Hacker News: beckford

New comment by beckford in "Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++"

beckford — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:27:50 +0000

That hasn't been true for a few years at least. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/cmake-debug.html is has had CMake debugging since cmake 3.27. Ditto for vscode and probably other C IDEs I am not familiar with. So does Gradle for Java. GNU make is hardly exclusive.

GPLv2 and Installation Requirements

beckford — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:55:00 +0000

Article URL: https://lwn.net/Articles/1052842/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068548

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by beckford in "How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission"

beckford — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:27:54 +0000

> One reason is that far more of their students actually applied than would be expected.

This sentence is buried midway through the article. It would be good for a future post to expand on this ... how much is explained by students simply applying more frequently to their local schools. This explanation was the only plausible explanation in the article I saw answer "why".

New comment by beckford in "Httpz – Zero-Allocation HTTP/1.1 Parser for OxCaml"

beckford — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:25:32 +0000

If you were looking at the parse link in the author's comment, you were looking at a spec (called a module interface in OCaml/OxCaml, similar to an interface in Java). The parse implementation is at https://github.com/avsm/httpz/blob/240051dd5f00281b09984a14a...

That said, I would be happy if all I needed to type in was a spec.

New comment by beckford in "Court rules Meta purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp did not stifle competition"

beckford — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 18:51:47 +0000

Since the link is paywalled, the TLDR paragraph is:

> Boasberg said in the ruling that the FTC had incorrectly excluded YouTube and TikTok from the market where it challenged Meta's dominance. "Even if YouTube is out, including TikTok alone defeats the FTC’s case," the judge said.

I agree. Meta does not have a monopoly since they compete with TikTok.

New comment by beckford in "Build System Tradeoffs"

beckford — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:02:46 +0000

> The first main disadvantage is that they require the kernel to support syscall tracing, which essentially means they only work on Linux. I have Ideas™ for how to get this working on macOS without disabling SIP, but they're still incomplete and not fully general; I may write a follow-up post about that. I don't yet have ideas for how this could work on Windows, but it seems possible.

On Windows, Linux, and also macOS with SIP disabled (as implied, disabling is a bad idea), the https://github.com/jacereda/fsatrace executable exists today and can trace filesystem access. It is used by the Shake build system.

In particular, https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2020/05/file-tracing.html mentions that Shake copies system binaries to temporary folders to workaround the SIP protection. That blogpost also mentions other problems and solutions (like library preloading).

New comment by beckford in "VCs urge founders to fundraise before AI bubble bursts"

beckford — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:25:27 +0000

Good advice but still:

> investors warn the good times won’t last forever

Umm ... these aren't short-term investors. They are investing because they think at least one of their bets will pay-off.

An Overview of Attestations in CI

beckford — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 13:39:39 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/diskuv/dk/blob/V2_4/docs/posts/2025-10-24-overview-ci-attestations.md

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45720952

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by beckford in "Writing reliable and maintainable metaprograms in pure C99"

beckford — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 22:29:12 +0000

Introduction paragraph:

Metalang99 is a firm foundation for writing reliable and maintainable metaprograms in pure C99. It is implemented as an interpreted FP language atop of preprocessor macros: just #include and you are ready to go. Metalang99 features algebraic data types, pattern matching, recursion, currying, and collections; in addition, it provides means for compile-time error reporting and debugging. With our built-in syntax checker, macro errors should be perfectly comprehensible, enabling you for convenient development.

Writing reliable and maintainable metaprograms in pure C99

beckford — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 22:29:12 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/hirrolot/metalang99

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45707488

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

Using AI to stop tech support scams in Chrome

beckford — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:55:06 +0000

Article URL: https://security.googleblog.com/2025/05/using-ai-to-stop-tech-support-scams-in.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589762

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Justin Cormack – A decade of containers [video]

beckford — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:01:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMU2mZgo99c

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571431

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Current State and Future of KCL

beckford — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 13:38:18 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/orgs/kcl-lang/discussions/1965

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45491300

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A beginner's guide to deploying LLMs with AMD on Windows using PyTorch

beckford — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 13:15:00 +0000

Article URL: https://gpuopen.com/learn/pytorch-windows-amd-llm-guide/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45491057

Points: 128

# Comments: 47

Traefik's 10-year anniversary

beckford — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 08:29:58 +0000

Article URL: https://traefik.io/blog/celebrating-10-years-of-traefik

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357732

Points: 253

# Comments: 147

New comment by beckford in "Human-Oriented Markup Language"

beckford — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:55:22 +0000

Yeah, I don't disagree. I'd go further and say the examples are on-point for a "human oriented" language. But the formal spec reveals how simple or complicated this language is. (And I'm also writing this from the perspective of someone who uses a programming language that does not have a HOML implementation).

New comment by beckford in "What if we treated Postgres like SQLite?"

beckford — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:44:54 +0000

Not OP, but I think it does run Postgres as a process. However, IMHO the general use case for SQL is for external actors (humans, machines) to get access to the underlying data in a structured way. So I see a benefit for a true in-process embedding of Postgres if the process exposed a Postgres TCP/IP port 5432, etc. (Hook your software up to a query tool, a reporting interface, etc.)

Beyond that, why care whether the "embedding" involves a spawned process? It still works great for integration tests which I suspect is the main use case, and for specialized data analysis software where a spawned process is no big deal.

New comment by beckford in "Human-Oriented Markup Language"

beckford — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:27:12 +0000

For something like this I would love to see a formal spec to go along with the examples.

New comment by beckford in "Cap'n Web: a new RPC system for browsers and web servers"

beckford — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 15:58:59 +0000

Disclaimer: I took over maintenance of the Cap'n Proto C bindings a couple years ago.

That makes sense. There is some opportunity though since the Cap'n Proto RPC had always lacked a JavaScript RPC implementation. For example, I had always been planning on using the Cap'n Proto OCaml implementation (which had full RPC) and using one of the two mature OCaml->JavaScript frameworks to get a JavaScript implementation. Long story short: Not now, but I'd be interested in seeing if Cap'n Web can be ported to OCaml. I suspect other language communities may be interested. Promise chaining is a killer feature and was (previously) difficult to implement. Aside: Promise chaining is quite undersold on your blog post; it is co-equal to capabilities in my estimation.

New comment by beckford in "Cap'n Web: a new RPC system for browsers and web servers"

beckford — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 15:14:00 +0000

Since Cap'n Web is a simplification of Cap'n Proto RPC, it would be amazing if eventually the simplification traveled back to all the languages that Cap'n Proto RPC supports (C++, etc.). Or at least could be made to be binary compatible. Regardless, this is great.