MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-23 23:31:39+00:00
> Unfortunately, it’s impossible to make Rust compile fast. The problem is inherent to all similar generics-heavy languages, like Haskell.

I don't think this is correct, strictly speaking. Furthermore, I think this conflates two common causes of slow generic compilation:

- Type-checking them can take a lot of time

- Generics may be implemented in a way that generates a lot of code

Neither of those are required for generics-heavy languages (e.g., OCaml is generally considered to compile fast despite having a "complex" type system), and the presence of one doesn't necessarily require the other - a hypothetical "simple" generics system with heavy use of monomorphization can end up taking a long time to compile, and a "complex" generics system that erases types may take a while to type-check but could compile fast after that.

> Put a non-optional borrow-checker on top of it

From my understanding the borrow checker usually takes up a small fraction of the time needed to compile. There are cases where that's not true, but I think people tend to overestimate its impact on compile times.

> There are ways to implement unsafe programs that still don’t execute remote code or leak secret — they only corrupt user data and act sporadically.

Reliably implementing unsafe programs that don't have RCEs or leak secrets but still corrupt data and "act sporadically" seems like a very peculiar combination of requirements to me, if it's even possible. "Act sporadically" is also quite nebulous, and depending on the precise issue may in fact be an RCE or secret leak in hiding - after all, it's not that uncommon for exploits to start their life as someone noticing a crash.

> It’s probably the strongest point of my whining: Rust is memory safe and unreliable. The price of memory safety was reliability in addition to the developer’s sanity

I think that is actually one of the weakest points. I didn't see any support for a claim that memory safety necessarily requires trading off reliability, let alone that that is what Rust does.

> Step into the shared mutable state — and there a memory corruption is not an exception, it’s a rule. You have to handle the corruptions, you cannot simply crash.

What definition of "memory corruption" is being used here? I didn't think that's the kind of thing that you usually "handle"...

> Which kinda destroys the first uncompromising thing in Rust — performance.

I feel this misunderstands Rust's priorities. (Safe) Rust prioritizes safety over performance, and that has been a well-known tradeoff for basically its entire lifetime. If you want performance at the expense of safety, that is what `unsafe` is for.

> So, to reiterate, the second you step into the shared mutable state you lose every single advantage of Rust. Which is kinda rational considering that the main concept of Rust was to never employ a shared mutable state.

This misses another useful bit of Rust, which is the ability to contain unsafety to clearly-delimited sections of your codebase.

There's more I could say, but life calls...
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-11-23 23:31:50+00:00
I've been using Ubuntu for 3 years now, and now that I'm about to upgrade my 13 y.o. laptop, there's a dilemma for me between choosing some top(ish)-spec x86_64 laptop or macbook pro M4.

The former just keeps me going with Ubuntu, but forces to still dual-boot Windows for some creative software I use that Ubuntu lacks (a certain DAW and a CAD modeller). The latter gives me an awesome (or so it seems) OS that is much closer in spirit to Ubuntu than to Windows and supports everything I need, but leaves me vendor-locked to whatever user-hostile directions Apple might take in the future.

I'd like to ask people who had been using both Ubuntu and MacOS, what would you advise? And MacOS users in particular, are you happy with the direction it has been evolving, and with that of Apple itself?
by svat | 2025-11-23 23:32:28+00:00
Related to your comment, not the original post/book:

- On Knuth’s idea (which seems good to me), see http://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/knuth-big-o-ca... but also the last two comments by David Speyer.

- And see also http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/non-nonstandard-... and http://texnicalstuff.blogspot.in/2011/05/big-o-notation-for-... that seem to have tried teaching along somewhat similar (but different) lines.

- See https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2022/05/10/partially-specifie... for a further formalization of O notation.

(These links via comments I left to myself at https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a...)
by swatcoder | 2025-11-23 23:33:00+00:00
They're not, and it's not really an HN thing to respond like you did. The guidelines ask you to assume best intent and engage in good faith.

