Hacker News: sestep

New comment by sestep in "Whohas – Command-line utility for cross-distro, cross-repository package search"

sestep — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:20:22 +0000

Another great tool, built on top of nix-locate, is comma. So for any program foo, if you have foo installed, you can run it like this:

foo

And if you don't have it installed, you can run it (without installing!) like this:

  , foo

And if multiple different packages provide a program named bin/foo then comma lets you interactively choose the one you want, and remembers your choice so you don't have to specify again unless you choose to via the -d flag.

New comment by sestep in "Highlights from Git 2.54"

sestep — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:17:55 +0000

I agree with the other replies saying to just run the checks in CI and have the CI error message mention how to install the pre-commit hook.

I'm glad cloning a repo doesn't automatically install hooks since I strongly dislike them: I often use Git commands in the terminal but sometimes I use the VS Code UI to commit, and it's extremely frustrating when simply creating a commit runs for several seconds because of some pre-commit hook.

New comment by sestep in "Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image"

sestep — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:42:02 +0000

Are you referring to how the nixpkgs-unstable branch hasn't been updated in the past five days? Or do you have some specific software in mind? (not arguing, just curious)

New comment by sestep in "A Case Against Currying"

sestep — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:25:51 +0000

This is an issue in Python but less so in languages like JavaScript that support "field name punning", where you pass named arguments via lightweight record construction syntax, and you don't need to duplicate a field name if it's the same as the local variable name you're using for that field's value.

Newcomb's Paradox Needs a Demon

sestep — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:46:45 +0000

Article URL: https://samestep.com/blog/newcombs-paradox/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317811

Points: 15

# Comments: 41

New comment by sestep in "The long tail of LLM-assisted decompilation"

sestep — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 04:18:41 +0000

One of the other PhD students in my department has an NDSS 2026 paper about combining the strengths of both LLMs and traditional decompilers! https://lukedramko.github.io/files/idioms.pdf

New comment by sestep in "Bun v1.3.9"

sestep — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:00:53 +0000

Could you clarify what you mean about Nix missing concurrency and parallelism? I often run builds using nix-output-monitor and it definitely looks like things are running in parallel, although I could be mistaken.

New comment by sestep in "Memory layout in Zig with formulas"

sestep — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 22:23:15 +0000

I think you can do this with Virgil, but I'm having trouble finding the exact doc page at the moment: https://github.com/titzer/virgil

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

sestep — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:44:48 +0000

https://samestep.com

New comment by sestep in "I hate GitHub Actions with passion"

sestep — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:01:18 +0000

I tried this five years ago back when I was an engineer on the PyTorch project, and it didn't work well enough to be worth it. Has it improved since then?

New comment by sestep in "I Accidentally Finished a Filesystem"

sestep — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:21:27 +0000

This sounds cool but is extremely uninteresting without performance measurements. Are there any?

New comment by sestep in "Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C"

sestep — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:18:23 +0000

Same question but for Jai.

New comment by sestep in "Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C"

sestep — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:16:56 +0000

Noob question: if it just compiles to threads, is there any need for special syntax in the first place? My understanding was that no language support should be required for blocking on a thread.

New comment by sestep in "Show HN: Jax-JS, array library in JavaScript targeting WebGPU"

sestep — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 01:19:17 +0000

Ahh no you're right, I forgot about the difficulties for GPU specifically; apologies for my overly curt earlier message. More accurately: I think this is definitely possible (Troels and I have talked a bit about this previously) and I'd be happy to work together if this is something you're interested in. I probably won't work on this if you're not interested on your end, though.

New comment by sestep in "Show HN: Jax-JS, array library in JavaScript targeting WebGPU"

sestep — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 21:14:57 +0000

It should be fairly straightforward; feel free to open a PR following the instructions in CONTRIBUTING.md :)

New comment by sestep in "Show HN: Jax-JS, array library in JavaScript targeting WebGPU"

sestep — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 21:07:43 +0000

Nope, both are measured! In fact, the time to do the autodiff transformation isn't even reflected in the charts shown on the README and the website; those charts only show the time to actually run the computations.

New comment by sestep in "Show HN: Jax-JS, array library in JavaScript targeting WebGPU"

sestep — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:14:46 +0000

Hey Eric, great to see you've now published this! I know we chatted about this briefly last year, but it would be awesome to see how the performance of jax-js compares against that of other autodiff tools on a broader and more standard set of benchmarks: https://github.com/gradbench/gradbench

New comment by sestep in "Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system"

sestep — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:07:50 +0000

If you have asciinema already installed then you can invoke it through svg-term like this!

  svg-term --command 'cowsay hey there'

But that has the aforementioned issues about not pausing enough, so I usually just record with asciinema first and then invoke svg-term.

New comment by sestep in "Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system"

sestep — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 23:40:11 +0000

I'm a big fan of svg-term myself: https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli

New comment by sestep in "Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system"

sestep — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 23:38:39 +0000

Alternatively you can use Nix! :P https://github.com/pranshuparmar/witr/pull/5