Hacker News: remywang

New comment by remywang in "A Preview of DuckDB v2.0"

remywang — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:25:10 +0000

If you like DuckDB, please consider funding DB research [1]!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336147

New comment by remywang in "Ask HN: Who needs funding for DB research?"

remywang — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:19:44 +0000

Remy Wang, Assistant Professor @ UCLA

https://remy.wang

Working on:

- Query languages (Prela [1] and Datalog)

- Join algorithms (WCOJ, instance-optimal joins [2], join ordering)

[1]: https://prela-lang.org

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00098

Ask HN: Who needs funding for DB research?

remywang — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:13:53 +0000

This is the sibling post of “Who wants to fund DB research?“ [1], please see that post for context. In short, if you are working on non-AI related DB topics and are looking for funding, leave a comment below with a short summary of your work. I’m focusing on non-AI areas because their funding has been declining largely due to the spending on AI. Format:

Name, Affiliation

Research topics

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336147

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336154

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Ask HN: Who wants to fund DB research?

remywang — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:13:04 +0000

You may have heard there’s a funding crisis for science in general, and for computer science in particular. Within CS, despite billions of dollars being spent for AI research, there is less and less funding for traditional areas. I work in Databases, and have seen many colleagues switching to AI-related work like vector DBs and agent systems, even though there have been lots of exciting breakthroughs on core DB topics like WCOJ and Datalog, to name a few. As I write this, a post on DuckDB v2.0 is top 1 of Hacker News, with many users commenting it’s one of their favorite pieces of software. DuckDB is the direct result of decades of DB research [1].

HN has a tradition of “who’s hiring” posts, and I figured we could also do a “who’s funding” post. If you are interested in funding DB research, feel free to leave a comment, or reach out to me directly [2]. If you are working in DB and are looking for funding, leave a comment under this post: [3].

[1]: https://duckdb.org/why_duckdb#standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants

[2]: https://remy.wang

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336154

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336147

Points: 12

# Comments: 0

Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson (1910)

remywang — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:42:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49307106

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by remywang in "Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs"

remywang — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:57:11 +0000

Looks like Andy's here, so if you see this - please also try to convince ClickHouse to consider funding DB research in academia. With all the money being poured into AI and the chaos in government funding, there is almost nothing for DB research anymore.

New comment by remywang in "F*: A general-purpose proof-oriented programming language"

remywang — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:05:51 +0000

That’s because syntax is the least interesting part of F*.

New comment by remywang in "Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576"

remywang — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:13:18 +0000

Isn’t a disproof of the Collatz conjecture easy to check as it should just be a counterexample? Or is the proof not constructive?

New comment by remywang in "Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals"

remywang — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:17:02 +0000

Does this work for release builds or just debug builds now?

New comment by remywang in "My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents"

remywang — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:51:47 +0000

Does he read his tests and constraints? You’d need lots of tests to have that kind of confidence (SQLite has 500+ lines of tests per line of code), at which point it’s not a lot of additional work to just read the code.

New comment by remywang in "Canceling "Hey""

remywang — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:27:57 +0000

If anyone wants a great mail client, I highly recommend Mailmate which among other things lets you write messages in markdown: https://freron.com/ it’s maintained by a solo dev for 15+ years and charges a fair price

New comment by remywang in "The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft"

remywang — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 16:46:30 +0000

I’ll gladly use AI to write if it were good at writing as much as how it is good at coding. But it’s just a terrible writer, and currently it’s easier to type things out myself compared to yelling at Claude.

Ask HN: How to make AI better at writing prose?

remywang — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 01:27:19 +0000

Current models are still notoriously bad at writing prose. It's not just the easily recognizable tics like "load-bearing" and "genuinely". The text is just sloppy, pompous, and full of air.

I've tried different approaches like feeding it examples of my own writing, giving it a style guide, and iterating a few editing sessions, but it appears the way these models write/talk is rather deeply ingrained, and it usually end up easier for me just to write myself. Has anyone found a good approach to make models write better?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015703

Points: 4

# Comments: 6

Value Polymorphism in Rust

remywang — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:50:18 +0000

Article URL: https://remy.wang/blog/value-polymorphism.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48953050

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by remywang in "Google Kills Custom Search API on Jan 1, 2027"

remywang — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 02:18:36 +0000

Please link to https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview instead of whatever this is.

New comment by remywang in "Focus"

remywang — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:25:19 +0000

It’s time to pull yourself out of your tunnel vision and look at the wasteland left behind by the ruthless machine you are building.

New comment by remywang in "No LLM Code in Dependencies"

remywang — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:08:24 +0000

> This will probably prevent git-annex from taking advantage of most new improvements to the Haskell language going forward. That is deeply unfortunate. This is the main reason why git-annex is not guaranteed to never change to depend on LLM generated code, because cutting it off from all future Haskell language improvements may be worse than the alternative.

Looks like they are aware, and git-annex has been around for decades written by one of the best Haskellers. “Some guys hobby project” is not fair

Tarski's influence on computer science [pdf]

remywang — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:37:20 +0000

Article URL: https://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/tarskiandcs.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762314

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by remywang in "Instagram is incorporating users' photos in ads for Meta Glasses"

remywang — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:15:27 +0000

Just stop using that cursed website

New comment by remywang in "We all depend on open source. We will defend it together"

remywang — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:27:00 +0000

Currently the worst assault on open source is PR spam and the collapse of trust and culture that comes with it. Focus on that if you really want to defend open source.