Hacker News Reader

datadefton California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

You are implying a centralized semi monopoly is the only way. If we had farmers to buyers direct distribution it would be much more resilient to this kind of problems.

datadefton Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one

Do you think that there is form of communication where you reach a higher understanding? Are we average Joes on HN?

datadefton NixOS and reproducible builds could have detected the xz backdoor

could have / should have => being smart retrospectively

datadefton Crabtime: Zig’s Comptime in Rust

> plenty of things Rust didn't solve

I agree on that too.

> Nor do I believe that Rust is the perfect tool for all tasks.

No disagrement here either.

I was just not really getting why you are attacking OP with assuming bad faith content from him immediatelly. Maybe I misread your comment.

datadefton Crabtime: Zig’s Comptime in Rust

I am sorry, but HN is probably the last place on Earth where you can wander off the mental plantation of single tech praiser people without much pushback. Perpetuating monocultural ideas and discouraging critical opinions is the way to create echo chambers that many online forums are poisoned with.

datadefton Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

True. I would love to have less features in MacOS actually. We are approaching Windows start menu level of crap being installed by default.

datadefton Moving away from US cloud services

My problem is that I do not want to replace one centralilzed service with another. I do not see any difference between the US and the EU (or Australia) in handling privacy. Most politicians are super keen on destroying privacy for people, for the "good cause". There are so many examples of this I lost count. We need strong encryption and true peer-to-peer networks where the connection is going through random routes (impossible to predict) and there is no government controll of any of the nodes it touches.

datadefton After 47 years, OpenVMS gets a package manager (VSP)

A lot. Problem is that sometimes the hardware is lost due to renovation to the building.

https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server...

datadefton Rhombus Language

Is it possible to have Hindley–Milner type system for a LISP?

datadefton Zlib-rs is faster than C

True, however I only saw this happens to achieve max perf. I have very limited experience so this is confirmation bias from my end.

datadefton uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users

I see what you mean. You can use it with mise that has build support.

datadefton uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users

    uv build
    Building source distribution...
    running egg_info
    writing venv.egg-info/PKG-INFO
    Successfully built dist/venv-0.1.0.tar.gz
    Successfully built dist/venv-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl

datadefton uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users

I have moved to uv few months back and never looked back. I use it with venv and it works very well. There is a new environment handling way with uv:

- uv init new-py-env

- cd new-py-env

- uv add jupyter

- uv build

These are executed super fast. Not sure if this could help your situation but it is worth to be aware of these.

datadefton Zlib-rs is faster than C

I thought that the point of Rust is to have safe {} blocks (implicit) as a default and unsafe {} when you need the absolute maximum performance available. You can audit those few lines of unsafe code very easily. With C everything is unsafe and you can just forget to call free() or call it twice and you are done.

datadefton DiceDB

Is this suffering from the same problems like Redis when trying to horizontally scale?

datadefton Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

The biggest problem what I have with using AI for software engineering is that it is absolutely amazing for generating the skeleton of your code, boilerplate really and it sucks for anything creative. I have tried to use the reasoning models as well but all of them give you subpar solutions when it comes to handling a creative challenge.

For example: what would be the best strategy to download 1000s of URLs using async in Rust. It gives you ok solutions but the final solution came from the Rust forum (the answer was written 1 year ago) which I assume made its way into the model.

There is also the verbosity problem. Calude without the concise flag on generates roughly 10x the required amount of code to solve a problem.

Maybe I am prompting incorrectly and somehow I could get the right answers from these models but at this stage I use these as a boilerplate generator and the actual creative problem solving remains on the human side.

datadefton New Zealand's $16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet

The amount of issues I have seen in the last ~20 years caused by "off by one" type of errors in Excel is insane.

Few examples:

- incorrect schedule for the electricity grid for an entire country

- incorrect assessment of an airport use for an airline (causing few millions USD loss in revenue)

- incorrect financial position assessment for a mine (resulting incorrect deciosion to optimize the wrong business process, not sure about how much they lost)

Making illegal states unrepresentable is a concept that benefits programming langues and business processes alike.

datadefton Tailscale is pretty useful

So I have this small form box (it is hardly bigger then few mobile phones stacked on each other) and I run Tailscale on it as well (also as an exit node). I installed Tailscale on my MBP and mobile phones as well. Now it is forming a network where regardless of where I am in the world I can chose my home server as an exit node and also access the samba shares and the other devices (rpi3 and rpi4).

datadefton Apple M3 Ultra

Apple today announced M3 Ultra, the highest-performing chip it has ever created

I thought it was few weeks ago when M4 Max came by.

datadefton Tailscale is pretty useful

It is one of the tools I use as well and I pay for it. It makes life so much easier. At work we have to test a lot of country dependent settings and with TS and Mullvad is is very simple. I can also access my home network easily.

datadefton Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed

I am not saying it would negate evolution. I am saying origins of life could be extraterrestial and then life goes on a evolutionary process.

datadefton Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed

"Historically, ideas on the origins of life have been mingled with evolutionary explanations. Darwin avoided discussing the origin of the very first species in public although he acknowledged the possibility that life originated by natural causes. Some of his followers adopted this materialistic position and advocated some sort of spontaneous generation in the distant past. Nevertheless, Pasteur’s experiments were a major obstacle for scientific acceptance of the sudden emergence of life. The scientific study of the origin of life, established in the 1920s, required abandoning the idea of a unique chance event and considering a view of life emerging as the result of a long evolutionary process."

https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.100...

datadefton Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed

The evolution theory of origin of life just got a kick in the wrong spot?

It is kind of weird how defensive is that crew. It is very much possible that life on Earth has extraterrestrial origins. I do not see why somebody would try to discard this idea.

datadefton Federal workers ordered to return to offices without desks, Wi-Fi and lights

I WFH for 20 years but never had a job where we did not have an office.

datadefton Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

Absolutely. And we can finally infent FTL and fly back in time to stop nuclear to begin with. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

datadefton Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

> Maintaining solar panels will be always way, way, waaay cheaper,

Citization needed. Actually we do not know and we are figuring this out.

Few examples:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpJKM65tsCo

- https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/weather/worlds-largest-float...

Batteries would need to be safer, less toxic and less prone to be mined by children in Africa, also orders of magnitude more energy dense.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...

datadefton Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

Again, comparing apples to oranges.

If 50 years we need to build a single nuclear plant while you have to build twice the solar capacity I doubt that solar come out cheaper.

datadefton Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

Thanks a lot, this is a must read indeed.

datadefton Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

In what timeframe?

Solar panels last 20-25 years. Nuclear power plants last for 50+ years and use fraction of the space that solar. It is hard to believe that the TCO is lower. Usually people just looking at the price in the short term and comparing that. Batteries are a whole different can of worms. Super toxic and you need a high volume of those because the energy density is much lower.

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Energy_density

datadefton Global sales of combustion engine cars have peaked

> An electric bike or scooter can be brought indoors to charge.

Just look at this:

https://www.newsflare.com/video/704902/e-bike-battery-explod...

There are a lot of videos like this that shows the devastation of charging electric bikes or scooters indoor.