Hacker News: lemming

New comment by lemming in "Jank now has its own custom IR"

lemming — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:27:44 +0000

That is really interesting, and very clever - thanks for the details! What you describe is indeed what I meant by whole world, I'm not sure if there's a better term of art for it.

New comment by lemming in "Jank now has its own custom IR"

lemming — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:53:53 +0000

I can't speak for the core team, but from memory invokedynamic took a long time to become performant. So if you still want to support older JVM versions, the performance will be pretty terrible on those older systems if invokedynamic is used for something as integral as var lookups.

New comment by lemming in "Jank now has its own custom IR"

lemming — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:58:10 +0000

That is very cool indeed. Are there limitations that this imposes? Is Julia a whole world compiler or does it support partial compilation?

New comment by lemming in "Jank now has its own custom IR"

lemming — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:55:23 +0000

Clojure (AFAIK) does not use invokedynamic, except perhaps in the latest version for some of the new interop stuff. It still officially supports JVM 1.8 bytecode. It’s a language which greatly values stability and backwards compatibility, so it’s been very slow to adopt newer JVM features.

New comment by lemming in "Jank now has its own custom IR"

lemming — Mon, 18 May 2026 03:30:34 +0000

No, it doesn't. In JVM Clojure's case, the vars are usually compiled to the moral equivalent of a global variable holding a pointer to a function. This allows you to update the function if the developer redefines it in the REPL, but it comes at a performance cost (the JVM can't inline it or otherwise optimise it). Clojure also allows you to compile with "direct linking", e.g. for production deployments, where you know you're unlikely to be wanting to dynamically update the code. In those cases defns are compiled down to static methods which call each other - much faster since the JVM can perform its magic with them, but you can't update them at the REPL.

I'm unsure exactly how jank works WRT this tradeoff, but the article makes it sound like it's closer to the direct linking version, but with the inlining etc being done by jank rather than the JVM. I don't know if this is only for AOT or also in JIT cases.

New comment by lemming in "Jank now has its own custom IR"

lemming — Mon, 18 May 2026 00:20:08 +0000

Great article, as always.

There is one thing that I think is important to bear in mind when discussing inlining, especially in the context of Clojure. This is that once a function has been inlined, you can no longer update the definition of that function in the REPL and have that update the behaviour of functions which use it, unless you recompile those as well. This is not a criticism of course, it’s just part of the natural tension between dynamism and performance.

From One AI to Any AI: JetBrains rethinks the approach to AI tooling [video]

lemming — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 01:02:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8fHU4WFd_c

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47942940

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by lemming in "4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor"

lemming — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:55:48 +0000

When I was in NYC a while back, I met a woman at a friend's dinner party. She sounded totally American, but was in fact Brazilian. She worked as a lawyer, and said that she'd had to get extensive voice training in order to sound American so that people would take her more seriously professionally. I have no idea if the professional part worked, but the accent, mannerisms etc was amazing - I would never have guessed.

New comment by lemming in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

lemming — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:15:06 +0000

Sure, but the article talks about flourishing populations of deer, elk, and bison. I assume that means we’re talking about herds of each, all in the same space. And they have to survive over winter, which sounds pretty cold there - presumably they don’t migrate, which I guess they usually would? It’s definitely not ideal conditions.

Obviously it’s possible, but I was surprised.

New comment by lemming in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

lemming — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 02:10:54 +0000

What's amazing to me is how little space is required to have a completely self-sustaining ecosystem. A 60km diameter circle just doesn't seem like a very big space to have enough plants to support "flourishing" numbers of multiple types of large herbivores, without migration, as well as all the different prey species required to keep things in balance.

Regardless of the arguments about radiation, it seems pretty clear that lack of humans is really the most important thing for animals to flourish.

New comment by lemming in "Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links"

lemming — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:54:11 +0000

Thanks! Yes, I get on really well with everyone in the community - the community in general is perhaps my favourite thing about Clojure!

New comment by lemming in "Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links"

lemming — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:57:28 +0000

Hehe, Lisp Emacs Myopia is indeed a real thing. Cursive users have been not starting REPLs for over a decade now!

j/k of course, and no offence taken :-)

New comment by lemming in "Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links"

lemming — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 05:38:41 +0000

Things have been different for well over five years...

In fact, I first presented Cursive at the conj 2014, and I'd been working on it in open beta for perhaps a year before that, so well over 10 years!

...all this fantastic "static analysis style" developer tooling by borkdude and eric dallo.

ahem

New comment by lemming in "Understanding Clojure's Persistent Vectors, pt. 1 (2013)"

lemming — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:35:10 +0000

I still don’t understand why they’re referred to as persistent vectors rather than immutable vectors, but I digress.

I believe that immutable just means, well, immutable, but persistent means that updates are achieved via structural sharing, so they’re efficient.

New comment by lemming in "Show HN: A memory database that forgets, consolidates, and detects contradiction"

lemming — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:12:13 +0000

So soon our agents will need spaced repetition flash cards for the things we want them to remember! I eagerly await Anki for Agents.

New comment by lemming in "Tailscale's new macOS home"

lemming — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:22:35 +0000

Related question: how are people handling adding family members of varying technical abilities to your tailnets? Does each family member get a separate user so you can manage their access? For my immediate family I was just logging tailscale in as me on their devices, but that becomes a pain when they get logged out and need me to log in again before things go back to working.

New comment by lemming in "Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python"

lemming — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:49:57 +0000

I'm very familiar with Clojure, but even I can't make a good argument that:

    (tc/select-rows ds #(> (% "year") 2008))

is more, or at least as, intuitive as:

    filter(ds, year > 2008)

as cited above. I think there's a good argument to be made that Clojure's data processing abilities, particularly around immutable data, make a compelling case in spite of the syntax. The REPL is great too, and the JVM is fast. But I still to this day imagine infix comparisons in my head and then mentally move the comparator to the front of the list to make sure I get it right.

New comment by lemming in "OpenClaw Is a Security Nightmare Dressed Up as a Daydream"

lemming — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:28:41 +0000

But if it doesn’t have access to the network, then it’s just not very useful. And if it does, then it’s just a prompt injection away from exfiltrating your data, or doing something you didn’t expect (eg deleting all your emails).

New comment by lemming in "Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode"

lemming — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:38:41 +0000

This argument is predicated on Anthropic losing money on the subs, but I'm not sure that's a cut and dried argument. OpenAI have said publicly that they're (very) profitable on inference, and they're much cheaper than Anthropic. I suspect this is just artificially trying to create a moat. The problem is their moat is not as sticky as they think it is - I completely ditched Claude for Codex a while ago, my money now goes to OpenAI, and I'm very happy with it. For a while Claude was noticeably better, but that's not the case any more - in my case I prefer Codex.

New comment by lemming in "Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games"

lemming — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:45:53 +0000

This actually produces more impressive results than I expected. My understanding was that models are quite poor at spatial reasoning/understanding, so I'm surprised it can generate such good assets. Do you use different models for the 3d generation?