MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-12-10 08:47:25+00:00
Depends of what you do.

Rust has a nice compiler-provided static analyzer using annotation to do life time analysis and borrow checking. I believe borrow checking to be a local optima trap when it comes to static analysis and finds it often more annoying to use than I would like but I won't argue it's miles better than nothing.

C has better static analysers available. They can use annotations too. Still, all of that is optional when it's part of Rust core language. You know that Rust code has been successfully analysed. Most C code won't give you this. But if it's your code base, you can reach this point in C too.

C also has a fully proven and certified compiler. That might be a requirement if you work in some niche safety critical applications. Rust has no equivalent there.

The discussion is more interesting when you look at other languages. Ada/Spark is for me ahead of Rust both in term of features and user experience regarding the core language.

Rust currently still have what I consider significant flaws: a very slow compiler, no standard, support for a limited number of architectures (it's growing), it's less stable that I consider it should be given its age, and most Rust code tends to use more small libraries than I would personaly like.

Rust is very trendy however and I don't mean that in a bad way. That gives it a lot of leverage. I doubt we will ever see Ada in the kernel but here we are with Rust.
by mpweiher | 2025-12-10 08:47:36+00:00
> The "C is not a high level assembler" crowd, in my view, is making a category error, conflating C itself with an ISO standard and abstract machine concept coming decades later.

"C isn't not a high level assembler" captures it almost perfectly, and it also captures the documented intent of the people who created the ANSI C standard, which was that ANSI C should not preclude the (common) use of C as a high-level assembly language.

Here the quote:

C code can be non-portable. Although it strove to give programmers the opportunity to write truly portable programs, the C89 Committee did not want to force programmers into writing portably, to preclude the use of C as a “high-level assembler”: the ability to write machine- specific code is one of the strengths of C. It is this principle which largely motivates drawing the distinction between strictly conforming program and conforming program (§4).

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/C99RationaleV5.1...

(bottom of page 2)
by giamma | 2025-12-10 08:47:42+00:00
I am more interested in how MCP can change human interaction with software.

Practical example: there exists an MCP server for Jira. Connect that MCP server to e.g. Claude and then you can write prompts like this:

"Produce a release notes document for project XYZ based on the Epics associated to version 1.2.3"

or

"Export to CSV all tickets with worklog related to project XYZ and version 1.2.3. Make sure the CSV includes these columns ....."

Especially the second example totally removes the need for the CSV export functionality in Jira. Now imagine a scenario in which your favourite AI is connected via MCP to different services. You can mix and match information from all of them.

Alibaba for example is making MCP servers for all of its user-facing services (alibaba mail, cloud drive, etc etc)

A chat UI powered by the appropriate MCP servers can provide a lot of value to regular end users and make it possible for people to use their own data easily in ways that earlier would require dedicated software solutions (exports, reports). People could use software for use cases that the original authors didn't even imagine.
by frankest | 2025-12-10 08:48:16+00:00
Weddings are also a social commitment exercise to the couple. Imagine if you had break a promise you made in front of everyone both of you know, after spending a whole lot of money. It’s loss aversion and social shame that possibly made a lot of couples stick together. Even so, posing with your best clothes, food, locations, entertainment and donning all of your jewelry (all of your wealth in gold in some country) does likely play the Envy string too.
Show HN: Blinding HDR profile pics for Twitter
by mesmertech | 2025-12-10 08:49:26+00:00
Seen this floating around twitter a bit so thought I'd try to vibe code it. Was mostly an exercise in finding out how long it takes to go from idea to production for a vibecoded simple app with no db or anything.

Turns out to be around an hour from domain purchase to deployment. Would probably be lower if I did this just using vercel but this needed imagemagick as a cli tool and figuring out the wasm setup for imagemagick was taking too long
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-12-10 08:49:45+00:00
The point with the linked list is that it is perfectly valid to use unsafe to design said ”tailored data structure with internal cross-reference or what not” library and then expose a safe interface.

If you’re having trouble designing a safe interface for your collection then that should be a signal that maybe what you are doing will result in UB when looked at the wrong way.

That is how all standard library collections in Rust works. They’ve just gone to the length of formally verifying parts of the code to ensure performance and safety.
by fooblaster | 2025-12-10 08:49:57+00:00
why exactly do you need a deity to tell you to love your fellow man? Do you need god in your life to want to love your children? I think this is not quite right. I don't expect that the desire to create these tools independent of outcome in the valley is simply about greed , and for companies like anthropic, the ability to use AGI fear as a means to drive investment in themselves from VC class that lives the idea of obliterating human labor. We need less money in tech - we'll probably get it soon enough.
by tomekowal | 2025-12-10 08:50:07+00:00
There is a hidden hypothesis in this article that AI "does not struggle" with things like undefined behaviour, off by one errors and undefined behaviour.