Here good faith curiosity would have led you to where peer replies are pointing you: that free transit in big metros tends to come with loitering issues, and if they become too extreme, it can make the transit system pretty inhospitable and uninviting for the families and working people meant to be using it, undermining the purpose of making it free.

It's a genuine challenge that metros of a certain scale need to address, although the OP is maybe (or maybe not) wrong in assuming that it would be an issue in a fairly small/high-trust college metro like Iowa City. But, in best interpretation of their comment, that's why they were asking it as a question.
by testing22321 | 2025-11-23 23:33:27+00:00
> But even society as a whole also forces you to work. If you temporarily lose your job you will still get (roughly) the same income, but only for a short time. And only if you try to look for work

That’s incorrect.

Australia pays benefits forever. Even if you’ve never had a job. Even if you quit because you were bored.

Plenty of countries have free university, and pay a living allowance to students.

I don't see how society can work if we don't "force" people to work, at least a little bit?

Provide a good base life (healthcare, for a start), and offer good wages to those who choose that. Again, plenty of countries do that now.
by tacticalturtle | 2025-11-23 23:33:32+00:00
> What’s Howard University and what makes it reputable enough to mention here, presumably as some sort of appeal to authority?

It’s arguably the most well known and prestigious of the historically black college and universities in the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historically_black_colleges_an...

It’s a pretty recognized name in the US. Certainly enough to qualify a professor as an authority - as much as any university association can.
by wahern | 2025-11-23 23:35:50+00:00
Iowa City is in Johnson County. A 2024 point-in-time count of the chronic homeless population--the highly visible population noticeably encountered in public spaces--in Johnson and Washington Counties combined is less than 200 people. See https://opportunityiowa.gov/media/5390/download?inline#page=... There are also only 13 bus routes, and it's a college town with a significant percentage of price-sensitive student ridership (i.e. highly elastic demand) that either wouldn't qualify or wouldn't bother applying for fare subsidies or passes (common in major metro regions). The context is incomparable to major coastal cities.

We know free transit works in many cases. There are plenty of examples. But it's rare to compare and contrast the contexts. (But, see, e.g., this 2012 National Academy of Sciences report: https://cvtdbus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2012-07-TCRP-...) It's far easier to promote free transit than it is to address underlying issues, like regulatory barriers to housing production and infrastructure projects, that limit organic improvements to social welfare and which are likely to cause free transit to fail long-term in large, diverse metro areas.
by fluoridation | 2025-11-23 23:35:57+00:00
>so far failed to engage with your opponent's rhetoric on any meaningful level.

I have not failed to do it, I have chosen not to do it. I asked a specific question and received as an answer something that's totally irrelevant. I am decidedly not interested in whether "it would be possible to have a system where startups to require less funding, for example, by UBI, or normalizing bootstrapping". It has nothing to do with my original comment, and I'm not going to engage with it.
by floathub | 2025-11-23 23:36:11+00:00
I used Emacs for several years before I discovered "project" (it's built in). If you're navigating dired trees or similar to find files or grep for strings in groups of files, this is like magic:

C-x p f (find any file in the current "project", e.g. git repo)

C-x p v (grep the whole project super fast)

It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize it was there all along. :-)
by fragmede | 2025-11-23 23:36:49+00:00
No but that’s the point. If there’s a copy of the private key out there, then it can be copied. The whole point is that the jedberg-laptop-1 key only ever exists as jedberg-laptop-1. When that laptop gets lost/stolen/destroyed/aged out, there's 100% certainty that it can't be recreated. The other side of that equation is that you need a tree of keys and a whole IT department to manage them so you don't get locked out of your servers. This particular bit of software is about ssh keys and exists within a larger conversation about PKI which you know more about than I, but operationally, you have this, and then you have a root login private key file locked with Shamir secret sharing (ssss on debian) that you distribute to a very select few number of key bearers. And then don't all get on the same plane together, ever.
by Zigurd | 2025-11-23 23:36:55+00:00
Last time I visited New York I was lucky to have a companion who knew all the ways to get around including the free bus lines. The people using these buses were no different from those using buses and other public transportation that charged fares.

