Hacker News: mcdow

New comment by mcdow in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

mcdow — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 18:13:34 +0000

it’s funny because it’s unexpected. one of those members is not like the others. the rest are tech companies.

it does make me wonder what prompted them to join. it would suggest to me there are forward looking people in Brazil’s government. I am impressed.

New comment by mcdow in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

mcdow — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:49:33 +0000

lol the government of brazil is in there

New comment by mcdow in "Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK"

mcdow — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:15:24 +0000

y’all seem to be missing the fact that Java is a mature product. it has left the “move fast and break things” era of it’s development.

code is a liability, and they likely have more to lose than gain by allowing AI contribution.

New comment by mcdow in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

mcdow — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:47:28 +0000

“no open source project will succeed with this level of unprofessionalism”

y’all clearly are not acquainted with some of the things Linus has said on the LKML

New comment by mcdow in "We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme"

mcdow — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:24:05 +0000

Haven't done any research into this, but I wonder how tough it would be to build a decent 3D printer. Maybe there are open-source designs out there.

New comment by mcdow in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

mcdow — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:43:36 +0000

there’s another thing that started to get quite popular in the late 2000s… smartphones

New comment by mcdow in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

mcdow — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:04:34 +0000

Chrome, Android, and Gmail are optional to use.

New comment by mcdow in "Vercel April 2026 security incident"

mcdow — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:04:53 +0000

They might be buying time to sell the relevant stock

New comment by mcdow in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

mcdow — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:29:32 +0000

I’m working on a combination of a semantic embedder and vector database with a focus on Apple devices https://github.com/emmettmcdow/dve

It should be drop in semantic search for any text. No need to worry about what models, what database, how the data is processed, dealing with performance concerns. None of that. Just vector search.

New comment by mcdow in "What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical"

mcdow — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:48:16 +0000

I’m looking forward to using a RISC-V computer in 20 years

Show HN: On-device embedding and vector search for Apple Devices, built in Zig

mcdow — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:44:42 +0000

dve handles embedding, vector storage, and search all in one library with a simple interface.

This last year I was working on an app for Macs which required doing vector search. The local AI/ML libraries for Apple devices are lacking, which means the only real option is to use an API. I didn’t want to do that, so I started working on my own library. It worked well enough for my uses that I eventually decided to split off my library from the app which used it.

I reached for Zig for its C-level performance and portability, but with modern conveniences. I used CoreML for the ML runtime, as it is the most natural way to run ML models on Apple devices. Unfortunately, it's not particularly common to release CoreML versions of models. I had to manually convert ML models from PyTorch/ONNX to CoreML in order to make embedding seamless.

Getting started with the library is straightforward, there are a few Zig examples in the repo. It also has experimental Swift and C/C++ bindings. It only supports Macs for now, but support for other platforms is planned. Feedback is greatly appreciated!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47413425

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Open Source Does Not Mean Free

mcdow — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:41:01 +0000

Article URL: https://emmettmcdow.com/posts/oss

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857223

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Zero-cost speed: making your code fast with structure of arrays

mcdow — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:02:30 +0000

Article URL: https://emmettmcdow.com/posts/soa

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768177

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mcdow in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

mcdow — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:20:25 +0000

It's the phones dude. It's literally just the phones. Get rid of the phones and you fix it.

New comment by mcdow in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

mcdow — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:38:32 +0000

https://emmettmcdow.com

New comment by mcdow in "Show HN: Stash – Sync Markdown Files with Apple Notes via CLI"

mcdow — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:44:46 +0000

This is awesome! I’ve been looking for a way to batch export my notes out of Apple notes, will this work for that purpose?

I totally agree with you that most notes apps miss the mark. I’m working on one now which I hope satisfies the same requirements as Apple notes(dead simple, iCloud sync, free) but has some things I want (improved search, first class markdown support).

I’ve been using it as my daily driver for a while, but it’s not quite ready for other users yet. I wrote a bit about it in my year in review[1] under the section “Not Another Notes App!”.

1. https://emmettmcdow.com/posts/2025-in-review

New comment by mcdow in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)"

mcdow — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 20:36:53 +0000

Is any company actually doing this? I haven’t heard of anyone that has this setup. Maybe contract work, but never a full time employee working 4 days.

New comment by mcdow in "DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says"

mcdow — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 18:53:42 +0000

This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).

Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.

New comment by mcdow in "Anthropic acquires Bun"

mcdow — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:05:48 +0000

From the comments here it sounds like most people think the amount Anthropic paid for the company was probably not much more than the VC funding which Bun raised.

How would the payout split work? It wouldn’t seem fair to the investors if the founder profited X million while the investors get their original money returned. I understand VC has the expectation that 99 out of 100 of investments will net them no money. But what happens in the cases where money is made, it just isn’t profitable for the VC firm.

What’s to stop everyone from doing this? Besides integrity, why shouldn’t every founder just cash out when the payout is life-changing?

Is there usually some clause in the agreements like “if you do not return X% profit, the founder forfeits his or her equity back to the shareholders”?

Ask HN: Have you ever seen a perfect codebase?

mcdow — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:30:04 +0000

In my experience even the best software projects have a few skeletons in their closet, blemishes on an otherwise well-built project.

At the end of the day, we all have to build things that simply work and provide business value. Striving for perfect code is not the goal. But it does make me wonder: does perfect software even exist? If not, what's the gold standard?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983118

Points: 10

# Comments: 13