Yes, it can consistently generate code that works and seems to be on top of it all due to a lot of training data. But wouldn't that use up more tokens and computational resources to produce than e.g. the same program in python?

If using more complex languages requires more resources from LLM, the same principles apply. One-off scripts are better in high level languages. Hot paths executed millions of times a second are better in lower level languages with high optimisation potential.

LLMs might slightly shift the correct choice towards lower languages. E.g. a small one-off script in C is much more viable with LLM's help. But the moment one needs to reuse it, it grows, and needs to be modified, one might regret not using higher level language.
by rswail | 2025-12-10 08:51:08+00:00
The pathetic part of EVs is that they should have been issued by whatever the business register/regulator is in the country of issue.

Not some arbitrary group like D&B etc.

The US/other countries should have ensured that each state/registration area had an appropriate cert to sign with.

It should be part of my company's annual registration/reporting expenses that they issue the appropriate certificate for "*.<mycompany>.<2LDs>.<gTLD>", signed by them (and by the TLD root cert of the nation of registration).
by eviks | 2025-12-10 08:51:34+00:00
> I do not

Ok, how does that address my initial question (which was not about you) then? Not everyone's setup is so primitive as to only be centered around two apps

Though in this case I don't get what is so terrible about app groups if you don't group anything else anyway since it's ephemereal, so wouldn't any grouping work (except for 2 apps)?
by mpweiher | 2025-12-10 08:51:56+00:00
David is quite accomplished, but in this instance he is simply wrong. For two reasons:

1. All the reasons he cites that depend on "what the metal does" being different and quite a bit more complex than what is surfaced in C apply equally to machine/assembly language. So the CPU's instruction set is not a low-level language? Interesting take, but I don't think so: it is the lowest level language that is exposed by the CPU.

2. The other reasons boil down to "I would like to do this optimization", and that is simply inapplicable.
by csomar | 2025-12-10 08:52:02+00:00
No. It didn't get any better. To be honest, the only working agentic tool out there in Claude Code. All other tools seems to confuse the model and not help much. Also bugs are a real problem (with gemini cli, it's really pathetic). Not that Claude Code doesn't have dozens of issues but the bar in this niche is set really low.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-10 08:52:12+00:00
Cloudflare: "Oh no, we can't have that much centralization, that's horrible, just think of the impact outages have!"

Let's Encrypt: crickets

Obviously I use LE myself and like what they do, and even in the example above some downtime would have less of an impact than Cloudflare would (due to renewals being less time sensitive), I'm just surprised that there aren't like 5 other orgs that do the same at scale, like an EU based one for example. If there's a lot of domain registrars, why doesn't every single one of them have ACME compatible services?

I think there was ZeroSSL but I vaguely remember something scummy about upsells there a few years back.
by pedrozieg | 2025-12-10 08:53:27+00:00
CVE counts are such a good example of “what’s easy to measure becomes the metric”. The moment Linux became a CNA and started issuing its own CVEs at scale, it was inevitable that dashboards would start showing “Linux #1 in vulnerabilities” without realizing that what changed was the paperwork, not suddenly worse code. A mature process with maintainers who actually file CVEs for real bugs looks “less secure” than a project that quietly ships fixes and never bothers with the bureaucracy.

If Greg ends up documenting the tooling and workflow in detail, I hope people copy it rather than the vanity scoring. For anyone running Linux in production, the useful question is “how do I consume linux-cve-announce and map it to my kernels and threat model”, not “is the CVE counter going up”. Treat CVEs like a structured changelog feed, not a leaderboard.
by donavanm | 2025-12-10 08:54:22+00:00
Generation and structure are important, but IME IDs arent complete without consideration of representation; encoding and opacity.

* User facing IDs must be opaque. If users can infer any structure or ordering from your ID they _will_ use and they _will_ create awkward dependencies on "your" implementation detail. My favorite example is the multi year and many many dev years of effort that went in to extending EC2 instance IDs. They were already assumed/intended to be opaque until clever users inferred the structure! The simplest answer of something like block cipher is so cheap as to be free (and can be accounted for as part of versioning).

* Encoding should be tailored for teh primary UX. Ex teh base32 variants are reasonably efficient and accommodating of text selection & input. Dictionary schemes (ala S/KEY rfc2289 or BIP39) may be more appropriate for voice communication.

