> Thread safety has not usually been a concern because it’s pretty rare to use raw threads in C++. Rust folks always seem to assume people write C++ like it is 1995.
What kind of charmed life do you lead to where use of reliable abstractions over threads is common in C++ codebases you touch?
My pet theory, one that is borne out by some amount of anecdotal evidence, is that they don't honestly believe. Assuming they're not bots, they were bit by the 2025 cost of living increases just as much as anybody, they know what changed, they know in their gut that Trump is the reason for it.
They are just so caught up in their culture war that they believe that shouldering such a burden, at least for a time, is worth it for all of the "positives" of the regime - especially the part where people they don't like are suffering.
That's why trying to argue over tariffs is useless - not because they don't believe, but because that's not their underlying motivation. In fact, they would prefer to talk about tariffs, because they have a set of well-rehearsed talking points for arguing against that.
It's better to figure out what they actually care about, as well as their motivations for why.
Is this a bot? Is this someone telling an unpopular truth on an alt account? Is this someone telling a fabrication on an alt account?
The best part about Hacker News is that you can't really know. It's a problem inherent to the kind of social space HN is trying to be; open registration, and lax control over abuse of user moderation tools.
Real person. Live in the south. Kamala being a woman had no impact on her election chances. Most people in my circles were big Haley fans.
Claiming that half the country wouldn't vote for a woman because Kamala didn't win and couldn't possibly have had any other faults as a candidate is very bot like, however.
The funny part is that most female world leaders are right wing, since right wing voters are more likely to vote for a woman than left wing voters. There are many more left wing female candidates, but those that win elections are mostly right wing.
HN is more tightly controlled than it lets on. User moderation tools are suspended if a user doesn't use them in accordance with a pro-corporate right-wing bias.
Do you have personal experience with this? I was under the impression that abuse of moderation tools was common due to the fact that user moderation tools and open registration do not mix well.
Yes, I asked dang by email, and he told me flags from my account have been disabled because I flagged things he agreed with. I think votes are also disabled.
The buttons are still there, but they don't do anything.
That's false and seriously misleading. Since you've done this repeatedly, even abusing your account profile to do it ("This is because I disagreed with dang. Damg has confirmed this by email."), I've banned the account.
It's fine to disagree with how we run HN. Plenty of users do. In fact, HN users love disagreeing with us and we take it as a sign of their attachment to this place. Complaining about / objecting to mod decisions and admin practices is part of the life of the forum.
How do we respond? By patiently answering questions, explaining how the site works, listening to objections, and addressing them as best we can—over and over and over. Anyone who wants to can verify this. We've done it over 200,000 times, on the site and by email. (I just checked.)
What's not fine is to misleadingly misrepresent what we've told you to other users, thereby poisoning the community. That's seriously over the line and is a reason for banning someone if they do it repeatedly as part of a pattern. (Fortunately, this is rare.) Readers have a right to know how HN is actually administered, and admins have a right not to have their words distorted.
When I explained to you why we removed flagging privileges from your account, the reason was no different than what I've publicly stated in countless comments, e.g.:
You can find 2,700 other past comments I've made about flagging at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... In not one of those, nor in any email I've ever sent, will you find any reference to us disabling flags because someone "flagged things [dang] agreed with".
It's funny, because I had been feeling this in my gut - the idea that they do have oversight over flagging and downvoting, and they just pick and choose who they go after based on biases.
To that end, I've actually been avoiding the downvote and flag button entirely. It's handy to close off an avenue of admin retaliation, but on a deeper level I feel like the reflexive race to downvote people you disagree with is the "game" part of gamified engagement.
Besides, if an HN user says something horrendous, I feel like other HN users deserve to know the kind of company they have on this site, instead of tone-policing it under the rug.
If you read some of those explanations and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. What you shouldn't do is take commenters' claims about it un-skeptically, because sometimes (as in this case) they are false.
> Great, if you are right everyone is going to be using Rust eventually.
Every task does not need speed and safety. Therefore, "everyone" doesn't need Rust.
But I could easily see a future where C++ is relegated to legacy language status. It has already had decades of garbage-collected languages chipping away at most of its general-purpose uses, but Rust seems capable and in a position to take away most of its remaining niches.
It's kind of why the old C++ programmer that I am decided to learn Rust in the first place - seemed like a good idea at the time to skate where the puck is heading.
