Hacker News: burntcaramel

New comment by burntcaramel in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

burntcaramel — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:58:34 +0000

Previously Anthropic subscribers got access to the latest AI but it seems like there’s a League of Software forming who have special privileges. To make or maintain critical software will you have to be inside the circle?

Who gates access to the circle? Anthropic or existing circle members or some other governance? If you are outside the circle will you be certain to die from software diseases?

Having been impressed by LLMs but not believing the AGI hype, I now see how having access to an information generator could be so powerful. With the right information you can hack other information systems. Without access to the best information you may not be able to protect your own system.

I think we have found the moat for AI. The question is are you inside or outside the castle walls?

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

burntcaramel — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:45:40 +0000

Can optimize in theory, or are you saying this is what JavaScript engines do today?

New comment by burntcaramel in "Understanding the Go Runtime: The Memory Allocator"

burntcaramel — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:44:38 +0000

Thank you, I stand corrected! I must have been tired originally reading this.

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

burntcaramel — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:50:49 +0000

The allocation of each object still has overhead though, even if they all live side-by-side. You get memory overhead for each value. A Uint8Array is tailor-made for an array of bytes and there’s a constant overhead. Plus the garbage collector doesn’t even have to peer inside a Uint8Array instance.

New comment by burntcaramel in "Let's discuss sandbox isolation"

burntcaramel — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:34:22 +0000

WebAssembly is particularly attractive for agentic coding because prompting it to write Zig or C is no harder than prompting it to write JavaScript. So you can get the authoring speed of a scripting language via LLMs but the performance close to native via wasm.

This is the approach I’m using for my open source project qip that lets you pipeline wasm modules together to process text, images & data: https://github.com/royalicing/qip

qip modules follow a really simple contract: there’s some input provided to the WebAssembly module, and there’s some output it produces. They can’t access fs/net/time. You can pipe in from your other CLIs though, e.g. from curl.

I have example modules for markdown-to-html, bmp-to-ico (great for favicons), ical events, a basic svg rasterizer, and a static site builder. You compose them together and then can run them on the command line, in the browser, or in the provided dev server. Because the module contract is so simple they’ll work on native too.

New comment by burntcaramel in "Understanding the Go Runtime: The Memory Allocator"

burntcaramel — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:28:24 +0000

> We said the runtime asks the OS for large chunks of memory. Those chunks are called arenas, and on most 64-bit systems each one is 64MB (4MB on Windows and 32-bit systems, 512KB on WebAssembly).

Incorrect. You ask the OS for pages. (Golang does internally appear to manage its heap into “arenas”.) On WebAssembly the page size is 64KiB. Window 64-bit it’s 4KiB, Apple Silicon 16KiB, Linux x86_64 4KiB.

New comment by burntcaramel in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

burntcaramel — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:02:21 +0000

If people who wore Google Glass without respect for others were Glassholes, perhaps people who unleash their OpenClaw instance onto the internet without respect are Clawholes?

New comment by burntcaramel in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

burntcaramel — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:52:54 +0000

I’m working on qip, a cli for running fast sandboxed WebAssembly modules.

https://github.com/royalicing/qip

We have LLMs that generate code but that code should be untrusted: perhaps it overflows or tries to read ssh keys. If we aren’t reviewing code closely a major security hole could be on any line.

And since LLMs can generate in whatever language, it makes sense for them to write fast imperative code like C or Zig. We don’t have to pick our favorite scripting language for the ergonomics any more.

So qip tries to solve both problems by running .wasm modules in a sandbox. You can pipe from other cli tools and you can chain multiple modules together. It has conventions for text, raw bytes, and image shaders, with more to come.

I am excited by the capabilities of probabilistic coding agents, but I want to combine them deterministic code and that what these qip modules are. They are pure functions with imperative guts.

Don't use escaping closures in SwiftUI

burntcaramel — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 01:52:14 +0000

Article URL: https://rensbr.eu/blog/swiftui-escaping-closures/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954333

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by burntcaramel in "Compiling Scheme to WebAssembly"

burntcaramel — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 01:53:41 +0000

WebAssembly Text Format (wat) is fine to use. You declare functions that run imperative code over primitive i32/i64/f32/f64 values, and write to a block of memory. Many algorithms are easy enough to port, and LLMs are pretty great at generating wat now.

I made Orb as a DSL over raw WebAssembly in Elixir. This gives you extract niceties like |> piping, macros so you can add language features like arenas or tuples, and reusability of code in modules (you can even publish to the package manager Hex). By manipulating the raw WebAssembly instructions it lets you compile to kilobytes instead of megabytes. I’m tinkering on the project over at: https://github.com/RoyalIcing/Orb

New comment by burntcaramel in "Data is the only moat"

burntcaramel — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:45:44 +0000

Don’t forget people’s minds.

- Which brands do people trust? - Which people do people of power trust?

You can have all the information in the world but if no one listens to you then it’s worthless.

Levers of Light

burntcaramel — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:30:43 +0000

Article URL: https://royalicing.com/2026/levers-of-light

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623819

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by burntcaramel in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

burntcaramel — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:26:44 +0000

https://royalicing.com/ — I write about WebAssembly, design, and thoughts about writing software

New comment by burntcaramel in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

burntcaramel — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:51:10 +0000

This is why Steve Jobs demoed software. Watch when he unveils Aqua, there’s a couple of slides of the lickable visuals and then he sits down and demos it. He clicks and taps and shows it working. Because that’s what you the user will do.

He’ll show boring things like resizing windows because those things matter to you trying and if he cares about resizing windows to this degree then imagine what else this product has.

Apple today hides behind slick motion graphics introductions that promise ideal software. That’s setting them up to fail because no one can live up to a fantasy. Steve showed working software that was good enough to demo and then got his team to ship it.

New comment by burntcaramel in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)"

burntcaramel — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 23:58:26 +0000

I'm working on a compiler for WebAssembly. The idea is you use the raw wasm instructions like you’d use JSX in React, so you can make reusable components and compose them into higher abstractions. Inlining is just a function call.

https://github.com/RoyalIcing/Orb

It’s implemented in Elixir and uses its powerful macro system. This is paired with a philosophy of static & bump allocation, so I’m trying to find a happy medium of simplicity with a powerful-enough paradigm yet generate simple, compact code.