Hacker News: ruuda

New comment by ruuda in "Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis"

ruuda — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:06:27 +0000

Property-based testing is nice, but making it coverage-driven is a game changer. It will explore code paths that naive random inputs will not trigger in a thousand years. In Rust this works very well with libFuzzer and the Arbitrary crate to derive the generators.

New comment by ruuda in "Keep Android Open"

ruuda — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:14:39 +0000

I contacted the EU DMA team about my concerns and got a real reply within 24 hours. Not just an automated message, it looked like a real human read my message and wrote a reply. I'd urge other EU citizens to do the same.

New comment by ruuda in "How to choose between Hindley-Milner and bidirectional typing"

ruuda — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:29:41 +0000

It's not complex, in the sense that the rules are simple, but simple rules can still lead to complicated emergent behavior that is difficult for humans to understand, even if each of the 153 steps that the typechecker took to arrive at the result were easy to understand individually.

New comment by ruuda in "Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu"

ruuda — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:03:13 +0000

I tried Zed for some time. Then it had a regression which broke it completely on my laptop. (Zed can't start any more, logging a PlatformNotSupported error even though earlier versions worked fine.) I carefully bisected it, and it turned out to be due to an intentional change in Blade. The issue was acknowledged, and confirmed by several other users. Then it got converted into a "discussion" because there was nothing actionable to do according to the devs. Then the discussion got closed because they are "directing all support questions to Discord going forward". Then Discord announced mandatory age verification.

New comment by ruuda in "Ask HN: Where do all the web devs talk?"

ruuda — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:27:25 +0000

Mastodon

New comment by ruuda in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

ruuda — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:17:36 +0000

We wrote https://github.com/chorusone/fastsync for fast ad-hoc transfers over multiple TCP streams.

Backseat Software

ruuda — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:15:36 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.mikeswanson.com/backseat-software/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46749205

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by ruuda in "FracturedJson"

ruuda — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:33:31 +0000

Give https://rcl-lang.org/#intuitive-json-queries a try! It can fill a similar role, but the syntax is very similar to Python/TypeScript/Rust, so you don’t need an LLM to write the query for you.

New comment by ruuda in "FracturedJson"

ruuda — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:15:46 +0000

RCL (https://github.com/ruuda/rcl) pretty-prints its output by default. Pipe to `rcl e` to pretty-print RCL (which has slightly lighter key-value syntax, good if you only want to inspect it), while `rcl je` produces json output.

It doesn’t align tables like FracturedJson, but it does format values on a single line where possible. The pretty printer is based on the classic A Prettier Printer by Philip Wadler; the algorithm is quite elegant. Any value will be formatted wide if it fits the target width, otherwise tall.

New comment by ruuda in "IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world"

ruuda — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:03:59 +0000

Everything I know about IPv6 comes from this one blog post: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810. It’s from 2017, when IPv6 adoption was 17% according to https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html; today it’s close to 50%.

New comment by ruuda in "What's New in Python 3.15"

ruuda — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 10:34:50 +0000

It's a Linux thing too. It bit me in particular when running a script in a container that defaulted to ascii rather than utf-8 locale.

New comment by ruuda in "What's New in Python 3.15"

ruuda — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 07:56:03 +0000

> Python now uses UTF-8 as the default encoding, independent of the system’s environment.

Nice, not specifying the encoding is one of the most common issues I need to point out in code reviews.

New comment by ruuda in "Backing up Spotify"

ruuda — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 21:41:17 +0000

There is a sweet spot for the bass. Lower is better for deep bass, but too low and it stops being a recognizable note, and consumer speakers can't reproduce it. This effect exists though I'm not sure if it is the cause of the pattern here.

New comment by ruuda in "VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits"

ruuda — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 23:14:32 +0000

They accept Monero too

New comment by ruuda in "Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?"

ruuda — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:36:39 +0000

I find them helpful. It happens semi-regularly now that I read something that was upvoted, but after a few sentences I think "hmm, something feels off", and after the first two paragraphs I suspect it's AI slop. Then I go to the comments, and it turns out others noticed too. Sometimes I worry that I'm becoming too paranoid in a world where human-written content feels increasingly rare, and it's good to know it's not me going crazy.

In one recent case (the slop article about adenosine signalling) a commenter had a link to the original paper that the slop was engagement-farming about. I found that comment very helpful.

New comment by ruuda in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

ruuda — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 07:34:33 +0000

Dell XPS used to be like this, but unfortunately Dell discontinued them :'(

New comment by ruuda in "Adenosine on the common path of rapid antidepressant action: The coffee paradox"

ruuda — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 12:02:13 +0000

Agreed. I got further into this one than usual before I grew suspect, but something felt off.

New comment by ruuda in "Synadia and TigerBeetle Pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation"

ruuda — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 20:42:16 +0000

> We did have three bugs that would have been prevented by the borrow checker, but these were caught by our fuzzers and online verification. We run a fuzzing fleet of 1,000 dedicated CPU cores 24/7.

Remember people, 10,000 CPU hours of fuzzing can save you 5ms of borrow checking!

(I’m joking, I’m joking, Zig and Rust are both great languages, fuzzing does more than just borrow checking, and I do think TigerBeetle’s choices make sense, I just couldn’t help noticing the irony of those two sentences.)

New comment by ruuda in "We're losing our voice to LLMs"

ruuda — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 17:27:27 +0000

I wholeheartedly agree, I wrote about this at https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/llm-interactions.

New comment by ruuda in "Cloudflare outage should not have happened"

ruuda — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 17:48:45 +0000

Sure, a different database schema may have helped, but there are going to be bugs either way. In my view a more productive approach is to think about how to limit the blast radius when things inevitably do go wrong.