Hacker News: dbdr

New comment by dbdr in "EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices"

dbdr — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:13:41 +0000

If a pesticide is banned to use inside the EU, it should also be banned to import into the EU products that were grown using that pesticide.

New comment by dbdr in "EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices"

dbdr — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:09:05 +0000

Only an idiot would drink when they are not thirsty. Nothing to do with his job being to lie and manipulate opinion.

New comment by dbdr in "Show HN: Gitdot – A better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust"

dbdr — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:47:49 +0000

> the misguided idea among some that as long as a dependency isn't through FFI, it doesn't count as a dependency, is one of the things I dislike the most about Rust culture

I have not heard that idea a single time. There's definitely the idea that FFI dependencies "count more" / add more baggage (because there's a bigger risk that the build fails, it's harder to investigate memory safety, ...). Absolutely not that a non-FFI dependency "does not count".

New comment by dbdr in "C++: The Documentary"

dbdr — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 05:34:30 +0000

That's absolutely correct. Wild to see it downvoted without explanation, while you preemptively mentioned the tradeoff that you do need to worry about correctness in that case (just as much as in C/C++), but that only applies to a small part of your codebase, so it's still a huge benefit.

The only downside is that unsafe rust is more verbose than C/C++.

New comment by dbdr in "C++: The Documentary"

dbdr — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:04:06 +0000

> If you are the 'systemizer' type and like to have an extremely precise mental model of the thing you write down to the last bit, nothing beats C++.

I would say the same thing of Rust.

New comment by dbdr in "Meta repeatedly snubs EU body over Facebook and Instagram user bans"

dbdr — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:33:09 +0000

The URL of the source for the last link is not working, this is the updated version: https://boingboing.net/2010/09/14/damning-zuckerberg-i.html

New comment by dbdr in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

dbdr — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:14:21 +0000

However they are literally changing the rules of what "the entire market" means to include those companies sooner that they would have been when people bought those indices.

New comment by dbdr in "Malicious npm packages detected across Red Hat Cloud Services"

dbdr — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:35:21 +0000

min-publish-age in cargo is coming:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/3923-carg...

New comment by dbdr in "Legal action forces Facebook whistleblower to sit in silence at Hay festival"

dbdr — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:01:16 +0000

If it's the algorithm, I'd be curious what other parameter it could be.

If it's people flagging, is there a good reason to do that? Otherwise, I would still call it nefarious behavior by people abusing the flagging mechanism in order to bury this story.

New comment by dbdr in "Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16"

dbdr — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:32:15 +0000

Peer review is imperfect, for sure. What alternative method do you recommend?

New comment by dbdr in "Legal action forces Facebook whistleblower to sit in silence at Hay festival"

dbdr — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:29:13 +0000

[meta] I was surprised this fell off the front page. The post has "131 points, 3 hours ago, 39 comments" and sits at rank 55. Number 2 on front page has "41 points, 4 hours ago, 0 comments". I don't want to assume something nefarious without reason, but that seems counterintuitive. Are there other parameters that can explain this ranking?

New comment by dbdr in "Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16"

dbdr — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:51:37 +0000

One issue with this is that it's a non-peer-reviewed critique of a peer-reviewed scientific article. It's of course still possible that the critique is correct and the article is wrong. However, you'd need to deeply understand this critique, and be at least as qualified as the reviewers to be able to convince yourself of that (or have a good reason to believe the reviewers deliberately accepted a flawed paper). Am I missing something?

New comment by dbdr in "The Green Side of the Lua"

dbdr — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:37:06 +0000

This paper is relevant:

Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: How Does Energy, Time, and Memory Relate?

https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/pap...

