If this wasn't ambitious enough, the author is also porting glibc to rust. As I understand it, all of it is agentic coded using custom harnesses.
Author is on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eigenvalue
Readit NewsCaptainJack commented on Frankensqlite a Rust reimplementation of SQLite with concurrent writers frankensqlite.com/... · Posted by u/rahimnathwani
CaptainJack commented on Hetzner Prices increase 30-40% docs.hetzner.com/general/... · Posted by u/williausrohr
I have been buying older servers by the truckloads. Older being a year or so. It will be enough to host whatever outside AI that we need for the coming 15-20 years. And the all were great deals, will have them paid for within a month per server. I have my own cage full with empty racks bought from a bankrupt company in AMS.
Curious about the specs of servers that you are buying.
We are looking for some non-GPU HPC servers, but there's always the question of whether second-hand servers will be good-enough/power-efficient for our use case.
CaptainJack commented on Show HN: Is this the best epoch converter? epochconverter.dev/... · Posted by u/subhash_k
Deployed the changes. Added support for micro and nano seconds. Try it out.
Amazing thing, bookmarked! Will save me lots of time, thanks.
CaptainJack commented on Show HN: Is this the best epoch converter? epochconverter.dev/... · Posted by u/subhash_k
Nice site, could see myself using it. But please, allow also changing to usec and nsec. Plenty of software uses uint64 for nanoseconds since epoch, it'd be nice to be able to convert these as well.
CaptainJack commented on Imagine 130M Washing Machines scottsumner.substack.com/... · Posted by u/RickJWagner
Historically news outlet run as public service (with sufficient guardrails for autonomy) such as the BBC, PBS, France Television, Arte (naming only those I know well) have produce much better news coverage than the privately owned ones.
OTOH the concept of independent public institution and general checks and balances seems to have been entirely forgotten, so maybe that's not a solution for 21st century.
An alternative would be communally owned media (50/50 by readership and journalists), with simple direct tax incentive to fund them (equal amounts of $ per person)
Having first hand experience of all of the named public services, I beg to differ heavily.
These corporations tend to be heavily left-leaning, with no real guardrails preventing this. The consequence is pretty biased coverage, under the guise of a "trust-us, we are here for the greater good".
Look at the handling of Middle-East by BBC, the Zucman tax at France Television, or the current allegations of fraud in some communities in the US.
My current take is that it is really hard to get a fair unbiased coverage, unless you actually state that you will strive to hire and promote both sides. If these corporations had to publish the composition/promotion/pay of their newsroom across the political spectrum (as they do for example by gender), you may start to have fair unbiased coverage. But many journalists working there see it as their job to describe "not the reality as it happens, but rather as it ought to be" (to quote the CEO of France Television). We should acknowledge that people are biased, and measure the balance of biases rather than assert there is no bias because they serve the greater good.
Why would people be opposed to this? France loans some world-class exhibits to the UK, and the UK loans some world-class exhibits to France. Seems like a win-win? Who loses anything with this?
All experts in restoration/conservation have argued that the tapestry is too old and fragile to be moved.
Macron has pushed for it (to announce as part of his state visit to the UK), the director of the Bayeux Museum has accepted (he is a civil servant, and more subject to politics).
Experts agree that any move is likely to worsen tears in the cloth (a superposition of linen): https://www.latribunedelart.com/bayeux-tapestry-let-s-listen...
The museum where it is exposed is supposed to go through renovation, and experts are worried even to move the tapestry within the same museum just for renovation purposes... one can understand their fears when it's about packing and transporting to the other side of the channel (notwithstanding the amazing level of the British Museum conservation team, among the best in the world).
CaptainJack commented on Show HN: Generate 'Cooking For Engineers' style recipe cards gobsmacked.io/recipes/bee... · Posted by u/ekglimmer
That's great, I really like it. My main thought is that most of non-american engineers favor SI units, so getting values in cups, ounces and pounds is not too great.
A possible improvement would be to replace freedom units with their international counterpart (with sane rounding to a two digits precision, or similar).
CaptainJack commented on My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024) fangpenlin.com/posts/2024... · Posted by u/leonry
I've used beancount extensively, spent many hours a few years ago. Built importers parsing bank PDFs (in UK, plaid doesn't work. Plus I'd rather also keep all the original statement PDFs).
Probably built 10+ importers, plus some plugins to do automated transaction annotations.
I have not made any update for many years now, because: - Downloading statements is still a pain, have to manually go through all websites. Banks are bad at making the statements available, and worse making it possible to automate it. - The root of the issue is actually that beancount is too slow. Any change/update takes ages. Python is both a blessing (makes it easy to add plugins/importers etc), and a curse (way slower than some other languages.
I believe the creator of beancount has started working on v3 with a mix of C++/python, relying on protobufs, a C++ core for parsing, etc. AFAIK, that is not production-ready yet.
This maps to my own experience in the UK. Every time I search for a C++ job, I inevitably end up discussing my fondness of Rust but inability to use it at work. The interviewer will typically reply mentioning discussions of using it for greenfield projects - but I know it won't result in me writing anything of substance.
2 years ago, seeing a somewhat applicable Rust job-description made me 90% certain it was about cryptocurrency fintech. Now, a few defence roles are creeping in, presumably due to the US government distancing itself from unsafe languages. Neither are fields I really want to work in. And what a shame it would be if such a great language was relegated to being an Ada alternative.
I try to keep on top of Rust, - it's the most likely candidate to put me out of a job - but it will be a long time before there are no more legacy C++ codebases. Being the COBOL guy of the future doesn't sound too bad.
Being in the uk, we were fortunate enough to choose rust as a main language with my co-founder about two years ago. We chose it after trying it out for some toy projects, and with no real experience with it (but both of us having heavy experience of C++, C#, Python, Ruby, and having tested many others).
We chose it because it felt "right", giving us c++ performance, productivity when writing, and a feeling of cleanliness from its type system I had not experienced since ... Ocaml.
But what we did not expect was how great it was from a talent perspective. We started hiring at a time where lots of rust developers were being laid off crypto, and the caliber of candidates is just ... amazing. Rust devs enjoy working with the language, and you get a type of developer who likes producing good code, and is usually quite passionate about coding.
So, I understand rust jobs are not easy to get by, but being on the other side of the table, it's a wonderful talent magnet for our team, allowing us to hire great developers.
Do underwater avalanches pose a tsunami threat?
Yes. Close to us, there was a landslide-caused tsunami in Nice, France back in 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Nice_tsunami