rustyhancock's comments

On: Tiny C Compiler

[rustyhancock]

What a blast from the past TCC!

Sad but not surprised to see it's no longer maintained (8 years ago!).

Even in the era of terabyte NVMe drives my eyes water when I install MSVC (and that's usually just for the linker!)

[antirez → rustyhancock]

That is, I believe, one the points of AI and Open Source many contacts. Something like TCC, with a good coding agent and a developer that cares about the project, and knows enough about it, can turn into a project that can be maintained without the otherwise large efforts needed, that resulted into the project being abandoned. I'm resurrecting many projects of mine I had no longer the time to handle, like dump1090, linenoise, ...

[pkal → rustyhancock]

I don't think it is not maintained, there is plenty of activity going on in the repo: https://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git, they just don't seem to be cutting releases?

[shakna → rustyhancock]

Still maintained. You have the mob repo in another comment.

Debian, Fedora, Arch and others pull their package from the mob repo. They're pretty good at pulling in CVE fixes almost immediately.

Thomas Preud'homme is the new maintainer lead, though the code is a mob approach.

[kristianp → rustyhancock]

There's still activity on the mailing list. It may still be maintained.

https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/tinycc-devel/2026-02/t...

On: I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)

[rustyhancock]

Another option can be if you have a core set of headers your project will use (and is stable) just precompiling them.

On: Speed up responses with fast mode

[rustyhancock]

At this point why don't we just CNAME HN to the Claude marketing blog?

[Kwpolska → rustyhancock]

Because we would miss simonw’s self-promotion blog posts.

[blackqueeriroh → Kwpolska]

jealous much?

[iLoveOncall → rustyhancock]

It gives the same space, if not a lot more, to OpenAI.

It should definitely be renamed to AINews instead of HackerNews, but Claude posts are a lot less frequent than OpenAI's.

[slyall → iLoveOncall]

It's the big thing right now. Have a look at the old HN front pages and you'll notice other topics/technologies dominated in the past.

On: Learning from context is harder than we thought

[rustyhancock]

It's a very interest benchmark. Much more impressive than needle in haystack benches or just tuneable benches.

I wonder if it's somewhat incompatible with some domains.

I.e. perhaps coding models need to rigidly stick to what they know and resist bad ideas in their contexts - I don't want my mistakes to be replicated by the model.

Still I agree with the premise that learning in session is what I want from a model.

Perhaps once models mature they will diverge even more than just having sophistication and coding or not. But creative, coding, rule based etc models

On: Show HN: A password system with no database, no sync, and nothing to breach

[rustyhancock]

I've always wondered if it's stateless how do I rotate a password? Either due to leaking or just periodically.

It seems particularly important since this doesn't defend against compromised local environment.

[KevinChasse → rustyhancock]

Rotation is explicit and deterministic via the version parameter. Old passwords can be regenerated for rollback; new ones don’t require storage.

[rustyhancock → KevinChasse]

But you have to remember a version parameter per password??

On: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

[rustyhancock]

Additionally hardware wallets which can use a seed to generate huge variety of keys.

Including AGE keys (so you can encrypt arbitrary data), SSH keys, FIDO2 and passkeys.

Additionally you might want to store a hardware wallet in a deposit box instead of the seed (if you trust the security model).

On: How to effectively write quality code with AI

[rustyhancock]

It definitely has for me! I just replied to the parent explaining why.

Tl;Dr I don't mind reading rust I hate writing it and the compiler meets me in the middle.

[gck1 → rustyhancock]

Same here. I had to do a lot of being in the loop with Python, but with rust - compiler gives Claude all the information it may need and then it figures things out without me.

Writing rust scares me, but I can read it just fine. I've come up with super masochistic linting rules that claude isn't allowed to change and that has improved things quite a bit.

I wish there was a mature framework for frontend that can be configured to be as strict as rust.

On: How to effectively write quality code with AI

[rustyhancock]

I'm finding Rust is perfect for me with LLMs.

I find rust generally easier to reason about, but can't stand writing it.

The compiler works well with LLMs plenty of good tooling and LSPs.

If I'm happy with the shape of the code and I usually write the function signatures/ Module APIs. And the compiler is happy with it compiling. Usually the errors if any are logical ones I should catch in reviews.

So I focus on function, compiler focuses on correctness and LLM just does the actual writing.

On: Footage of friends finding out about Princess Diana's death

[rustyhancock]

I meant to post a link to Reddit but had the wrong one in my paste buffer. I've updated the title to reflect the actual content!

Interesting in the comments Oop also explains that the "customer" had the AI bot discuss maths and percentages before it created the discount code.

My reading is that the code did not work on the sales gateway. Although, it's not totally clear.

The consensus is that fulfillment is not enforceable as the website would act as an invitation to treat and not a contract.

Here is what I had intended to submit https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1qxc7x9/an_a...

On: GPT-5.3-Codex

[rustyhancock]

Anyone remember the dot-com era when you would see one provider claim the most miles of fibre and then later that week another would have the title?