Hacker News: williamstein

New comment by williamstein in "We replaced Node.js with Bun for 5x throughput"

williamstein — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:30:13 +0000

SEA with node.js "works" for nearly arbitrarily general node code -- pretty much anything you can run with node. However you may have to put in substantial extra effort, e.g., using [1], and possibly more work (e.g., copying assets out or using a virtual file system).

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vercel/ncc

New comment by williamstein in "OpenClaw privilege escalation vulnerability"

williamstein — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:44:21 +0000

The current OpenClaw GitHub repo [1] contains 2.1 million lines of code, according to cloc, with 1.6M being typescript. It also has almost 26K commits.

[1] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw

Nteract 2.0: A ground-up rebuild of the notebook app

williamstein — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:58:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nteract.io/blog/nteract-2.0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602615

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by williamstein in "Why mathematicians are boycotting their biggest conference"

williamstein — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:28:09 +0000

FWIW, the Joint Mathematics Meeting is bigger, based on number of registered attendees [1].

[1] https://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm20...

New comment by williamstein in "Node.js needs a virtual file system"

williamstein — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:46:29 +0000

This exact thing solves a huge problem with SEA binaries as he points out in his post. You can include complicated assets easily and skip an ugly unpack step entirely. This is very useful.

New comment by williamstein in "Pyodide: a Python distribution based on WebAssembly"

williamstein — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 06:56:01 +0000

I tried to make a version of this using Zig once, but ran out of steam: https://cowasm.org/

New comment by williamstein in "Show HN: Unfucked - version all changes (by any tool) - local-first/source avail"

williamstein — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:14:07 +0000

Is this open source or source available?

New comment by williamstein in "Write-only code"

williamstein — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 21:29:22 +0000

He is trying to use a different phrase “write-only code” to define exactly the same thing Karpathy defined last year as “vibe coding”.

For what it is worth, in my experience one of the most important skills one should strive to get much better at to be good at using coding agents is reading and understanding code.

New comment by williamstein in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"

williamstein — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:23:09 +0000

> Checkpoints run as a Git-aware CLI. On every commit generated by an agent, it writes a structured checkpoint object and associates it with the commit SHA. The code stays exactly the same, we just add context as first-class metadata. When you push your commit, Checkpoints also pushes this metadata to a separate branch (entire/checkpoints/v1), giving you a complete, append-only audit log inside your repository. As a result, every change can now be traced back not only to a diff, but to the reasoning that produced it.

The context for every single turn could in theory be nearly 1MB. Since this context is being stored in the repo and constantly changing, after a thousand turns, won't it make just doing a "git checkout" start to be really heavy?

For example, codex-cli stores every single context for a given session in a jsonl file (in .codex). I've easily got that file to hit 4 GB in size, just working for a few days; amusingly, codex-cli would then take many GB of RAM at startup. I ended up writing a script that trims the jsonl history automatically periodically. The latest codex-cli has an optional sqlite store for context state.

My guess is that by "context", Checkpoints doesn't actually mean the contents of the context window, but just distilled reasoning traces, which are more manageable... but still can be pretty large.

New comment by williamstein in "Nobody likes lag: How to make low-latency dev sandboxes"

williamstein — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 01:17:58 +0000

It's a reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723990

New comment by williamstein in "Unrolling the Codex agent loop"

williamstein — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:53:25 +0000

I strongly agree. The memory and cpu usage of codex-cli is also extremely good. That codex-cli is open source is also valuable because you can easily get definitive answers to any questions about its behavior.

I also was annoyed by Theo saying that.

New comment by williamstein in "2025: The Year in LLMs"

williamstein — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 06:21:15 +0000

There's a plugin that evidently supports ChatGPT Pro with Opencode: https://github.com/sst/opencode/issues/1686#issuecomment-349...

New comment by williamstein in "MIRA – An open-source persistent AI entity with memory"

williamstein — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 22:33:52 +0000

Title says "open source", but the Business Source License (BSL) is not an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved open-source license.

New comment by williamstein in "Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI"

williamstein — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:18:15 +0000

Their new CLI agent tool [1] is written in Python unlike similar agents from Anthropic/Google (Typescript/Bun) and OpenAI (Rust). It also appears to have first class ACP support, where ACP is the new protocol from Zed [2].

[1] https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-vibe

[2] https://zed.dev/acp

New comment by williamstein in "Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1"

williamstein — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 07:42:56 +0000

For example, https://github.com/williamstein/nats-bugs/issues/5 links to a discussion I have with them about data loss, where they fundamentally don't understand that their incorrect defaults lead to data loss on the application side. It's weird.

I got very deep into using NATS last year, and then realized the choices it makes for persistence are really surprising. Another horrible example if that server startup time is O(number of streams), with a big constant; this is extremely painful to hit in production.

I ended up implementing from scratch something with the same functionality (for me as NATS server + Jetstream), but based on socket.io and sqlite. It works vastly better for my use cases, since socketio and sqlite are so mature.

New comment by williamstein in "Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1"

williamstein — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:39:47 +0000

https://github.com/williamstein/nats-bugs

New comment by williamstein in "Zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries included"

williamstein — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:32:26 +0000

Instead you can use https://github.com/coder/code-server, which is really vscode running in your browser. You then get all extensions, etc.

New comment by williamstein in "Landlock-Ing Linux"

williamstein — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 01:19:55 +0000

codex-cli is a neat example of an open source Rust program that uses Landlock to run commands that an LLM comes up with when writing code (see [1]). The model is that a user trusts the agent program (codex-cli), but has much more limited trust of the commands the remote LLM asks codex-cli to run.

[1] https://developers.openai.com/codex/security/

New comment by williamstein in "[dead]"

williamstein — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:17:46 +0000

- 200 day’s maintenance free operation

- water jets to clean vacuum itself

- claims that it is much more quiet

New comment by williamstein in "Software development in the time of strange new angels"

williamstein — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:29:50 +0000

If I hired a software developer a few years ago, I might expect them to do roughly what Claude Code does today on some task (?). If I hired a dev today I would expect much more from them than what Claude Code can currently do.