I hope you realize how your critique is identical to the critiques people have about IPv6
Is your claim that the borrow checker is the problem? That’s a really difficult design space to beat Rust in:
1. Shared mutable data structures to allow high performance code
2. No GC to allow high performance code
3. Non lexical lifetimes to allow flexibility in memory ownership for expressivity and performance (ie you can’t restrict allocations to never escape a lexical lifetime)
Capability based systems might avoid the Rust borrow checker but they’re even more verbose with annotations and complex than Rust.
Effects systems show some promise but not yet proven they can actually be a general purpose language like Rust (ie do the ideas scale well to multiple different problem domains).
Anyway, there’s lots of alternative ways of designing languages but they all come with undesirable tradeoffs. Would be better if you actually made some concrete proposals that Rust gets wrong rather than “it’s too complex - they should have made it simpler” without taking any position - always easier to critique from the sidelines without making a proposal of your own that can be critiqued.
this seems somewhat unlikely to me. My guess is that we'll see a continued split where Rust takes the low level like OS kernels and cryptography that need time consistency and adversarial security guarantees, while most higher level programs (apps/databases etc) are written in fast garage collected languages (e.g C#/Julia).
> Rust is literally the fast stab at making a memory safe systems language.
Graydon started developing Rust in 2006, 20 years ago. The guy is somewhat famously a compiler buff with experience in a half dozen of them. What about that comes across as a "fast stab" to you?
> Do you really think we are never going to be able to design a better one?
I didn't want to learn C++. I learned it anyway because it was the best in the niches I was interested in, as well as there being existing programs that I wanted to contribute to that were written in C++.
I can state for a certainty that if I had waited around for the perfect language before making the leap, it would have negatively affected both my career and hobbyist dalliances.
Did I mention waiting around? You should always use the right tool for the job, and right now if you need a memory safe systems programming language for a greenfield project, Rust is the tool.
My point is that Rust's ergonomic issues will see it replaced when someone figures out a way to net similar advantages in a friendlier language.
It's amusing to see strong beliefs on this being impossible!
As a C++ developer, my experience with learning both Rust and Zig is that they're both good languages, and any reasonably skilled C++ developer could learn either language if they put their mind to it.
If you forced me to pick between Zig and Rust for a long-running project though, I'd pick Rust 10/10 times for the simple fact that it has been stable for more than a decade and already has momentum and funding behind it. Zig is a cool language - one that I've actually written more of than Rust - but it hasn't hit 1.0 yet and still has significant churn in both the language and standard library.
That is not a statement anyone can deny. Unless you're a Rust-bro "hey man I learned it so I’m baffled how you can't see it's super simple ..... etc etc" - often the implication that you're not very smart if you think Rust is complex.
Of everything that I have learned about programming, this is the BIGGEST lesson: - complexity is bad, avoid complexity. Complex is not the same as "sophisticated", which implies necessary intricacy. Complex means unneeded unnecessary cognitive load - things made harder than they should be when it could have been avoided - that's complexity. If you are writing complex code then you're writing bad code. And Rust is complex.
It is sad that we did not end up with a SIMPLE programming language that solves the memory safety problem.
What we needed was Rust-- i.e Rust without all the non-safety related extras that make it different - it's all the non-safety add ons that makes Rust into a Rube Goldberg machine.
> It is sad that we did not end up with a SIMPLE programming language that solves the memory safety problem.
I am not a savant by any means, and yet I was able to get up and running with Rust relatively quickly. What Rust isn't is ergonomic, in that Rust gets very annoyed with the ways that one might want to structure their code. Trust me, I got bit by the borrow checker countless times, and it did grate on me.
As a result, there are many tasks that I would avoid using Rust for, tasks where both speed and safety aren't critical. But if neither is a priority, the list of alternative languages I can resort to is quite long, much longer than Zig, C++, or C. And in the cases where both are a factor, I would consider being needled by the compiler to be a feature and not a bug.
> It is sad that we did not end up with a SIMPLE programming language that solves the memory safety problem.
We did, arguably. Those languages are called JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, etc. Those languages tend to be eschewed in certain niches, though, and it's there that simplicity tends to be harder to achieve.
> What we needed was Rust-- i.e Rust without all the non-safety related extras that make it different - it's all the non-safety add ons that makes Rust into a Rube Goldberg machine.
