Hacker News: mxey

New comment by mxey in "We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler"

mxey — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:26:41 +0000

That’s the opposite of clean-room. The whole point of clean-room design is that you have your software written by people who have not looked into the competing, existing implementation, to prevent any claim of plagiarism.

“Typically, a clean-room design is done by having someone examine the system to be reimplemented and having this person write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners.”

New comment by mxey in "Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations"

mxey — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 08:35:09 +0000

PostgreSQL shares other caches between processes so they probably could have a global plan cache if they wanted. I wonder why they don’t though.

One possible reason is that the planner configuration can be different per connection, so the plans might not transfer

New comment by mxey in "Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations"

mxey — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 08:33:18 +0000

This is very good to know because it means this exclusion constraint workaround is a better approach over using a SQL hash function and a btree if you want to enforce uniqueness on values too long for a btree index.

New comment by mxey in "Cue Does It All, but Can It Literate?"

mxey — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 11:19:30 +0000

No, that’s why I said deploy. All it does is run kubectl apply and kubectl rollout status.

Only those are directly tied to the data in CUE. there’s not much advantage to running other commands with it. You can run arbitrary processes with cue cmd though.

New comment by mxey in "psc: The ps utility, with an eBPF twist and container context"

mxey — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 20:06:19 +0000

“ss” also has filters, no need for grep

ss -o state established '( dport = :ssh or sport = :ssh )'

New comment by mxey in "6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available"

mxey — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:50:40 +0000

There will be no certificates longer than 45 days by any CA in browsers in a few years.

New comment by mxey in "Cue Does It All, but Can It Literate?"

mxey — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:19:09 +0000

Not sure if that’s what you mean but we have apps where all you need to deploy them to Kubernetes is run “cue cmd deploy”.

> The problem is, once you have to wrap CUE, the loss of flexibility within a special-purpose language like CUE is enough for people to ask why not just bother writing the scripts in a general purpose language with better ecosystem support.

cue cmd is nice but it’s not the reason to use CUE. The data parts are. I would still use if I had to use “cue export” to get the data out of it with a bit of shell.

New comment by mxey in "CSRF protection without tokens or hidden form fields"

mxey — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 10:24:17 +0000

Without those headers, you can as a fallback compare the Origin header to the Host header.

See https://words.filippo.io/csrf/

New comment by mxey in "Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025"

mxey — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:49:13 +0000

I had the same thought about the idea that Safari is “behind”. My hypothesis is that features only “exist” to people if they are implemented in Chrome. If a feature exists in WebKit but not in Chrome, nobody talks about it.

New comment by mxey in "Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025"

mxey — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:47:04 +0000

iPhones tend to have dramatically better JavaScript performance so you might wanna also test on an average Android phone.

New comment by mxey in "Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025"

mxey — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:45:54 +0000

I can’t wait for websites to tell me I need to install Chrome on my phone.

New comment by mxey in "Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025"

mxey — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:45:10 +0000

Safari adds support for new web features in point releases throughout the year.

New comment by mxey in "Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS"

mxey — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 11:23:00 +0000

you know you CAN make small websites with the existing standards already

New comment by mxey in "Debian's Git Transition"

mxey — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 11:00:59 +0000

Quilt was AFAIK used before Git, so you’re not wrong. But now that it’s there, it has some advantages.

I’m not arguing against replacing Quilt, but it should be more than just Git. I haven’t done Debian packaging in a long time but apparently there are some Git-based tools now?

New comment by mxey in "Debian's Git Transition"

mxey — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 07:20:07 +0000

So there’s no way to have commit messages on changes to patches? There’s also https://dep-team.pages.debian.net/deps/dep3/

People keep saying “just use Git commits” without understanding the advantages of the Quilt approach. There are tools to keep patches as Git commits that solve this, but “just Git commits” do not.

New comment by mxey in "Debian's Git Transition"

mxey — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:11:29 +0000

How do you track changes to the patches themselves?

New comment by mxey in "Rue: Higher level than Rust, lower level than Go"

mxey — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 09:54:22 +0000

> For everyone else, keeping checked-in auto-generated code is a continuous toil and maintenance burden. The Google go developers don't see it that way of course, because they are biased due to their google3 experience.

The golang/go repo itself has various checked-in generated repo

New comment by mxey in "Rue: Higher level than Rust, lower level than Go"

mxey — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 09:52:26 +0000

> On the other hand, these auto generation tools in Go are only somewhat standardized, you don't have a central tool that takes care of things (or at least I'm not aware of it).

https://pkg.go.dev/cmd/go#hdr-Generate_Go_files_by_processin...

New comment by mxey in "Don MacKinnon: Why Simplicity Beats Cleverness in Software Design [audio]"

mxey — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:13:14 +0000

What do you mean that there is no standard decoder? For what, UTF-8?

I agree on the composability. Accepting Unicode code points is more generic. I guess it depends on your environment. If every caller will combine it with a UTF-8 decoder, you might want to include it.

New comment by mxey in "Don MacKinnon: Why Simplicity Beats Cleverness in Software Design [audio]"

mxey — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:12:23 +0000

> Unfortunately, in software, manufacturing costs are too cheap to meter, so we're fine with using bench-top prototypes in production, because we're not the ones paying the costs for the waste anyway, our users are.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say - UTF-8 is the standard text encoding by a mile. It’s not a prototype.