There's a contingent of rust fans that show up on every story about C – their premise is that C code is unsafe and most safety-critical C code should be rewritten in rust.
Fil-C is new and is a viable competitor to rust, that's why you're hearing all asides about tiny niches, unacceptable performance degradation, etc.
Hacker News is not a place where any one group brigrades a thread. There are people who prefer C who don't want a GC, people who prefer Rust who don't want C, people who prefer Rust who agree with Fil-C for legacy C, people who don't prefer C or Rust and may use languages with GC.... We all have interests and face people who denigrate them in bad faith. If you have specific objections to inaccurate statements in this thread, then state them. I'll do the same for any technology if I'm qualified to make statements on it.
I'm not saying that people don't comment in bad faith here. But if someone's first thought upon seeing significant negativity is that a coordinated, massive campaign is occurring, that someone is probably wrong. Commenting in that vein also harms discussion. If Hacker News is to foster good discussion, then simply not being a troll or ideologue is not sufficient.
There really are many people here, with largely diverse opinions. Don't lump people together unless they lump themselves together.
If you missed it, djb himself posted this cute graph of "nearly 9000 microbenchmarks of Fil-C vs. clang on cryptographic software (each run pinned to 1 core on the same Zen 4)":
I've heard Filip has some ideas about optimizing array performance to avoid capability checks on every access... doing that thread safely seems like an interesting challenge but I guess there are ways!
Sure of course I followed that link. I've really got no idea what the horizontal axis is! But there is a huge cluster of results between 1x and 1.5x execution time.
And, the kind of code he is interested in is not necessarily the same as the kind of code I'm interested in. In fact I know it's not!
As one more data point, compiling my little benchmark with gcc, without any optimisation flag.
There’s no Rust fans here, only GC skeptics. GC skeptics existed long before anyone dreamed of Rust and will survive Rust as well.
It’s a pretty reasonable objection too (though I personally don’t agree). C has always been chosen when performance is paramount. For people who prioritise performance it must feel a bit weird to leave performance on the table in this way.
And Jesus Christ, give it a rest with this “Rust fans must be thinking” stuff. It sounds deranged.
No, back in the day C was used for everything. Vim was not written in C because it needed to wring every last bit of performance out of text editing.
Rewriting everything in rust "for memory-safety" is a false tradeoff given the millions of lines of C code out there and the fact that rewrites always introduce new bugs.
Please, I’m begging you, stop talking about Rust. You’re shoehorning Rust into a discussion where it hasn’t been mentioned, just to hate on some imaginary people you think are pushing Rust here. No one is talking about that. You sound deranged and obsessed.
The vast majority of the conversation here is about GC and the performance implications of that. Please stick to the rest of the thread.
I almost always find that building Boehm GC as a malloc replacement (malloc() -> GC_malloc(), free() -> NOP), and then using LD_PRELOAD to get it used makes any random C/C++ program not only still work but also run faster.
Not only that, but you can then use GC_FREE_SPACE_DIVISOR to tune RAM usage vs speed to your liking on a program by program (or even instance by instance) basis, something completely impossible with malloc().
Well the problem with SF is less density and more than half of it is single-family home neighborhoods with zero amenities.
Anti-growth people will point to neighborhoods like Glen Park, NoPa and Noe as "SF" while forgetting most of the surface area of the city is empty neighborhoods like Parkside, Mt Davidson Manor, etc.
It’s a matter of degree, not difference. If you fit 2x the number of people in them - you’d still have the same general problem. Just 2x the number of people now.
And because larger cities tend to also be more attractive (Tokyo is still growing, for instance), you’ll never have enough density to be ‘enough’ - aka where it’s cheap enough for everyone to live where they want.
There were two years during the pandemic when people moved out- because jobs let them - but people moved back and it has more than made up for it since.
Every major city in the world has seen significant population increases as mechanized farm work and fertilizers have removed the need for many farm workers, and economy activity has concentrated.
It’s been a consistent trend for almost 100 years.
And yet, with the Tokyo example, the combination of lots of housing and good public transit means that you can get small but liveable apartments that are a 20-minute walk from central downtown Tokyo (and under a 10-minute walk to multiple train stations with access to the rest of the metro area) for under $1500/month. Here's one right here: https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/rent/B0021114/park-flats-gi...
The tiny salaries in Japan make that even more expensive (comparatively than SF) - last I checked. But yes, the Japanese are significantly more socially coherent eh?
It really feels like all these concerns about semantic everything belong to a previous era of the web. I remember arguing with people 20 years ago who believed RDF and the semantic web was going to take over, but the use cases never materialized.
Semantic web is a bit different from semantic HTML.
As I understand it, the main point of semantic web is making the web machine readable, often using languages specifically designed for that task that are not HTML.