I think it might also be worth considering that some people find those "non-safety related extras" a good thing. Dropping backwards compatibility and/or familiarity, just like everything else, is a tradeoff, and that tradeoff might be worth it if you think the resulting semantics are nicer to work with.
You focused on the C++ aspect and completely failed to engage with the actual critique - what is a “simple” language that you’re evaluating Rust against as a failure?
You'd be surprised to see, after deep inspection, how little of Rust you can remove while keeping its safety story the same (that is, memory safe without GC).
Traits? Nope. We need some way for code reuse. Classes cannot be made memory safe without extra cost (at least, I don't know how can they). And they are not less complex either. Templates like C++? More complex, and doesn't allow defining safety interfaces. No tool for code reuse? That will also severely limit the safety (imagine how safe Rust was if everyone would need to roll their `Vec`).
The borrow checker of course cannot be omitted. ADTs are really required for almost anything Rust does (and also, fantastic on their own). Destructors? Required to prevent use after free.
Async can be removed (and in fact, wasn't there in the beginning) which is a large surface area, but even today it can mostly be avoided if you're not working in some areas.
I don't think anybody can deny Rust is complex, but most often it's inherent complexity (what you call "sophistication") given the constraints Rust operates in, not accidental complexity.
Absolutely this. Folks are used to an awful lot of the complexity being hidden from them through avoidance of threading, runtimes, garbage checkers, standard libraries, and so on. For a language which exposes all of the complexity, Rust feels minimalist. C++ is one of a small number of other languages which also expose all the complexity, and it feels gargantuan and like poorly-thought out additions after additions by comparison. I don't mean to disparage the C++ devs at all, C++ has managed to be useful for ~40 years, and it's still capable of incredible things. Just that we've learned a lot over those 40 years, and computational capacity has grown significantly, and Rust has had the opportunity and architecture to integrate some of that learning more fundamentally.
Somehow most of the libraries in the Rust ecosystem seem to interoperate with each other seamlessly, and use the same build system, which I didn't have to learn another unrelated language to use! Astounding!
Says who? You can totally do code reuse using manually-written dynamic dispatch in "rust without traits". That's how C does it, and it works just fine (in fact, it's often faster than Rust's monomorphic approach that results in a huge amount of code bloat that is often very unfriendly to the icache).
Granted, a lot of safety features depend on traits today (send/sync for instance) but traits is a much more powerful and complex feature than you need for all of this. It seems to me like it's absolutely possible to create a simpler language than Rust that retains its borrow checker and thread safety capabilities.
Now whether that'd be a better language is up to individual taste. I personally much prefer Rust's expressiveness. But not all of it is necessary if your goal is only "get the same memory and thread safety guarantees".
> Says who? You can totally do code reuse using manually-written dynamic dispatch in "rust without traits". That's how C does it, and it works just fine.
Rust can monomorphize functions when you pass in types that adhere to specific traits. This is super-handy, because it avoids a bounce through a pointer.
The C++ equivalent would be a templated function call with concept-enforced constraints, which was only well-supported as of C++20 (!!!) and requires you to move your code into a header or module.
Zig can monomorphize with comptime, but the lack of trait-based constraint mechanism means you either write your own constraints by hand with reflection or rely on duck typing.
C doesn't monomorphize at all, unless you count preprocessor hacks.
> Having been a longtime Windows user, an on/off Linux desktop user, and now primarily a Mac user, I really think it's just what you're used to
I've also used all three OS's in anger and largely agree.
I like to call that sort of attitude YOSPOS, named after one of the technology-oriented subforums on Something Awful. It stands for "Your Operating System is a Piece Of Shit."
Which OS? Your OS, whichever one (the royal) You happen to be using at the time. They all stink for different reasons, and it's just a matter of which OS's annoyances you decide to put up with.
That said, good lord, Windows 11 has been rough. I actually don't mind most of the UI changes, but the AI psychosis and the general lack of stability has made Windows 11 one of the only versions of Windows I can remember that started mediocre and kept getting worse with updates instead of better.
Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.
While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on.
Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.
> Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.
The "former type" had to do with online socializing with people you know IRL.
I have never seen anything on Discord that matches this description.
Are you using the word tweens in some sense other than its usual definition of pre-teen? My understanding is that discord, like most online services, requires registered users to be 13 years old.
Nope, that's exactly what I meant. That requirement just means that they have to check a box which says that they're 13 or older. Surely no child would ever break the rules, right?
