HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wging

2,299 karma · joined February 15, 2011

submissionscomments
wging··on An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord
Some of those details are available here: https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-estimates-age-without...
wging··on AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?
That first question is answered in the thread:

> Yes, when using either 32-bit or 64-bit number, the lowest portion can output a zero, as I suggested on the attached example file as a modification to fix the problem. But a true zero (fitting the requested size), on AMD, never happens.

Another person (on page 2) confirms those results on an older AMD processor (but failed to reproduce on a very new one, 9950X3D).

wging··on Introducing System One Models and Jev
I had a different initial confusion - it seems this company has no relation to the company formerly known as Typesafe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akka.io
wging··on Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side
The article is talking about symbols that were lost. The sentence should be interpreted as "these [symbols], for Insert (now gone) and Delete (still with us)". The photo is of a symbol for 'insert', an 'a' with a caret above it.
wging··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
See also https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/, a 2012 game that did the same thing
wging··on Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings
They link to their code on GitHub - see footnote 2 on page 2. I don't see it linked anywhere else, which makes it easy to miss. https://github.com/rjha18/vec2vec/
wging··on Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%
I think they've gotten worse about this as an organization over the last few years(?). Earlier this year an update to their mobile app introduced loading time, and resulting slowness, for opening menus that used to be ~instant. To me that smacks of once having known not to do that, but that knowledge having been lost (or priorities having shifted).

More specifically, I'm talking about tapping the '...' on a track for the options menu. That should be latency-free, and used to be.

wging··on Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it
Years and years ago, there was an article about the way Amazon.com's menu dropdown worked. It had the same spark (of careful attention to user behavior and needs): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5330998 / https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...
wging··on Dolly Parton has died
Her husband was Carl Dean.
wging··on Show HN: How far do I have to go to run into 100k people?
Cities on the water make fun shapes for obvious reasons. Atlantic City, Seattle, Chicago, Galveston, New Orleans. The slices can go very far or even be omitted due to not hitting the contiguous US. Chicago's is probably the most interesting, they cross Lake Michigan before getting sufficient density to stop.
wging··on British runner Josh Kerr breaks world record for mile which stood for 27 years
> I'm sure the record standing so long is partially down to the fact the mile isn't run at major championships

I'm not so sure about that. The 1500 is the equivalent race run at major championships (and most paced time trials). But that record (3:26.00 by Hicham El Guerrouj) has stood one year longer, and is generally considered a stronger record. This is possibly the closest anyone's ever come to an equivalent performance to the 1500 record, in either the mile or the 1500. The second-fastest 1500m time ever is 3:26.34 by Bernard Lagat in 2001. The World Athletics scoring tables value a 3:42.66 at about 3:26.3, eyeballing the midpoint of given values. (Or taking the WA point values on the top lists, Josh Kerr's new mile record is 1298, Lagat's second-best 1500m is 1297, and El Guerrouj's 3:26.00 is 1302.)

I don't know whether the WA points or other conversion methods actually have small enough error bars to distinguish between the Lagat and Kerr performances, but the 1500 record beats the mile record by a big enough margin that I don't think we need to worry about that.

https://worldathletics.org/records/all-time-toplists/middlel...

https://worldathletics.org/records/all-time-toplists/middlel...

wging··on British runner Josh Kerr breaks world record for mile which stood for 27 years
> I think El Guerrouj set the previous WR in a race without pacers.

El Guerrouj had two pacers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvCsj7eJKKA

In fact, looking at this race, Tanui (the second pacer) actually stays on the track for longer than today's pacers did.

wging··on Emacs appearances in pop culture
I'd add rms/Richard Stallman to that list of famous emacs users. He's famous for way more than just gnu emacs, so it's not quite cheating.
wging··on Dumb ways for an open source project to die
Many OSS licenses are also free software licenses, even if they are not viral and don't impose severe restrictions on the licensee in the way the GPL does. The MIT license, for example. "Free software" and "GPL" are not synonymous, even GNU doesn't say so. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicen...
wging··on Networking changes coming in macOS 27
Longer than that, even. A similar requirement for iOS apps was in the cards 10 years ago. https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=12212016b

(Yes, this article is about an extension of the deadline. I don't remember what happened after that.)

wging··on Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race
Truer than you'd think just from the information I provided. He has two world championship silver medals over 10,000m.
wging··on Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race
What does 'harder to recruit' mean though?
wging··on Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race
It's his first marathon ever, but he's a very experienced runner. It would be hard to find a better prospect for a good first marathon. He's a multiple (former) world record holder and medalist at shorter distances from the mile up to half marathon. His half marathon is still 2nd all time.