* Following ID structure -> opacity -> encoding you should probably account for the block size and encoding efficiency to minimize padding or excess characters
by squigz | 2025-12-10 08:54:32+00:00
I used to laugh about the idea of kid's voting rights. As I get older, I'm not so sure it's a bad idea. They're the ones who have to grow up in the world we're shaping. Maybe they should have a voice in how it's shaped.

And if anyone wants an idea of why, here's a clip from one of the best shows of all time, The West Wing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSDxg-bDw1A
by pjmlp | 2025-12-10 08:54:44+00:00
Yes it does, alongside C++, Rust isn't available everywhere.

There are industry standards based in C, or C++, and I doubt they will be adopting Rust any time soon.

POSIX (which does require a C compiler for certification), OpenGL, OpenCL, SYSCL, Aparavi, Vulkan, DirectX, LibGNM(X), NVN, CUDA, LLVM, GCC, Unreal, Godot, Unity,...

Then plenty of OSes like the Apple ecosystem, among many other RTOS and commercial endevours for embedded.

Also the official Rust compiler isn't fully bootstraped yet, thus it depends on C++ tooling for its very existence.

Which is why efforts to make C and C++ safer are also much welcomed, plenty of code out there is never going to be RIR, and there are domains where Rust will be a runner up for several decades.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-10 08:55:34+00:00
I share your sentiment and would love to expand how I feel as if even AGPL isn't enough for cloud providers like Amazon, Google etc. which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party

Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it gets large enough then companies technically can still call dibs on me and use their infrastructure to compete against me and I could do nothing...

It was an interesting thought experiment and made me blur the lines between (Fully open source good, source available bad) to well... it depends. And I think everyone should have such nuance since I don't think we live in a world of black and white but its interesting to hear everyone's opinion on it as this topic gets raised every once in a while.
Are we evaluating AI agents all wrong?
by imshashank | 2025-12-10 08:56:09+00:00
I've been building AI agents for the past year, and I've noticed something troubling: everyone I talk to is evaluating their agents the same way—by looking at the final output and asking "Is it correct?"

But that's completely wrong.

An agent can get the right answer through the wrong path. It can hallucinate in intermediate steps but still reach the correct conclusion. It can violate constraints while technically achieving the goal.

Traditional ML metrics (accuracy, precision, recall) miss all of this because they only look at the final output.

I've been experimenting with a different approach: using the agent's system prompt as ground truth, evaluating the entire trajectory (not just the final output), and using multi-dimensional scoring (not just a single metric).

The results are night and day. Suddenly I can see hallucinations, constraint violations, inefficient paths, and consistency issues that traditional metrics completely missed.

Am I crazy? Or is the entire industry evaluating agents wrong?

I'd love to hear from others who are building agents. How are you evaluating them? What problems have you run into?
by KeplerBoy | 2025-12-10 08:56:18+00:00
Just do it. There's nothing wrong with it, if that's the kind of talk you want to give.

Look at stuff by david beazley, matt godbolt or casey muratori. They all have talks which focus on small pieces of code and i'm sure it's a tremendous effort to frame that well enough and pace it appropriately, but it sure works for them (and me watching their talks).
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-10 08:57:34+00:00
> I meant it's a term expressing viewpoint that's part of popular culture in Germany, as opposed to part of academia.

The word "Datenkrake" is also used in academic texts (even though I would say the word is a litle bit colloquial):

> https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=date...

As I wrote: I would consider this word to be "part of daily life" like "cooking pot" or "bicycle", which is why I would never have expected that the English translation of it

> https://www.dict.cc/?s=Datenkrake

is not understood.
by eudoxus | 2025-12-10 08:57:44+00:00
All code is shared "under someones own copyright and terms". Whether you use pre-existing words or not doesn't define if its open-source or source-available. I can write a license right now that I maintain the copyright, and written with my own terms that complies with the OSD. We happen to have a collection of existing licenses that have been vetted, but it isn't a exclusionary whitelist.

I'll reiterate, "source available" can only be defined as not OSD code that is viewable. Everything else is entirely open to implementation and interpretation.

This is the largest problem with the term. This is in stark contract to examples like "Fair Source" which has a legal definition like the OSD, and a entity behind it stewarding that definition [0], while being a subset of Source Available. All fair source is source available, not all source available is fair source.

Yet, fair source doesn't fall into your definition of source available.

[0] - https://fair.io/
by langkey | 2025-12-10 08:57:52+00:00
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by tirpen | 2025-12-10 08:57:55+00:00
I think another ace up Django's sleeve is that it has had a remarkable stable API for a long time with very few breaking changes, so almost all blogposts about Django that the LLM has gobbled up will still be mostly correct whether they are a year or a decade old.

