Hacker News: nihsett

New comment by nihsett in "Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore"

nihsett — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:02:51 +0000

My dad exclusively uses perplexity and I think completely stopped using google. It's definitely more common than we realize.

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

nihsett — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:42:44 +0000

Yeah, me too. I argue with multiple models at the same time via a markdown doc to coordinate the discussion. I feel like it makes me less anxious about the final output if nothing else.

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

nihsett — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:31:26 +0000

That's true. GC and manual are the two ends of the spectrum with other options in between like Rust. By catastrophic mistakes I mean security vulnerabilities created by memory safety related mistakes.

Maybe it's just me but I cannot write a huge program in rust as easily as I can in Java or Python. I have to spend more effort bending my program to fit the language and it's semantics. I get safety and speed but it feel like I'm wearing a straitjacket for those gains paying in my time and productivity.

Sometimes that tradeoff makes sense, but if I'm writing a backend webserver or some other application why would I bother with all this effort. Just doesn't make sense to me.

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

nihsett — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:05:32 +0000

Buffer overflows for one. I don't have numbers but many security vulnerabilities have some kind of memory safety problem underneath.

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

nihsett — Mon, 25 May 2026 05:37:15 +0000

Exactly. 95% of programmers are application programmers - they ship software used by regular users. I think it's insane to use a non-GC language for most of those cases. Manual memory management is mentally taxing and it's easy to make catastrophic mistakes. The marginal benefit from it is just not worth it unless you're making games or a trading system.

5% who write tools or other "infra" layer for the other 95% to work on top of maybe need that level of control over memory. It doesn't make any sense to me to sign up for that complexity unless you really really need it.