Having been out of university since before Discord was much of a thing, that's news to me. It also is eerily reminiscent of Facebook's beginning sign up requirements.
I guess that depends on the University and whether or not you get to keep your email address after you graduate. From what I understand from my college-aged kids, most people get kicked out of the hub after they graduate.
It's similar in Apple's strategy of trying to get Macintosh into the classrooms (in the 80s/90s), and student discounts on Adobe products.
I am not a huge fan of Discord, although I do use it. It's very good at what it does, and the communities it houses are well moderated, at least the ones that I have joined. I dislike that they've taken over communities and walled them off from the "searchable" internet.
That is actually something I quite like about Discord. Whatever I write and post, while not "private" is not indexed or searchable by anyone other tgan those people that have been vetted (invited) by the respective community. Not that I'm mostly on small friendgroup Discords with 10 - 100 members.
Discord's initial core demographic was online gaming. From there it has radiated outwards due to being the best group messaging (and voice chat) solution out there. The more overlap your friend group has with gaming and adjacent groups the more likely they are to use Discord
Definitely. My friend group consists of gen-z and millenials and we met irl but have a shared interest of gaming that gets us together on weekends.
What Discord does so well is that you start using it for gaming but then it also becomes the space for all kinds of things. We discuss news there, music/popculture, organize events etc
Whatsapp is more for the "formal" stuff and when it's time critical since not everybody has Discord notifications enabled.
I'd say Discord is definitely more popular among gen-z (or even younger) and gamers but it's kinda become reddit 2.0 where every niche has its discord.
- bots (like we had on IRC)
- first class clients on all platforms (mobile, tablet, desktop, browser)
- voice chat
- video chat
Telegram and Discord are the only ones that satisfy all these.
And of these Telegram is just one channel, on Discord we can separate subjects by channels in seconds. If I see a message on #general, I go check what it is. On #memes I know it's not urgent.
Matrix if you want to play IT support on your free time.
Maybe, but at least in my circles it’s a structure thing- until the group actually can be organised in a single chat sanely something else will be used-
but as soon as multiple chats are required the thing is moved on discord.
Yeah same as sibling comments, I'm in multiple discord servers for IRL friend groups. I personally run one with ~50 people that sees a hundreds of messages a day. By far my most used form of social media. Also as OP said, I'll be migrating to Matrix (probably) when they IPO, we've already started an archival project just in case.
And you won't. I will NOT invite anyone from "social media" to any of the 3 very-private, yet outrageously active, servers, and that's why they have less than 40 users collectively. They're basically for playing games and re-streaming movies among people on first name basis or close to it. And I know those 40 people have others of their own, and I know I'll never ever have access to them either. Because I dont know those other people in them.
And I know server like these are in the top tier of engagement for discord on the whole because they keep being picked for AB testing new features. Like, we had activities some half a year early. We actually had the voice modifiers on two of them, and most people don't even know that was a thing.
The split where social networking is mostly for people you “know” and social media is… some other thing, mostly for scrolling videos, definitely is significant.
But, the “know IRL” split is a bit artificial I think. For example my discord is full of people I knew in college: I knew them IRL for four years, and then we all moved around and now we’ve known each other online for decades. Or childhood friends. By now, my childhood friend and college friend circles are partially merged on discord, and they absolutely know each other (unfortunately there’s no way for you to evaluate this but I know them all quite well and it would be absurd to me, to consider them anything other than friends).
The internet is part of the real world now. People socialize on it. I can definitely see a distinction between actually knowing somebody, and just being in a discord channel with them. But it is a fuzzy social thing I think, hard to nail down exactly where the transition is (also worth noting that we have acquaintances that we don’t really “know” offline, the cashier at our favorite shops for example).
While it's also used to socialize with people you don't know IRL, most of my experience with Discord (mostly in uni) was to aggregate people IRL together. We had discords for clubs, classes, groups of friends, etc. The only reason I use discord now is for the same reason. Private space for a group of people to interact asynchronously in a way that's more structured than a text group chat.
I'm sorry but what?! 'Socializing with people you know IRL' is almost exclusively what I've seen Discord used for, and almost solely what I personally use it for. There are vastly more Discord servers set up among IRL friend groups (or among classmates, as another popular use case) than there are Discord servers for fandoms of people who have never met IRL.
