zbentley

5 ms·

1.
by zbentley 5d ago
“Emulator” is a term of art in this area which refers to emulation of a hardware (and usually machine instruction) environment. Ironically, “translation” (as in instruction translation), as proposed by a sibling comment, is an even more con
2.
by zbentley 5d ago
I do think Go and Java are strong examples of this. Those languages have native code support, but it’s clunky to use and, more importantly, very rare. If you removed JNA/JNI/CGo, plenty of people would complain…but the vast majo
3.
by zbentley 6d ago
> Arenas make lots of sense for video games, but their applicability for these other applications is much more dubious. It's a fairly common pattern in non-video contexts to preallocate arenas of different sizes for different worklo
4.
by zbentley 7d ago
Does that extend to medical systems? If someone hacks my pacemaker and destabilizes my heart, or my pharmacy/hospital and prevents me from receiving medical care, is that something that should be legally permitted on the basis that &qu
5.
by zbentley 7d ago
All true, but there's a wrinkle with delegating auth in computer systems--the same wrinkle that comes up when thinking about digital data as property/copyrightable etc.: when you delegate auth, you copy the access; you don'
6.
by zbentley 8d ago
> That's why all your LLM requests to build something substantial should start with "run prior work research first". Yes, but I think there are incentives to not do this for many LLM providers. Doing prior-work research is
7.
by zbentley 8d ago
I posted this because it seemed timely given that 'CGamesPlay and I were discussing this exact kind of system two weeks ago on the thread about why kernel.org's cgit (git web UI) hosting system was becoming expensive to operate du
8.
You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles(tigrisdata.com)
4 points by zbentley 8d ago|1 comments
9.
by zbentley 9d ago
Ideally written as: 5) multit 6) database synchreadinghronization
10.
by zbentley 12d ago
I'm with you on the broader sentiment that Rust isn't making nearly as many inroads many people think. But this example is silly. Do we say "FORTRAN is eating R" because R uses BLAS/LAPACK/whatever via gfortran
11.
by zbentley 12d ago
I ... what? I've never heard anyone conflate the two--not teenagers, non-technical adults, or software people. Most folks know that "GIF" means "moving image that can be easily shared but has no sound and usually crap qu
12.
by zbentley 12d ago
Off topic, but the fact that that's a Wordpress link just makes it funnier.
13.
by zbentley 12d ago
> It would set a terrible precedent for them to do so unilaterally. Speaking generally (not about Automattic), big SaaS have law enforcement desks that work on exactly this type of thing, and the "terrible precedent" is already
14.
by zbentley 12d ago
Narrowly, I don't think there's any technical reason why a better clipboard couldn't require the user to specify where to send text ("paste content into application X field Y") and then handle transmitting that data
15.
by zbentley 12d ago
> How hard would it be to have something like this? Very. Both because of the technical issues others in this thread mentioned, and because Android and iOS had the unutterably massive advantages of starting from zero pre-existing softwa
16.
by zbentley 12d ago
Yep. And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate. If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a)
17.
by zbentley 13d ago
True, but Python is the one with an env management system (virtual environments) which is the most prone to breakage for projects that depend on system Python. Uv is far superior to both Mise and Homebrew for Python work, and I find that it
18.
by zbentley 14d ago
Related but in specific ways. Stock is often priced in anticipation of growth. If NVDA could meet its credit obligations while its real profit stayed flat, the two would diverge, at least for awhile. A large amount of NVDA’s current cash fl
19.
by zbentley 15d ago
Anecdotal, but I've been happily using it under Linux desktops for years, and it works quite well. Workloads include: development, VM hosting, steam gaming, web browsing, multimedia playback. OSes include Debian, Proxmox, vanilla Arch,
20.
by zbentley 15d ago
GP didn't say that, though. Agency isn't some magical axiomatic property where if you exercise it you're the sole contributing factor to your actions. Exercising agency, like making any other choice, is a decision whose input
21.
by zbentley 15d ago
No apology needed; I understand what you're getting at, and I broadly agree. It's a spectrum between "extremely easy-to-hire people that operate in such a narrow niche that they're an operational liability with limited c
22.
by zbentley 15d ago
I think a DBA/ops/infrastructure person as an imposed bottleneck is a useful capability in some environments. But I won't follow you as far as "expecting developers to have expertise in how and where their software run
23.
by zbentley 15d ago
It's one thing to be able to scale database compute/storage; it's another thing to be able to partition it. It's extremely common for bad queries/access patterns to cause noisy-neighbor effects on other simultaneo
24.
by zbentley 15d ago
> a case where a normal person had genuine photos leaked and then just baldly denied everything "Genuine" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A big part of the threat model for image provenance/signing/similarity
25.
by zbentley 15d ago
> For loads with over 20k rows/s and people pushing changes, you may need a full-time person to handle the cluster and take a look at the crazy queries people are going to write. I think this was a benefit of DBA culture in previous
26.
by zbentley 15d ago
I think the answer to this is roughly ... the content of an applied statistics degree, or a research methodology practicum. There are so, so many ways that quantitative measurement of human phenomena can mislead, from measurement error to c
27.
by zbentley 17d ago
Pedantically, colored functions in Go might be ones that produce their output on a channel rather than returning a value. Then, you need select/for-range/<- to get their result, similar to “await”. Practically, the runtime’s ab
28.
by zbentley 18d ago
I explained further here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49604462 In my preference order: an explicit CLI option/envvar which requires the optional dep, a flag file on the filesystem, or an ImportError attempt if
29.
by zbentley 18d ago
Declare the optional dependency and then import it unconditionally if the optional is installed. You can conditionally import a file you control based on asking whether an optional specifier was installed, either by probing the filesystem,
30.
by zbentley 19d ago
Case law citation needed.

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