Hacker News: billywhizz

New comment by billywhizz in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

billywhizz — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:24:38 +0000

SQL Server was very good and used in a lot of enterprises. ime the decision between Oracle and SQL Server tended to be down to whether the IT department or company was a "Microsoft Shop" or not. There were a lot of things that came free with SQL Server licenses and it had really nice integrations with other Microsoft enterprise systems software and desktop software.

Oracle was definitely seen as the more mature and resilient (and expensive!) RDBMS in all the years I worked in that space. It also ran on Unix/Linux whereas SQL Server was windows only. Many enterprises didn't like running Microsoft servers, for lots of (usually good) reasons.

New comment by billywhizz in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

billywhizz — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:30:20 +0000

the chinese can

New comment by billywhizz in "A better streams API is possible for JavaScript"

billywhizz — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 01:32:46 +0000

that sounds way off. there is a big perf hit to async, but it appears to be roughly 100 nanoseconds overhead per call. when benchmarking you have to ensure your function is not going to be optimized away if it doesn't do anything or inputs/outputs never change.

you can run this to see the overhead for node.js Bun and Deno: https://gist.github.com/billywhizz/e8275a3a90504b0549de3c075...

New comment by billywhizz in "Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite"

billywhizz — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 03:13:32 +0000

i played around with this a while back. you can see a demo here. it also lets you pull new WAL segments in and apply them to the current database. never got much time to go any further with it than this.

https://just.billywhizz.io/sqlite/demo/#https://raw.githubus...

New comment by billywhizz in "Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”"

billywhizz — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:50:09 +0000

> We are just dumber than them.

you are, for sure.

New comment by billywhizz in "Denial of service and source code exposure in React Server Components"

billywhizz — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 21:27:40 +0000

is it not obvious?

> These issues are present in the patches published last week.

> The patches published last week are vulnerable.

> If you already updated for the Critical Security Vulnerability, you will need to update again.

New comment by billywhizz in "Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1"

billywhizz — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 21:45:30 +0000

the OP was specifically about jetstream so i guess you just didn't read it?

New comment by billywhizz in "Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas"

billywhizz — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 20:47:06 +0000

is this really the best use case you could come up with? says it all really if so.

New comment by billywhizz in "NPM debug and chalk packages compromised"

billywhizz — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:49:47 +0000

> When a package in the npm registry has established provenance, it does not guarantee the package has no malicious code. Instead, npm provenance provides a verifiable link to the package's source code and build instructions, which developers can then audit and determine whether to trust it or not

New comment by billywhizz in "QEMU 10.1.0"

billywhizz — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 19:00:03 +0000

if you want to look at existing implementations on top of kvm then these might be useful - rust-vmm is a core library for AWS' firecracker vmm.

https://github.com/rust-vmm/kvm https://github.com/kvmtool/kvmtool https://github.com/sysprog21/kvm-host

New comment by billywhizz in "SQLite (with WAL) doesn't do `fsync` on each commit under default settings"

billywhizz — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 19:54:29 +0000

yes. most folks don't seem to understand this. but, you can get something approaching such guarantees if you are able to limit yourself to something as (seemingly) simple as updating a ledger. this approach is used in a lot of places where high performance and strong consistency is needed (see e.g. LMAX disruptor for similar). https://tigerbeetle.com/

New comment by billywhizz in "Parsing Protobuf like never before"

billywhizz — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:12:39 +0000

i can't see how these numbers can be anywhere near correct (nor the ones above). in JavaScript on an old Core i5 the overhead of a simple ffi call is on the order of 5 nanoseconds. on a recent x64/arm64 cpu it's more like 2 nanoseconds.

you can verify this easily with Deno ffi which is pretty much optimal for JS runtimes. also, from everything i have seen and read, luajit should be even lower overhead than this.

you really shouldn't be asking chatgpt questions like this imo. these are facts, that need to be proven, not just vibes.

New comment by billywhizz in "Microsandbox: Virtual Machines that feel and perform like containers"

billywhizz — Sat, 31 May 2025 22:35:32 +0000

is there anything good written up on this?

New comment by billywhizz in "HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere"

billywhizz — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 21:32:32 +0000

there's a pretty good summary of things with links from daniel stenberg - the curl guy - here : https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/10/25/the-quic-api-openssl-...

New comment by billywhizz in "SQLite-on-the-Server Is Misunderstood: Better at Hyper-Scale Than Micro-Scale"

billywhizz — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 22:21:13 +0000

this is nice. i like the idea which has been tried in a few places of running sqlite in the browser directly/locally. the only thing that is really missing to make this work at a bigger scale for read-heavy databases is a very cheap or free static hosting service which does range requests, allows you control of CORS and doesn't have the file size limitations of gist or github pages. maybe this exists already? S3 would do i guess?

you can do kinda magic things like this and build websites that connect to multiple different databases around the web and... well, i'll leave the rest up to your imagination.

go here: https://just.billywhizz.io/sqlite/squeel/

hit CTRL/CMD + Q on your keyboard.

paste in this sql

``` attach database 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/just-js/just.billywhizz.io...' as chinook ;

select * from albums ; ```

and hit CTRL/CMD + g to run the queries.

New comment by billywhizz in "GPT-4.5"

billywhizz — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:18:49 +0000

or you could read it as a way to create a moat where none currently exists...

New comment by billywhizz in "IT Unemployment Rises to 5.7% as AI Hits Tech Jobs"

billywhizz — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 19:55:14 +0000

"Another Reason"....

"Another reason for January’s tech job losses was that companies began implementing some intended spending cuts for this year, Janulaitis said, and many slashed budgets based on what the economy looked like during fiscal planning last year."

New comment by billywhizz in "Sqlite3 WebAssembly"

billywhizz — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 10:09:23 +0000

cool. will check this out. i think it's an interesting approach and allows all sorts of very low rent interactivity as long as you don't need super high throughput or expect lots of contention.

New comment by billywhizz in "Sqlite3 WebAssembly"

billywhizz — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 00:46:26 +0000

hi simon. i direct messaged you on twitter about a PoC i did of this in aug 2022, but never heard back - i thought you might have been interested. my twitter handle is justjs14.

i have some code i would have to dig out that did this very thing - it allows you to open a SQLite db in browser using sqlite (with a VFS) compiled to wasm (not the official WASM build), make changes and both push and pull WALs to and from a server (or indeed browser to browser would be possible both manually or over WebRTC). it even works with github pages if you give the browser client a github token to work with.

if you are interested, feel free to ping me and i can see if i can get this up and running from scratch again. i did a ton of experiments with this approach around then and i think it could be useful for a subset of applications at least.

there's also a working demo of the pull functionality only here: https://just.billywhizz.io/sqlite/demo/#https://just.billywh...

New comment by billywhizz in "Build a serverless ACID database with this one neat trick (atomic PutIfAbsent)"

billywhizz — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 22:50:02 +0000

i've been playing around with this idea on and off for a while. this was the original demo/implementation afaik: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-database....

this has all sorts of nice properties if it suits your needs, especially if you have lots of small read-only databases that just receive updates occasionally.

there's a little demo i did here: https://billywhizz.io/squeel-demo/