Hacker News: GZGavinZhao

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

GZGavinZhao — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:12:24 +0000

As always, honorable mention to Typst [0] as a good balance between the readability & simplicity of Markdown with the flexibility & composability of LaTeX. I think and hoping that Typst will be the future, but for now I'm happy with Markdown.

[0]: https://typst.app

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Slovenian officials blame Israeli firm Black Cube for trying to manipulate vote"

GZGavinZhao — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:29:34 +0000

Always baffles me why some people think and act like being proud of their state/country/race and criticizing its actions are mutually exclusive.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies"

GZGavinZhao — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:02:52 +0000

Did you meant to write "You *can't* make massive leaps in technology or medicine" instead of *can*?

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Async/Await on the GPU"

GZGavinZhao — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:53:54 +0000

One concern I have is that this async/await approach is not "AOT"-enough like the Triton approach, in the sense that you know how to most efficiently schedule the computations on which warps since you know exactly what operations you'll be performing at compile time.

Here with the async/await approach, it seems like there needs to be manual book-keeping at runtime to know what has finished, what has not, and _then_ consider which warp should we put this new computation in. Do you anticipate that there will be measurable performance difference?

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "The Future for Tyr, a Rust GPU Driver for Arm Mali Hardware"

GZGavinZhao — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:38:32 +0000

Can't wait to write a Rust driver for my eink tablet <3

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Zulip.com Values"

GZGavinZhao — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:07:17 +0000

UI and user ergonomics continues to be Zulip's biggest blocker to wider adoption. I understand that to many people not having E2EE and truly independent self hosting (e.g. push notification issues) is a deal breaker, but for many organizations the current level of openness from its values is enough.

I really wish Zulip could find someone to re-design the interface around the channels/threads model to make it easier to use and more friendly to beginners. I am personally never bothered by the design and got used to its interface quite quickly, but I know many many people who got turned away by its design or uses it in a Slack/Discord way by posting everything into "general chat".

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Remarkable Pro Colors"

GZGavinZhao — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 07:51:36 +0000

Their E-ink display driver is userspace unfortunately...

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Remarkable Pro Colors"

GZGavinZhao — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:23:53 +0000

reMarkable just open-source your display drivers and E-ink render stack please. I'm pretty sure the pressure curve issue can be solved just by tuning a few parameters in the code. I appreciate reMarkable for adhering to GPL and giving us trivial root access to the machines, but while you're there I really don't see why you don't just do it fully.

Even with the limited amount of usability, the community has already made some amazing additions, for example KOReader. Imagine how far we'd get if we can just write any app we want for reMarkable. I would completely get a typefolio and ditch my laptop if I have the ability to *easily* write my own app on the reMarkable without going through the loops of binary patching and other quirks.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Kiki – Accountability monster for people who are easily distracted"

GZGavinZhao — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:39:23 +0000

On Android there is a similar app called "Forest". I used it five or six years ago, not sure if it still exists now.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Track Your Routine – Open-source app for task management"

GZGavinZhao — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:21:22 +0000

Haha thank you, I must admit I can't make it always work out, but writing (typing) them down and forcing myself to look at the view to remind my brain is a lot better than juggling all the priorities around in my head. I really really hate planning tasks, I just want to do things and write code, so Linear is a good way for me to offload these computations and just focus on clearing the list.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Track Your Routine – Open-source app for task management"

GZGavinZhao — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:57:04 +0000

I often suffer from having too many things I want to work on, plus impulsive tasks (e.g. I saw an issue on GH that I happen to know how to solve) that I go on and spend 3 hours to do right away, causing delay in everything else more important. I force myself to only spend time on tasks on the "Active" view (minus a very small set of exceptions). All other impulsive thoughts go into "Backlog" status. Every night I review the "Backlog" view and move issues that I actually decide to do in the "Active" view. Also obviously you have to periodically clean up "Backlog".

That is the most important value Linear brings to me. There are other tools that can achieve similar effects, but I learned how to do it with Linear at work so I stuck with that. On top of this, Linear has priorities, deadlines, task blocking relations, etc., that naturally reflect how I prioritize issues in life. This is the same as how I prioritize tasks to do at work. Once again there are tools to do this outside of Linear, but none of them are as polished to use and just work.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Track Your Routine – Open-source app for task management"

GZGavinZhao — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:52:22 +0000

Surely I'm not the only person who first used Linear [0] at work and then loved it so much that I started using it for personal task management...?

Sure it's not open-source, but none of the open-source tools are as polished as that.

[0]: https://linear.app

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)"

GZGavinZhao — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:29:16 +0000

I'm trying to make a Chinese Hanzi variant of Wordle called Handle 汉兜 [0] available as a Discord activity/app so my Discord groups can have fun solving puzzles just like we've been having with NYT's official Wordle Discord app[1]. A Discord app is just a webview or iframe embedded inside Discord that you can launch.

[0]: https://handle.antfu.me [1]: https://discord.com/discovery/applications/12117814899314524...

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

GZGavinZhao — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:02:57 +0000

> There is third approach, established by a group in Minnesota [1], which is to design languages and tools which are modular and extensible from the get-go, so that extensions are more interoperable. They do research on how to make this work using attribute grammars.

MLIR [1] has entered the chat :P

I know I know MLIR is an IR and not a programming language, but MLIR does give me the feeling of "an IR to rule them all" (as long as you're ok with SSA representation), and the IR itself is quite high-level to the point it almost feels like an actual programming language, e.g. you can write a MLIR program that compiles to C using the EmitC dialect that feels a lot like writing C.

[1]: https://mlir.llvm.org

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere"

GZGavinZhao — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:55:59 +0000

My naive guess is that since CO2 takes up so few percentage, you would need an unfathomable amount of N, O, and Ar to get the mix right..?

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers"

GZGavinZhao — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:50:18 +0000

Next thing I want them to work on is Linux suspend(-to-RAM) support!

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Mistral OCR 3"

GZGavinZhao — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:35:45 +0000

Does it handle math expressions (those rendered from LaTeX) well? I've been looking for a good OCR model to transcribe my math textbooks into markdown (obviously ignoring the images and figures) with LaTeX as math expressions, and none of the current OCR models work reliably enough.

EDIT: you can try it yourself for free at https://console.mistral.ai/build/document-ai/ocr-playground once you create a developer account! Fingers crossed to see how well it works for my use case.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "My payment agent is named George, not stripe-agent"

GZGavinZhao — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 01:06:22 +0000

As the end of the article says, to the author this is more of a "ritual".

I don't know how effective it is, but I can't imagine this would undermine the quality of the output, so if it adds a little bit of humor and human-ness to my workflow, I'm happy to try it out.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Blender 5.0"

GZGavinZhao — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 01:23:27 +0000

I think at the very least they've found those rare individuals who can both code well and manage well. There are countless open source project leaders who might be the most knowledgeable person in the world on that area but have no idea how to communicate and collaborate in an open-source setting, especially as the project gets popular and attracts people who're detrimental (not necessarily malicious) to the project's growth.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "The Swift SDK for Android"

GZGavinZhao — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:37:01 +0000

Flutter still exists, so as a competitor you need to beat both React Native and Flutter.