Hacker News: stux

New comment by stux in "Parrot – type-safe SQL in Gleam, supports SQlite, PostgreSQL and MySQL"

stux — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 14:01:33 +0000

These sqlc-style libraries are a great solution to the problem of “make running a query as easy as calling a function”, but I’ve always thought SQL’s lack of composability is a more interesting problem that I haven’t seen addressed (the problems with views are well documented).

New comment by stux in "Nullable but not null"

stux — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 18:19:47 +0000

This is interesting! A field being nullable because it's legitimately optional in the domain model is one thing, but for new fields which shouldn't be nullable in the domain model, unless you can pick a reasonable identity value, you need a concept of absence that's different from null. Luckily the intersection of "non-nullable fields" and "fields with no reasonable identity value" and "fields which didnt exist in v1 of the domain model" is normally pretty small, but it's painful when it happens.

This reminds me of frozen/nonfrozen enums in Swift. You can do exhaustive case analysis on frozen enums, but case analysis on nonfrozen enums requires adding an `@unknown default` case.

https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

New comment by stux in "Web apps built with Ruby on Rails"

stux — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 18:29:32 +0000

Rails definitely seems optimized for creating code, but how is it at maintaining code? I've never used it, but it seems like Ruby's dynamic types would make it really challenging to do large refactors. What techniques do rails developers use?

New comment by stux in "Some programming language ideas"

stux — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 21:57:07 +0000

> with functions named by their normalized hash contents, and referred to anywhere by that, but I can't seem to remember what it's called right now. Something like "Universe" I think?

Unison: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/

New comment by stux in "We're forking Flutter"

stux — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 23:02:26 +0000

> Flutter founder here.

Given that the literal founder of Flutter is in this thread using this introduction multiple times, it’s kinda hard to give you the benefit of the doubt that you honestly just meant “a founder using Flutter”.

New comment by stux in "We're forking Flutter"

stux — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 22:12:05 +0000

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3A...

- 0 open PRs

- 2 PRs merged, 1 PR closed in the past 4 years

- All PRs reviewed by a member of the Flutter team within 24hrs

- [“If I'm still supposed to write tests, even for this change, then this is probably as far as I take the PR.”](https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/128910#issuecomment-...)

- 40+ PRs from 2019

So, disgruntled ex-employee?

New comment by stux in "Swift Static Linux SDK"

stux — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 23:25:13 +0000

> Anonymous enums/structs in parameters

Can you share an example of this? It sounds really interesting but I couldn’t find any references. Do you mean the parameter “packs” features?

New comment by stux in "The Git repositories of XZ projects are available on GitHub again"

stux — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 22:52:48 +0000

Edit: nvm, dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39984512

The Git repositories of XZ projects are available on GitHub again

stux — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 22:52:48 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/tukaani-project

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39985203

Points: 100

# Comments: 16

New comment by stux in "SQLite 3.44: Interactive release notes"

stux — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 13:39:13 +0000

> Aggregate functions can now include an ORDER BY clause after their last parameter.

Hopefully that means we'll soon get support for `DISTINCT` in `GROUP_CONCAT`.

Atm you can do `group_concat(x, '|')` and `group_concat(distinct x)`, but you can't do `group_concat(distinct x, '|')`.

New comment by stux in "Using Redundant Conditions to Unlock Indexes in MySQL"

stux — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 18:13:23 +0000

As the article notes,

> Redundant conditions are nice because they require no changes to the database [...] This makes them useful for queries that are only sometimes run or where indexes can't be easily added to the main conditions

but where possible I typically prefer adding an index on the expression that the query is using (if your database supports it) since it expresses your intent more clearly. A redundant condition is more likely to get "optimized away" by other developers or changes in the query planner.

New comment by stux in "Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers?"

stux — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 18:22:43 +0000

My two favourites at the moment that haven’t already been mentioned are:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/algorithms-data-struct...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/software-unscripted/id...

New comment by stux in "7GUIs"

stux — Thu, 05 May 2022 22:46:46 +0000

Reminds me of the principles brought up in this talk by Sean Parent:

https://youtu.be/0WlJEz2wb8Y

The temperature converter is a good example of an “implies” relationship, which Sean argues is difficult to model in UIs.

New comment by stux in "SQLite: Vulnerabilities"

stux — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 12:53:14 +0000

I think the tone of this page is frustration that this page needs to exist. I think if I had to constantly deal with stuff like this I'd be pretty frustrated too:

> CVS-2019-19317 is an excellent example of a bogus CVE. This CVE describes a bug in an unreleased development version of SQLite. We were working on the new generated columns feature of SQLite, and a third-party hacker found an error in the code under active development, and then wrote a CVE against it. The error was fixed before the problem was ever released, and yet still there is this CVE sitting out there, unresolved, and as far as I can tell unresolveable.

Lot's of great related discussion from drh in this[0] sqlite forum thread.

[0]: https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/0e8b92001245dec1

New comment by stux in "Writing a SQLite clone from scratch in C (2017)"

stux — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 03:18:38 +0000

I agree with your general point that "it's very hard to write safe C code", and

> people keep finding use-after-free bugs in sqlite3

is true, but

> that allow attackers to escalate the memory corruption into arbitrary code execution... bugs that have affected major projects, including iCloud and Chrome; here are a handful: there are lots more even from just the past year :/

is just incorrect. I'd strongly encourage you to read https://www.sqlite.org/cves.html

New comment by stux in "Simple SQL in Python"

stux — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 17:07:28 +0000

Yeah this approach is definitely way nicer with some tooling support.

For example https://github.com/cashapp/sqldelight for Kotlin integrates with IntelliJ to provide ctrl+click navigation (see gif in their readme), and https://github.com/simolus3/moor/ for Dart has similar features that integrate with VSCode (https://moor.simonbinder.eu/docs/using-sql/sql_ide/).

(...since everyone is linking their favorite libraries with a similar approach!)

New comment by stux in "How we use Rust in our mobile SDK"

stux — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 11:34:21 +0000

Dart’s FFI is still stabilizing, but there’s a small example here https://github.com/brickpop/flutter-rust-ffi