Hacker News: giovannibonetti

New comment by giovannibonetti in "How We Synchronized Editing for Rec Room's Multiplayer Scripting System"

giovannibonetti — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:06:54 +0000

I find it fascinating when different people independently arrive at the same architecture when working on a hard problem like this. In my company we built our offline-first apps with PowerSync, which has the same idea of optimistic local changes while waiting for the central server to acknowledge the definitive changes. In PowerSync's case, the sync engine reads Postgres replication logs directly.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "“Your frustration is the product”"

giovannibonetti — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:35:02 +0000

Micro-payments, probably

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)"

giovannibonetti — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:45:45 +0000

For those of you in Brazil, my company jota.ai has built a financial AI-assistant that you can chat with to open a bank account, connect with accounts from other banks, make instant Pix payments with any of them, all of that through WhatsApp right now. We're working hard to release long-running agents soon that can do increasingly complex workflows involving payments and whatnot.

Please let us know if you have suggestions of what complex workflows you would like to build.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Show HN: Oxyde – Pydantic-native async ORM with a Rust core"

giovannibonetti — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:08:10 +0000

You might be interested in a library that flips around the concept of an ORM, like sqlc [1] or aiosql [2]. You specify just what you want from the database, without needing to couple so much API with database tables.

[1] https://sqlc.dev/ [2] https://nackjicholson.github.io/aiosql/

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

giovannibonetti — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:54:46 +0000

That's the space where Go shines

New comment by giovannibonetti in "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"

giovannibonetti — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 23:38:23 +0000

> OTOH, if and only if you design your schema to exploit MySQL’s clustering index (like for 1:M, make the PK of the child table something like (FK, some_id)), your range scans will become incredibly fast. But practically no one does that.

You can achieve that with Postgres as well if you accept duplicating the data by adding an index with an include clause containing all the non-key columns you want to return in the SELECT clause. This way, you'll get fast index-only scans.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams"

giovannibonetti — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:17:51 +0000

I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone.

[1] https://www.powersync.com/

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations"

giovannibonetti — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:27:27 +0000

Clustered indexes only save up to 2x write amplification in the very rare case where you're indexing the entire table (e.g. if it has very few columns).

However, that is usually the least of your concerns with write amplification. If you don't batch your writes, you can easily get 100x write amplification. For any primary key or any other index not strongly correlated with your INSERTs, you can get perhaps another 100x write amplification even if you batch you writes.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)"

giovannibonetti — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 12:17:45 +0000

You assume it is valid, until it isn't and you can have different strategies to handle that, like just skipping the broken part and carrying on.

Anyway, you write a state machine that processes the string in chunks – as you would do with a regular parser – but the difference is that the parser is eager to spit out a stream of data that matches the query as soon as you find it.

The objective is to reduce the memory consumption as much as possible, so that your program can handle an unbounded JSON string and only keep track of where in the structure it currently is – like a jQuery selector.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Ask HN: Which is the best sync engine?"

giovannibonetti — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:50:08 +0000

I have been using Powersync, and it works great for mobile apps with offline-first functionality.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

giovannibonetti — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 12:35:28 +0000

I think only Turso — SQLite rewritten in Rust — supports that.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Helion: A high-level DSL for performant and portable ML kernels"

giovannibonetti — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:42:51 +0000

That's Mojo's selling point.

https://www.modular.com/mojo

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Why I love OCaml (2023)"

giovannibonetti — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:51:55 +0000

Roc says hi!

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Why I love OCaml (2023)"

giovannibonetti — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:50:51 +0000

Why does type inference contribute to that issue?

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Sustainable memristors from shiitake mycelium for high-frequency bioelectronics"

giovannibonetti — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:38:50 +0000

> Soon we'll have shiitake replacing transistors in our airplane and spacecraft computers, while sitting and eating ramen on the vehicles themselves. The future is shaping up to be interesting.

By the way, some people say eating meat is not going to be sustainable as more and more people become able to afford it, and fungi are a great option for providing the equivalent protein intake.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "What we talk about when we talk about sideloading"

giovannibonetti — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 01:35:08 +0000

> This community has pockets of people who like authoritarian control, and genuinely believe in Apple or Google Play as some kind of superego that they need to defend, that they believe is protecting us.

Perhaps you meant Leviathan instead of superego?

New comment by giovannibonetti in "SQL Anti-Patterns"

giovannibonetti — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 20:55:35 +0000

I've noticed that LIMIT 1 makes a huge difference when working with LATERAL JOINs in Postgres, even when the WHERE condition has a unique constraint.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "ChatGPT Pulse"

giovannibonetti — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 17:21:20 +0000

Watch out, Meta. OpenAI is going to eat your lunch.

New comment by giovannibonetti in "Markov chains are the original language models"

giovannibonetti — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 23:55:43 +0000

> You can model multiple-hop dependencies as a Markov chain by just blowing up the state space as a Cartesian product.

Where the state space would be proportional to the token length squared, just like the attention mechanisms we use today?

New comment by giovannibonetti in "If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents"

giovannibonetti — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:37:03 +0000

> Quality needs to come from the process, not the people.

Not sure which Japanese school of management you're following, but I think Toyota-style goes against that. The process gives more autonomy to workers than, say, Ford-style, where each tiny part of the process is pre-defined.

I got the impression that Toyota-style was considered to bring better quality to the product, even though it gives people more autonomy.