They are either being paid, or they are so lost in propaganda that they're willing to do it >for free. They have more time that they are willing to waste on propaganda than you, unless you decide to dedicate every waking moment to a rebuttable you are behind the eight ball. Even then, they're probably in dozens of communities and threads at the same time, repeating the same garbage.
The only way this sort of rhetoric can be fought is at the level of moderation. This site has user-driven moderation, which in theory means that you can fight the tide this way, but in practice the authoritarians and fascists have access to these tools as well, and bad faith use is rarely punished, so these tools are less of a panacea and more of a race to who can down-vote who first.
The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them. The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you decide you still want to engage, I recommend viewing the interaction through the lens of an attention economy; spend less time on a rebuttle than they did on their post, and only in places where you think it will actually be seen.
Correct, it's literally their main job to spew propaganda. As demonstrated repeatedly by power outages in st. petersburg, moscow and most recently iran.
Unless one verifies every single user by ID, there needs to be at least a platform-level detection of user jurisdiction and the application of appropriate penalties and limits to their activity.
You don't have to go that far, there's a lot easier solution - prefer socializing in spaces that actually vet their users to some degree and have humans who have an active hand in moderation.
It's the old way that social spaces on the internet used to work, and you don't need ID verification for that, you just need spaces that are conducive to that style of community-building. Think Discord, not Instagram. Think (invite-only) Mastodon, not Twitter. Think lobsters, not HN. Think Tildes, not Reddit.
> They have more time that they are willing to waste on propaganda than you
Yes, that's why I need others to help. There are actually less of them (bots) than us. There is one pretty strange "tiktok-like" site, that has the worst kind of people and memes out there showing up regularly, something like 4chan but for images, but somehow most trolls (there are trolls from many different groups operating there) still can't hold on and every such trolling post is pretty fast met with a big wave of downvotes and counter-comments.
> The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them
The owners of that site can't manage such a big firehose of hate and most users say that they are racist degenerates (and they say they don't care if you are black or white racist, if you are racist they like you).
> The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.
They DO care and a lot of users here also care. Every stupid comment that I've seen could be from troll was very quickly downvoted and counter-commented. We didn't see a lot of them, because they are deleted pretty fast and often and trolls just can't get easy foothold here.
Your comment seems almost completely divorced from the tone of someone who actually read the article in good faith. It's almost like you got to the first critical thing that was said, stopped, and came back to the comments section to pout.
In no way was Scott Alexander dancing on the man's grave, in fact he spends a considerable portion of the article going over the positive influence Scott had on his life, despite not endorsing his politics and being dubious of his self-help methods.
I disagree, for me, the most objectionable parts were subjective evaluations of Adams' last chapter of life, which come rather late in the article:
The man who had dreamed all his life of being respected for something other than cartooning had finally made it.
Obviously, it destroyed him.
and later, Adams was willing to sacrifice everything for the right to say “It’s Okay To Be White”
Who is Alexander to say he was destroyed, or sacrificed anything? Yes, it is factual that Dilbert was removed from newspapers and Adams' income probably dropped 99%. But Adams was already a senior citizen who had millions of dollars and no children. I doubt he cared about the money any more. Adams probably also lost a huge number of fans. But who cares? Those fans were at arms length at best. He found (or created) a community of people he could interact with daily who deeply, deeply admired him. He "found his tribe." I can't speak for you, or for most celebrities, as I've never been one, but I'd probably feel more satisfied having a few dozen super-close friends who I admire back and with whom I'm engaged in a two-way discourse than millions of anonymous admirers that I've never met and don't know anything about.
Adams was not entirely stupid. He knew that his comic strip would be in jeopardy if he made comments about black people, and he did it anyway. He made a calculation and proceeded. It probably isn't the same decision that most people, including Alexander, would have made, but that doesn't mean it "destroyed him" or even that it was a sacrifice. He shed all the "admirers" and distant "fans" and found out who his true allies were. Far fewer, yes, but now he knew those who stood by him were aligned. Especially later in life when you have less time and patience for fighting, for nonsense, for explaining things over and over, it seems like a win.
The funny part is that Alexander comes to the exact same conclusion:
Adams is easy and fun to mock - as is everyone who lives their life uniquely and unapologetically. I’ve had a good time psychoanalyzing him, but everyone does whatever they do for psychological reasons, and some people end up doing good.
Though I can’t endorse either Adams’ politics or his persuasive methods, everything is a combination of itself and an attempt to build a community. And whatever the value of his ideas, the community seems real and loving.
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