Hacker News: dcsommer

New comment by dcsommer in "Art of Roads in Games"

dcsommer — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 05:11:18 +0000

I think GP is simply identifying a potential popular niche that could be satisfied in a future city builder game, which seems quite on topic.

New comment by dcsommer in "Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp"

dcsommer — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:06:49 +0000

Just for reference, Wamedia ships on the major Meta apps and on iOS, Android, Desktop, and Web platforms.

New comment by dcsommer in "Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp"

dcsommer — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:43:07 +0000

We invested a lot into build system optimizations to bring this number down over time, although we did accept on the order of 200 KiB size overhead initially for the stdlib. We initially launched using a Gradle + CMake + Cargo with static linking of the stdlib and some basic linker optimizations. Transitioning WhatsApp Android to Buck2 has helped tremendously to bring the size down, for instance by improving LTO and getting the latest clang toolchain optimizations. Buck2 also hugely improved build times.

New comment by dcsommer in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem – Joan Didion (1967)"

dcsommer — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:31:00 +0000

Great reading to see beyond the clichéd, sanitized retellings of that era. It really makes you consider the prices paid for what some call progress.

New comment by dcsommer in "Denial of Fuzzing: Rust in the Windows Kernel"

dcsommer — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 15:35:45 +0000

Great work by the MS team. It is great progress to shift OOB access into a controlled crash. These kinds of panic bugs are then easy to remediate, with clear stack traces, as we see in the turn around time from the report.

New comment by dcsommer in "Hard Rust requirements from May onward"

dcsommer — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 16:08:26 +0000

> basically fine

How many type confusion 0 days and memory safety issues have we had in dynamic language engines again? I've really lost count.

New comment by dcsommer in "Zig builds are getting faster"

dcsommer — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 01:38:29 +0000

Is there a straightforward path to building Zig with polyglot build systems like Bazel and Buck2? I'm worried Zig's reliance on Turing complete build scripts will make building (and caching) such code difficult in those deterministic systems. In Rust, libraries that eschew build.rs are far preferable for this reason. Do Zig libraries typically have a lot of custom build setup?

New comment by dcsommer in "The challenge of maintaining curl"

dcsommer — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 04:54:59 +0000

It would be cool to build a "library clout" measure for all open source software. First collect for all deployed software systems measures of usage per platform and along other interesting dimensions like how that system relates to others (is it a common dependency or platform for other deployed software). Use this to generate "clout" at a deployed software unit level. Then detect all open source libraries compiled in it by binary signature matching or through the software's own build system if it is open. Then a library's "clout" is built from the clout of the projects that use it.

This clout score might be used to guide investments in a non-profit for funding critical OSS. Data collection would be challenging though, as would callibrating need.

Basically make a rigorous score to track some of the intuition from https://xkcd.com/2347/

New comment by dcsommer in "Why Romania excels in international Olympiads"

dcsommer — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 02:36:49 +0000

This is interesting if true, but without data I can't take this claim at face value.

New comment by dcsommer in "It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36"

dcsommer — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 15:03:43 +0000

Neither are high and low surrogates - those are big ranges of code points that are illegal except for one specific (and not recommended) encoding (utf-16). Yet, there they will remain in Unicode.

Digits definitely are a form of text though. Unicode is for writing systems, which definitely includes writing numbers

New comment by dcsommer in "Uncertain"

dcsommer — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 23:26:08 +0000

Seems more proper to call it a `ProbabilityDistribution` type. It's a more general and intuitive way to handle the concept.

New comment by dcsommer in "'70 MPH e-bikes' prompt one US state to change its laws"

dcsommer — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 23:15:00 +0000

Enforcement needs to be on the sales side, as enforcement at the consumer level is obviously impossible to scale. Also, class 2 (and 3) should not be allowed in bike lanes. If you have a throttle, you're not a bike; you're a motorcycle or moped. I see a clear difference in awareness and safety between pedal and throttle usage.

New comment by dcsommer in "There is no memory safety without thread safety"

dcsommer — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:31:38 +0000

Unsafety in a language is fine as long as it is clearly demarcated. The problem with Go's approach is there no clear demarcation of the unsafety, making reasoning about it much more difficult.

New comment by dcsommer in "The Beam"

dcsommer — Tue, 13 May 2025 04:23:17 +0000

"Strongly typed" is stretching it. Type checking is bolted on and not part of `erlc`. Typing is quite unergonomic in Erlang/Elixir (similar to Typescript bolted onto JS).

The type system is one of the weakest parts of the beam ecosystem.

New comment by dcsommer in "The Llama 4 herd"

dcsommer — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 21:05:56 +0000

> 40% of Americans believe that God created the earth in the last 10,000 years.

Citation needed. That claim is not compatible with Pew research findings which put only 18% of Americans as not believing in any form of human evolution.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/02/06/the-evolutio...

New comment by dcsommer in "A small violin part highlights bigger problems for the global economy"

dcsommer — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:58:36 +0000

Have there been any studies or economists predicting macro-level benefits to the US economy with the tariffs? I'm not aware of any (much the opposite), but I'm interested if they exist.

New comment by dcsommer in "Computers and Mice – Mister Rogers Neighborhood"

dcsommer — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 22:24:55 +0000

Yet I feel that AI gives such instant gratification that the boredom and struggle required for imagination is short-circuited and atrophies.

New comment by dcsommer in "Improving on std:count_if()'s auto-vectorization"

dcsommer — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 21:19:35 +0000

For what languages would removing 'std::' realistically cause ambiguity for practicioners?

New comment by dcsommer in "Improving on std:count_if()'s auto-vectorization"

dcsommer — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 17:24:39 +0000

If the goal is brevity, the rules could first replace 'std::' with nothing.

New comment by dcsommer in "Zig's dot star syntax (value.*)"

dcsommer — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 23:19:46 +0000

It preserves a left to right reading of the code. You don't have to jump visually elsewhere.