Hacker News: bsaul

New comment by bsaul in "Zig’s io.threaded is neat"

bsaul — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:31:53 +0000

it's also my opinion. Which makes me wonder : isn't there an opportunity to create a variant of rust that would make absolutely zero compromise on UB and safety at the detriment of user experience ( which we don't care about now, with AI generating the code) ?

Like programming in a kind of super strict IL. Or the opposite : super poweful, super abstract language, yet extremely strict.

New comment by bsaul in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

bsaul — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:26:10 +0000

« Even America's closest postwar allies like the UK, Sweden and Japan did not get that type of diplomatic cover, it was exclusive to Israel.«

wasn’t echelon a joint collaboration between the US and the UK ?

New comment by bsaul in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

bsaul — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:59:04 +0000

That's actually a really good point... There's currently zero incentive to buying more hardware, and that's one very good reason do have a new one.

New comment by bsaul in "Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI"

bsaul — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:14:57 +0000

something i've just realized : today long-standing maths problems are falling. It's great intellectually but won't probably have an immediate impact on our lives.

Now, what will happen once long-standing physics ( and chemistry and biology) problems will start to fall and at the same rate ?

Then we're going to enter a totally different world.

New comment by bsaul in "US Treasury undertakes historic intervention in yen market"

bsaul — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:39:51 +0000

"was considering a mass sell off to raise cash to defend the Yen."

How would that have worked ? Selling US bonds in exchange for yens, to diminish the amount of yen in the economy, and pump up its price ?

New comment by bsaul in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

bsaul — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:08:52 +0000

Never developped a driver, but doesn't that require running the OS in some special mode, or in a VM, requiring a ton of time waiting for the thing to reboot over and over again ?

New comment by bsaul in "Scaling to 1M concurrent sandboxes in seconds"

bsaul — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:47:11 +0000

how complex is maintaining a firecracker cluster over bare metal in practice ?

New comment by bsaul in "A road to Lisp: Why Lisp"

bsaul — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:22:13 +0000

never understood why people say that: the syntax for defining code seems quite different from the syntax defining data structure. There's no homoiconicity in javascript..

New comment by bsaul in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

bsaul — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:12:14 +0000

Not a really nice post. It reads like someone refusing to accept bitter feelings (which is absolutely understandable given the circumstances), and then go on to personally attacking the person who hurt you.

He should have kept the "horrible manager" parts away, as it really doesn't have anything to do with the point of the post.

New comment by bsaul in "Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower"

bsaul — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:06:33 +0000

i don't understand the last point of UDF. Either you need the state to be updated atomically across different systems or you don't. But writing a row in a system in order to update the second one at any random time in the future isn't really much different from enqueuing a job in queue.

New comment by bsaul in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

bsaul — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 20:35:22 +0000

I wonder if our common expectation that true theories somehow had to be beautiful and elegant is going to survive the coming century. What if "real" nature phenomenon were actually best described by horrible mess of impossible equations, that only machines could actually manipulate and reason about ?

That would be really sad..

New comment by bsaul in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

bsaul — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:29:58 +0000

if this was the case, there would be no state sponsoring palestinian terrorism for a long time.

Look at what happened after 9/11, it's pretty clear there's a wide difference between how US consider its own security matter vs israel's one.

New comment by bsaul in "Using AI to write better code more slowly"

bsaul — Tue, 26 May 2026 10:57:15 +0000

"Because this version of AI is worth 10 trillion dollars."

i wonder how much the real version of AI is worth. I've got a hinch we're going to find out pretty soon.

New comment by bsaul in "Haiku"

bsaul — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:58:56 +0000

wondering : apart from the aesthetics, is there still some technology from beos that would be still considered an improvement compared to what today's OS provide ?

New comment by bsaul in "France moves to break encrypted messaging"

bsaul — Sun, 10 May 2026 04:33:17 +0000

of course, nothing magically prevents the app from sending keys or decrypted content to a third party.

That's why if you're really serious about e2ee you have to install the app from source.

New comment by bsaul in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

bsaul — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:39:03 +0000

i think using AI is going to transform our definition of programming into something more abstract, but it's still going to require human.

We're going to start thinking in terms of program general properties ( termination conditions, invariants, symetries, etc), and code quality indicators, to drive our work into certain directions, depending on the project.

Then in 20 years we're going to consider the task of actually typing code something of really low value and uninteresting.

I can feel it's already happening to me after just a few months of vibe coding.

New comment by bsaul in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

bsaul — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:23:20 +0000

yes miro is also what i'm using. It's really a digital whiteboard.

New comment by bsaul in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

bsaul — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:20:37 +0000

"used to be" ?? What are engineering team doing nowadays when discussing architecturing their systems ?

New comment by bsaul in "Claude Opus 4.7"

bsaul — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:58:28 +0000

i tried to find an API pricing for GLM 5.1 but couldn't find any on the homepage. How are you using it ?

New comment by bsaul in "Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness"

bsaul — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:48:28 +0000

you forgot the memory model. Which is an absolutely essential and hard to design part of the agent.