Hacker News: tylermw

New comment by tylermw in "A better R programming experience thanks to Tree-sitter"

tylermw — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:55:13 +0000

Honored!

New comment by tylermw in "A Better R Programming Experience Thanks to Tree-sitter"

tylermw — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:49:07 +0000

I've done exactly what you're talking about using tree-sitter (via the tarborist VS Code extension), specific to targets pipelines:

https://bsky.app/profile/tylermw.com/post/3mjmcykuows2d

So yes, it is possible and quite useful!

New comment by tylermw in "A Better R Programming Experience Thanks to Tree-sitter"

tylermw — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:46:21 +0000

Yes, the main benefit is caching and reproducibility: with targets (or any other DAG-based approach), you only recompute what needs to be recomputed and you are assured that no stale inputs or temporary analysis artifacts end up in the final product. If you don't own the underlying data sources and those sources can change at any point, a DAG-based approach helps ensure that.

New comment by tylermw in "A Better R Programming Experience Thanks to Tree-sitter"

tylermw — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:40:07 +0000

Thanks for all the work you (and the rest of the contributors) have done putting this together! I think bringing tree-sitter to R has already shown massive benefits: Just air alone has been a big improvement to my workflow.

New comment by tylermw in "A better R programming experience thanks to Tree-sitter"

tylermw — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:29:51 +0000

I read this article a week or so ago and immediately implemented a VS Code extension that I've always wanted: a static analysis tool for targets pipelines. targets is an R package which provides Make-like pipelines for data science and analysis work. You write your pipeline as a DAG and targets orchestrates the analysis and only re-runs downstream nodes if upstream ones are invalidated and the output changes. Fantastic tool, but at a certain level of complexity the DAG becomes a bit hard to navigate and reason about ("wait, what targets are downstream of this one again?"). This isn't really a targets problem, as this will happen with any analysis of decent complexity, but the structure targets adds to the analysis actually allows for a decent amount of static analysis of the environment/code. Enter tree-sitter.

I wrote a VS Code extension that analyzes the pipeline and provides useful hover information (like size, time last invalidated, computation time for that target, and children/parent info) as well as links to quickly jump to different targets and their children/parents. I've dogfooded the hell out of it and it's already vastly improved my targets workflow within a week. Things like providing better error hints in the IDE for targets-specific malformed inputs and showing which targets are emitting errors really take lots of the friction out of an analysis.

All that to say: nice work on extending tree-sitter to R!

tarborist: targets + tree-sitter https://open-vsx.org/extension/tylermorganwall/tarborist

GH: https://github.com/tylermorganwall/tarborist

New comment by tylermw in "Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness"

tylermw — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:07:03 +0000

A non-Apple entity using "macOS26" as their organization name? Are you trying to trigger everyone's corporate phishing training?

New comment by tylermw in "Atmospheric Simulation in R"

tylermw — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:54:41 +0000

Author here. I wrote an R package to generate realistic sky maps for a given location and datetime (with scattered light, realistic moon phases, stars, and planets all at physically-based brightness values) to support plausible 3D renders of real terrain and data visualizations.

Atmospheric Simulation in R

tylermw — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:21:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tylermw.com/posts/rayverse/atmospheric-simulation-in-r.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411672

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by tylermw in "Data scientist uses AI and ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine for his dying dog"

tylermw — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:23:35 +0000

This is pretty astounding. Honestly, this is the feel-good "our company is helping save dogs" story that should have been featured at the super bowl. The fact that AI can be used by a motivated and smart person to facilitate the production of custom mRNA immunotherapy via genomic sequencing for their dogs cancer just hints at the possibilities of the future, if we choose to embrace science rather than reject it.

New comment by tylermw in "Show HN: A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia"

tylermw — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:53:08 +0000

Nice work! It's always fun to see a new renderer in the wild.

New comment by tylermw in "I made Zig compute 33M satellite positions in 3 seconds"

tylermw — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:29:12 +0000

Looks like the author fixed the graph!

New comment by tylermw in "I made Zig compute 33M satellite positions in 3 seconds"

tylermw — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:22:05 +0000

Nice results! SIMD can be a pain, good to know Zig makes it easy.

However, note that the plot under "Native SIMD Throughput Comparison" is extremely misleading: for an accurate proportional comparison between bar charts, you should start the y-axis at zero. The way the data are presented makes it look like a 10-100x gain, rather than the actual 2x improvement.

New comment by tylermw in "School cell phone bans and student achievement"

tylermw — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:41:21 +0000

When you're dealing with large populations (here, the study include 230,065 students--a very large number), even small shifts due to some treatment can be significant. It is very hard to generate top-down policy interventions that shift the mean of a population in significant ways: if this treatment effect (banning phones) is real, 1.1 points represents a very big policy win that can easily be applied elsewhere. The devil is in the details, however: they exclude some recent data based on the pandemic, but baseline off of 2022-2023, which was still in the throes of the pandemic. The data they show looks to have around a 0.5-1 sigma variation in percentile from 2022-2024, so the shift from the baseline of around 1 to 4 definitely looks significant, but it will be interesting to see if sticks over time.

New comment by tylermw in "Distributed Ray-Tracing"

tylermw — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:01:53 +0000

There is a way to model this type of situation for watertight dielectrics with interface tracking: you assign each material a priority value, and a transition between materials occurs when entering that material only if it has a higher priority than your current material. Yining Karl Li has a great article about it:

https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2019/05/nested-dielectrics.htm...

that inspired me to add the feature to my renderer (rayrender.net).

The downside to priority tracking (and possibly why PBRT does not include it) is it introduces a lots of overhead to ray traversal due to each ray needing to track a priority list. Modern raytracers use packets of rays for GPU/SIMD operations, and thus minimizing the ray size is extremely important to maximize throughput and minimize cache misses.

New comment by tylermw in "Statistical Physics with R: Ising Model with Monte Carlo"

tylermw — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:06:51 +0000

The developing S7 object system (https://github.com/RConsortium/S7) is looking fairly promising in that it combines many of the nice properties of S3 and S4 (validation, multiple dispatch, sane constructors) while still being fairly simple and straightforward to use.

New comment by tylermw in "GPT-5"

tylermw — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:17:27 +0000

What's going on with this plot's y-axis?

https://bsky.app/profile/tylermw.com/post/3lvtac5hues2n

New comment by tylermw in "iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras"

tylermw — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 14:36:42 +0000

For 28 Years Later, note that while the iPhone sensor did in fact ultimately collect the photons for the movie, they attached substantial professional-grade glass to the front to augment the phone camera.

New comment by tylermw in "iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras"

tylermw — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 14:33:05 +0000

Yes, the distortion noted in the article is also seen in wide angle lenses on traditional cameras.

New comment by tylermw in "Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature"

tylermw — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:55:16 +0000

Importantly, the base R pipe implements the operation at the language parsing level, so it has basically zero overhead.

New comment by tylermw in "CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract [updated]"

tylermw — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 17:41:52 +0000

Yes, you are correct, I should have typed "runs". But the point is that MITRE runs the U.S. National Cybersecurity FFRDC that maintains the CVE system, and FFRDCs are deliberately structured to minimize potential conflicts of interest (GP comment) and are definitely distinct from private industry (parent comment).