Hacker News: danappelxx

New comment by danappelxx in "The first 40 months of the AI era"

danappelxx — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 05:40:44 +0000

There is natural incentive for engineers working on a project to keep Claude skills up to date. I cannot say the same for general documentation.

New comment by danappelxx in "Show HN: GitHub "Lines Viewed" extension to keep you sane reviewing long AI PRs"

danappelxx — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:15:55 +0000

GitHub API is actually quite tricky here because there is a different between “comment” and “review” and “review comment” (paraphrasing, I don’t remember the details). So it’s not as simple as one API call that grabs the markdown. Of course you can write a creative one-liner to extract what you need, though.

New comment by danappelxx in "RIP pthread_cancel"

danappelxx — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 19:31:54 +0000

If the DNS resolution call blocks the thread, then you need N worker threads to perform N DNS calls. Threads aren’t free, so this is suboptimal. OTOH some thread pools e.g. libdispatch on Apple operating systems will spawn new threads on demand to prevent starvation, so this _can_ be viable. Though of course this can lead to thread explosion which may be even more problematic depending on the use case. In libcurl’s situation, spawning a million threads is probably even worse than a memory leak, which is worse than long timeouts.

In general, what you really want is for the API call to be nonblocking so you’re not forced to burn a thread.

New comment by danappelxx in "Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity"

danappelxx — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 10:26:17 +0000

Mirrors my experience. IPv6 issues are frustratingly hard to triage and reproduce, lots of “works on my machine” etc.

New comment by danappelxx in "AWS Lambda Web Adapter"

danappelxx — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 20:25:10 +0000

This is an interesting point. Hangs usually cost $ from user experience, with serverless they cost $ from compute. All the more reason to set strict deadlines on all API calls!

New comment by danappelxx in "Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system"

danappelxx — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 19:40:28 +0000

Took the same class at UCI (with Prof Anton Burtsev). Best class I ever took.

New comment by danappelxx in "Distributed SQLite: Paradigm shift or hype?"

danappelxx — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 03:25:55 +0000

Yup, exactly. Phones change wifi networks, routers drop packets, load balancers get overloaded. Hard to fully eliminate tail latencies.

New comment by danappelxx in "Distributed SQLite: Paradigm shift or hype?"

danappelxx — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 03:16:49 +0000

Unless your database is in the browser, you are always going to be at mercy of network latencies talking to the backend.

New comment by danappelxx in "Distributed SQLite: Paradigm shift or hype?"

danappelxx — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 03:02:19 +0000

I think you always need loading states to account for slow network, or am I missing something?

New comment by danappelxx in "Normal Operating Sounds"

danappelxx — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 04:25:41 +0000

“Cabin Noise during Acceleration with Ludicrous Enabled” was by far the most interesting

New comment by danappelxx in "Gleam: a type safe language on the Erlang VM"

danappelxx — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 06:45:56 +0000

Generally stems from the philosophy that code is read more than written, and this helps readability.

New comment by danappelxx in "gRPC request context which caries values across microservice boundaries"

danappelxx — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 05:41:47 +0000

What do you use instead?

New comment by danappelxx in "Nginx Unit – Universal web app server"

danappelxx — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 08:50:42 +0000

Not that difficult, but it’s still a separate dependency (with python requirements). If the goal here is a Caddy competitor, then IMO it’s missing the mark in terms of “one stop shop”. What’s the killer feature?

New comment by danappelxx in "Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System? (2022)"

danappelxx — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 01:59:07 +0000

Ah, good to know!

New comment by danappelxx in "Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System? (2022)"

danappelxx — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 21:54:17 +0000

It’s becoming standard as a security measure. See: Kata containers, Firecracker VM

New comment by danappelxx in "Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System? (2022)"

danappelxx — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 20:18:54 +0000

I’ll assume the worst case:

- lots of containers running on a single host

- containers are each isolated in a VM (aka virtualized)

- workloads are not homogenous and change often (your neighbor today may not be your neighbor tomorrow)

I believe these are fair assumptions if you’re running on generic infrastructure with kubernetes.

In this setup, my concerns are pretty much noisy neighbors + throttling. You may get latency spikes out of nowhere and the cause could be any of:

- your neighbor is hogging IO (disk or network)

- your database spawned too many threads and got throttled by CFS

- CFS scheduled your DBs threads on a different CPU and you lost your cache lines

In short, the DB does not have stable, predictable performance, which are exactly the characteristics you want it to have. If you ran the DB on a dedicated host you avoid this whole suite of issues.

You can alleviate most of this if you make sure the DB’s container gets the entire host’s resources and doesn’t have neighbors.

New comment by danappelxx in "Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System? (2022)"

danappelxx — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 19:41:19 +0000

IMO if you’re concerned about performance and yet are deploying databases this way — mmap should not even be on the radar.

New comment by danappelxx in "Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System? (2022)"

danappelxx — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 18:59:30 +0000

Who is deploying databases in containers?

New comment by danappelxx in "OpenAPI v4 (aka Moonwalk) Proposal"

danappelxx — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 02:53:46 +0000

Agreed, but if you’re asking for a solution that will generate a spec from your code, the more proven path is to generate code from a spec. Gives you more and costs less.

In my opinion the problem is that there’s some APIs that are impossible to represent with OpenAPI — that’s the real challenge they should be solving with this version, not reducing spec line count.

New comment by danappelxx in "OpenAPI v4 (aka Moonwalk) Proposal"

danappelxx — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 01:13:46 +0000

I suspect OpenAPI advocates would argue you should start with the spec and use it to generate both the client and server. This is already a common pattern in other RPC definition languages such as gRPC. You _could_ write a server to match the gRPC spec, but why would you?