Hacker News: dwattttt

New comment by dwattttt in "C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior"

dwattttt — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 03:25:14 +0000

It's interesting to consider that the same question would've surely come up during C and C++ language development, but that the answer is informed by the impact on the ecosystem, which was dramatically different when C, C++, and Rust were all being developed.

New comment by dwattttt in "EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation"

dwattttt — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:57:10 +0000

Do you also oppose drivers licensing, alcohol age limits? Those rely on a trusted ID managed by a government.

New comment by dwattttt in "Californians' data deletion requests, DROP, become enforceable Aug. 1"

dwattttt — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:38:16 +0000

Google TV surfaces this under settings (along with the ability to regenerate it, or remove it)

EDIT: Android also surfaces this information more generally, I just found it under More Privacy Settings -> Ads

New comment by dwattttt in "Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types"

dwattttt — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:11:50 +0000

I expect it's referring to the newtype pattern; you don't want to accidentally add inches to cm, so if you have to handle both of them a lot, you make a single field struct Inches and one for Cm.

For containers, you can do this to make it a type error to index the container with anything other than the newtype you made.

In some languages you can replace/implement the indexing operation a[i] with your new type, so the code looks the same as usual, but gets the benefit of preventing the wrong 'integer' from being used.

New comment by dwattttt in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

dwattttt — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:11:46 +0000

Bugs due to cache state are absurd. In the classical sense of the word.

When Bruce Dawson investigated a bug in the Xbox 360 cpu, the offending instructions didn't even need to "execute" in order to crash the system.

[0] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/01/07/finding-a-cpu-d...

New comment by dwattttt in "I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals"

dwattttt — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:55:41 +0000

For a more mathematically rigorous treatment, negative feedback is fundamental to Control Theory; it allows us to stabilise processes that would otherwise go out of control.

New comment by dwattttt in "Concurrency, interactivity, mutability, choose two"

dwattttt — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:30:14 +0000

I'll take a punt; based on the last pairing, where "statefulness" is abandoned

> You could have multiple independent, divergent copies of the state but not a single consistent state.

I'd suggest it's describing "consistency".

New comment by dwattttt in "Logic for Programmers"

dwattttt — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:45:53 +0000

I took some time to think about why this saying bugs me, and I think I've settled on "it suggests you can't understand your limits".

I know it's explaining the joke, but you've blown past "clever" if you've reached the point where you can't debug it.

New comment by dwattttt in "Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals"

dwattttt — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:06:45 +0000

Agreed on the last point. I'm very much in favour of developing an analysis that can assert the absence of an abort, I just can't see how an approach like Fil-C can achieve that.

It can guarantee a potential memory corruption event will be caught at runtime, but at that point I have very limited options.

To be clear, I prefer aborting safely to corrupting memory. But I prefer "issue detected at development time" significantly more than both.

New comment by dwattttt in "Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals"

dwattttt — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:10:53 +0000

> Regarding the silly point: Fil-C is less of a rock than Safe Rust as everything in C just works.

I'm going to challenge this. Is this from your experience? InvisiCaps, which Fil-C is based on, turns out of bounds accesses into panics. You're saying that turning any "benign" out of bounds into "abort the program" in all the C you? anyone? everyone? uses Just Works?

I'd rather the majority of those failure modes be caught by linters/compiler passes, not runtime safe aborts.

New comment by dwattttt in "Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals"

dwattttt — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:24:04 +0000

Very explicitly making a silly point; a rock is 100% memory safe.

The serious point: I care about whether the program I write aborts regularly, whether due to a Rust panic or a capability violation.

New comment by dwattttt in "Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals"

dwattttt — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:08:20 +0000

While most hello worlds do not check that the message was printed (which I assume writeStreamingAll does for you), dismissing the rest of the differences as "the others aren't correct" isn't really accurate.

Explicitly passing IO in is a fine design choice, but it's not a correctness issue to say others are wrong to not do so.

New comment by dwattttt in "Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library"

dwattttt — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:07:28 +0000

The world would be quite different if AI companies had to create the knowledge they trained on, rather than consume that knowledge freely given away. They're not known for freely giving away their produce either, I don't know why you think the ire should be pointing in this direction.

New comment by dwattttt in "EPA says [dedicated] power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws"

dwattttt — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:48:14 +0000

Is _that_ what that smell is? I did wonder.

New comment by dwattttt in "Our position on open-weights models"

dwattttt — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:00:26 +0000

It's also not a law of nature that there be a valid/efficient form of a product that makes a business profitable. I'm in no place to judge whether that's the case here, but not all products are viable.

New comment by dwattttt in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

dwattttt — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:30:08 +0000

I didn't have budgets handy, but GDP is another way to normalise its cost to the country; ~$2.2B cost in 1942 with a nominal GDP of $166B, nominal GDP of $29.2T in 2024 puts the Manhattan Project's cost relative to GDP at $386B in 2024.

Nominal GDP from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_statistics_of_the_Uni...

New comment by dwattttt in "Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now"

dwattttt — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:21:02 +0000

> The fact that 'unsafe' also enables all unsafe operations in the function body just makes it even messier

This changed in the 2024 edition to now fire a warning lint, asking you to wrap your unsafe operations in an unsafe block, even inside an unsafe function.

New comment by dwattttt in "Ziggity – A terminal UI for Git, written in Zig"

dwattttt — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 01:18:10 +0000

Why are there exceptions in the first place then? If that's what you want, write ON ERROR RESUME NEXT and be honest about it.

New comment by dwattttt in "Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now"

dwattttt — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:27:03 +0000

I think this point gets missed too often in the face of technical things the Rust compiler does.

There was a world where everyone just used the unsafe keyword everywhere, and Rust code crashed & had memory issues all the time.

The big thing Rust did wasn't invent borrow checking or memory safety; it's the ease of use, the defaults, and the social aspect of "if unsafe is used, a memory bug is in the unsafe part".

New comment by dwattttt in "Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now"

dwattttt — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:09:04 +0000

It's not as pessimistic as it sounds. The task of "make the handling of the unsafe as safe as possible" can be quite easy; in some cases, hiding the unsafe in a module and only exposing a safe wrapper means there's only a small amount of code you have to review.