Hacker News: russellthehippo

New comment by russellthehippo in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

russellthehippo — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:23:52 +0000

Pretty cool apps! One thing i'd love to see for both is a historical view of the data - how do things change over time? Where is today relative the past five years for a given place? ten years? etc.

New comment by russellthehippo in "Data centers have hiked electricity prices on the public by $23B"

russellthehippo — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:41:11 +0000

Precisely this. Incredibly annoying headline

New comment by russellthehippo in "Data centers have hiked electricity prices on the public by $23B"

russellthehippo — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:40:46 +0000

Failures to allow faster generation/hookup rollout have suppressed supply increase relative to demand increase

New comment by russellthehippo in "Was sick of sandbox priced 50x what the CPU is worth so I made my own 5x cheaper"

russellthehippo — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:06:16 +0000

"VMs but it's on Hetzner so it's equally fast and 10x cheaper!" Hell yeah I also wanted to build this, good luck mate

New comment by russellthehippo in "I rewrote PostHog's SQL parser, 70x faster, while barely looking at the code"

russellthehippo — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:13:38 +0000

The key parts of this is how not vibecoded it is. Feels like a model of how you should do software with AI. Now that we can easily set up property testing, fuzzing, etc. there's almost no reason not to.

New comment by russellthehippo in "Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents"

russellthehippo — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:21:33 +0000

"Welcome to the agentic substrate"

YAAS (yet another agentic substrate)

New comment by russellthehippo in "Samurai City"

russellthehippo — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:35:53 +0000

There were real geographic and social tradeoffs to having status and power.

New comment by russellthehippo in "Show HN: Electrolite – embeddable Electric-style sync for SQLite"

russellthehippo — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:37:42 +0000

Hi HN, I made this. My brother wanted to use per-tenant SQLite at his startup, but really likes Electric’s Shape model for Postgres. So I got curious to see if the same idea was feasible for SQLite.

Electrolite is “Electric-style Shapes, but for SQLite, embedded in an app.” The server defines authorized subsets of rows, the browser asks for one by name, gets an initial snapshot, then long-polls for logical changes captured by SQLite triggers.

It’s very experimental, not on npm yet, and the predicate language is intentionally small. I also wouldn’t describe it as deeply optimized yet. But in a local in-process smoke test, one SQLite write woke 1000 live Shape clients and all materialized the new row in ~100ms, so it looks promising for SQLite-first apps.

Would love your feedback and suggestions, and maybe it will even be useful for you.

Show HN: Electrolite – embeddable ElectricSQL-style sync for SQLite

russellthehippo — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:29:33 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/russellromney/electrolite

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022299

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by russellthehippo in "Technical, cognitive, and intent debt"

russellthehippo — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:25:49 +0000

I'm finding in practice in using this process that you're right - it just doesn't work, even for one dev (usually). ha. But, the process of forcing plans to verify intent has worked pretty well! specifically the process of repeated adversarial review against a dual "will do, won't do" thing has been very, very useful at getting change plans to match intent.

New comment by russellthehippo in "Honker – Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and cron scheduler in a SQLite file"

russellthehippo — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:49:35 +0000

Appreciated your input on the original thread as well. Maybe I should note this recommendation in the docs or something.

New comment by russellthehippo in "Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a cron scheduler – inside your SQLite file"

russellthehippo — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:49:53 +0000

Author here. Yeah doesn’t depend on the underlying db if it speaks SQLite.

New comment by russellthehippo in "Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a cron scheduler – inside your SQLite file"

russellthehippo — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:47:58 +0000

Yup

New comment by russellthehippo in "Honker – Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and cron scheduler in a SQLite file"

russellthehippo — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:47:29 +0000

Respectfully (thanks haha) - yeah probably right. Original intent was to use inotify type thing but i avoided per-platform differences at the outset. this was definitely a for fun project that blew up unintentionally and am working to harden/improve.

Love Fly.

New comment by russellthehippo in "Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a cron scheduler – inside your SQLite file"

russellthehippo — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:32:25 +0000

Author here - previously posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47874647

Key difference vs SQL polling is that we’re touching metadata instead of data pages. I have work in process to make this work without any polling (innotify, kqueue, mmap’d shm file check) after the original stat(2) direction proved unreliable if lightweight.

Would love your feedback and or contributions in the repo - still figuring out the end shape.

New comment by russellthehippo in "An update on GitHub availability"

russellthehippo — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:51:31 +0000

Reading the capacity crunch idea made me a little more empathetic to their issues - 30x in one year is a lot when you're starting from a high baseline. Now that being said...I'd really appreciate more availability.

New comment by russellthehippo in "Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite"

russellthehippo — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 02:27:41 +0000

Reporting back again. It seems I was actually right the first time - the C API's SQLITE_FCNTL_DATA_VERSION doesn't work cross connection. It is cached on each read - but if there aren't any reads (i.e. just polling SQLITE_FCNTL_DATA_VERSION) then it doesn't work.

PRAGMA data_version is pretty fast (1500ns with prepared statement) and doesn't have that issue.

Checking the wal-index is sub-nanosecond when mmapped but has slightly different behavior on Windows.

Here's the link to the thread on this, my scripts are all there.

https://github.com/russellromney/honker/issues/5

New comment by russellthehippo in "Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite"

russellthehippo — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 10:59:23 +0000

I've added examples for many ORMs and web frameworks to the docs. See here:

https://honker.dev/guides/orm/#sqlalchemy--sqlmodel

New comment by russellthehippo in "Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite"

russellthehippo — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 10:58:12 +0000

Reporting back. This appears to be a bug in my original test the code of which sadly I did not commit anywhere. I went back to regenerate these tests and proved the opposite - the C API is better than PRAGMA and works across connections. I am going to make that update as I've proved across dozens of versions of SQLite that this is not in fact the case.

New comment by russellthehippo in "Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite"

russellthehippo — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:27:24 +0000

Ha. Great callout. Will inspect further