Top all-time · #14654
Patrick Jackson
Personal blog · jackson.dev/post · on HN as Arcuruaiprogrammingsystems
Patrick Jackson's personal blog at jackson.dev covers ai, programming and systems. Since 2022, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Rust Coreutils: Fixing Low-Hanging Performance Fruit”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Patrick Jackson's posts on Rust reimplementations of Unix core utilities, such as a post comparing the performance of Rust's dd with GNU dd. The comments mention the dd post only in passing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Patrick Jackson
Most-linked posts?
- Rust Coreutils: Fixing Low-Hanging Performance Fruit3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-10-18
- Don't Sleep on BitNet (2025)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-03-11
- OSS Licensing Sucks2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-09-06
What Hacker News says?
It's the scale that's the problem. I've been saying for a while, the value of any individual piece of work is not terribly valuable for an LLM, but the aggregate value of all human work is obviously very valuable. I think this line of thinking can be the argument for why we should heavily tax these AI companies above and beyond how we tax other industries. Also that if you're going to use these things to write softw…
Comment linking /post/moral-ai-licensing/
on “Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'”Submitted Cloning Windows Recall in 30 Lines of Bash as a story · 14 points
HN discussionhttps://eidetica.dev I've been building a Decentralized Database built on top of syncing CRDTs, and recently got it to a point I can demo. It's definitely in a "proof-of-concept" stage though, known security holes and all. I've been focused on building out the featureset and keeping everything unstable instead of trying to finalize each piece as I build it. It's the opposite of how I normally build things but I thin…
Comment linking /post/crdts_as_database/
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)”Submitted OSS Licensing Sucks as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHas the code quality in that repo gotten to a good point then? I haven't followed it much, but last I looked[1] (which was a few years ago) almost every tool I looked at in detail had pretty bad performance or correctness issues. [1] https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/
Comment linking /post/rust-coreutils-dd/
on “Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils”Submitted OSS Licensing Sucks as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI understand why users get annoyed at "rugpulls", but if a company that is doing the vast majority of the work to develop and maintain a project is not financially sustainable they don't have that many options. An article like this really needs to include info about the financials. I'm honestly curious since I've been considering how I license my large OSS projects lately [1], and I really do want to understand what…
Comment linking /post/oss-licensing-sucks/
on “Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism”Submitted Using CRDTs and Sync as a Database as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> When I last looked 'dd' was significantly slower, though I did make it a bit closer a while back - https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/ I read your blog. Maybe you should take a look at some of the other utils. I worked on sort and ls and both have long been faster than their GNU equivalents. > They don't seem to get enough experienced programmers fixing them up or usage for me to actually recommend anybody…
Comment linking /post/rust-coreutils-dd/
on “Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell”Submitted Feature-First Development as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThey're faster? They must have been working on performance then, maybe I should take another look at how that project has been maturing. When I last looked 'dd' was significantly slower, though I did make it a bit closer a while back - https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/ A lot of the Rust coreutils were written by people learning the language, and the code is often _more_ complicated than the corresponding c…
Comment linking /post/rust-coreutils-dd/
on “Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell”Submitted I Let AI Vote for Me in the Nix SC Election as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI had a similar thought recently[0], though I was thinking about it more from the copyright side. I think there needs to be some kind of additional tax taken from AI profits, possibly justified by copyrights, because otherwise the economic impact might end up being nuts. [0] https://jackson.dev/post/generative-ai-and-copyright/
Comment linking /post/generative-ai-and-copyright/
on “Copilot for Everything: Training your AI replacement one keystroke at a time”Submitted Rust Coreutils: Fixing Low-Hanging Performance Fruit as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think it's great that Rust is safe in that way, where you can have novice programmers write code and you can be pretty sure it won't break anything else. I recently spent some time fixing performance issues in some novice Rust code, and while the code was pretty clearly written by someone new to systems programming it still all worked fine - https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/
Comment linking /post/rust-coreutils-dd/
on “Rewriting a high performance vector database in Rust”Submitted Moving to a Lonely Forge as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAt the risk of being spammy, I wrote a simple Matrix bot that replicates the entirety of their currently announced featureset, but also supports any other model too, that you can access from a normal Matrix client. Stop re-building chat clients, I already have one! Ideally they would just run their own chatbot on different existing chat platforms that you could verify your API key with, but with my project you can a…
Comment linking /post/chaz/
on “Claude Team plan and iOS app”Submitted Don't Sleep on BitNet (2025) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI used to use this, but it won't work if you want to share the script with someone who doesn't use Nix. My preferred option recently has been to detect the presence of Nix in the shell script, and if so just rerun the script with the deps installed. That way it still works for anybody not using Nix, but also has pinned versioning for Nix users. I haven't used this for anything complex, so it may need a little bit of…
Comment linking /post/a-portable-nix-shell-shebang/
on “Nix-shell shebang: run any script with arbitrary packages, self-contained”Submitted AGPL: The Moral AI License as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPersonally, I think that the human directing the agent owns the copyright for whatever is produced, but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP. I'm concerned about the copyright 'washing' this enables though, especially in OSS, and I think the right thing for OSS devs to do is to try to publish resulting code with the strongest copyleft licensing that they are comfortable…
Comment linking /post/moral-ai-licensing/
on “Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?”Submitted Stay Out of My (Project) $Home as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's good to see this getting some continued development. I looked into it last year[1] and I thought it showed a lot of promise so I've been very disappointed that I never saw a newer model. [1] - https://jackson.dev/post/dont-sleep-on-bitnet/
Comment linking /post/dont-sleep-on-bitnet/
on “Microsoft BitNet: 100B Param 1-Bit model for local CPUs”Submitted Chaz: An LLM <-> Matrix Chatbot as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://jackson.dev/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”> The most surprising thing for me is how unintuitive it is to optimize Rust code given that it’s honestly hard to find a Rust project that doesn’t loudly strive to be “blazingly fast”. No language is intrinsically fast 100% of the time, at least not when a mortal like me is behind the keyboard. It takes work to optimize code, and too often that work is guess-and-check. I get the feeling that a lot of Rust projects…
Comment linking /post/rust-coreutils-dd/
on “Data-driven performance optimization with Rust and Miri”Awesome! I've been waiting for them to start scaling ternary models for over a year[1]. Excited to try it out, typical Qwen 27B is too heavy for me to run on my local hardware at reasonable speeds. [1] https://jackson.dev/post/dont-sleep-on-bitnet/
Comment linking /post/dont-sleep-on-bitnet/
on “Bonsai 27B (1-bit LLM): The First 27B-Class Model to Run on a Phone”Excellent, I'm finally able to retire the NixOS module I wrote to replace Tailscale to fix this exact problem [1]. It was certainly imperfect and overengineered, but it has worked for my use cases pretty well. I'm still not sure if I like the login situation for Tailscale (allowing only 3rd party auth) but I understand why they do it. EDIT: Turns out I can't use it yet since you have to buy Mullvad through Tailscale…
Comment linking /post/replacing-tailscale-with-nixos/
on “Tailscale Has Partnered with Mullvad”The maintainers of that project have said that a lot of the code was written by new Rust programmers, so some of the code could probably use some help from experienced systems programmers. I did a little cleanup on their `dd` tool a while ago[1], and I would be pretty cautious about actually relying on it anytime soon. [1] https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/
Comment linking /post/rust-coreutils-dd/
on “Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)”