Hacker News: squirrellous

New comment by squirrellous in "PingCap TiDB Leaks"

squirrellous — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:13:49 +0000

That confused me too since I remember reading they are Rust proponents. Apparently their storage engine TiKV is written in Rust, and TiDB is the database built on top.

New comment by squirrellous in "Recent AI models struggled to match a human algorithmic innovation"

squirrellous — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 04:40:50 +0000

That's more or less what happened with math, so I don't think it's an unfair expectation, especially with more AI advances.

New comment by squirrellous in "Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?"

squirrellous — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 04:53:06 +0000

One way I use skills, which I don’t see mentioned very often, is as “shortcuts”. Imagine some frequently issued prompt like “fetch origin and rebase this branch onto origin/master and resolve conflicts”. I make that into a little skills file called “rebase” with a one sentence description, and next time just type something like “/reb-tab-enter”.

New comment by squirrellous in "We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora"

squirrellous — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:14:10 +0000

Riegeli is great! Packed full of features. It could be the standard storage format for serialized pb binary if there were more official support.

New comment by squirrellous in "Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache"

squirrellous — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:52:11 +0000

Ah yes, something like prefix tree would work well storing reverse domain names like com.abc.www (although this is such a well known thing I feel like I must be missing things).

New comment by squirrellous in "Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache"

squirrellous — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:18:47 +0000

I wonder at their scale, why wouldn’t it make sense to store the entries lightly compressed in memory?

New comment by squirrellous in "HN: The Good Parts (2016)"

squirrellous — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 10:08:03 +0000

There is https://hnrss.github.io/ if you don’t mind a 3rd party service.

New comment by squirrellous in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

squirrellous — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:10:01 +0000

This doesn’t seem to mention that having AI aggressively optimize software will result in code that is too clever / complex to be maintained by the original human author. For something with a very stable API and can be tested to death like a regex engine it’s likely workable. Other things, not so much. We have enough trouble maintaining AI generated code _without_ aggressive optimizations as is!

New comment by squirrellous in "DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813"

squirrellous — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:01:00 +0000

I _think_ that has always been based on discretion of the mods. It’s only allowed after some period of time and if popular enough.

New comment by squirrellous in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

squirrellous — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:12:30 +0000

Well, did they hire you? Don’t leave us hanging!

New comment by squirrellous in "Ask HN: What are your favorite blogs not about AI?"

squirrellous — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:09:43 +0000

Here are some that come to mind right now:

https://research.swtch.com/

https://danluu.com/

https://apenwarr.ca/log/

New comment by squirrellous in "IceCream – Never use print() to debug again"

squirrellous — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:41:54 +0000

My first thought as well. Debugging is actually a decent use case of AI.

New comment by squirrellous in "Protobuf-py: Protobuf for Python, without compromises"

squirrellous — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 02:26:33 +0000

These days I am of the opinion that we don’t need a real IDL. Instead one should choose a “primary language” and define the schema in that language. All other language bindings are generated from that canonical language. Then for wire format you’d just pick something workable from pb json msgpack etc. This replaces all the Google codegen intermediate layer, and for the primary language it naturally becomes very ergonomic.

New comment by squirrellous in "Protobuf-py: Protobuf for Python, without compromises"

squirrellous — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 09:59:31 +0000

Honest question - why isn’t the following document [1] a standard? Is it too loosely specified?

[1] https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/encoding/

New comment by squirrellous in "Does code cleanliness affect coding agents? A controlled minimal-pair study"

squirrellous — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 05:47:37 +0000

Research done by SonarSource, a company that sells static analysis products. This explains the focus on static analysis, among other things.

New comment by squirrellous in "Pystd, similar-ish functionality with a fraction of the compile time"

squirrellous — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:18:38 +0000

Love to see someone implementing pathlib in c++. It is what stdfs could have been.

New comment by squirrellous in "DuckDB Internals: Why Is DuckDB Fast? (Part 1)"

squirrellous — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 14:13:30 +0000

Those three things you mentioned kind of live in the same niche - offline data storage and querying. In that world yes everything has become columnar since it’s just better. Row-oriented is still the solution for online streaming use cases.

New comment by squirrellous in "Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability"

squirrellous — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 01:53:35 +0000

The last time I tried JJ it plainly refused to work with git LFS, which is kind of what OOP here is about (large files). Has that improved?

New comment by squirrellous in "Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails"

squirrellous — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:42:14 +0000

If you don’t like what Anthropic is doing, stop paying them money. There’s plenty of competition to go around. They can’t keep this up for long if users flock elsewhere.

New comment by squirrellous in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

squirrellous — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:54:12 +0000

One could argue the reinterpret_cast makes the intent more explicit which is a good thing.

That said I don’t have much against the use of void* or even char* here. If it works in C, it works in C++ just fine. std::span is not the right tool for this.