Hacker News: buggymcbugfix

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Tailscale Traces Database Corruption to 16y/o SQLite WAL-Reset Bug"

buggymcbugfix — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:51:58 +0000

lol good old ostrich algorithm

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug"

buggymcbugfix — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:46:13 +0000

Agreed, I was also wondering about this. Maybe the aggressive checkpointing was for preventing WAL-overflow?

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug"

buggymcbugfix — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:40:15 +0000

Not only are they funding open source, they are actively allowing users to host their own control plane via headscale which is a libre implementation of the tailscale control protocol and developed by an engineer who works for Tailscale by day. This instantly made me trust and like them, even if at first I was cautious because I naturally mistrust anything that gets a lot of hype. I've been running headscale on NixOS, hosting my own tailnet since last year and everything just works out of the box. Tailscale lives up to the hype! <3

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL bug with TLA+"

buggymcbugfix — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:18:21 +0000

Thanks for the nice article. The SQLite docs that explain this bug are emphatic about how utterly rare, even irreproducible it is. How, then, was it found, one wonders?

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes"

buggymcbugfix — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:45:03 +0000

Thousands of cheeses, each of which is a unique experience. Heck, even the serving temperature completely alters the experience. Next: wines, charcuterie, ...

Pity the fool who can't taste the difference between any of these.

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy"

buggymcbugfix — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:09:31 +0000

The compiler is being actively worked on by Adam and his team at Nectry, but unfortunately those developments are not currently being backported to the open source repo. I'm fairly confident this will happen eventually.

I maintain my own private fork with some small modifications which I started polishing up this week to release it for a talk that I'm preparing.

The project I'm using this on is an ecommerce site [0] written in 100% Ur/Web with a hand-rolled backend ERP system written in PHP (not by me) which I am slowly replacing bits of with new Ur/Web code. As of today, we have 22223 lines of Ur/Web code, weighing in at 701 KiB.

[0]: https://liepelt.design

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy"

buggymcbugfix — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:50:44 +0000

One reason I love writing production code in Ur/Web is that LLMs are incapable of synthesising something even remotely resembling it. Keeps me on my toes.

I think this is a great policy by the Zig team.

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

buggymcbugfix — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:22:21 +0000

Whoa you were faster than me!

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

buggymcbugfix — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:21:46 +0000

You just add `trace`. It's not hard.

https://wiki.haskell.org/Debugging

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Before GitHub"

buggymcbugfix — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:15:19 +0000

I am a sucker for underdog software (anyone else using Ur/Web in prod?) and I was instantly infatuated when I first came across Fossil. I wasted a week of my life trying to fall in love with it but actually realising all the little things that make Git awesome. Beautiful diff output. Staging changes in hunks. Fixup commits, interactive rebase with autosquash. Git lets you treat not just your code as art but also your code evolution. In Fossil you don't get to clean up your branch into a coherent story. No, every path to and from dead-end blood-soaked alleys stays with you forever, unless you just don't commit anything until you have smoothed over all the details. No committing and pushing your WIP code to keep it safe (I mean you can, but you cannot then ever undo that). I'm sure other people feel very differently and that's ok. But Git's UX is on a completely different planet, imho.

Yes, I am someone who, when my branch code-wise is ready to be merged, I will still take however long it needs to clean the history into a coherent, bisectable set of patches.

To be fair, Fossil is kinda cool in many ways, but it's a downgrade for my dev UX. Also the configuration interface for access controls and suchlike to the repo server, issue tracker, etc. is... eccentric. I wouldn't be surprised to find some incorrectly/unsafely configured repos in the wild.

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

buggymcbugfix — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:38:06 +0000

I think this point is crucial:

> [...] would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them.

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Composition shouldn't be this hard"

buggymcbugfix — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:39:53 +0000

That is true! The system I mentioned above, which I had to refactor, was written in the worst Haskell that I've ever seen and nobody at the company dared touch it with a 10-foot pole.

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Composition shouldn't be this hard"

buggymcbugfix — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:14:56 +0000

You can't say...

> Not sure if tools and technologies can solve accidental complexity.

... and then say

> For me, consistent systematic naming and prefixes/suffixes to make names unique are a hint that a person is thinking about this or has experience with maintaining old systems. This has a huge effect on how well you can search, analyze, find usages, understand, replace, change.

I have battle scars from refactoring legacy systems where my predecessors did _not_ consistently or uniquely name things and I would not have seen it through without my sidekick, the type checker!

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "PostgreSQL production incident caused by transaction ID wraparound"

buggymcbugfix — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:03:31 +0000

Getting AI vibes from this article? It is strangely repetitive and meandering. Also tell-tale "It's not X, it's Y" and sort of unspecific mostly.

Also, why would you have billions of open transactions? That is the implication I got from the article as someone who doesn't know anything about Postgres.

(I use SQLite and perhaps I have Stockholm syndrome, but I like how it pushes you towards a design with small transactions, ideally entirely database-side.)

EDIT: Yeah, gptzero says AI with 100% confidence.

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet"

buggymcbugfix — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 05:03:18 +0000

> That’s all great, but there are websites that still don’t have dark modes.

Such as that very website? ;)

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage"

buggymcbugfix — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:15:25 +0000

Very cool! Although this part feels a bit hand-wavy (or shall I say, AI-wand-wavy?)

Machine learning decode: building on our previous work23, here we apply machine-learning-based decode (see section ‘Reading and decoding data’) to account for noise and inter-voxel cross-talk.

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Garment Notation Language: Formal descriptive language for clothing construction"

buggymcbugfix — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:16:56 +0000

+1. This is 100% hallucinated. Creds: My first programming language was GRAFIS CAD Fachsprache, a parametric pattern drafting software for garments, which incidentally powers our business (https:/liepelt.design—the website and intranet of which we are developing in ur/web btw just to clarify the geek factor!)

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Improving Unnesting of Complex Queries [pdf]"

buggymcbugfix — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:27:21 +0000

Indeed they write that the algorithm has been implemented in DuckDB.

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "Improving Unnesting of Complex Queries [pdf]"

buggymcbugfix — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:46:01 +0000

I wonder if this is being implemented for SQLite?

New comment by buggymcbugfix in "[dead]"

buggymcbugfix — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 16:14:56 +0000

Erlang does exactly what the author wants.