Hacker News: billywhizz

New comment by billywhizz in "scScript for Linux"

billywhizz — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:22:47 +0000

i haven't looked at the code yet but i love the website. just how open source project websites should be! ♥

New comment by billywhizz in "AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T"

billywhizz — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:16:33 +0000

i guess you didn't bother reading it then.

New comment by billywhizz in "AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T"

billywhizz — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:06:32 +0000

"people are lending to them" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. e.g. https://prospect.org/2026/08/03/ai-bailout-could-be-baked-in...

New comment by billywhizz in "AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T"

billywhizz — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:04:48 +0000

the fact fortune magazine is the one ringing the alarm bell here is arguably more useful information than any attempt at a "mathematical proof".

New comment by billywhizz in "Deno Desktop"

billywhizz — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 23:15:38 +0000

also notable that deno has a very low overhead bindings layer for doing JS->C/C++/Rust/Native interop using v8 fastapi calls where possible.

New comment by billywhizz in "Deno Desktop"

billywhizz — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 23:12:46 +0000

from what i understand after a quick look at the source is it uses a C ABI to communicate between the WebView/CEF "host" application and the deno runtime which is loaded by the host as a shared library.

marshalling of values back and forth between the JS/C++/Rust layers still has to happen but these are just straight C api calls in process under the hood so much less overhead than having to do serdes across a socket/pipe.

- https://github.com/denoland/deno/blob/main/cli/rt_desktop/li...

- https://github.com/littledivy/laufey/blob/main/webview/src/m...

New comment by billywhizz in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

billywhizz — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:56:03 +0000

this is social media induced psychosis my friend

New comment by billywhizz in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

billywhizz — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:53:01 +0000

> It will completely kill the market.

it will kill all the people in that hospital too

New comment by billywhizz in "Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged"

billywhizz — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:08:43 +0000

> I doubt the entire process was a single week, just whatever harness they specially prepared for the work.

it wasn't. probably quite a lot of preparation i would think. and it's very much a first pass which is far from idiomatic rust and far from memory safe. still impressive though for what it is.

https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2053588764774269292 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2054984043708740093

New comment by billywhizz in "Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a cron scheduler – inside your SQLite file"

billywhizz — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:09:00 +0000

i did a quick benchmark on this with a single db connection updating user_version in a tight loop with the wal_hook callback enabled.

on my crappy old i5 with the db file on /dev/shm it can do ~150k writes a second with the wal_hook callback called on every write. and this is using JS bindings to C++ so has some unnecessary overhead.

New comment by billywhizz in "Honker – Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and cron scheduler in a SQLite file"

billywhizz — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:09:06 +0000

good point. but ime and as seems to be widely understood writing from multiple connections is a bit of a minefield in SQLite. and afaik it still would be possible to have a hook on all connections you expect to be writing?

New comment by billywhizz in "Honker – Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and cron scheduler in a SQLite file"

billywhizz — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:42:30 +0000

SQLite has a wal hook which calls you back every time a transaction is committed to the WAL. https://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/wal_hook.html

New comment by billywhizz in "GPT-5.5"

billywhizz — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:38:37 +0000

"some value" is not the same as "a surprisingly good measure of the quality of the model for other tasks".

doublethink does not mean holding two conflicting ideas in your head at once. it means holding two logically inconsistent positions/beliefs at the same time.

New comment by billywhizz in "GPT-5.5"

billywhizz — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:45:26 +0000

how can you say "it ended up being a surprisingly good measure of the quality of the model for other tasks" and also "It should not be treated as a serious benchmark" in the same comment?

if it is indeed a good measure of the quality of the model (hint: it's not) then, logically, it should be taken seriously.

this is, sadly, a great example of the kind of doublethink the "AI" hypesters (yes - whether you like it or not simon - that is what you are now) are all too capable of.

New comment by billywhizz in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

billywhizz — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 23:36:06 +0000

you probably could have written the low stakes productivity app in a fraction of the time you wasted on this.

New comment by billywhizz in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

billywhizz — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 23:34:28 +0000

what's even more amazing is it took them two weeks to fix what must have been a pretty obvious bug, especially given who they are and what they are selling.

New comment by billywhizz in "GPT-5.5"

billywhizz — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 23:23:29 +0000

why do you find it surprising? these models have no actual understanding of anything, never mind the physical properties and capabilities of a bicycle.

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...