Ipso facto, eliminating fare collection eliminates crime. Fare evasion as a crime amounts to make-work for cops. Not all value, and often least of all value in public goods, is derived from charging at the point of use.
by brightball | 2025-11-23 23:37:34+00:00
Process over Outcome is something that I think would be easy for anyone to proscribe to a process that they didn't like.

In my younger years, I was very cavalier about my approach to programming even at a larger company. I didn't particularly want to understand why I had to jump through so many hoops to access a production database to fix a problem or why there were so many steps to deploy to production.

Now that I more experienced, I fully understand all of those guardrails and as a manager my focus is on streamlining those guardrails as much as possible to get maximum benefit with minimum negative impact to the team solving problems.

But this involves a lot of process automation and tooling.
by byko3y | 2025-11-23 23:37:34+00:00
There are programming languages/models/runtimes that crash and recover, there are models that gracefully degrade. Rust cannot recover. Neither can C++ in many cases e.g. when you have an exception in a destructor then it's a guaranteed `std::terminate`.

Do note that C did not have such a flaw built into language — C++ authors invented it and Rust inherited this flaw (the authors simply did not feel like it's a flaw). I mean specially designed embedded C code can survive total RAM erasure and still perform some meaningful work (with CPU registers and ROM intact). Or compare it to BEAM that can have processes crash all day long and still continue to work. "Memory safety at all cost" is not a practical requirement — it's theological.
by lxgr | 2025-11-23 23:37:39+00:00
I agree that it's inconvenient in many cases, but what vendor am I being locked into, exactly? My primary hardware key can be from a completely different vendor than the backup one, so I don't quite buy the conspiracy angle.

There's also no technical obstacle preventing anyone from creating "paired" hardware authenticators that share the same internal root derivation key and can as such authenticate to all services (at least if they don't demand resident credentials) that were registered to any of the keys in the set.

The fact that these keys don't exist on the market (I believe Yubikey looked into them a while ago) more is evidence for the lack of demand, and less for the existence of a cabal, in my view.
by rkeene2 | 2025-11-23 23:37:45+00:00
If you're willing to go a bit further you can also do GPG signing with ECDSA, though it requires a patched GPG due to bugs and a patched SSH agent that allows raw signing. We have a packaged version with a macOS UI [0], but the same backend [1] works on Linux using the tpm via PKCS#11.

We have a blog post on this, but I guess it was never made public, but the only difference between GPG and SSH is the way in which keys and signatures are wrapped and listed through the various layers -- it's all just fundamentally ECDSA with a named curve.

[0] https://github.com/KeetaNetwork/agent

[1] https://github.com/KeetaNetwork/agent/tree/main/Agent/gnupg/...
by jclarkcom | 2025-11-23 23:39:16+00:00
Here are some of the commands it used (censored & auto-generated) with a few specific examples at the end: https://jonathanclark.com/posts/bonded-internet-connection-c...

> It was able to one-shot deploying a digital ocean droplet and configure wireguard?

Yes, that part was pretty easy - but the whole thing wasn't one shot. The parts I struggled with were: - getting automated SSH installed on the $130 router, once you have that the LLM can drive things - during security hardening, I got fully locked out and had to recreate a new VM. But it was able to automatically recreate everything in a few minutes.
Show HN: AI Live Log Bridge- Feeds Cursor/Claude Terminal+browser Logs via MCP
by ami3466 | 2025-11-23 23:40:02+00:00
Solves the "blind AI" issue without the manual copy-pasting.

It’s an MCP server that gives LLMs real-time visibility into your local execution environment and can run auto-fix.

Terminal: CLI wrapper pipes stdout/stderr (and preserves ANSI colors) to the model.

