Hacker News: msvan

New comment by msvan in "Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode"

msvan — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 20:43:11 +0000

One thing that would be genuinely useful would be the ability to integrate Claude with the Metal debugger somehow, to get automated analysis of GPU profiling. The .gputrace format is proprietary and cannot be easily analyzed, and it seems that the new "agentic coding" integration in Xcode also does nothing to expose this data to LLMs. Oh well.

Show HN: Autoliner – write a bot to control a virtual airline

msvan — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:35:27 +0000

Article URL: https://autoliner.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46875162

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Show HN: Autoliner – write a bot to control a virtual airline

msvan — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 16:18:07 +0000

Article URL: https://autoliner.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857754

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Hyperspeedcube

msvan — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:15:13 +0000

Article URL: https://ajfarkas.dev/projects/hyperspeedcube/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42305722

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by msvan in "12 Months of Mandarin"

msvan — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 22:48:04 +0000

I kind of see myself from ten years ago in this blog post! I also obsessively studied Mandarin Chinese in my late teens for the sheer fun of it, before doing a math undergrad. I even wrote comments on Hacker News about it a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622940.

At the time I had seemingly limitless motivation for grinding away on flashcards and other learning materials. My progress was strong and I passed the HSK6 after a year and a half or so of studying, which at the time was the highest level of certification offered. I think they changed the system since and added more levels beyond 6. You can do amazing things if you're dedicated!

Today my Chinese is absolutely unusable, and my views on China have soured to the extent that I don't really want to revive my old skills. My takeaway is that learning one of these languages, the CJK languages, Arabic, or similarly weird languages, is just too much effort and I don't think it's worth it. I clearly had a lot of excess energy at the time that I could've directed towards something better. Knowing Chinese is about as useful as juggling and you might as well get really good at juggling if you're bored. It'll save you a few thousand hours.

New comment by msvan in "When To Do What You Love"

msvan — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 22:34:25 +0000

This is because you chose to live an expensive life. Most of the world gets by on less.

New comment by msvan in "Zb: An Early-Stage Build System"

msvan — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 20:33:30 +0000

As a current Nix user, what I would really like is a statically typed language to define builds. Recreating Nix without addressing that feels like a missed opportunity.

New comment by msvan in "Rapier is a set of 2D and 3D physics engines written in Rust"

msvan — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 08:51:17 +0000

This one has some more traction: https://github.com/fu5ha/ultraviolet

New comment by msvan in "Cosmic: The Road to Alpha"

msvan — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 23:17:56 +0000

Bit of a side note, but COSMIC depends on the rustybuzz text shaper which is deprecated: https://github.com/RazrFalcon/rustybuzz/issues/74. There was some work underway to bring it up to sync with the latest harfbuzz and then handing over ownership to the harfbuzz team, but this seems to have fizzled out.

Graphite: 2D Raster and Vector Editor

msvan — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 21:48:28 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/GraphiteEditor/Graphite

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38169500

Points: 22

# Comments: 4

New comment by msvan in "Why Async Rust?"

msvan — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 19:31:22 +0000

I think the final remark about a hypothetical language, Rust-like but without all the low-level requirements, is important here. There is essentially no widely-adopted programming language out that feels like a modern ML with a good tooling situation. Until that happens, Rust will continue to awkwardly serve the audience of such a language while never truly being what they want it to be.

Half-Edge Data Structures (2019)

msvan — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 20:08:25 +0000

Article URL: https://jerryyin.info/geometry-processing-algorithms/half-edge/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37093365

Points: 69

# Comments: 8

New comment by msvan in "Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer"

msvan — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 21:58:26 +0000

A 4K monitor has 8.3M pixels, so you could equivalently say that it's ~three 4K monitors.

New comment by msvan in "Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS"

msvan — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 18:02:27 +0000

Lots of negativity in here. I for one am excited about the prospect of an editor that is as responsive as I remember Sublime being back in the day, with the feature set I've come to expect from VS Code. An editor like this simply does not exist today, and betting on the Rust ecosystem is entirely the right choice for building something like this in 2023.

New comment by msvan in "2023 State of Software Engineers [pdf]"

msvan — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 17:58:56 +0000

And in that case, what causes the discrepancy in productivity between London and SF?

New comment by msvan in "2023 State of Software Engineers [pdf]"

msvan — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 17:18:42 +0000

You'd think there would be an arbitrage opportunity in paying more $$$ for London talent. Still surprises me that this hasn't happened after all these years of huge differences.

New comment by msvan in "Meilisearch 1.0 – Open-source search engine built in Rust"

msvan — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:05:48 +0000

How does Meilisearch compare to ElasticSearch from an operational point of view? I've experienced ElasticSearch to be quite painful to maintain, requiring lots of manual tweaking to balance shards and careful design of indices.

New comment by msvan in "Blessed.rs – An unofficial guide to the Rust ecosystem"

msvan — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 19:38:58 +0000

From the slog Github repo:

> You might consider using tracing instead. It's been a while since slog was created and it served Rust community well all this time. It remains a stable, featureful and battle-tested library, used in many important projects.

> In last few years, another ecosystem for Rust was created with similar features and a very good support for debugging async code and already larger dev team and community.

> Please check tracing and see if it is more suitable for your use-case. It seems that it is already a go-to logging/tracing solution for Rust.

> Reasons you might want to stick with slog anyway:

> async support doesn't benefit you

> you consider mature, stable code & API a plus

> it has some features that tracing is missing

> great performance (I have NOT done any comparison, but slog's performance is very good).

New comment by msvan in "Introducing ReadySet"

msvan — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 18:56:54 +0000

I've used both of the suggested methods under "Current standards for scaling out databases" so I see where this is coming from. But I peeked at the AWS reference architecture, and it places a Consul and ReadySet deployment in my environment for me to run and maintain. I feel like any sales pitch for this really needs to convince me that having these things in my environments is going to be worth the hassle in terms of milliseconds and dollars, as opposed to just using RDS read replicas and paying a bit more. Then again, I can see this being an obvious choice if you're growing very quickly or have tight latency requirements.

With that said, it looks like cool tech and I read Jon's Rust for Rustaceans which serves as a stamp of quality for this even if I haven't tried it yet!

New comment by msvan in "Onivim 2 – A retro-futuristic modal editor"

msvan — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 08:42:23 +0000

The project has run out of funds: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3811#issuecomment-9103....

Considering how many people are annoyed by the trend of Electron everywhere, it's a bit sad to see an ambitious native editor like this unable to secure funding.