Hacker News: eliben

New comment by eliben in "Watgo – A WebAssembly Toolkit for Go"

eliben — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:45:02 +0000

You're welcome :)

The harnesses are documented here: https://github.com/eliben/watgo/tree/main/tests

Note that I had to switch the harness from wazero to Node (unfortunately!) when it turned out wazero doesn't support gc and other new proposals (e.g. your comment here https://github.com/wazero/wazero/issues/2483)

Thank you very much for maintaining wazero - I love that project, and am looking forward to being able to use it for this in the future.

New comment by eliben in "Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?"

eliben — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:36:57 +0000

watgo (https://github.com/eliben/watgo) -- a WebAssembly toolkit for Go. Think something like wasm-tools or wabt, just in pure (0 dependency) Go.

New comment by eliben in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

eliben — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:33:50 +0000

According to the official tracker (https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/clean-energy-serving-... and elsewhere) there were 279 days in 2025 where California was on 100% renewable for _some_ time during the day (could be hours, could be minutes at mid-day).

In total hours equivalent of 77.3 full days over 2025.

New comment by eliben in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

eliben — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:32:35 +0000

California is a great example; highest electricity prices in the US (not counting Hawaii, which makes sense) despite significant hydro and fantastic solar capacity. In the last few years California runs 100% renewable on many days (and growing) every year.

Economics 101: prices are not set by what goods cost to create + markup. Prices are set by how much people are willing to pay.

New comment by eliben in "Notes on Lagrange Interpolating Polynomials"

eliben — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:53:39 +0000

Thank you for the feedback. The idea was to first define what we want the basis functions to be (a pretty abstract definition) and then develop how to actually get that from _normal_, continuous functions.

New comment by eliben in "Notes on Lagrange Interpolating Polynomials"

eliben — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:35:15 +0000

Fixed, thank you! (it's actually r(x)=p(x)-q(x))

(proof-reading through HN is a mildly embarrassing process, sorry about that! I do go over these posts and proof-read them several times myself before publishing)

New comment by eliben in "Notes on Lagrange Interpolating Polynomials"

eliben — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:42:24 +0000

Thanks for noticing, I'll fix it shortly

New comment by eliben in "Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built"

eliben — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:02:01 +0000

Right, standalone binaries for CLI tools is great. And if one has Go installed, they can just `go run ...` any tool from its GitHub path, all installation/build/caching happens automagically (meaning the execution is immediate after the first run).

But I can definitely see how someone with `uv` muscle memory wants everything in the same command.

`uv` is the best thing that happened to the Python ecosystem since... I don't know... maybe Numpy.

New comment by eliben in "Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built"

eliben — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:35:37 +0000

Very interesting! I encountered the problems these tools are trying to tackle just recently while trying to guide an agent into creating an in-browser tool for me. Closing the loop on a web interface isn't as simple as CLI-only tools. I should give this a try.

It's also interesting that you've shifted to Go for your agent-coded CLI tools, Simon.

New comment by eliben in "The Nobel Prize and the Laureate Are Inseparable"

eliben — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:28:51 +0000

The underlying issue here is that the Nobel Peace Prize is a useless, politicized joke. It appears to be almost designed to give newspapers something to write about.

It's a shame it gets tied with scientific prizes which represent actual merit.

New comment by eliben in "Useful patterns for building HTML tools"

eliben — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 19:12:13 +0000

Nice, I'm proud I managed to nerd-snipe you :-) Thanks for taking the time.

Seriously, though, I think this solves a nicely framed simpler problem. I was thinking about a more general tool, but that's genuinely hard (you'll need heavy CV algorithms or a special ML model to detect what is background what what isn't).

To be honest, what you built here is probably sufficient anyway, because the models are better at obeying "create a white background" or "create a 0xffffff background" than "transparent", so this tool can post-process to what's needed.

When asked for "transparent", I've had a model generate a fake checkerboard pattern of gray colors to imitate how viewers render transparent areas :-) For this kind of nonsense, the transparent-png tool wouldn't do!

New comment by eliben in "Useful patterns for building HTML tools"

eliben — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 18:01:34 +0000

Great work, Simon -- thanks for sharing!

One tool I'd really like to see in this format is a simple "turn the background of this PNG to transparent". Models still refuse to follow the instruction to create transparent backgrounds for logos they create, and I often have to look for other tools doing this as post-processing.

It's possible that this is too complicated for the "few hundred lines of js" code envelope, though.

New comment by eliben in "Revisiting "Let's Build a Compiler""

eliben — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:51:23 +0000

I also enjoyed working with BF for toy compiler projects; here's a series of JIT compilers for BF in increasing level of sophistication: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/adventures-in-jit-compila...

New comment by eliben in "Consistent Hashing"

eliben — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 13:21:14 +0000

Thanks for spotting this, what a silly typo :)

... Fixed

New comment by eliben in "Consistent Hashing"

eliben — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 13:20:53 +0000

Thanks for the kind words!

Regarding ring size, yes I'd say 2^64 is good. Since the representation is sparse, it seems safe but I'd be interested in hearing other views.

New comment by eliben in "A polyglot's guide to multiple-dispatch (2016)"

eliben — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 14:19:51 +0000

Thanks for posting this!

Just a quick note that this post is the first in a series: see https://eli.thegreenplace.net/tag/multiple-dispatch for the full series

New comment by eliben in "Anonymous recursive functions in Racket"

eliben — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:53:50 +0000

The Y combinator in Python: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2016/some-notes-on-the-y-combi...

(scroll down, after the concept is explained using Clojure)

A bit crazier, in Go with generics: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2022/the-y-combinator-in-go-wi...

New comment by eliben in "A blog does not need “analytics”"

eliben — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 12:20:34 +0000

A quick plug for https://www.goatcounter.com/ - a super lightweight visitor counter. Very much privacy oriented (https://www.goatcounter.com/help/gdpr).

I've set it up on my blog a while ago (https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2023/using-goatcounter-for-blo...) and it's been working really well.

New comment by eliben in "Implementing Forth in Go and C"

eliben — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 02:17:04 +0000

Yes, Factor is mentioned in the first paragraph of the post!

New comment by eliben in "Implementing Forth in Go and C"

eliben — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 19:03:03 +0000

Thanks for the feedback! What do you feel is not finished?