Hacker News: wmanley

New comment by wmanley in "Free the Icons"

wmanley — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:43:04 +0000

> seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.

Maybe Zuck just wanted his laptop to get better.

New comment by wmanley in "AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere"

wmanley — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:29:22 +0000

> A good fix (which is the only acceptable fix in open-source software), is one that speaks for itself.

I disagree. Often if I'm making a PR to an open-source project I'm doing so because I have a use-case that the original author hadn't considered. So the first step in getting the PR merged is explaining my point of view and convincing the maintainer that my use-case is valid. Only when this is done can the "goodness" of the patch be evaluated.

New comment by wmanley in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

wmanley — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:47:10 +0000

I disagree. An HTML website which uses links, forms, buttons and inputs will by default:

* Have working back/forward buttons * Have working progress indicator as provided by the browser * Show errors to the user - even if they are ugly * Be accessible to keyboard navigation

With SPAs these are all things the developer has to get right.

So often when using a SPA I'll click a button, you get a spinner and then nothing will happen. Is it still in progress? Don't know. Eventually I'll open developer console and trace the network requests to find the JSON HTTP request that returned "ERR_BAD_EMAIL" and fix what I've entered. With a normal form submission at least the user will see the error message and can press back and then fix it.

New comment by wmanley in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

wmanley — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:08:50 +0000

The counterargument: In Defence of the Single Page Application:

https://williamkennedy.ninja/javascript/2022/05/03/in-defenc...

New comment by wmanley in "Love systemd timers"

wmanley — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:37:37 +0000

I design all my services expecting to receive sockets this way. It makes sandboxing easy as the service itself doesn't need network access to have a listening socket.

It's a shame docker never supported it. I feel like if they had got on board all those years ago there would be broad support across the software ecosystem for it and we wouldn't need half of these complicated iptables rules and proxies and service mesh. It would be a step towards a capability based system.

New comment by wmanley in "Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha"

wmanley — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:53:38 +0000

Wonderful. I love the poem at the end too.

New comment by wmanley in "Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a cron scheduler – inside your SQLite file"

wmanley — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:08:27 +0000

I've implemented something similar in the past, but using inotify. You need to watch the -wal file for IN_MODIFY. To make it work reliably I found I had to run:

    BEGIN IMMEDIATE TRANSACTION; ROLLBACK;

Otherwise the new changes weren't guaranteed to be visible to the process. I'm sure there's a more targetted approach that would work instead - maybe flock on a particular byte in the `-shm` file.

New comment by wmanley in "Do you even need a database?"

wmanley — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:14:43 +0000

SQLite in mmap mode (not the default) will use mmap for reading. It will still use write using `pwrite` so it can detect and recover from write failures.

See https://www.sqlite.org/mmap.html :

> The default mechanism by which SQLite accesses and updates database disk files is the xRead() and xWrite() methods of the sqlite3_io_methods VFS object. These methods are typically implemented as "read()" and "write()" system calls which cause the operating system to copy disk content between the kernel buffer cache and user space.

> Beginning with version 3.7.17 (2013-05-20), SQLite has the option of accessing disk content directly using memory-mapped I/O and the new xFetch() and xUnfetch() methods on sqlite3_io_methods.

The principal advantage to mmap in my mind is that the cache is shared among your SQLite connections.

New comment by wmanley in "Do you even need a database?"

wmanley — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:45:09 +0000

Business logic tests will rarely test what happens to your data if a machine loses power.

New comment by wmanley in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

wmanley — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:28:43 +0000

It's a shame that unix tools don't support file descriptors better. The ability to pass a file (or stream, or socket etc) directly into a process is so powerful, but few commands actually support being used this way and require filenames (or hostnames, etc) instead. Shell is so limited in this regard too.

It would be great to be able to open a socket in bash[^1] and pass it to another program to read/write from without having an extra socat process and pipes running (and the buffering, odd flush behaviour, etc.). It would be great if programs expected to receive input file arguments as open fds, rather than providing filenames and having the process open them itself. Sandboxing would be trivial, as would understanding the inputs and outputs of any program.

It's frustrating to me because the underlying unix system supports this so well, it's just the conventions of userspace that get in the way.

[^1]: I know about /dev/tcp, but it's very limited.

New comment by wmanley in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

wmanley — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:56:10 +0000

US borders are awful. I guess you get away with it because the USA is so large that most people rarely leave, so rarely have to experience it.

New comment by wmanley in "The state of the kernel Rust experiment"

wmanley — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 13:16:58 +0000

I guess that means you're using the colloquial meaning of the word safety/unsafe rather than the rust definition. It's worth being explicit about that (or choosing a different word) in these discussions to prevent confusion.

For Rust safety (meaning no UB) most definitely is a property of the language. If a module does not contain unsafe and the modules it uses that do contain unsafe are implemented soundly then there is no UB.

In C UB is a part of the language.

New comment by wmanley in "The state of the kernel Rust experiment"

wmanley — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 11:23:44 +0000

> in C only specific language features are unsafe and not all code

Using rust's definition of unsafe which is roughly "can cause undefined behaviour" then it seems to me isolating use of these features isn't possible. What is C without:

* Dereferencing pointers * Array access * Incrementing signed integers

You can do all of the above without invoking UB, but you can't separate the features in C that can cause UB from the ones that can't.

New comment by wmanley in "100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite"

wmanley — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:38:12 +0000

Use a connection per-thread instead. By sharing a connection across threads you’ll be limiting concurrency - and transactions won’t work as you’d expect. SQLite connections are not heavy.

Also: use WAL mode and enable mmap.

New comment by wmanley in "Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg"

wmanley — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 07:41:26 +0000

Retries won’t work in that case. Would be better to have two endpoints: get the time in x seconds and wait until time passed. That way retrying the wait endpoint will work fine and if time hasn’t elapsed it can just curl itself with the same arguments.

New comment by wmanley in "Drawing Text Isn't Simple: Benchmarking Console vs. Graphical Rendering"

wmanley — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 11:03:22 +0000

No, actually the biggest difference is removing the `filter` property from the `.wave2` class which is used for rendering the background. With that removed the page is responsive even with the backdrop-filter - and it makes no visual difference AFAICS.

New comment by wmanley in "Drawing Text Isn't Simple: Benchmarking Console vs. Graphical Rendering"

wmanley — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:56:40 +0000

It's also perfectly responsive if you disable JavaScript. Maybe something related to the --positionX and --positionY CSS variables that are updated on every mouse move?

New comment by wmanley in "Laptops with Stickers"

wmanley — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:53:19 +0000

What stickers did you used to have? I'm always fascinated with how people change their mind.

New comment by wmanley in "Drawing Text Isn't Simple: Benchmarking Console vs. Graphical Rendering"

wmanley — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 17:13:54 +0000

Looks like it's caused by `backdrop-filter: blur(6px);` on `.menu-content`. After disabling that it's slow, but not that slow.

Edit: This is with Firefox 144 on Ubuntu 22.04

New comment by wmanley in "The future of Python web services looks GIL-free"

wmanley — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 22:50:51 +0000

Even with volatile it’s a load and then a store no? It may not be undefined behaviour, but I don’t think it will be atomic.