Hacker News: lukemerrick

New comment by lukemerrick in "Show HN: Tiny-vLLM – high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA"

lukemerrick — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:25:28 +0000

I am not super familiar with C and CUDA, so I read solely for the README and enjoyed it supremely. The blend of cheerful walking through instructive examples and your philosophical takes on how to approach the exercise to get the most out of it put me in a great mood. You captured that special upbeat attitude that comes about when you're doing something as well as you can just because it's so legitimately interesting to you.

Are We Entering a First-Order Optimizer Renaissance?

lukemerrick — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 23:01:37 +0000

Article URL: https://lukemerrick.com/posts/first_order_optimization.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44566313

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by lukemerrick in "Sharing new research, models, and datasets from Meta FAIR"

lukemerrick — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 23:07:17 +0000

Meta is a very large organization, and I'm willing to believe that a good chunk of Meta FAIR (the lab releasing all of this stuff) truly do care about innovations for advancing AI safety and are doing great work along these lines. I'm not disagreeing with your point about the company being led by its financial incentives as a unit, but let's also allow ourselves permission to celebrate this work by this group of people.

New comment by lukemerrick in "Cosmopolitan v3.5"

lukemerrick — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 07:09:13 +0000

Looks like there is both an ARM and x86 version according to the docs. Probably need two different binaries, but you still get cross-OS for each architecture.

New comment by lukemerrick in "Show HN: Huewords, a Word and Logic Puzzle"

lukemerrick — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 05:40:30 +0000

Just spent two hours on this. Would happily spend the time again (and probably will soon!). Awesome work.

New comment by lukemerrick in "New attention mechanisms that outperform standard multi-head attention"

lukemerrick — Thu, 30 May 2024 15:16:15 +0000

Just skimmed so far and didn't see any reference to the Simplified Transformer block of https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01906 (and it seems they also left out grouped query attention, too, as pointed out by another comment).

While lazy me wants them to explain how their approach compares to these approaches, it looks like their exposition is pretty clear (quite nice for a preprint!) and I guess I'll just have to actually read the paper for real to see for myself.

Given how well I've seen Simplified Transformer blocks work in my own playground experiments, I would not at all be surprised if other related tweaks work out well even on larger scale models. I wish some of the other commenters here had a bit more curiosity and/or empathy for these two authors who did a fine job coming up with and initially testing out some worthwhile ideas.

Startup Rivos Says Apple Intimidates Workers Who ‘Dare to Leave’

lukemerrick — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 01:07:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-23/startup-rivos-says-apple-intimidates-workers-who-dare-to-leave

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37638627

Points: 32

# Comments: 8

New comment by lukemerrick in "The Pile: An 800GB dataset of diverse text for language modeling (2020)"

lukemerrick — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 01:58:13 +0000

Related to the idea of "no one trains on data they own, they shouldn't own the resulting model": since big public datasets like The Pile have CC-SA items in them, is anyone considering bringing the argument that model weights are derivative work that must be "shared alike"?

New comment by lukemerrick in "JupyterLab 4.0"

lukemerrick — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 14:34:51 +0000

As you guessed, the history tracking is one of the killer features. Imagine it being super easy to edit the history of a REPL session (delete, reorder, merge, and edit contents of each command) and rerun... That's a notebook! Notebooks also allow for markdown input and rich HTML output (which is killer for plotting) making it possible to polish your REPL history into a document you'd actually want to share with a colleague to explain something like a data analysis workflow.

I actually started in notebooks and then learned to love the REPL as a simplified "scratchpad notebook." I'd say in many ways notebooks are an improvement that cater heavily to REPL-lovers, but that for some quick tasks, the extra complexity isn't always worth it.

File from Microsoft Xandr shows the many ways advertisers label people

lukemerrick — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 05:31:48 +0000

Article URL: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36267897

Points: 7

# Comments: 2

New comment by lukemerrick in "Building a Lox Interpreter in Julia"

lukemerrick — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 07:47:22 +0000

Thank you for the tip! Getting to implement a different language from Lox feels like a nice way to cut down on the tedium.

New comment by lukemerrick in "Building a Lox Interpreter in Julia"

lukemerrick — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 07:44:21 +0000

Wow, the whole concept of a peephole optimizer is a bit mind blowing to me. I'm appreciating all the reasons to power through to writing a bytecode VM as the next step.

