Hacker News: andersmurphy

New comment by andersmurphy in "I’ve banned query strings"

andersmurphy — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:36:28 +0000

Yup do what works best for you.

I do the opposite I don't support path params. Means your router can just be a simple map/dict.

Query strings avoid all the hierarchy/taxonomy problems you run into with path params.

New comment by andersmurphy in "Does Postgres Scale?"

andersmurphy — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:45:42 +0000

The problem is row locks when using interactive transactions over the network and contention. That can absolutely kill your performance with postgres, there's not really anything you can do to get around it (other than avoid interactive transactions). [1]

[1] - https://andersmurphy.com/2025/12/02/100000-tps-over-a-billio...

New comment by andersmurphy in "Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite"

andersmurphy — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:14:10 +0000

Is the main use case for this for languages that only have access to process based concurrency?

Struggling to see why you would otherwise need this in java/go/clojure/C# your sqlite has a single writer, so you can notify all threads that care about inserts/updates/changes as your application manages the single writer (with a language level concurrent queue) so you know when it's writing and what it has just written. So it always felt simpler/cleaner to get notification semantics that way.

Still fun to see people abuse WAL in creative ways. Cool to see a notify mechanism that works for languages that only have process based concurrency python/JS/TS/ruby. Nice work!

New comment by andersmurphy in "The RAM shortage could last years"

andersmurphy — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:04:01 +0000

Yeah, there's always Fil-C (Rust isn't memory safe in practice).

New comment by andersmurphy in "The RAM shortage could last years"

andersmurphy — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 05:57:42 +0000

Yeah JS is closer to lisp/scheme than C (I say this as someone who writes JS, Clojure and the occasional C).

New comment by andersmurphy in "Vercel April 2026 security incident"

andersmurphy — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:58:57 +0000

In some ways Mythos (like many AI things) can be used as the ultimate accountability sink.

These libraries/frameworks are not insecure because of bad design and dependency bloat. No! It's because a mythical LLM is so powerful that it's impossible to defend against! There was nothing that could be done.

New comment by andersmurphy in "Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975"

andersmurphy — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:13:04 +0000

Absolutely love the one on Forth. Issue 5 I think? Has a build it yourself modem for under 50$ in it.

New comment by andersmurphy in "Vercel April 2026 security incident"

andersmurphy — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:07:53 +0000

That's the irony of Mythos. It doesn't need to exist. LLM vibe slop has already eroded the security of your average site.

New comment by andersmurphy in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

andersmurphy — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:05:36 +0000

For what it's worth blob types and application functions make it pretty straight forward to implement your own datatypes. I often have one for EDN and one for bigdecimal.

New comment by andersmurphy in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

andersmurphy — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:07:09 +0000

The bigger change is those that do write by hand have stopped open sourcing their work. The age of sharing innovation for free is quickly coming to an end.

I also expect a bunch of open source/open core projects to go closed source in the next few months.

New comment by andersmurphy in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

andersmurphy — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:35:13 +0000

Recommend this series if you want to dabble in assembly/forth:

https://tumbleforth.hardcoded.net/

New comment by andersmurphy in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

andersmurphy — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:48:48 +0000

Python from scratch now means writing python without LLMs? It's like wild swimming all over again.

The shark is being jumped.

New comment by andersmurphy in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

andersmurphy — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:24:24 +0000

I've been diving into aarch64 assembly recently building a small Forth. It's honestly really refreshing.

If you're prepared to forgo some portability and pick an architecture assembly opens up a lot if options. Things like coroutines, automatic SIMD become easier to implement. It's also got amazing zero cost C FFI (and I'm only half joking). Linux kernel booting into a minimal STC Forth is a lot of fun.

Not to mention you can run your code on android without SDK or NDK over ADB (in the case of aarch64).

New comment by andersmurphy in "Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links"

andersmurphy — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:26:09 +0000

Coffi [1] built on java 22 (project panama) C FFI. Makes binding to C from Clojure a lot of fun.

- [1] https://github.com/IGJoshua/coffi

New comment by andersmurphy in "The beginning of scarcity in AI"

andersmurphy — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:26:02 +0000

We don't know what anthropic's true costs are. So pricing that in is at best a guess.

New comment by andersmurphy in "The beginning of scarcity in AI"

andersmurphy — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:19:49 +0000

Yup. Also regardless of price they need to spend more and more as the project collapses under the inevitable incidental complexity of 30k lines of code a day.

It's similar to how if you know what you're doing you can manage a simple VPS and scale a lot more cost effectively than something like vercel.

In a saturated market margins are everything. You can't necessarily afford to be giving all your margins to anthropic and vercel.

New comment by andersmurphy in "AI cybersecurity is not proof of work"

andersmurphy — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:20:13 +0000

> What happens is that weak models hallucinate (sometimes causally hitting a real problem)

So the bigger models hallucinate better causally hitting more real problems?

New comment by andersmurphy in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

andersmurphy — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:41:29 +0000

That's a good point. I'll give that a go and do a write up at some point.

The choice to use SQLite for me isn't actually about speed (LMDB is way faster).

I just get tired of people saying switch to Postgres for speed/scale. Postgres is great for many things but speed/scale is not its strength.

The main reason I use SQLite is the affordances and conveniences of an embedded database. Being able to easily have many databases. When databases are "cheap" it opens up loads of options. Of the embedded/file OLTP databases SQLite also has the largest toolbox: litestream, R*Tree indexes, JSONB, FTS, etc.

New comment by andersmurphy in "Saying goodbye to Agile"

andersmurphy — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:12:14 +0000

Clearly they didn't use enough hammer. Screws always require the most hammer. Common knowledge to any certified practitioner of Hammer™[1].

- [1] Get 20% off your Hammer Master™ certificate with referral code THUMBPAIN

New comment by andersmurphy in "Saying goodbye to Agile"

andersmurphy — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:58:34 +0000

This is a great point! Reminds me of Agentic software development. When it doesn't work out it's only evidence that you could have used more agents.

You can never use enough tokens.