Semantic HTML is more concerned with writing standardized HTML that leverages browser capabilities and respects users who use assistive technology to browse the web.
Frankly, I don't see what this framework has to do with either. I was curious about how they implemented the dropdown menus, and they're specially styled <details> elements, which are normally used for accordions. That seems a bit strange to me, because the obvious choice for a dropdown is the <select> element.
Not much, since we’ve never really had it, but yes, I would love to consume hypertext like a stable API, have user-styles and block elements I don’t like. I do these things now, too, but in a better world they could be less of a hassle technically and less niche socially, then I’d do them even more.
Here’s a uBlock Origin style I use for hackernews, for example:
The original point was that there is some inherent tradition in programming being free, with a direct critique wrt LLMs, which apparently breaks that tradition.
And my point is that's simply not the case. Different products have always been not free, and continue to be not free. Recent example would be something like Unity, that is not entirely free, but has competitors, which are entirely free and open source. JetBrain is something someone else brought up.
Again: You have local LLMs and I have every expectation they will improve. What exactly are we complaining about? That people continue to build products that are not free and, gasp, other people will pay for them, as they always have?
This is just pushing the externalities to the residents. It takes several months for airbnbs to get banned, and it's tough for smaller cities to get the bans enforced.
There must be a better answer than "pass a law so the american multinational does a better job at regulating its rentals"
It could also be misguided security guidelines – because of things like caller id spoofing where scammers would spoof one of their actual numbers to lull people into a false sense of security
Reznor released 5 movie scores last year. He's got 2 Oscars, 1 Emmy, 4 Grammys, and 3 Golden Globes the latest one this year. Multiple nominations in all those categories. He's far from done.
I don't think this is pertinent to their point at all. They were just referencing the quality of one of the scores Reznor has done. Reznor has continued to score movies nearly every year since. I'd agree with them that Reznor's career heyday probably is now. He's writing scores for multiple productions a year while still playing stadiums with NIN.
He was nominated in 2020 for an Academy Award in Best Original Score for both Mank and Soul, winning for Soul, plus a slew of other award ceremonies that season. Challengers in 2024 also had nominations in a bunch of awards.
Trello sold to Atlassian. Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow sold to Prosus FogBugz sort of lives on at https://ignitetech.ai/softwarelibrary/fogbugz but it looks like one of those companies that buys software solutions and retains the minimum staffing to keep lights on.
That's true but I'm not really worried about them. I'm worried about the people who are doing everything right and about to not be poor. Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. It's almost like a pseudo welfare cliff. Public policy should strive to avoid doing stuff like that.
I'm of the opinion that when public goods are cheap enough to face shortages all the time the market economy steps up because better off people will spend more to save time/hassle.
The problem is when things are expensive enough to kick out a lot of people, but not enough people actually alleviate shortage, which is basically how it currently goes with parking.
> Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. It's almost like a pseudo welfare cliff.
No, it's the opposite. A city built around everyone having a car makes car ownership a cliff. Normalising not having a car (and a reliable bus service - like the kind you get by turning street parking spaces into bus lanes - helps with that) makes the ladder gentler. If people are late for work because they couldn't find a parking spot just as often as people are late because the bus was late or didn't show, maybe there will be fewer horror stories of people getting fired because their car broke and they couldn't afford to get it fixed.
The market economy has solved none of these problems, and I suggest looking up just how socioeconomically mobile people in the US really are (it's not great).
Price parking at the market rate. Demand for other forms of transportation increase substantially. Provide it. Poor people can now take cheap buses and trains instead of expensive cars.
If you're worried about the transition, subsidize other forms of transport and build that out first, but forcing poor people to own cars just to make it to work is not a good way to help them.
Price parking at the market rate. Political competitor criticizes you for being an "eco-dictator" and promises a return to free parking. You lose the next election.
Sorry for the cynicism, I'm actually for increasing the price of parking, but recent political events have robbed me of any illusions that environmentally friendly policies have a future. When they have a choice between the environment and paying less money (short-term), most people will choose paying less money.
Outside of maybe a couple urban areas like NYC, that's patently untrue in the United States. It would not surprise me if the poor frankly had more and older/rougher cars than their more wealthy counterparts.
1. Open Ally Bank account (there are others but this definitely works)
2. Setup recurring bill pay for your check payment.
3. Setup recurring external transfer from your hipster bank to Ally or equivalent in step 1.
$6.99 isn’t worth replacing the above system that has another distinct advantage over this: you have two layers of cushion from your main account.
My understanding is that this service will print your account details on the check. The “bill pay” services typically are not writing checks against your account, they withdraw the money and use their own account.
Knowing the horror stories of intercepted checks that are cashed, this is not a triviality.
Fil-C is new and is a viable competitor to rust, that's why you're hearing all asides about tiny niches, unacceptable performance degradation, etc.