I'm not sure how far down the compiler I actually will enjoy going vs. exploring ideas around type systems, linters, etc. up near the AST level, but if I do venture down this advice will certainly come in handy!

New comment by lukemerrick in "Building a Lox Interpreter in Julia"

lukemerrick — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 07:34:16 +0000

Thank you for the suggestions! I was actually just searching about MLIR today after reading some Julia language community discussions on the new Mojo language that uses MLIR.

New comment by lukemerrick in "Building a Lox Interpreter in Julia"

lukemerrick — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 07:25:29 +0000

I actually played with Unityper.jl and SumTypes.jl, but my conclusion was that if I was going to depart from dispatch on Julia types in my code, I might as well just stick to an untyped tree, since either way I'd have to have a single `evaluate` function for interpreting any kind of node.

Reconsidering now, it seems that there might be benefits beyond type dispatch to having a typed syntax tree, so maybe I'll give that a shot as a next step!

New comment by lukemerrick in "Building a Lox Interpreter in Julia"

lukemerrick — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 16:53:05 +0000

In general, if you keep the source code positions of every nontrivial token, and you keep the raw source code, then yeah you can print out those pretty specific point error messages regardless of whether you keep your trees lossless. Also, if you want to include filename in your messages (perhaps because unlike Lox your language supports imports), then you'll need more than just lossless trees to store the necessary information.

I'm not sure exactly how Rust and rust-analyzer keep track of the info necessary to their excellent error messages and diagnostics, but I wouldn't be surprised if pinpoint messages were not the primary motivation for rust-analyzer to do lossless parsing.

New comment by lukemerrick in "Building a Lox Interpreter in Julia"

lukemerrick — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 04:40:48 +0000

Disclaimer: I wrote this blog post. If this were an "Ask HN" post, though, the question would be "What next after reading Crafting Interpreters?" I have only done the tree-walk interpreter half of the book, but I'm already excited to move beyond Lox, and I'm curious to hear what others have done in this situation.

Building a Lox Interpreter in Julia

lukemerrick — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 04:40:48 +0000

Article URL: https://lukemerrick.com/posts/intro_to_julox.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36161129

Points: 74

# Comments: 24

New comment by lukemerrick in "Show HN: Yaksha Programming Language"

lukemerrick — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 15:17:58 +0000

I'm late to the party, but I want to say thank you for sharing this. It's inspiring to look at how much you've built and (hopefully) enjoyed the process of building! I'm loving everything -- your site, your language design, your docs, your builtin libraries, your dev tools. Beyond impressive. People like you are the ones who make HN one of my best places on the internet.

For context on where I'm coming from, about two weeks ago I picked up Crafting Interpreters [1] for fun. I'm finding your clear-yet-concise Compiler internals [2] to be particularly compelling reading, and jumping back and forth between those "how this all works" docs and the live example of this language you actually built do a WASM-compiled tree-blowing-in-the-wind animation is just... just wow. So freaking cool!

I also enjoyed reading the comment thread that inspired you to start on Yaksha and seeing how this project has a wholesome start as inspiration-by-programming-hero. I hope you recognize that a few years later you've now ascended from inspiree to inspirer. I also hope you're still having tons of fun building out Yaksha!

[1] https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/

[2] https://yakshalang.github.io/documentation.html#compiler-int...

New comment by lukemerrick in "Optimizing utility-scale battery storage dispatch"

lukemerrick — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 22:28:33 +0000

Disclaimer: I'm the author.

I was torn whether to share my own post, but I figured the HN crowd might include a few others who will also really geek out about this topic and appreciate it. It's mathematical optimization and forecasting used to guide giant batteries hooked up to the electrical grid, after all.

There is some accompanying code I got to share publicly, too, if you want to run this yourself [1]. While I'm at it, I'll also mention some papers for anyone who wants a true deep dive [2, 3].

[1] https://gist.github.com/lukemerrick/4e1f9921a19ec97f7b949909...

[2] Linear Programming for battery optimization -- https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1244909

[3] Mixed-Integer Linear Programming for battery optimization [PDF] -- https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20...

Optimizing utility-scale battery storage dispatch

lukemerrick — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 22:28:33 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@lukemerrick_/df823572b59e

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33114949

Points: 1

# Comments: 1