Hacker News: samwillis

New comment by samwillis in "Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds"

samwillis — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:36:10 +0000

They have made it very clear that the mechanical translation is the starting point, and are refactoring to remove as many unsafe declarations as possible.

New comment by samwillis in "Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror"

samwillis — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:05:34 +0000

contenteditable I believe was in IE 5.5 in ~2000, I remember playing with it back then. It landed about the same time as "Outlook Web Access" which is arguably the first SPA, originator of AJAX, and first use of XMLHttpRequest. I think TinyMCE and FCKEditor were a little later.

New comment by samwillis in "A complete ClickHouse OLAP engine, compiled to WebAssembly"

samwillis — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:31:40 +0000

They have compiled to WASM64, the newer 64bit version of WASM. That's not available on iOS yet.

WASM till recently has had a 32bit address space, to match the limitations of JS numbers. With 64bit WASM you have to use BigInt rather than the floats that are numbers in js to address the memory.

It's only the address space that's affected - old WASM still handled 64bit math fine.

PGlite reaches 10M weekly downloads

samwillis — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:28:29 +0000

Article URL: https://electric.ax/blog/2026/06/25/pglite-reaches-10-million-weekly-downloads

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675796

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

AI agents as CRDT peers – building collaborative AI with Yjs

samwillis — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:33:46 +0000

Article URL: https://electric-sql.com/blog/2026/04/08/ai-agents-as-crdt-peers-with-yjs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47692540

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by samwillis in "Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs"

samwillis — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 06:51:01 +0000

It's disingenuous to suggest that "Yjs will completely destroy and re-create the entire document on every single keystroke" and that this is "by design" of Yjs. This is a design limitation of the official y-Prosemirror bindings that are integrating two distinct (and complex) projects. The post is implying that this is a flaw in the core Yjs library and an issue with CRDTs as a whole. This is not the case.

It is very true that there are nuances you have to deal with when using CRDT toolkits like Yjs and Automerge - the merged state is "correct" as a structure, but may not match your scheme. You have to deal with that into your application (Prosemirror does this for you, if you want it, and can live with the invalid nodes being removed)

You can't have your cake and eat it with CRDTs, just as you can't with OT. Both come with compromises and complexities. Your job as a developer is to weigh them for the use case you are designing for.

One area in particular that I feel CRDTs may really shine is in agentic systems. The ability to fork+merge at will is incredibly important for async long running tasks. You can validate the state after an agent has worked, and then decide to merge to main or not. Long running forks are more complex to achieve with OT.

There is some good content in this post, but it's leaning a little too far towards drama creation for my tast.

New comment by samwillis in "Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust"

samwillis — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:56:40 +0000

Have you considered doing property tests with Mathematica as an oracle?

An ai based development workflow with a concrete oracle works very well. You still need the research and planing to solve things in a scalable way, but it solves the "are the tests correct" issue.

What we've done is pull out failing property tests as a unit tests, makes regression testing during the agentic coding loop much more efficient.

From science fiction to reality – you can build difficult things with LLMs now

samwillis — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:48:58 +0000

Article URL: https://electric-sql.com/blog/2026/01/20/from-science-fiction-to-reality-you-can-build-difficult-things-now

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709779

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Scaling long-running autonomous coding

samwillis — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:18:04 +0000

Article URL: https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624541

Points: 290

# Comments: 197

New comment by samwillis in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

samwillis — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:19:59 +0000

I'm convinced that LLMs results in all software needing to be open source (or at the very least source available).

In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple.

The future is highly customisable software, and that is best built on open source. How this looks from a business perspective I think we will have to find out, but it's going to be fun!

New comment by samwillis in "Cadova: Swift DSL for parametric 3D modeling"

samwillis — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 16:11:55 +0000

Manifold works on solid triangle meshes, OpenCascade is a true BREP kernel that represents solids as edges (straight and curved) and surfaces (not meshed) computed from those edges. There is no triangulation in the root model in OpenCascade.

New comment by samwillis in "The Bayesian Geometry of Transformer Attention"

samwillis — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 16:25:23 +0000

Higher level overview and links to the other related papers: https://medium.com/@vishalmisra/attention-is-bayesian-infere...

The Bayesian Geometry of Transformer Attention

samwillis — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 16:24:49 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22471

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46455302

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by samwillis in "Show HN: OpenWorkers – Self-hosted Cloudflare workers in Rust"

samwillis — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 16:18:58 +0000

Yes, exactly. The other reason Cloudflare workers runtime is secure is that they are incredibly active at keeping it patched and up to date with V8 main. It's often ahead of Chrome in adopting V8 releases.

Attention Is Bayesian Inference

samwillis — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:51:18 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@vishalmisra/attention-is-bayesian-inference-578c25db4501

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439064

Points: 152

# Comments: 32

Concurrent JavaScript: It can work

samwillis — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 12:14:36 +0000

Article URL: https://webkit.org/blog/7846/concurrent-javascript-it-can-work/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344262

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by samwillis in "SSE sucks for transporting LLM tokens"

samwillis — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 19:45:48 +0000

This is one of the main use cases we are building "Durable Streams" for, it's an open source spec for a resumable and durable stream protocol. It's essentially an append only log with a http api.

https://github.com/durable-streams/durable-streams

https://electric-sql.com/blog/2025/12/09/announcing-durable-...

When we built ElectricSQL we needed a resumable and durable stream of messages for sync and developed a highly robust and scalable protocol for it. We have now taken that experience and are extracting the underlying transport as an open protocol. This is something the industry needs, and it's essential that it's a standard that portable between provider, libraries and SDKs.

The idea is that a stream is a url addressable entity that can be read and tailed, using very simple http protocol (long polling and a SSE-like mode). But it's fully resumable from a known offset.

We've been using the previous iteration of this as the transport part of the electric sync protocol for the last 18 months. It's very well tested, both on servers, in the browser, but importantly in combination with CDNs. It's possible to scale this to essential unlimited connections (we've tested to 1 million) by request collapsing in the CDN, and as it's so cacheable it lifts a lot of load of your origin when a client reconnect from the start.

For the LLM use case you will be able to append messages/tokens directly to a stream via a http post (we're working on specifying a websocket write path) and the client just tails it. If the user refreshes the page it will just read back from the start and continue tailing the live session. Avoids appending tokens to a database in order to provide durability.

New comment by samwillis in "Transparent leadership beats servant leadership"

samwillis — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:17:13 +0000

> But they need to FEEL the weather

You mean they need to smell it!

New comment by samwillis in "PGlite – Embeddable Postgres"

samwillis — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:33:11 +0000

The key limitation (at the moment) is that it only supports a single connection. W're planning to lift that limitation though.

New comment by samwillis in "PGlite – Embeddable Postgres"

samwillis — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:26:18 +0000

This is such awesome work! We *are* going to get this integrated with the ongoing work for "libpglite".