I get remarkably good and correct LLM output for Django projects compared to what I get in project with more fast moving and frequently API breaking frameworks.
by zwnow | 2025-12-10 08:58:01+00:00
The brain has intrinsic understanding of the world engraved in our DNA. We do not simply predict tokens based on knowledge, we base our thoughts on intelligence, emotions and knowledge. LLMs neither have intelligence nor emotions. If your brain simply predicts tokens I feel sorry for you.

Edit: really does not surprise me that AI bros downvote this. Expecting to understand human values from people that want to make themselves obsolete was a mistake.
by baq | 2025-12-10 08:58:40+00:00
This might actually be a solved problem soonish, LLMs are unreasonably effective at writing compilers and C is designed to be easy to write a compiler for, which also helps. I don’t know if anyone tried, but there’s been related work posted here on HN recently: a revived Java compiler and the N64 decompilation project. Mashed together you can almost expect to be able to generate C compilers for obscure architectures on demand given just some docs and binary firmware dumps.
by rickdeckard | 2025-12-10 08:59:12+00:00
> How late do you think Apple can come to that party and still wind up winning in the end?

In my view Apple is positioning themselves (once more) to win without the need of competing on fair grounds. They are late to this party, but their biggest asset is the control over the data and spending of their users.

The users WANT to use those services, and Apple is not ready to offer anything. But as long as they can be the "broker" between the user and such services (and most of all the deciding party!), they can sell the consumption of their entire userbase for revenue-share to the service-providers.

Their biggest risk (beside of stock-market impacts) is, that Apple users start to engage directly with such services without Apple being an intermediary party (using a browser or another device).

So their highest priority will be to keep the user entertained so they can continue profiting from their consumption until they themselves have arrived at the party.

Once they have arrived, they will start diverting profitable AI-tasks from 3rd parties back to their own services, leaving unprofitable ones to the then-integrated 3rd party providers
by donavanm | 2025-12-10 08:59:40+00:00
you probably don't go all in, but try to find real assets that are not _too_ strongly correlated and are likely to have durable long term value. The most compelling answers I've heard are things like desirable real estate, commodities, or futures/contracts like water rights. Even then its not no equities, just a much lower allocation to minimize down side while still capturing some of the exuberant growth
by ReptileMan | 2025-12-10 08:59:44+00:00
>The software was built to allow customers to track a chip's overall computing performance - a common practice among companies that buy fleets of processors for large data centers - and would use the time delay in communicating with servers run by Nvidia to give a sense of the chip's location on par with what other internet-based services can provide, according to an Nvidia official.

just a firewall will do
by duskdozer | 2025-12-10 09:00:06+00:00
It's depressing to me at least. I guess with things like this it works well if you fully buy in and don't understand or care about the privacy violations and psychological tricks they use. But even if I tried to ignore it, I just end up annoyed by the interfaces or workflows or stuff like that. I guess it's just the curse of having really non-standard preferences
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-10 09:00:13+00:00
> ...not to introduce more types for things like uindex or uaddr or uptr, which are the same as usize on nearly every platform. ... there remains concern among several of the maintainers about breaking that guarantee, despite the fact that people on the only target that would be affected basically saying they'd rather see that guarantee broken.

The proper approach to resolving this in an elegant way is to make the guarantee target-dependent. Require all depended-upon crates to acknowledge that usize might differ from uptr in order to unlock building for "exotic" architectures, much like how no-std works today. That way "nearly every platform" can still rely on the guarantee with no rise in complexity.
by crusty | 2025-12-10 09:00:14+00:00
I mean, as Americans would consider it (and not the red scare "socialism" of Fox-types), what is often the colloquial military industrial complex is already socialism, without incoming the privatized profits and socialized losses enabled by regulatory capture or too-big-to-fail. It's a single-payer operation (with strict caveats) where the government not only pays and sets prices through cost-plus schemes (that may or may not separately be perverted and exploited) but they also control the products produced. Even universal, single-payer healthcare as a practical concept is likely less socialist.

In case you're wondering, this is an argument for universal Healthcare and not for the US government having to buy aircraft carriers off the rack or against it limiting/ controlling whom besides itself can pick up reaper drones and hellfire missiles.
by bloppe | 2025-12-10 09:00:47+00:00
The whole point of having a license is that you don't have to rely on trust. It's right there in the license. There's no way to weasel out of it.

https://mariadb.com/bsl11/

"Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you rights under the terms of the Change License" ... "To specify as the Change License the GPL Version 2.0 or any later version, or a license that is compatible with GPL Version 2.0 or a later version, where “compatible” means that software provided under the Change License can be included in a program with software provided under GPL Version 2.0 or a later version"