Hacker News: dcsommer

New comment by dcsommer in "We must pace the frontier"

dcsommer — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:21:33 +0000

That's reductive. Without coordinated cooperation, enough actors will defect so game theory plus market forces will force acceleration on the frontier overall.

New comment by dcsommer in "YuE2 · Frontier Music with Symbolic Planning"

dcsommer — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 02:35:42 +0000

For an informed take (from a professional musician, composer, and arranger) on where this is going for musicians and the music industry, I really recommend Adam Neely's video essay "Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk

New comment by dcsommer in "The Maxwell Conjecture Is False (GPT 5.6 Sol)"

dcsommer — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:15:35 +0000

Sure they care about elegance, or at least brevity. Minimizing tokens out, or generally "token efficiency," is part of the objective function for these systems. It doesn't mean they are perfect at it though.

New comment by dcsommer in "Show HN: Nectar, a Rust-like React that compiles to WebAssembly"

dcsommer — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:52:23 +0000

What is the binary size comparison including wasm + js?

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

dcsommer — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:48:10 +0000

https://www.memorysafety.org/docs/memory-safety/

New comment by dcsommer in "Dav2d"

dcsommer — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:51:48 +0000

Codecs are difficult and expensive to develop. Therefore they get reused in many contexts, including security critical ones. Sandboxing is shown over and over to not be a great security solution, so what this means in practice is that security-critical software that needs software decoding get pwned because software engineers don't care to prioritize it in the first place.

Why shouldn't safety be the default? If you really want to, it wouldn't be too hard to maintain a patch on top of rustc to drop the bounds checks if you want to compile object files without them.

Software decoding has a safety culture problem, and we need to talk about it.

New comment by dcsommer in "Dav2d"

dcsommer — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:13:20 +0000

Performance should not be priority #1. Security should be. Why do we slow down all CPUs to prevent SPECTRE attacks yet continue to write in C? As rav1d shows, the perf loss is far less to migrate from C to Rust than it is to apply SPECTRE mitigations, and adding a sandbox around a memory-unsafe codec is going to be way more expensive again than using Rust code to start.

New comment by dcsommer in "Dav2d"

dcsommer — Sun, 03 May 2026 21:53:32 +0000

How is this POV compatible with the exploitable vulnerabilities, caused by memory safety, found in openh264, x264, dav1d, and practically every video decoder out there?

New comment by dcsommer in "Dav2d"

dcsommer — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:58:28 +0000

We must not continue to develop media codecs in memory unsafe languages. Small, auditable sections can opt-out perhaps, but choosing default-unsafe for this type of software is close to professional negligence.

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.