I wouldn't have predicted this out of nowhere, but if you told me a marathon debut went this well and asked me to guess whose it was, I like to think I'd have come up with Kejelcha in my top few picks.

That said, great 5000/10000 athletes don't always have great marathon careers. An example from this race is the world record holder at both those distances, Joshua Cheptegei. He's run several marathons but none spectacular by his standards. He was in this race too but 7 minutes back.

wging··on Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race
I've read that even if you absorb it all, there's some question about whether it's useful. This Alex Hutchinson article suggests, among other things, that it may spare your fat stores rather than your muscle glycogen:

> Even if you can absorb 120 grams per hour, it might not make you faster. In Podlogar’s study, cyclists burned more exogenous carbs when they consumed 120 rather than 90 grams per hour, but that didn’t reduce their rate of endogenous carb-burning—that is, they were still depleting the glycogen stores in their muscles just as quickly.

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/en...

https://archive.ph/Vpk0h

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9560939/

wging··on Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
That would not fit as well.
wging··on Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say
What is wrong in that quoted sentence? Do you mean "articulacy" should instead be "articulateness"? "Articulacy" is also a word, and correct in this context.
wging··on Why I forked httpx
These days node supports the fetch API, which is much simpler. (It wasn't there in 2020, it seems to have been added around 2022-2023.)
wging··on The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
> Scott took it too literally

He does say in section (I):

> I was particularly told to “take it as literally as possible”

wging··on Sir Tony Hoare has died
But there are no citations on any of the edits claiming this, and there were two incompatible dates claimed (March 5, March 8).
wging··on 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
[4] looks like it's only a runner for the actual testing, which is a separate crate: https://github.com/mozilla/memtest

(see: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/main/toolkit..., which points to a specific commit in that repo - turns out to be tip of main)

wging··on If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?
Regarding the noise you mention, I wonder if memento's use of the git 'notes' feature is an acceptable way to contain or quarantine that noise. It might still not add much value, but at least it would live in a separate place that is easily filtered out when the user judges it irrelevant. Per the README of the linked repo,

> It runs a commit and then stores a cleaned markdown conversation as a git note on the new commit.

So it doesn't seem that normal commit history is affected - git stores notes specially, outside of the commit (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes).

In fact github doesn't even display them, according to some (two-year-old) blog posts I'm seeing. Not sure about other interfaces to git (magit, other forges), but git log is definitely able to ignore them (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#Documentation/git-log.txt--...).

This doesn't mean the saved artifacts would necessarily be valuable - just that, unlike a more naive solution (saving in commit messages or in some directory of tracked files) they may not get in the way of ordinary workflows aside from maybe bloating the repo to some degree.

wging··on Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell (2014)
Discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825607
wging··on In praise of –dry-run
One nice way to do things, if you can get away with it, is to model the actions your application takes explicitly, and pass them to a central thing that actually handles them. Then there can be one place in your code that actually needs to understand whether it's doing a dry run or not. Ideally this would be just returning them from your core logic, "functional core, imperative shell" style.
wging··on Show HN: A small programming language where everything is pass-by-value
There is some prior work on mitigating the performance cost of immutability that you might be interested in. For example, Clojure's persistent vectors allow fast modifications without destroying the original vector, because internally they're wide trees rather than just linear arrays of memory. This allows for assignments to be implemented without a copy of the full vector. https://hypirion.com/musings/understanding-persistent-vector...
wging··on A 40-line fix eliminated a 400x performance gap
It's certainly possible that what I encountered, labeled as an 'icicle graph', is a nonstandard usage of the term. But if so, that's a shame. I don't think inverting the y-axis is useful by itself, the different bucketing is what makes for an actually useful change.
Page 1 of 25Next →