Browser: Chrome extension uses Native Messaging to capture Console logs and Network errors (4xx/5xx).

Security: Runs locally with regex-based secret redaction (keys, JWTs) before the LLM reads anything.

Works with any MCP client (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Desktop).

https://github.com/Ami3466/ai-live-log-bridge
by lxgr | 2025-11-23 23:40:48+00:00
> Keeping the certificate’s key as non-exportable in the HSM means you do not need to revoke it as it cannot be compromised (not permanently at least), once you’ve regained access to the HSM you can assume the bad guys are out.

How so? I can still lose my Yubikey, and even if the attacker can't export the private key corresponding to a CA-signed SSH certificate, they can still use it, no? How would I "regain access" in this scenario?
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-23 23:40:53+00:00
Huh?

I don't see the similarity between your comment and the point I was making.

When a very successful long term investor buys a long term investment it can be a notable signal of the merit of the investment.

But if anyone sells an investment (absent of a credible explanation why) it doesn't say anything about the merit of the investment.

Further, if insiders (board, execs) buy shares in the company they are running that's a positive signal. It the majority of insiders sell shares that is a bearish signal. If one important insider (e.g. CEO, founder, etc) sells shares, that on its own doesn't really mean anything, because one person/entity could be selling shares for any of many different reasons.

One more nuance... When warren buffet sold off some airlines, and then later I think he sold Morgan Stanley or some other bank stock, and he explained in shareholder meeting (and probably some reports) why he sold these (unsustainable business practices) that is a valid bear signal.

So really it's when someone sells, and they don't explain why they sold, or their explanation has a conflict of interest, then the sale is not a meaningful signal.
by IanCal | 2025-11-23 23:41:31+00:00
This is a good point.

Docker? I typically want other kinds of isolation for services and things anyway - it’s got its own file system, you could have N versions on the same branch working without conflict (at least the conflict you’d have with work trees).

There is some more plumbing involved but…not much?

Edit - task boards are my first thought for the comms side for agents sharing info.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-23 23:41:51+00:00
That's awesome. I'm glad your friend is able to benefit from community-provided solutions to a real problem that many people have, even in ways perhaps not originally envisioned by the authors of Dark Reader.

Your friend's preferences are valid and there's no reason for anyone to be vindictively espousing vitriol at those preferences, just like the preferences of the majority of users of this extension who prefer dark mode.
by themafia | 2025-11-23 23:41:59+00:00
Falling asleep on a bus is a great way to get victimized. The homeless are most likely to be victimized by other homeless. It almost never gets reported to the police.

It's not a shelter and it's not meant to be converted into one. To me it's an indication of an overworked and failing system that leaves people in bad situations because it has nowhere else for them to go.

Sure, you could argue that because there's currently no obvious major problems, that you could just leave it as is and be entirely unconcerned with it, or even go so far as to suggest that anyone who does want to fix it is doing so in bad faith. I think that's cruel and lazy.

The actual problem? These people need _real_ shelter.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-23 23:42:09+00:00
> I don't think I ever had a colleague that even ever heard of the concept, let alone applied it. Of the "smart people", they typically only have heard of plain continuations, if you are lucky.

I have a similar picture so far in my work experience. Basically, none of my coworkers ever touched a lispy language. If I said words like "continuation", "environment of a closure", "continuation-passing style" or "macros and metaprogramming", I would get blank stares. Or if I complained about that lambdas in Python are stunted things, they would not understand, because they were only familiar with mainstream OOP and every noun a class paradigm and wouldn't get the ideas where to use lambdas or even inner/nested functions.

This kind of stuff is definitely not part of the usual CS curriculum at universities here (Germany). And of course even more pure fantasy to imagine that to be taught in any boot camps or other higher schools than universities.

