The irony is that this guide is written like a system prompt. We‘re all working with LLMs too much these days.
Here's a version from 2014 in the same style if you're curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...
Readit Newscobbal commented on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans news.ycombinator.com/news... · Posted by u/usefulposter
I'm curious why `npm` is used to install a `rust` binary?
They're not doing so here, but shipping a wasm-compiled binary with npm that uses node's WASI API is a really easy way to ship a cross-platform CLI utility. Just needs ~20 lines of JS wrapping it to set up the args and file system.
Key part is *where reliability matters*, there are not that many cases where it matters.
We tell stories of Therac 25 but 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people. Annoys people and wastes time yes, but reliability doesn’t matter as much.
E-mail, internet and networking, operations on floating point numbers are only kind of somewhat reliable. No one is saying they will not use email because it might not be delivered.
We guarantee 5 nines of uptime, and 1 nine of not killing people
cobbal commented on Show HN: Maths, CS and AI Compendium github.com/HenryNdubuaku/... · Posted by u/HenryNdubuaku
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It's just a regional thing. Neither is correct or wrong. You may as well yell at a french person that the word is "cheese", not "formage".
From the very article you linked:
> In English, the noun mathematics takes a singular verb. It is often shortened to maths or, in North America, math.
cobbal commented on NanoClaw solves one of OpenClaw's biggest security issues venturebeat.com/orchestra... · Posted by u/marsh_mellow
This is why I really think for AI tools it’s probably good to just start fresh.
Like our emails, files, other accounts and stuff. That’s “ours” and personal.
Even for business, that should be off limits.
What we do give to AI should be brand new blank slates. Like say I roll out an AI solution in March 2026. That is the seed from which everything we do using AI will work.
To get there we could move data we want to the new environment. But no access to any existing stuff. We start fresh.
If it needs to take any actions on behalf of our existing accounts it needs to go through some secure pipeline where it only tells us intent, without access.
This is cutting off the "Access to private data" leg of the lethal trifecta. One of the few ways to actually make an agent secure.
cobbal commented on Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins fortune.com/2026/02/03/fa... · Posted by u/shscs911
cobbal commented on Extracting verified C++ from the Rocq theorem prover at Bloomberg bloomberg.github.io/crane... · Posted by u/clarus
If I understand this correctly, it translates Rocq to C++? Took me several minutes to even understand what this is. Why is it called an extraction system? Who is this for?
I'm confused.
edit: I had to dig into the author's publication list:
https://joomy.korkutblech.com/papers/crane-rocqpl26.pdf
Testing remains a fundamental practice for building confidence in software, but it can only establish correctness over a finite set of inputs. It cannot rule out bugs across all possible executions. To obtain stronger guarantees, we turn to formal verification, and in particular to certified programming techniques that allow us to de- velop programs alongside mathematical proofs of their correctness. However, there is a significant gap between the languages used to write certified programs and those relied upon in production systems. Bridging this gap is crucial for bringing the benefits of formal verification into real-world software systems.
That's essentially correct. Extraction is a term in roqc. A rocq program contains both a computational part, and proofs about that computation, all mixed together in the type system. Extraction is the automated process of discarding the proofs and writing out the computational component to a more conventional (and probably more efficient) programming language.
The original extractor was to ocaml, and this is a new extractor to c++.
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cobbal commented on Show HN: 48-digit prime numbers every git commit textonly.github.io/git-pr... · Posted by u/keepamovin
Attempt 168: cb80ebbd975f0028... not prime
[PRIME] Found after 168 attempts! Commit: cb80ebbd975f00288dca70d8fa735c688755f947
Why does it say not prime then prime?
Wolfram alpha thinks it's prime: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=factor+0xcb80ebbd975f00...
One thing I’d especially like feedback on is the SideEffect approach.
It’s intentionally not a monad, and I’m curious how others feel about this trade-off compared to Option/Either in real-world TypeScript codebases.
Is early termination the only supported side effect? Its name suggests a more general capability, but I didn't see more examples in my (cursory) look at the readme