News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

beckford

Re:Docker Agent on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @03:24PM (#49997599)
Docker Agent could be beneficial for research studies. For example, while writing a ML paper about agents I need to rerun experiments so that: - others can repeat my results - validate that variability from LLMs is not causing overconfidence in the results

But currently uv is good enough to create isolated, repeatable environments. And it isn't limited to Linux like standard Docker. So when I want to test small samples on my local PC's GPU (Windows or mac) before running on beefier hardware, I can do that easily.

Re:We do modern frequentist statistics: Using fake-data simulation on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @07:06PM (#49734259)
As mentioned in the sibling comments, Andrew Gelman has covered this elsewhere. In particular, Gelman et al have a "Model Checking" chapter in their Bayesian Data Analysis book https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/book/BDA3.pdf . A popular intro Bayesian book Statistical Rethinking has a similar "Sampling from the Imaginary" chapter (https://civil.colorado.edu/~balajir/CVEN6833/bayes-resources...). Both books introduce the topic early (the latter book deals with it in the third chapter) if you are willing to do a bit of reading.
The part about being hardware-agnostic sounds something like ROS 2, but maybe at a higher level. I would love to see a post about that (with a bit of explainers for people like me who only lightly dabble with robotics).

But I'm also curious to know if the "Salem" name was searched first. When I first saw the title I thought it was talking about Agility Robotics, which is based in Salem, Oregon and is currently 3rd spot on Google search for "Salem Robotics" (and 4 of the top 5 results on YouTube).

The most important lines to me are the CFTC Chairman's quote:

> These are financial exchanges that offer financial instruments and operate across state lines. They match the bid from a resident of one state with the offer of a resident from another state and submit the trade to a clearinghouse that backstops the transactions of customers throughout the country. New York has no business regulating these interstate financial markets.

If true, it seems quite irrelevant that NY is limiting its suit to NY customers. NY would be restricting trade to people in other states. (I am not a fan or user of Kalshi)

Re:All memory manufactured in 2027 has been sold out on Friday August 07, 2026 @04:10PM (#49215615)
They did the same for a Samsung Fold phone delivered to me last month (in the US).
Re:Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language on Friday August 07, 2026 @03:20PM (#49215089)
Awesome! How did you find that out?
Using fragments for secure data has been discussed before on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23036515. Tldr: it may not go directly to the server (unless you are using a buggy browser or web client) but the fragment is captured in several places.
Re:I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++ on Thursday April 09, 2026 @04:27PM (#47709417)
That hasn't been true for a few years at least. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/cmake-debug.html is has had CMake debugging since cmake 3.27. Ditto for vscode and probably other C IDEs I am not familiar with. So does Gradle for Java. GNU make is hardly exclusive.
Re:How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission on Saturday January 10, 2026 @02:27PM (#46569065)
> One reason is that far more of their students actually applied than would be expected.

This sentence is buried midway through the article. It would be good for a future post to expand on this ... how much is explained by students simply applying more frequently to their local schools. This explanation was the only plausible explanation in the article I saw answer "why".

Re:Httpz – Zero-Allocation HTTP/1.1 Parser for OxCaml on Saturday January 10, 2026 @11:25AM (#46567036)
If you were looking at the parse link in the author's comment, you were looking at a spec (called a module interface in OCaml/OxCaml, similar to an interface in Java). The parse implementation is at https://github.com/avsm/httpz/blob/240051dd5f00281b09984a14a...

That said, I would be happy if all I needed to type in was a spec.

Since the link is paywalled, the TLDR paragraph is:

> Boasberg said in the ruling that the FTC had incorrectly excluded YouTube and TikTok from the market where it challenged Meta's dominance. "Even if YouTube is out, including TikTok alone defeats the FTC’s case," the judge said.

I agree. Meta does not have a monopoly since they compete with TikTok.

Re:Build System Tradeoffs on Monday November 03, 2025 @03:02AM (#45796846)
> The first main disadvantage is that they require the kernel to support syscall tracing, which essentially means they only work on Linux. I have Ideas™ for how to get this working on macOS without disabling SIP, but they're still incomplete and not fully general; I may write a follow-up post about that. I don't yet have ideas for how this could work on Windows, but it seems possible.

On Windows, Linux, and also macOS with SIP disabled (as implied, disabling is a bad idea), the https://github.com/jacereda/fsatrace executable exists today and can trace filesystem access. It is used by the Shake build system.

In particular, https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2020/05/file-tracing.html mentions that Shake copies system binaries to temporary folders to workaround the SIP protection. That blogpost also mentions other problems and solutions (like library preloading).

Re:VCs urge founders to fundraise before AI bubble bursts on Monday October 27, 2025 @10:25AM (#45721362)
Good advice but still:

> investors warn the good times won’t last forever

Umm ... these aren't short-term investors. They are investing because they think at least one of their bets will pay-off.

Re:Writing reliable and maintainable metaprograms in pure C99 on Saturday October 25, 2025 @06:29PM (#45707489)
Introduction paragraph:

Metalang99 is a firm foundation for writing reliable and maintainable metaprograms in pure C99. It is implemented as an interpreted FP language atop of preprocessor macros: just #include <metalang99.h> and you are ready to go. Metalang99 features algebraic data types, pattern matching, recursion, currying, and collections; in addition, it provides means for compile-time error reporting and debugging. With our built-in syntax checker, macro errors should be perfectly comprehensible, enabling you for convenient development.

Re:Human-Oriented Markup Language on Monday September 22, 2025 @01:55PM (#45337073)
Yeah, I don't disagree. I'd go further and say the examples are on-point for a "human oriented" language. But the formal spec reveals how simple or complicated this language is. (And I'm also writing this from the perspective of someone who uses a programming language that does not have a HOML implementation).
Re:What if we treated Postgres like SQLite? on Monday September 22, 2025 @01:44PM (#45336911)
Not OP, but I think it does run Postgres as a process. However, IMHO the general use case for SQL is for external actors (humans, machines) to get access to the underlying data in a structured way. So I see a benefit for a true in-process embedding of Postgres if the process exposed a Postgres TCP/IP port 5432, etc. (Hook your software up to a query tool, a reporting interface, etc.)

Beyond that, why care whether the "embedding" involves a spawned process? It still works great for integration tests which I suspect is the main use case, and for specialized data analysis software where a spawned process is no big deal.

Re:Human-Oriented Markup Language on Monday September 22, 2025 @01:27PM (#45336695)
For something like this I would love to see a formal spec to go along with the examples.
Re:Cap'n Web: a new RPC system for browsers and web servers on Monday September 22, 2025 @11:58AM (#45335292)
Disclaimer: I took over maintenance of the Cap'n Proto C bindings a couple years ago.

That makes sense. There is some opportunity though since the Cap'n Proto RPC had always lacked a JavaScript RPC implementation. For example, I had always been planning on using the Cap'n Proto OCaml implementation (which had full RPC) and using one of the two mature OCaml->JavaScript frameworks to get a JavaScript implementation. Long story short: Not now, but I'd be interested in seeing if Cap'n Web can be ported to OCaml. I suspect other language communities may be interested. Promise chaining is a killer feature and was (previously) difficult to implement. Aside: Promise chaining is quite undersold on your blog post; it is co-equal to capabilities in my estimation.

Re:Cap'n Web: a new RPC system for browsers and web servers on Monday September 22, 2025 @11:14AM (#45334592)
Since Cap'n Web is a simplification of Cap'n Proto RPC, it would be amazing if eventually the simplification traveled back to all the languages that Cap'n Proto RPC supports (C++, etc.). Or at least could be made to be binary compatible. Regardless, this is great.

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