Hacker News: exidex

New comment by exidex in "Rethinking Database Programming"

exidex — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:52:03 +0000

Just as with any kind of programming I want to be able to detect as much amount of issues as early as possible. That includes issues like invalid queries (both on syntax and types level) but also stuff like will specific transaction isolation level be just enough (from correctness and performance point) for my specific use case, or will the migration query lock the whole db or take multiple days to execute because I didn't know some niche quirk. To me it is obvious that you will not beable to do that with SQL, one because it is old so it accumulated all the weird quirks, that were done in the name of backward compatibility, two is that by it's nature of being script language you just could not do more complicated cross query static analysis. See also https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/against-sql which nicely describes other issues. See languages like PRQL for better syntax, or https://www.languagesforsyste.ms/MixT/ for static analysis possibilities

I am mostly aligned with the article on what I want from next generation of web development. But I don't think using specific library in a specific language or specific query language is a viable long term solution. Hance the mention of Substrait. The solution that I think is needed, is something like LLVM but for databases.

As for the NoSQL, I think it was the worse thing that happened to databases in the last 20 years, probably more

New comment by exidex in "Rethinking Database Programming"

exidex — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:18:02 +0000

I think, the reality is SQL being simply to old to coexist with a web app use case. All the nice things that article talks about are not possible to nicely integrate with SQL. Current development is done by either writing SQL by hand or by letting ORMs to autogenerate it. Both feel bad because of how bad SQL is. But there is no other option. I hope https://substrait.io/ will gain traction and will be supported natively by databases

New comment by exidex in "Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice"

exidex — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:15:14 +0000

Um, did they announce opensource firmware without providing the source?

New comment by exidex in "Asian AI startups launch Mythos-like models"

exidex — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 19:02:08 +0000

People are biased by definition

New comment by exidex in "Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28"

exidex — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:37:59 +0000

Larger types are supported, there is A notion of tearing. According to JVM spec even long and double could tear, not sure about practical implications though

New comment by exidex in "Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?"

exidex — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:47:33 +0000

I have converged on a workflow that is just what I was doing before, but use LLMs just for boring or tedios parts. General guidelines are: only single agent at a time, small targeted queries, understand what you are building, if something would seem like a fun task, do it yourself. I use LLMs for bug hunting, to trace the flow, to build quick visualizatios (paste csv, ask to generate visualization), to search in the code of the dependencies using github mcp, to write 100 line scripts (deno + ts + zx was a game changer for me). Even "dumber" opensource models are good for this kind workflow, more tokens per second is generally more benefitial than plain intelligence. I would use LLMs more or less, sometimes even full vibecoding if the task is something like quick tooling web app and the flow is just firing of the next LLM query every 30 seconds. But, depending on the type of task or domain that you work in, YMMV

New comment by exidex in "A Wayland Compositor in Minecraft"

exidex — Sat, 23 May 2026 07:08:46 +0000

Not sure why people praise Minecraft for this. This is huge feat of Wayland, and was possible because devs took time to consider use cases outside of current norm, and why it took so long to migrate the ecosystem. People liked to bitch about the "Gnome blocking/not implementing essential protocols" part, but even that partially made this possible

New comment by exidex in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

exidex — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:28:14 +0000

"The bottom line" is the new "Its not just X, its Y"

New comment by exidex in "Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing"

exidex — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:13:15 +0000

My choice is to not do a PhD and just invest as much or as little effort in the topic as you like

New comment by exidex in "MacBook Neo and How the iPad Should Be"

exidex — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:50:27 +0000

That is only because there is no viable platform to build similar gui-based tooling on

New comment by exidex in "I wrote a WebAssembly plugin system for my Wayland compositor"

exidex — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:48:43 +0000

This is the idea I had in mind since initial wasm release but wasm wasn't ready then but now it is. Glad to see somebody is working on this. If executed properly this could be the last windows manager that people will ever need

New comment by exidex in "How I write software with LLMs"

exidex — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:49:10 +0000

I was more thinking in terms of creating a benchmark which would optimized during training. For regular projects, I agree, you have to count that anyway

New comment by exidex in "How I write software with LLMs"

exidex — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 07:35:03 +0000

Now you have to count defects

New comment by exidex in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

exidex — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 17:53:47 +0000

Add that to a long list of side projects I would like to do "at some point"

New comment by exidex in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

exidex — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 17:49:46 +0000

Pantograph[0] seems to be a more recent attempt to implement the same idea. It is still not a general editor but generalizing it to ranges of tree selections looks promising

[0]: https://pantographeditor.github.io/Pantograph/

New comment by exidex in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

exidex — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:00:25 +0000

And I am sure that people have been complaining about the hand gymnastics you have to do to press those shortcuts since around that time as well

New comment by exidex in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

exidex — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:42:06 +0000

There are certainly different possibilities of where the line would be drawn. I am not that familiar with vim internals, but I don't consider file management to be part of vim editing model. And we are only talking about editing model (e.g. b being beginning of a word), not the whole editor (plugin system, ui, lsp and treesitter integration, etc). Though it is true that some parts are more tightly related to "vim". There some cases were Neovim already wants to disconnect itself from vim legacy like allowing to scroll viewport without moving the cursor

By "recreating everything" I was also referring to the ecosystem around the editor

New comment by exidex in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

exidex — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:12:34 +0000

I didn't really spent time thinking about it, because from reading their issue tracker, I very much doubt neovim would consider something like that. Partially because of how much of it is already vim specific and it would be very difficult to abstract that away, but mostly because of ideology.

You can already to a lot in Neovim with plugins, including recreating Helix, Ki, whatever. But the problem is that the vim state machine is always present underneath it, resulting in unwanted behaviors or impossibility to implement some things. I would envision it to pretty much allow to listen on raw keyboard and mouse events. However cursed it sounds, it should be possible to fully implement vscode or any other editing model in neovim

New comment by exidex in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

exidex — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:42:40 +0000

It's a shame that editors are build around the editing model, so much time has been wasted by recreating everything. Neovim is a perfect editor in many aspects but editing model is not one of them, in my opinion. Helix or even Ki would not be needed if Neovim allowed to completely replace the vim part of it with plugins

New comment by exidex in "Helix: A post-modern text editor"

exidex — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:40:24 +0000

To some extend that is true for any opinionated piece of software. But that is a beauty of opensource don't use it if it doesn't match your idea of how that software should look like