:00
One side effect of devops over the last 10-15yrs I've noticed as dev and ops converged is that infrastructure complexity exploded as the old school pessimistic sysadmin culture of simplicity and stability gave way to a much more optimistic dev culture. Also better tooling also enabled increased complexity in a self fulfilling feedback loop as more complexity also demanded better tooling.

It's kept me employed though...
by imiric | 2025-11-13 23:54:05+00:00
I think that it would be foolish for any software engineer to completely dismiss any technology. There is a time and place for any tool, and it is a job of a competent engineer to determine what the appropriate combination of these is that would solve a certain problem within specific constraints.

That said, memory safety is one criterion out of many that could be used to make that decision. For a large number of software projects, memory safety simply isn't a major concern. Ease of use, iteration speed, developer familiarity, availability of specific libraries, and so on, are often equal or greater concerns than memory safety.

So, sure, if you're writing a kernel, operating system, or a mission-critical piece of software, then Rust might be worth considering. Otherwise, you might be better served by other languages.
by josephg | 2025-11-13 23:54:56+00:00
My favorite framing for this is that rust front loads all the pain.

C and C++ are incredibly subtle languages. But you can get a lot of code written before you run into certain foot guns in C and C++. This gives those language a more enjoyable on-ramp for beginners.

In comparison, rust is a wall. The compiler just won’t compile your code at all if you do anything wrong. This makes the act of learning rust much more painful. But once you’ve learned rust, it’s a much smoother experience. There’s far fewer ways for your programs to surprise you at runtime.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-13 23:55:40+00:00
> That would kind of destroy the whole rationale for corporations to exist

For management? Not at all. It's almost just customary that employment agreements don't make employees, including senior managers, personally liable for their mistakes.

You'd just have to pay Board members and executives boatloads more. (Or, more accurately, they'd be able to justify more pay for the risk. And then go and purchase insurance to offload it anyway.)
by nine_k | 2025-11-13 23:56:06+00:00
Sounds cool as a fantasy. How are you going to measure the distance between the drones with millimeter precision? How are you going to synchronize the pulse between the drones with nanosecond precision to achieve the phased array effect? How are you going to do all that with the enemy actively deploying EW measures?

Not that these problems are impossible to solve, but they are nontrivial in practice, I'm afraid. It would take quite some effort to turn the fantasy into a reliable theory, and then quite some more, into a practical swarm.

Will be cool though.
by crote | 2025-11-13 23:56:18+00:00
How often do you DIY a self-balancing binary tree? Sure I wrote a few in college, but in the real world you are almost always just using an existing library. Optimizing for edge cases like that doesn't make sense.

And is your hand-written C implementation going to be safe and correct. You didn't mention any kind of locking or atomic operation, so is it going to unexpectedly break in a multithreaded environment?

The concepts of Rust are definitely more complicated, but in practice it just means that C makes it easier to shoot yourself in the foot. It's easy, but is that really the most important thing here?
by tuetuopay | 2025-11-13 23:57:03+00:00
If you want something more comparable, they estimate that only 5% of their Rust code is within unsafe blocks. That makes only 5% of the code with potential for memory safety issues: that's already a 20x improvement. Let's make it 10x because unsafe blocks tend to be trickier, but you still get a lot of Rust guarantees.

The thing is with Rust, you know where to look for memory safety issues: the unsafe blocks. C and C++? GLHF that's your whole codebase. As they mentioned, you don't opt-out of all of Rust guarantees by going the unsafe route. Of course you can ditch them, but that'll be hugely visible during code review. Overall, you can be much more confident saying "yup there's no bug there" in Rust than in C or C++.
by rtaylorgarlock | 2025-11-13 23:58:05+00:00
In my experience, somehow the strength in natural language / litigious / prosaic work translated negatively in a way to coding. The verbose, prolific way it writes + the investment into dev tooling by Anthropic resulted in Anthropic's models leading the sycophantic-presumptuous-over-confident frontier. So much so that I still have barely used Sonnet 4.5 thinking.