Hacker News: setheron

The Intensional Model in Disguise

setheron — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 21:57:31 +0000

Article URL: https://fzakaria.com/2026/11/06/the-intensional-model-in-disguise

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50399047

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A Clock Made of Branches

setheron — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 22:53:52 +0000

Article URL: https://fzakaria.com/2026/11/01/a-clock-made-of-branches

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50345195

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by setheron in "Linux 7.3"

setheron — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:39:34 +0000

proposed by John Ericsson (Nix core contributor) for the idea of Null namespaces to make namespaces cheaper for when doing finegrained sandboxed builds.

New comment by setheron in "Butlerian Jihad"

setheron — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:52:18 +0000

What about the cyborgs ? Whatever their name was.... I can't remember. But they were the "thinking machine" class?

New comment by setheron in "apsw: Another Python SQLite Wrapper"

setheron — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:19:16 +0000

I remember working on https://github.com/fzakaria/sqlelf and I was curious about some performance;

Immediately the maintainer responded with a very thorough set of benchmarks and improvements!

The nicest part was that it turns out we lived in the same small-ish town and I didn't even know it.

New comment by setheron in "Nix wrote half of my debugger"

setheron — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 02:52:24 +0000

The kernel's RNG is seeded from a seed passed at boot.

New comment by setheron in "Rewind VM: a flaky build you only catch once"

setheron — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:10:00 +0000

Small update: https://fzakaria.com/2026/10/07/nix-wrote-half-of-my-debugge...

New comment by setheron in "Linux containers in 500 lines of code (2016)"

setheron — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:22:37 +0000

I have written https://fzakaria.com/2020/05/31/containers-from-first-princi... a while ago in similar vein.

New comment by setheron in "Rewind VM: a flaky build you only catch once"

setheron — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 04:14:31 +0000

You can ask for as many schedules as you need `rewind check --all --schedules 3000` (for 1 in 1_000 lets say) but the code also pushes the scheduler toward bad timing: it switches threads at random points and sometimes stalls a process for up to about a millisecond, the way a busy CI machine would.

New comment by setheron in "I am done with this shit"

setheron — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 03:54:02 +0000

Code models and linking of objects.

Rewind VM: a flaky build you only catch once

setheron — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 03:53:13 +0000

Article URL: https://fzakaria.com/2026/10/03/rewind-vm-a-flaky-build-you-only-catch-once

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960501

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by setheron in "I am done with this shit"

setheron — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 14:42:04 +0000

We can work on harder problems at the frontier of the models knowledge. I'm working on one such domain, and I find AI use helpful, but I still need to be incredibly astute.

New comment by setheron in "A build graph that rolls dice"

setheron — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:52:56 +0000

Stuck feeling it's so cool and also so complicated.

Actually Queryable Executables

setheron — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:32:07 +0000

Article URL: https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/24/actually-queryable-executables

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434861

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by setheron in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

setheron — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:51:36 +0000

You might like https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/24/actually-queryable-executabl...

New comment by setheron in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

setheron — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:51:18 +0000

I like your phrasing; I think too often we get caught trying to optimize for everything.

For my own edification I often let performance & size slip to see if I can re-imagine something simpler from the start from a complete new direction;

This is often the greenfield hubris because it doesn't have all the same battle-scars of the full implementation so I try to make sure I take a very different approach to make it worthwhile :)

Then I just have faith that performance and size can always be improved over time.

New comment by setheron in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

setheron — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:11:17 +0000

I won't share any feedback specially but choosing low level primitives as research I found challenging due to the unfamiliarty in peer review circles.

I enjoyed all the papers I read on my graduate classes that bordered on "art" whereas now they seem to be obsessed with performance only.

New comment by setheron in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

setheron — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:04:03 +0000

I might look at this next; with Nix it's easy to explore and rebuild seamlessly ;P

New comment by setheron in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

setheron — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:06:21 +0000

(author) I'm enjoying the comments. When I published a short-paper with this idea in academic circles, the feedback wasn't so kind

New comment by setheron in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

setheron — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:03:52 +0000

(author) In the post I say I did write sqlelf which is just that, sqlite + virtual tables prior to this.