Hacker News: wkoszek

New comment by wkoszek in "What shall I teach my son?"

wkoszek — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 22:11:52 +0000

The right question might be: how to expose a kid to many things to pick up what are they into. And how to let them spend as much time on it as possible.

New comment by wkoszek in "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"

wkoszek — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 23:14:16 +0000

LowEndBox often lists similar VPSes if anyone here is interested

New comment by wkoszek in "Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush"

wkoszek — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 04:26:18 +0000

I haven't yet tried the units from Amazon where you connect the Waterpik to the faucet, but perhaps they could be good -- for me the problem has always been how small the water container was.

New comment by wkoszek in "Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush"

wkoszek — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:15:57 +0000

Human teeth need cleaning :)

New comment by wkoszek in "Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush"

wkoszek — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:14:55 +0000

If this is doing better waterpik + toothbrush and perhaps has a long guarantee and leaves you with a 2x normal feeling every morning, I could see the appeal. I dropped $60 on Waterpic and it broke. So then I got a better Waterpik for $100+ but it was clunky unit with bigger water container that didn't fit in my small bathroom. And it broke. But I do like the feeling of electric toothbrush.

New comment by wkoszek in "Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal"

wkoszek — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 06:15:45 +0000

PayPal might still be the sweetheart, but there's no innovation I feel. With eBay having CC support and being able to charge and return a charge back to the card, PayPal now is in a niche. I'm helping a founder recruit. To handle the load of candidates, we give folks applying some $ for doing a small 1hr project, and Claude told me that PayPal may still be universal way of sending a "gift amounts". I often wonder how much work would it be to bring IBAN accounts to the US. The need for Zelle baffles me, and the fact that person A can't send $ to person B via normal bank infrastructure is interesting.

New comment by wkoszek in "Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD"

wkoszek — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:59:56 +0000

I'm really happy seeing this project. Not sure if this helps you gain $$$ customers, but stupid thing that turns out very difficult in PG is making this fast:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM large_text_db WHERE X

Where X is something that must be matched exactly. X can be FTS query on FTS-indexed table, but the way COUNT() works in PG is that it's impossible to make it fast. Over large tables, lets say 1B+ rows, it can be very very slow.

Example use case is: searching through a hospital DB of reports that have "pancreatic cancer" in them. This is trivial in SQLite, but in PG it's hard.

New comment by wkoszek in "Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD"

wkoszek — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:55:41 +0000

You use stability of PostgreSQL to open a pitch. Also most people use PostgreSQL because someone out there was a fan, proponent and champion of Postgres. Otherwise they'd be on MySQL or Oracle.

And your sales folks would call and say: "No need to change anything, we still run PostgreSQL, and ours is just called pgrust, but it's N times as fast".

New comment by wkoszek in "Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD"

wkoszek — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:52:54 +0000

I'd help with testing if you helped them add this. I'd be interested in this.

New comment by wkoszek in "Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD"

wkoszek — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:48:41 +0000

I really hope your project succeeds so that you can sit, sip delicious coffee with your legs on a high desk, and laugh really loud, like a gorilla, at all the haters from this and previous HN threads.

New comment by wkoszek in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

wkoszek — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:26:53 +0000

There's so much to do in databases, and it's so hard to get right and test is all, I think we'll all have 10x the jobs. The easy stuff will go away, but to e.g.: test the new DB engine and ensure there aren't any exploits -> let's just work on it. But it's not that the introduction of compilers made engineers obsolete.

New comment by wkoszek in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

wkoszek — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:25:09 +0000

I mean.. they made it 2 weeks ago. Clearly the time isn't now. Why be so negative immediately.

New comment by wkoszek in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

wkoszek — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:37:14 +0000

Don't give up. Just publish it, if you know your invention is better. Devtool VCs will give you money based on the growth of your GitHub stars, popularity and the size of community. I can even intro you to some - but it can't be to "burn angel money". You'd just have to commit to build a DB company for 10yrs. Devtool community building is low effort: Discord channel and you can write code in 1 window, and talk in another as your thing is testing/compiling.

New comment by wkoszek in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

wkoszek — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:27:31 +0000

If someone did this before with PG, provide links. Practical pragmatic example where I think this project is cool: process vs thread. There were members of the PG core team that wanted to explore it, and members who said it'd tank a project. pgrust is an amazing experimentation ground for it.

I published similar project here: www.emuko.dev - emulator for RISC-V. This one turned out to be 3x as slow as QEMU for example.

re: CTOs - if the improvement is 3% nobody of course will look at it. If the improvement is 30%, it'll be too big for big players to ignore, so as a CTO you'll be tasked with trying it out. It's really a matter of whether this thing is safe and secure, losing data or has a trojan. If the authors can prove it's all valid working code etc., it'll be a viable project.

New comment by wkoszek in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

wkoszek — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:45:24 +0000

Congrats for launching this project. I think it's awesome. I did two similar projects, just to learn how to work with LLMs and it felt good--reminded me times debugging code with GDB and going through stuff in semi-manual mode.

I'm building data + AI platform. It got complex, and I'm using AI-assisted coding to move fast. One thing that helps me was property based testing. I have a traffic generator that simulates 10 users working on my platform. I run it 24/7 and if it shows that the software survives the test (I called it "fate" after ffmpeg's CI), it's good enough to roll out. If you wrote something like that, core PostgreSQL folks would like it too, unless there's something equivalent like this. It'd be: create random tables, fill with random data, then issue randomly constructed query.

New comment by wkoszek in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

wkoszek — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:19:31 +0000

There is big appetite for PostgreSQL in business cases. But there's also a lot of problems in PG and people want to solve them. But there's ~10 people in the core of PostgreSQL who contribute to it and know how to change the core. If you have a business use case that would require changing the core, doing it in safer, less error prone technology would be way better. That's why you have other products that had to be created that talk PG protocol, but aren't using official build.

New comment by wkoszek in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

wkoszek — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:10:01 +0000

Same. Sorry to see so much hate here.

New comment by wkoszek in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

wkoszek — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:05:03 +0000

Author of this project is not that different than you. The only difference is that he is willing to take the risk. If you have an invention and sit on it, nothing will happen.

New comment by wkoszek in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

wkoszek — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:03:07 +0000

His project is cool. Students could use it as an example of porting code. Companies could switch to it, if it works. There are hundreds of reasons why people may want it, so it's awesome he's publishing one. Something needs to be done to get interest and then adoption.

New comment by wkoszek in "The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth"

wkoszek — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:58:44 +0000

Many people do, yet when I open it from time to time and read through some sections, it can be a lot of fun