Hacker News: bennettnate5

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Artemis II and the invisible hazard on the way to the Moon"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:27:58 +0000

I guess in that case it would be to eat gamma? Assuming you're keeping all three long-term, the gamma particles will be washing over you whether they're inside you or out.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

bennettnate5 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:08:51 +0000

> Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park".

No good deed goes unpunished--wild that the competitor company successfully sued them.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "The Oxford Comma – Why and Why Not (2024)"

bennettnate5 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:50:08 +0000

It's common in English writing to interject additional details in on a noun by using a phrase separated with commas. I've personally found Oxford commas can in certain cases make it unclear whether you're interjecting or not, like so:

Alice, the cook of the house and the guest were very chatty that evening.

Alice, the cook of the house, and the guest were very chatty that evening.

In the second, is Alice the cook of the house or not? This is the ambiguity of Oxford commas.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Newcomb's Paradox Needs a Demon"

bennettnate5 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:48:25 +0000

Here's a potential winning strategy: take a coin out of your pocket and flip it 100 times. If it lands heads 51 or more times, take both boxes; otherwise, just take the one. Provided the computer had anticipated you being the kind of person that would do this, it would anticipate you are probabilistically more likely to take the single box exclusively and put the million dollars in it. Regardless of the outcome of the coin tosses, you get that million dollar box, and you still get the added $1000 in the first box 49% of the time.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "An interactive intro to quadtrees"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:22:48 +0000

Not commenting on the quad tree specifically but I know a lot of reasoning that goes into non-binary tree structures comes down to performance gains from exploiting cache entry size. When each node lookup in the tree is going to trigger an 64-byte load from L1, it's often much better performance to have your tree have 4 or 8 pointers to children in that cache entry rather than two if it means you do on average half or quarter as many traversals.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid"

bennettnate5 — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 20:57:17 +0000

> prince Fëanor

> one of the good guys

Uhhhh...

Feanor drew his sword on his half-brother and threatened to kill him because he was paranoid Fingolfin was trying to usurp his power. He compelled all of his sons to swear an oath to slay any man, elf or being in possession of the silmarils (which led to subsequent needless bloodshed).

Then he ordered and carried out the mass-murder of relatively unarmed Teleri in order to rob them of their ships.

Such actions does not a good guy make.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Is Rust faster than C?"

bennettnate5 — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:02:18 +0000

The simplest example is `memcpy(dst, src, len)` and similar iterative byte copying operations. If the function did not use noalias, the compiler wouldn't be free to optimize individual byte read/writes into register-sized writes, as the destination may overlap with the source. In practice this means 8x more CPU instructions per copy operation on a 64-bit machine.

Note that memcpy specifically may already be implemented this way under the hood because it requires noalias; but I imagine similar iterative copying operations can be optimized in a like manner ad-hoc when aliasing information is baked in like it is with Rust.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform"

bennettnate5 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:55:12 +0000

I find it humoring that this article inadvertently contributes to its statistic

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Teacher effects on student achievement and height: a cautionary tale (2019)"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 18:10:09 +0000

The authors are getting their conclusions all wrong; this is clearly convincing evidence that some teachers are slipping HGH in their students' lunch meals! /s

New comment by bennettnate5 in "For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?"

bennettnate5 — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 16:25:07 +0000

When support needs are infrequent enough on the customer end, this effectively becomes a market for lemons--a customer can't know how good your support is until they've bought your product, and by then it's too late for them. People can advertise world-class customer support for one-time purchases because the few customers that encounter the awful support won't move the needle that much compared to shifting money from long term support teams to sales teams.

That being said, I realize this dynamic is likely much different for frequent/long-term buyers such as B2B solutions where quality support does translate to better retention and word-of-mouth advertising.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Weird Expressions in Rust"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 18:22:38 +0000

> They were named after President Lincoln, but only as a marketing tactic

> there's no real connection

Funny--I always thought it was meant to be a pun on linkin', as in you're linkin' the logs together because they have those slots that fit precisely together on the ends.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted federal facility"

bennettnate5 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 21:52:55 +0000

Not to be confused with the National Archives _Museum_, where you can still readily visit to see important documents such as the declaration of independence.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Cursor goes rogue in YOLO mode, deletes itself and everything else"

bennettnate5 — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:09:34 +0000

I mean, when its training set includes decades of internet references to `sudo rm -rf /`, why not?

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Why does C++ think my class is copy-constructible when it can't be?"

bennettnate5 — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 23:31:42 +0000

The frustrating thing with layer-cake languages like C++ is that it can technically have all the ergonomic APIs that make life nice to write, yet have all this cruft and esoteric edge-case behavior that makes it so, so hard to read. I can't safely ignore features in C++ that others are using when I'm evaluating the correctness and security implications of already written code. And barring a strictly enforced (e.g. mandatory lint before merging) coding convention that bars all the nasty sharp points and legacy APIs, even a new project will gradually accrue the bad bits from devs who are used to using C++ that way.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Breakthrough cancer drug doubles survival in trial"

bennettnate5 — Sat, 31 May 2025 16:48:46 +0000

Agreed, though "doubles remission time for cancer survivors" would be a rather more verbose title

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Apple is reportedly going to rename all of its operating systems"

bennettnate5 — Thu, 29 May 2025 00:48:31 +0000

> I don’t understand that (or why it’s done for cars either). Are they afraid the OS will be delayed into the next year and would rather its name be a year ahead than behind?

My understanding is that it's a marketing gimmick--_you're buying the car/phone of the future!_.

More importantly, once a few sellers do it, game theory pushes the rest to follow the same convention (otherwise their flagship models could be mistaken as last year's by buyers on first glance).

If Android moves to the same year-numhering convention, I'd bet they'll do the same year-in-the-future strategy for this reason

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Third party cookies must be removed"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 02 May 2025 02:59:06 +0000

...thus raising the bar for privacy-preserving techniques in client side browsing. Aggressive fingerprinting arrived years ago; if we can move beyond cookies altogether and focus on it as the next issue to tackle, I would think that's a net win. Saying that we should keep 3rd part cookies alive and healthy because it will keep websites using them against users rather than fingerprinting is just throwing the majority of users who don't know to block them under the bus. Plus it still leaves the door open for even privacy-conscious users to be defeated by fingerprinting anyways if a server is keen on tracking particular individuals.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Does using Rust make your software safer?"

bennettnate5 — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 19:20:16 +0000

> All engineers used fuzzing to test for panic safety, and as a result, no Rust implementation has a red mark.

I'm curious how they decided whether an implementation had a vulnerability. Did they use formal methods to test for the absence of panics (maybe something like Kani)? Or was it manual code inspection and/or fuzzing? If the latter, this comparison is unfair in that the developers got to test their code on its evaluation criteria before it was evaluated and correct their mistakes (similar to training an ML model on the test set).

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Pitfalls of Safe Rust"

bennettnate5 — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:37:46 +0000

Here's an important one: never use `mem::size_of_val(&T)`. Rust as a language strongly steers you towards ignoring double (or even triple)-referenced types because they're implicitly auto-dereferenced in most places, but the moment you try to throw one of those into this API it returns the size of the referenced reference `&T` which is very much not the same as `T`. I've been burned by this before, particularly in unsafe contexts; I only use `size_of::()` now.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water"

bennettnate5 — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 03:05:52 +0000

> and only applies to their believers (who happen to concentrate in Utah)

Worth noting here that the church additionally spends north of $1 billion annually on humanitarian aid across the globe [1] (separate from the redistributions to the poor mentioned by OP). Aid is provided independent of religious affiliation.

[1] https://philanthropies.churchofjesuschrist.org/humanitarian-...