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flooow

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I wish Roclang well but (as a regular listener to Feldman's podcast) I don't think we can draw many conclusions from this switch other than "Feldman has lots of opinions on lots of things".

I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer.

In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage.

But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig for your sloppy-but-functional AI-written code - why open yourself up to memory unsafety on top of everything else? Further, the Zig community appears to value a hand-crafted, 'artisanal' approach to software development, which is the very antithesis of vibecoding.

I have no particular interest in Zig as a language but definitely feel some empathy here. The industry is changing in ways that many of us are struggling to process.

This story has been horribly misreported in the mainstream media. Suffice to say that the AI gaff was the very thinnest pretence for a politically motivated firing. The true reason being that West Midlands Police made the UK govt furious for suggesting that maybe Maccabi were violent thugs rather than persecuted victims, which goes against prevailing official narratives WRT Israel.

I have only found one news source that actual tells the story properly (warning, long read): https://whispering.media/the-maccabi-gospel/

From listening to Feldman's podcast, this doesn't really come as a surprise to me. The rigor that Rust demands seems not to jibe with his 'worse is better' approach. That coupled with the fact they already switched the stdlib from Rust to Zig. The real question I have is why he chose Rust in the first place.

It's obviously going to be much much more difficult to steal $450K from an actual bank account and get clean away - you're going to need a lot more proof of identity than a google login. From that POV, owning a lot of cryptocurrency is painting a target on your back.

You're being downvoted but as a lefty European tech worker this rings true. I come to HN for interesting technical content (obviously) but I find the politics of the site by turns confusing and hard to stomach.

It is certainly the case that many well-meaning, Dem-voting Americans don't seem to know what leftist politics is (having never been exposed to it), and don't seem to realize that they are right-wing. It's an interesting phenomenon, but quite alarming when the consequences for the rest of the world are Not Good.

Kind've interesting that the author is now a big Zig advocate. Presumably he likes Zig for the same reason he likes Go and dislikes Rust - because Worse is Better.

I love Rust and you couldn't pay me to write Go (haven't tried Zig). It's The Right Thing.

Lots of people seem surprised that the new government apparently have no desire to improve the dire state of the UK. But that was never on the cards and the idea that they might have done so is pure projection. The current leadership of the Labour party are from the right-wing Labour First faction who have always been very clear that their aims are not to improve the country but to keep the left out of power. They will govern in the same business-as-usual nothing-can-ever-get-better vein as the Tories and their Blairite predecessors.

However I don't blame the public for not knowing this fact. There was (and to some extent still is) a media lockdown on reporting who is behind the Starmer project. (Because if it had been reported on it might not have succeeded).

I Like Makefiles 2 years ago

`just` is great and I use it all the time.

* All commands in one place, view them all with `just --list`

* Stupid-simple format

* Small standalone binary

* Configurable (with arguments, environment variables etc) but not _too_ configurable

When I see a git repo with a Makefile, I'm filled with dread. When I see a repo with a Justfile, I get warm fuzzies.

Some people say it just doesn't do enough to justify existing. These people are just wrong.

I rent an ex-coucil house in SE London. It takes around 45 minutes to get into the centre. The local drug-dealers hang out next to the house, there is graffiti on the walls, and it is next to one of the busiest roads in London. There have been multiple murders on the estate since I moved in. It is in the 96 percentile for air pollution. It is apparently worth six hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

Assuming a £100K bung from mum and dad for the deposit, a 25 year repayment mortgage at 5%, and further assuming you spent 50% of your income on the mortgage, you would require an income of £122K to afford it. That would put you firmly in the top 1% of earners in the UK.

Despite your high income, and paying £45K/year tax, you would live in one of the most deprived parts of the country and your local hospitals and schools would be in special measures.

The chances of cargo update pulling in some updated dependency which is now compromised with malware is low. The chances of a compromised dependency getting past `cargo-audit` are low. The chances of compromised code causing measurable harm are low. The repercussions for me publishing compromised code are low. The effort I would have to expend to manually check the code is high.

So yes, I `cargo update`.

'goroutines' are just threads, that happen to be scheduled in userspace. They are not coroutines - they don't work the same way and don't have the same features.

Pretty much nothing in the blog post is possible is Go, without 'writing it yourself', which is what you are doing with channels. The same is possible in most other languages.

One has to assume this kind of propaganda isn't supposed to convince any objective observer but rather to provide cover to allow ongoing operations to continue for as long as possible before they get checked by the US.

The underlying point is correct though. Rust developers cannot be expected to maintain a C++ implementation of their language. Half of them learned Rust to get away from C++, the other half never knew C++ in the first place.

The end of the year has witnessed a surge in blockchain gaming development, signaling a major trend for the upcoming bull market. The unique proposition of integrating blockchain with gaming (GameFi) is set to revolutionize the sector.

This is a cool level-headed approach, is it? Because it looks indistinguishable from the usual blockchain hype we all got fed up with years ago.

Regarding recent discussion about null-safety in Go (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300425), here is a thread from Go forum in the pre-1.0 days where a user tries to highlight the problem and suggests a solution.

I think it is interesting because the user valiantly tries to argue his case but is repeatedly misunderstood (by a core dev, even) and in my view the proposal is not taken seriously. A little example of how small moments from history can have huge implications later on.

Choice quote: "It's a bit too soon to tell whether this will actually be a problem".

Incorrect. Semantically, Rust always inserts runtime bounds-checks, regardless of optimization level. The compiler _may_ then remove them as part of an optimization pass, iff it can prove the check is redundant.

Do bounds checks even matter, even for very tight loops? This article [1] seems to suggest that removing the checks can give up to 10-15% speed increase under some circumstances. Worth it? I'd say no.

[1] https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/lossless-compression-wit...

It may be ignorant or even insane, but this sort of thinking is also taken seriously in certain places, and even highly rewarded. William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for a model which predicts that if the planet warms by 6C - an extinction level event!! - GDP will only be reduced by 8.5%. Why? Because most high-value production happens indoors, where we have aircon. [1]

[1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/nobel-prize-winning-econ...