Hacker News: FjordWarden

New comment by FjordWarden in "The silent death of good code"

FjordWarden — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 01:07:57 +0000

Let management argue there case, don't do it for them.

New comment by FjordWarden in "The silent death of good code"

FjordWarden — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 01:03:57 +0000

Man am I getting tired of these articles and we can do without this neurotic melancholic whining. Maybe it is the title of the article that triggered me, but it reminded me of hearing Douglas Murray read excerpts from "The Strange Death of Europe" in his self-aggrandising pompous tone.

The authors colleague needed a couple of tries to write a kernel extension and somehow this means something about programming. If it was not for LLMs I would not have gone back to low-level programming, this stuff is actually getting fun again. Lets check the assembly the compiler produced for the code the LLM produced.

New comment by FjordWarden in "The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013)"

FjordWarden — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:37:53 +0000

Interesting, I did not know that colors-of-noice was related to this, what you say sounds conceptually very similar to how Maxwell's demon connects thermodynamics to information theory.

New comment by FjordWarden in "The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013)"

FjordWarden — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:43:42 +0000

No, it is a hypothesis I formulated here after reading the article. I did a quick check on google scholar but I didn't hit any result. The more interesting question is, if true, what can you do with this information. Maybe it can be a way to evaluate a complete program or specific heap allocator, as in "how fast does this program reach universality". Maybe this is something very obvious and has been done before, dunno, heap algos are not my area of expertise.

New comment by FjordWarden in "The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013)"

FjordWarden — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 11:11:14 +0000

Maybe also heap fragmentation

New comment by FjordWarden in "Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers"

FjordWarden — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:47:40 +0000

TS returns a tree with nodes, you walk the nodes with a visitor pattern. I've experimented with using tree-sitter queries for this, but for now not found this to be easier. Every syntax will have its own CST but it can target a general AST if you will. At the end they can both be represented as s-expressions and but you need rules to go from one flavour of syntax tree to the other.

AST is just CST minus range info and simplified/generalised lexical info (in most cases).

New comment by FjordWarden in "Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers"

FjordWarden — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:32:02 +0000

You have to figure this out for yourself in most cases. Tree sitter does have a query language based on s-expressions, but it is more for questions like "give me all the nodes that are literals", and then you can, for example, render those with in single draw call. Tree sitter has incremental parsing, and queries can be fixed at a certain byte range.

New comment by FjordWarden in "Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers"

FjordWarden — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:37:04 +0000

This is like the difference between an orange and fruit juice. You can squeeze an orange to extract its juices, but that is not the only thing you can do with it, nor is it the only way to make fruit juice.

I use tree-sitter for developing a custom programming language, you still need an extra step to get from CST to AST, but the overall DevEx is much quicker that hand-rolling the parser.

New comment by FjordWarden in "The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly"

FjordWarden — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:04:21 +0000

Ah, I think I found the reason as to why WebAssembly (in a browser or some other sandboxed environment) is not a suitable substrate for near native performance. It is a very ironic reason: you can't implement a JIT compiler that targets WebAssembly in a sandbox running in WebAssembly. Sounds like an incredibly contrived thing to do but once speed is the goal then a copy-and-patch compiler is a valid strategy for implementing a interpreter or a modern graphics pipeline.

New comment by FjordWarden in "The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know"

FjordWarden — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 20:02:38 +0000

The CM DB group YT channel is good place to learn about the basics and advanced topics: https://www.youtube.com/@CMUDatabaseGroup

New comment by FjordWarden in "Langjam Gamejam: Build a programming language then make a game with it"

FjordWarden — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:17:34 +0000

Challenge accepted, but no way I can finish this in 7 days even with a head start of a few months.

New comment by FjordWarden in "Unexpected things that are people"

FjordWarden — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:35:13 +0000

Polders have personhood in some jurisdictions. The government reclaimed the land from the sea, sold it to multiple people, levies taxes on them and now the dykes need to be maintained.

This is just legal fiction, technology developed and applied cross industry.

The mere concept of water rights implies obligations must lie someplace. All this talk about reified gods takes away much of how mundane the concept is.

New comment by FjordWarden in "AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is"

FjordWarden — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 16:26:27 +0000

Imagine if you spent those years building something else.

New comment by FjordWarden in "Some people can't see mental images"

FjordWarden — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:43:50 +0000

After coming down from the shock of learning there are people like you I was even more amazed that one of the founding engineers of Pixar, and a giant in computer graphics, also has this condition. He even did a survey that found his artists where more likely to be on the aphantasia spectrum than managers. Dunno, maybe some people are so driven to create what they cannot think or see.

New comment by FjordWarden in "I unified convolution and attention into a single framework"

FjordWarden — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 13:48:59 +0000

From the paper:

Structured State Space Models and Mamba. Models like Mamba [Gu and Dao, 2023] can be in- terpreted within GWO as employing a sophisticated Path, Shape, and Weight. The Path is defined by a structured state-space recurrence, enabling it to model long-range dependencies efficiently. The Shape is causal (1D), processing information sequentially. Critically, the Weight function is highly dynamic and input- dependent, realized through selective state parameters that allow the model to focus on or forget information based on the context, creating an effective content-aware bottleneck for sequences.

New comment by FjordWarden in "TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning"

FjordWarden — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 16:35:58 +0000

> The irony, of course, is that if you've read this far, it may mean you’ve already mastered a rare skill: sustained attention in a world of distraction.

No, sorry I read the first and last sentence. This is why I like the short format more then the long forms, it often boils down to the same clever narrative trickery without waisting 3 hours of your life.

New comment by FjordWarden in "Defense.gov Now Redirects to War.gov"

FjordWarden — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 10:34:36 +0000

Wow there is so much spacing after the "of" that I read it as "U.S. Department of space war"

New comment by FjordWarden in "Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean"

FjordWarden — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 21:44:52 +0000

Not clear from the article but a reasonable presumption for sure.

New comment by FjordWarden in "Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean"

FjordWarden — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 10:50:14 +0000

Ok this is worrisome news, but from what I could gather from the article this a novel technique with no historic data. Why can't this be something that the Southern Ocean does?

New comment by FjordWarden in "Structuring Arrays with Algebraic Shapes"

FjordWarden — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 07:34:24 +0000

Ok, sum types and product types