Well, maybe some day I will work with people, who have this knowledge, and maaaaybe together we can make something happen employing the ideas and such a language, that implements these concepts well. Or even just work with people, who know FP and have explored building things with it, like I did.
by whatevermom2 | 2025-11-23 23:43:53+00:00
Hi, had to create an account just to answer. Vendor lock-in is not that much of a problem with macOS; you can install pretty much anything you want and it looks like it will still be in the future unlike mobile platforms. MacOS is very easy to get used to so the transition shouldn't hurt :) If your only concern is vendor lock-in, I think you should be good with macOS. I am saying this as someone who switched to Asahi because I wanted more freedom relative to the desktop environment (wanted a real tiling window manager). MacOS + Apple hardware is an incredible combination that has not been reproduced anywhere. Maybe one thing to be careful of: you cannot install Linux on M3 and M4, so if you want to make a switch later on, you won't be able to. Ah and btw you can dual boot Asahi on M1 and M2!

Hope I helped a little :)
by naikrovek | 2025-11-23 23:45:00+00:00
> Giving someone a house and a doctor will not get them off heroin on its own and may not even help them very much at all honestly.

Giving someone a house and health care will, though.

Every addict I have ever known (I’ve known many) consume drugs in order to escape something. Addressing this while also treating the user will indeed help them. Mental health care + physical health care = “health care” in my opening sentence.

I don’t know what it is about people in the US, but almost all of us completely reject the idea that someone can be held down entirely by their own mind. Large amounts of people are, and those that don’t seem to understand that this is possible are often people whose own mind holds them down, but not so much that they’re homeless.

People in other countries get this. We do not. I don’t understand it.
by byko3y | 2025-11-23 23:45:01+00:00
Man, I explained it in the first sentence of the article — it's not bad, it's much worse than it could have been. The main body of the article is not hate — it's plain facts. Everybody working on a significant Rust codebase agrees that Rust compilation takes eternity. Complexity? I know people that like complexity, they would say "that's a great language because of how hard it is to write a program in it!" — complexity would feel like a praise for them. Shared state? "Just don't use it, you are doing it wrong". That's is, where is the hatred?
by Fnoord | 2025-11-23 23:45:59+00:00
That one also reads 'schizotypy'. This is much more broad than schizophrenia and includes schizoid personality disorder; something I don't have a diagnosis for but I do tick the boxes for (IMO) as a so-called introvert with diagnosed autism. And yes, we do have cats, and I have a natural dislike for dogs.
by hajile | 2025-11-23 23:46:05+00:00
Nobody would consider Chrome or Firefox to be immature or lacking polish because they have replaced entire compilers several times over the past few years? I don't have an exact count, but they probably do this every 3-5 years which puts them way ahead of Racket.

I'd also note that Chez Scheme was a commercial implementation bought and open-sourced by Cisco. It wasn't something they threw together. Because it is a complete scheme v6 implementation they are building on instead of rolling their own implementation in C. Coding against a stable Scheme API has to be easier and less buggy than what they had before (not to mention Chez being much faster at a lot of stuff).
by mixmastamyk | 2025-11-23 23:46:18+00:00
Everyone, but especially the working poor deserve a civilized way to get to work. Without screaming, smelly, sleeping, druggies taking up the seats. Or worse.

If you’re appalled by the idea, you may not be aware: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-t...

LAMetro recently woke up and started cleaning this up. Not sure how long it will take before ridership fully returns.
by belorn | 2025-11-23 23:46:33+00:00
The wast majority of deaths during covid in Sweden occurred not because of lock down differences to other countries, but because of how elder care system. I recall some doctor even described themselves as bringers of death because of how much the system did not work. The post analysis of covid also brings this up as the reason why the numbers didn't end up as good as they had hoped, and when the lock down of elder care facilities did arrive it was both too late and too draconian, including news articles of elders "escaping" through windows.

It was found that having a new person almost every day spending about 15 minutes at some elderly person home before going to the next person, without enough time to even wash their hands, had bad results during an pandemic. They also found out that having a very small number of doctors going from elder care facility to the next in order to sign off on all medicine was also a bad idea.