Hacker News: benwilber0

Code Is A Commodity

benwilber0 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:11:25 +0000

Article URL: https://benwilber.github.io/programming/2026/02/14/code-is-commodity.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47019786

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by benwilber0 in "Fast Lua runtime written in Rust"

benwilber0 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:09:15 +0000

The "runtime" word is very confusing in this case.

It's a web application server written in Rust (Axum/Tokio), that has hooks into Lua bindings (mlua) so that application behaviors can be implemented in Lua.

New comment by benwilber0 in "Fast Lua runtime written in Rust"

benwilber0 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:21:48 +0000

Looks neat. I built a programmable server for Server-Sent Events using a similar stack (Rust/mlua/axum) [1]. I think the Rust/Lua interop story is pretty good.

[1] https://github.com/benwilber/tinysse

New comment by benwilber0 in "Lua for Elixir"

benwilber0 — Thu, 15 May 2025 16:57:48 +0000

> I am surprised more projects don’t provide a Lua scripting layer.

Completely agree. I've been adding Lua scripting support to pretty much everything I make now. Most recently my programmable SSE server [1]. It's extended the functionality far beyond anything that I would have had the time and patience to do myself. Lua is such a treat.

[1] https://github.com/benwilber/tinysse

New comment by benwilber0 in "Show HN: CLI that spots fake GitHub stars, risky dependencies and licence traps"

benwilber0 — Mon, 12 May 2025 17:10:53 +0000

Github was a "social network" from its very beginning. The whole premise was geared around git hosting and "social coding". I don't think it became enshittified later since that was the entire value proposition from day 1.

A lithium deposit valued at $1.5T discovered in the US state of Oregon

benwilber0 — Sun, 11 May 2025 14:24:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.earth.com/news/volcanic-white-gold-a-lithium-deposit-valued-at-1-5-trillion-has-been-discovered-in-the-u-s/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43954035

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by benwilber0 in "Redis is open source again"

benwilber0 — Thu, 01 May 2025 16:59:11 +0000

But why are they spending any time switching away from Redis at all unless they are a hosting provider offering Redis-as-a-service?

I wasn't aware the license had any negative affect on private internal use.

New comment by benwilber0 in "Redis is open source again"

benwilber0 — Thu, 01 May 2025 16:20:29 +0000

Your company invested hundreds of engineering hours switching from Redis to a clean fork of Redis?

New comment by benwilber0 in "Linux Kernel Exploitation: Attack of the Vsock"

benwilber0 — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:48:30 +0000

> I probably would have gone for turning the UaF into an type confusion style attack

I'm aware that Linux is nearly 40 years old at this point, and C is even decades older. But it is mind-boggling to me that we're still talking about UAFs and jumping from dangling pointers to get privileged executions in the 21st century.

(rewrite it in Rust)

SQLite is great for what it is: a small, embedded SQL database. But nothing more

benwilber0 — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:24:36 +0000

Article URL: https://benwilber.github.io/programming/2025/03/31/sqlite-is-great-for-what-it-is.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43849605

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by benwilber0 in "A single line of code cost $8000"

benwilber0 — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 15:03:16 +0000

> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes

How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes

New comment by benwilber0 in "My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025"

benwilber0 — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:38:09 +0000

> contention slowdowns caused by having a primary key that needs a lock (incrementing key)

This kind of problem only exists in unsophisticated databases like SQLite. Postgres reserves whole ranges of IDs at once so there is never any contention for the next ID in a serial sequence.

New comment by benwilber0 in "My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025"

benwilber0 — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:34:58 +0000

You use a regular bigint/bigserial for internal table relations and a UUID as an application-level identifier and natural key.

New comment by benwilber0 in "My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025"

benwilber0 — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 22:20:18 +0000

> Always use a BigInt (64 bits) or UUID for primary keys.

Use bigint, never UUID. UUIDs are massive (2x a bigint) and now your DBMS has to copy that enormous value to every side of a relation.

It will bloat your table and indexes 2x for no good reason whatsoever.

Never use UUIDs as your primary keys.

New comment by benwilber0 in "Migrating away from Rust"

benwilber0 — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 21:47:27 +0000

Tokio + Axum + SQLx has been a total game-changer for me for web dev. It's by far the most productive I've been with any backend web stack.

New comment by benwilber0 in "People say they’ll pay more for “made in the USA” so we ran a test"

benwilber0 — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 22:23:12 +0000

Americans in the market for a "premium" shower head are clearly not looking for the cheapest thing on the market. So it's obvious that they would be willing to spend more for the added feel-good of a domestic product.

New comment by benwilber0 in "Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii"

benwilber0 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:57:51 +0000

got hugged.

Maybe the next post will say "Blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii (running Varnish)"

New comment by benwilber0 in "A new form of verification on Bluesky"

benwilber0 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:47:16 +0000

My initial thought is about GPG's "Web of Trust" system for trusting strangers' keys. But I don't know if that's a very good example since it always seemed somewhat esoteric and maybe not very successful in general.

New comment by benwilber0 in "A new form of verification on Bluesky"

benwilber0 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:26:24 +0000

I'm guessing because users will just "verify" themselves, and then the whole thing is meaningless.

New comment by benwilber0 in "Python’s new t-strings"

benwilber0 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 14:42:42 +0000

The first mistake we're going to see a library developer make is:

    def execute(query: Union[str, Template]):

Maybe because they want their execute function to be backwards compatible, or just because they really do want to allow either raw strings are a template string.