Hacker News: engfan

New comment by engfan in "Audacity 4.0"

engfan — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:06:16 +0000

The video on their audio editor would have been much more interesting and widely useful if they instead showed how they made their beautiful video. There is much more combined video and audio editing going on than audio-editing alone and doing this well is difficult and time-consuming.

New comment by engfan in "Audacity 4.0"

engfan — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:05:07 +0000

There video on their audio editor would have been much more interesting and widely useful if they instead showed how they made their beautiful video. There is much more combined video and audio editing going on than audio-editing alone and doing this well is difficult and time-consuming.

New comment by engfan in "GNU Hyperbole Implicit Buttons: Build Your Hyperverse"

engfan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:20:51 +0000

The concept of a hyperverse, with rapid, contextual hyperlinking and low to no markup links that Hyperbole provides is quite interesting. Speed to capture and retrieve knowledge, especially in software engineering contexts, is critical but few systems really pay attention to this.

Is there anything your knowledge capture and retrieval systems do or don't do that you love or want?

New comment by engfan in "HyWiki: Zero Markup Hypertext"

engfan — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:20:50 +0000

This post is about Hyperbole's HyWiki package for knowledge management.

I've been doing a deep dive into knowledge management and PKMSs, and in my research I've found that HyWiki offers the best of all words. It has a truly unique behavior compared to other PKMSs that allows it to obviate the bookkeeping involved with linking your notes together, and allows your curated knowledge to propagate into the rest of your Emacs, not just your siloed notes vault.

This post is about Hyperbole's HyWiki package for knowledge management.

HyWiki offers the best of all words. It has a truly unique behavior compared to other PKMSs that allows it to obviate the bookkeeping involved with linking your notes together, and allows your curated knowledge to propagate into the rest of your Emacs, not just your siloed notes vault.

https://www.chiply.dev/post-hyperbole-hywiki - both article and a video are here

HyWiki: Zero Markup Hypertext

engfan — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:20:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.chiply.dev/post-hyperbole-hywiki

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48831594

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by engfan in "Show HN: Magnitude – open-source, AI-native test framework for web apps"

engfan — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 13:23:13 +0000

Anerli wrote: “When the interface does eventually change, that's where it becomes non-deterministic again by necessity, since the planner will need to generatively update the test and continue building the new cache from there.”

But what determines that the UI has changed for a specific URL? Your software independent of the planner LLM or do you require the visual LLM to make a determination of change?

You should also stop saying 100% open source when test plan generation and execution depend on non-open source AI components. It just doesn’t make sense.

New comment by engfan in "The Einstein AI Model"

engfan — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 02:02:24 +0000

I have never heard anyone think this way: “The main mistake people usually make is thinking Newton or Einstein were just scaled-up good students, that a genius comes to life when you linearly extrapolate a top-10% student.

The reason such people are widely lauded as geniuses is precisely because people can’t envision smart students producing paradigm-shifting work as they did.

Yes, people may be talking about AI performance as genius-level but any comparison to these minds is just for marketing purposes.

New comment by engfan in "Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software"

engfan — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 08:02:20 +0000

You should check out the HyWiki part of the Emacs Hyperbole hypertext package available from melpa or elpa-devel. It utilizes Org mode for notes and WikiWords to automatically interlink them as you type. The WikiWords work in any kind of text buffer as well, even in programming file comments. It even lets you link to many other kinds of Emacs entities like bookmarks, Org IDs and headings, etc. One command to build a web-based wiki. With a little practice, it might amaze you.

New comment by engfan in "Why LLMs Within Software Development May Be a Dead End"

engfan — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 03:11:36 +0000

The same thing that has happened forever. People practice and gain skills on their own time before being welcomed into the professional community. Skilled new college graduate programmers have often put in a decade or more of learning before they graduate because they start young. They may have taught themselves many programming languages, studied many open source libraries, learned about profiling and efficiency tradeoffs, etc. Companies with serious engineering needs simply don’t want and haven’t wanted those who lack this natural desire to build and iterate. The only change is that the bar continues to rise a bit and all people are now competing at one level or another with machines.

New comment by engfan in "Greybeard's tomb: the lost treasure of language design (2019)"

engfan — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 04:51:35 +0000

The boy can write. Thanks for the laughs.

New comment by engfan in "Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo"

engfan — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 19:23:06 +0000

Someone once said to Doug: “I don’t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of your inventions.”

I had the pleasure of working with him. He was brilliant and kind. The world just wasn’t ready for him.

New comment by engfan in "MatX: Efficient C++17 GPU numerical computing library with Python-like syntax"

engfan — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:03:01 +0000

Why can’t you keep the calling interfaces of functions as close to the Py libraries as possible, simplifying the transition for everyone? Will that really destroy the performance increase? Common calling interfaces make everything much simpler. Even in this simple example, the calls differ significantly.

New comment by engfan in "Why can't America teach writing?"

engfan — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 20:54:45 +0000

Probably because many people struggle to read with any reasonable level of comprehension. People reading this site are not representative of the public at large, as you know.

New comment by engfan in "What makes developers productive?"

engfan — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 23:25:08 +0000

GNU Hyperbole for rapid, implicit linking of all your programming artifacts and management support for handling technical complexity. One of those you can get for free.

New comment by engfan in "Lite XL: A lightweight text editor written in C and Lua"

engfan — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 22:24:16 +0000

Actually, using Org mode and the Hyperbole package in Emacs solves all the problems listed in easy to use ways except you get much more editing dunctionality rather than just the features requested. Don’t reinvent the wheel; just learn something that runs everywhere and solves your problems. You start Emacs once and then rapidly edit files from the command-line by calling emacsclient, not restarting Emacs.

New comment by engfan in "Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua"

engfan — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 22:47:17 +0000

Emacs standard/core key sequences (not just single keystrokes), e.g. C-x C-f to open files.

New comment by engfan in "Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua"

engfan — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 11:11:41 +0000

If a code editor does not support custom binding to sequences of keys (rather than single key presses), then its not really good for programmers.

New comment by engfan in "Extending org-mode to handle YouTube links"

engfan — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 13:03:12 +0000

You may also be interested that the Git tip of the master branch of the GNU Hyperbole package has a nicely designed link interface for controlled playback of youtube videos, allowing for easy link creation as well. See the hsys-youtube.el file. This will be part if the next package release as well. For example, it can play just a particular span of a video from a start and end time.

New comment by engfan in "Doug Engelbart’s design for knowledge-based organizations (1992) [pdf]"

engfan — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 03:30:27 +0000

Engelbart was always dead on. But very few listened, and now, unfortunately he’s just dead. And we are stuck with unchangeable web pages laid out for graphic design purposes rather than understanding and information reuse. It will be another several decades before this broadly changes.

New comment by engfan in "Show HN: Markdown as web page/site"

engfan — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 04:24:26 +0000

Great idea. Keep expanding it as you have time.