This is the main summary table:

    Energy                  Time                    Memory
    (c) C 1.00              (c) C 1.00              (c) Pascal 1.00
    (c) Rust 1.03           (c) Rust 1.04           (c) Go 1.05
    (c) C++ 1.34            (c) C++ 1.56            (c) C 1.17
    (c) Ada 1.70            (c) Ada 1.85            (c) Fortran 1.24
    (v) Java 1.98           (v) Java 1.89           (c) C++ 1.34
    (c) Pascal 2.14         (c) Chapel 2.14         (c) Ada 1.47
    (c) Chapel 2.18         (c) Go 2.83             (c) Rust 1.54
    (v) Lisp 2.27           (c) Pascal 3.02         (v) Lisp 1.92
    (c) Ocaml 2.40          (c) Ocaml 3.09          (c) Haskell 2.45
    (c) Fortran 2.52        (v) C# 3.14             (i) PHP 2.57
    (c) Swift 2.79          (v) Lisp 3.40           (c) Swift 2.71
    (c) Haskell 3.10        (c) Haskell 3.55        (i) Python 2.80
    (v) C# 3.14             (c) Swift 4.20          (c) Ocaml 2.82
    (c) Go 3.23             (c) Fortran 4.20        (v) C# 2.85
    (i) Dart 3.83           (v) F# 6.30             (i) Hack 3.34
    (v) F# 4.13             (i) JavaScript 6.52     (v) Racket 3.52
    (i) JavaScript 4.45     (i) Dart 6.67           (i) Ruby 3.97
    (v) Racket 7.91         (v) Racket 11.27        (c) Chapel 4.00
    (i) TypeScript 21.50    (i) Hack 26.99          (v) F# 4.25
    (i) Hack 24.02          (i) PHP 27.64           (i) JavaScript 4.59
    (i) PHP 29.30           (v) Erlang 36.71        (i) TypeScript 4.69
    (v) Erlang 42.23        (i) Jruby 43.44         (v) Java 6.01
    (i) Lua 45.98           (i) TypeScript 46.20    (i) Perl 6.62
    (i) Jruby 46.54         (i) Ruby 59.34          (i) Lua 6.72
    (i) Ruby 69.91          (i) Perl 65.79          (v) Erlang 7.20
    (i) Python 75.88        (i) Python 71.90        (i) Dart 8.64
    (i) Perl 79.58          (i) Lua 82.91           (i) Jruby 19.84

New comment by dbdr in "The Green Side of the Lua"

dbdr — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:30:34 +0000

Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: How Does Energy, Time, and Memory Relate?

https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/pap...

New comment by dbdr in "Migrating from Go to Rust"

dbdr — Mon, 25 May 2026 07:59:55 +0000

GC pauses are not the only reason. At the very least, raw compute performance and lower memory usage are also valid reasons in some contexts.

New comment by dbdr in "CUDA-oxide: Nvidia's official Rust to CUDA compiler"

dbdr — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:51:18 +0000

Learning Rust is more alike to learning a new programming paradigm (e.g. functional when you only know imperative) than a new language with different syntax only. If you ignore that and try to jump directly to writing code more or less the same way as you used to, it will be painful. So take it slow and follow along with The Book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/). It all makes sense eventually and is very much worth it!

New comment by dbdr in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

dbdr — Sat, 09 May 2026 05:47:49 +0000

> Very little will change in Hungary with the new government.

Are you aware the new government is not even in power yet?

New comment by dbdr in "For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions"

dbdr — Fri, 01 May 2026 08:22:04 +0000

> The commit message just said it reverted a change from another commit because there was "no benefit". From the patch itself, it is not at all evident that this is a fix for a critical security bug.

If the commit message says it fixes a security bug, then bad actors immediately know there's a possible exploit there. So maybe it's intentional? (not familiar with the policy for this)

New comment by dbdr in "How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]"

dbdr — Fri, 01 May 2026 07:31:33 +0000

Stopping the action is not the only reason to quit a job you deeply disapprove of. There's a related anecdote in the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. From my memory: a man working for the US embassy in Japan was unhappy and doing psychotherapy. The therapist was trying to see if his issues with his boss had something to do with his relationship to authority, digging into his relationship to his father, etc. Turns out, he was just in deep disagreement with the policies he had to enforce, and quitting solved the issue.

Quitting a job you think is harmful (or even maybe meaningless) can be good for yourself, in addition to the morality question.

New comment by dbdr in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

dbdr — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 07:47:56 +0000

If that's the right approach, then it would be useful to make that library public as a crate, because writing such hardened code is generally useful. Possibly as a step before inclusion in the rust stdlib itself.