Hacker News: functional_dev

New comment by functional_dev in "What Zig felt like, coming from Rust"

functional_dev — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:16:11 +0000

Learned today why there is no "zig metadata" command. A dependency can be marked lazy, so whether you even need it depends on the build flags you pass.

So ZLS has to actually run your "build.zig" to see the modules

That is why it breaks when Zig changes the build system.

https://vectree.io/c/zigs-build-system-protocol-module-graph...

New comment by functional_dev in "RSA-896"

functional_dev — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:03:12 +0000

RSA-768 was already factored in 2009.. cheap now. What surprised me is that RSA keys are much weaker than their size looks. You need 2048 bits to get normal safety, and 768 is far below that.

https://vectree.io/c/how-rsa-key-sizes-map-to-real-security-...

New comment by functional_dev in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)"

functional_dev — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:46:03 +0000

Location: Riga, Latvia (EU)

Remote: Yes, remote only

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rust, TypeScript/Node, React, Go, Elixir, OCaml, Postgres, Kubernetes, NATS, gRPC, LLM/agent systems (RAG, tool calling, vector search)

Résumé/CV: https://martinserts.com

Email: martins.erts+hn@gmail.com

20+ years backend and full-stack. Rust and TypeScript in production, plus a long functional-programming background.

Also three AI products built solo, end to end, in Elixir, Go and OCaml, each on infrastructure I set up and still run. One has been live and unattended for months.

Open to contract (B2B) or permanent.

New comment by functional_dev in "We scaled PgBouncer to 4x throughput"

functional_dev — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:04:57 +0000

is there a reason to still pick PgBouncer over these newer ones? Or is PgBouncer mostly the default because everybody runs it

New comment by functional_dev in "Protobuf-py: Protobuf for Python, without compromises"

functional_dev — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:50:36 +0000

I did not know this before... Google protobuf is not one thing, it is three! Same import, but:

* old C++ extension

* upb

* pure Python

upb parses FAST, but then every access is still C->Python and it slows it down. So for many reads the slow python one can win?

This one helped me to dig deeper - https://vectree.io/c/how-python-protobuf-runtimes-work-pure-...

New comment by functional_dev in "Unlimited OCR: One-shot long-horizon parsing"

functional_dev — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:47:11 +0000

I did not know this until today... vision models don't hunt for the white space between letters like old OCR does. They just chop the whole image into a fixed grid of equal squares (patches) and treat each square like a word in a sentence.

This will help if you want to dig deeper - https://vectree.io/c/how-ocr-works-traditional-pipelines-vs-...

New comment by functional_dev in "In praise of memcached"

functional_dev — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:23:57 +0000

I always used memcached without knowing how it stores things.. never knew about the slab thing.

It is more sophisticated than grab memory per item.

This helped be to understand it better - https://vectree.io/c/memcached-internals-slab-allocation-lru...

New comment by functional_dev in "I still prefer MCP over skills"

functional_dev — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:27:36 +0000

actually local MCP just spawns a subprocess and talks via stdin/stdout.. same as CLI tool. Extra layer is only for remote case.

This might help if interested - https://vectree.io/c/implementation-details-of-stdio-and-sse...

New comment by functional_dev in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

functional_dev — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:15:56 +0000

You are right, PRs are not in git. format-patch and request-pull are originals designed for mailings lists. Github just put UI on top.

Interesting that DAG model means any branch from anywhere can be merged... the forge is just coordination.

Explored here if curious - https://vectree.io/c/git-graph-theory-logic

New comment by functional_dev in "A new trick brings stability to quantum operations"

functional_dev — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:46:23 +0000

The ETH article title is actually fine - "a new trick brings stability."

The hype is in the HN title.

New comment by functional_dev in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

functional_dev — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:02:36 +0000

true, but reading this made me learn something new.

Turns out HashCash (system Bitcoin borrowed), was originally built to fight email spam in 1977 - https://vectree.io/c/hashcash-the-proof-of-work-system-cited...

New comment by functional_dev in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

functional_dev — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:39:51 +0000

I like the garden analogy.

Writing online used to bring you readers. Now it trains model, which answers the same questions without sending anyone to your site.

New comment by functional_dev in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

functional_dev — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:24:11 +0000

really cool, data pipeline alone sounds like fun challenge

New comment by functional_dev in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

functional_dev — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:22:49 +0000

better tooling and integration

New comment by functional_dev in "Peptides: where to begin?"

functional_dev — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:04:45 +0000

Did you try increasing protein intake during the cut?

New comment by functional_dev in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

functional_dev — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:55:49 +0000

I found it interesting, that Git itself has built in similarity notion... when it packs objects, it groups files by path+size, runs delta cmpression to find which are close.

Very different from just counting commits - https://vectree.io/c/delta-compression-heuristics-and-packfi...

New comment by functional_dev in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

functional_dev — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:32:29 +0000

Do you have a link to the paper showing the 20x improvement?

New comment by functional_dev in "Running out of disk space in production"

functional_dev — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:23:23 +0000

Such a simple trick, but effective!

New comment by functional_dev in "Union types in C# 15"

functional_dev — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:13:56 +0000

Right, the default boxes into heap, but unions are different. Some languages pack them as a flat struct (tag + payload, no allocation).

Here is visual layout if anyone is interested - https://vectree.io/c/memory-layout-tagging-and-payload-overl...

New comment by functional_dev in "IPv6 is the only way forward"

functional_dev — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:53:48 +0000

Backwards compatibility point is interesting.

Found this visual breakdown of IPv4 -> IPv6 transition.

Dual stack and tunneling sections show how much complexity came from not having a clean migration path - https://vectree.io/c/ipv4-vs-ipv6-address-architecture-nat-a...