Hacker News: wging

New comment by wging in "Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say"

wging — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:31:18 +0000

That would not fit as well.

New comment by wging in "Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say"

wging — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:31:25 +0000

What is wrong in that quoted sentence? Do you mean "articulacy" should instead be "articulateness"? "Articulacy" is also a word, and correct in this context.

New comment by wging in "Why I forked httpx"

wging — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:23:52 +0000

These days node supports the fetch API, which is much simpler. (It wasn't there in 2020, it seems to have been added around 2022-2023.)

New comment by wging in "The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)"

wging — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 06:44:33 +0000

> Scott took it too literally

He does say in section (I):

> I was particularly told to “take it as literally as possible”

New comment by wging in "Sir Tony Hoare has died"

wging — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:17:19 +0000

But there are no citations on any of the edits claiming this, and there were two incompatible dates claimed (March 5, March 8).

New comment by wging in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

wging — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:40:24 +0000

[4] looks like it's only a runner for the actual testing, which is a separate crate: https://github.com/mozilla/memtest

(see: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/main/toolkit..., which points to a specific commit in that repo - turns out to be tip of main)

New comment by wging in "If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?"

wging — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 04:47:08 +0000

Regarding the noise you mention, I wonder if memento's use of the git 'notes' feature is an acceptable way to contain or quarantine that noise. It might still not add much value, but at least it would live in a separate place that is easily filtered out when the user judges it irrelevant. Per the README of the linked repo,

> It runs a commit and then stores a cleaned markdown conversation as a git note on the new commit.

So it doesn't seem that normal commit history is affected - git stores notes specially, outside of the commit (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes).

In fact github doesn't even display them, according to some (two-year-old) blog posts I'm seeing. Not sure about other interfaces to git (magit, other forges), but git log is definitely able to ignore them (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#Documentation/git-log.txt--...).

This doesn't mean the saved artifacts would necessarily be valuable - just that, unlike a more naive solution (saving in commit messages or in some directory of tracked files) they may not get in the way of ordinary workflows aside from maybe bloating the repo to some degree.

New comment by wging in "Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell (2014)"

wging — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 05:57:21 +0000

Discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825607

New comment by wging in "In praise of –dry-run"

wging — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 01:57:19 +0000

One nice way to do things, if you can get away with it, is to model the actions your application takes explicitly, and pass them to a central thing that actually handles them. Then there can be one place in your code that actually needs to understand whether it's doing a dry run or not. Ideally this would be just returning them from your core logic, "functional core, imperative shell" style.

New comment by wging in "Show HN: A small programming language where everything is pass-by-value"

wging — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 04:03:30 +0000

There is some prior work on mitigating the performance cost of immutability that you might be interested in. For example, Clojure's persistent vectors allow fast modifications without destroying the original vector, because internally they're wide trees rather than just linear arrays of memory. This allows for assignments to be implemented without a copy of the full vector. https://hypirion.com/musings/understanding-persistent-vector...

New comment by wging in "A 40-line fix eliminated a 400x performance gap"

wging — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:20:21 +0000

It's certainly possible that what I encountered, labeled as an 'icicle graph', is a nonstandard usage of the term. But if so, that's a shame. I don't think inverting the y-axis is useful by itself, the different bucketing is what makes for an actually useful change.

New comment by wging in "A 40-line fix eliminated a 400x performance gap"

wging — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 02:53:15 +0000

I also like icicle graphs for this. They're flamegraphs, but aggregated in the reverse order. (I.e. if you have calls A->B->C and D->E->C, then both calls to C are aggregated together, rather than being stacked on top of B and E respectively. It can make it easier to see what's wrong when you have a bunch of distinct codepaths that all invoke a common library where you're spending too much time.)

Regular flamegraphs are good too, icicle graphs are just another tool in the toolbox.

New comment by wging in "You can make up HTML tags"

wging — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 03:42:17 +0000

A more common alternative to counting divs would be CSS classnames or (for unique elements on the page) IDs. You'd do `document.querySelector('.my-class')` to locate `

` or similar, rather than using the fact that e.g. something is nested 3 divs inside .

Even if this custom element trick didn't work, I don't see why one would need to count divs (at least if you control the markup, but if not then made-up tags aren't an option anyway). The article even mentions using class names as an option.

New comment by wging in "Stepping down as Mockito maintainer after ten years"

wging — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:19:35 +0000

I think the problem is that it's on his users to enable this flag, not something that can be done by Mockito automatically.

New comment by wging in "How uv got so fast"

wging — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:18 +0000

uv supports PyPI, which still has packages that are Python-2-only. So even if you're running python 3.8, it seems possible to try to declare a dependency on some <3.0 code from PyPI. That means it's an error they should detect.

New comment by wging in "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English"

wging — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 10:36:11 +0000

It's based on mpv, not vlc.

New comment by wging in "The best things and stuff of 2025"

wging — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 01:15:50 +0000

2023, 2018, and 2016 were all submitted, just with very few comments.

New comment by wging in "How uv got so fast"

wging — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:08:21 +0000

I think the article is being careful not to say uv ignores _all_ upper bound checks, but specifically 4.0 upper bound checks. If a package says it requires python < 3.0, that's still super relevant, and I'd hope for uv to still notice and prevent you from trying to import code that won't work on python 3. Not sure what it actually does.

New comment by wging in "When compilers surprise you"

wging — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 21:09:19 +0000

The beginning of that article is slightly wrong: the compiler should compute N(N-1)/2 (and does), because the original code adds up all the numbers from 0 to N excluding N. The usual formulation in math includes the upper bound: the sum of integers from 1 to N, including N, is N(N+1)/2, so you have to replace N by (N-1) if you want a formula for the sum where the last number is N-1.

New comment by wging in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

wging — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:42:25 +0000

> But in go you can just _err and never touch it.

You can do that in Rust too. This code doesn't warn:

    let _ = File::create("foo.txt");

(though if you want code that uses the File struct returned from the happy path of File::create, you can't do that without writing code that deals somehow with the possibility of the create() call failing, whether it is a panic, propagating the error upwards, or actual error handling code. Still, if you're just calling create() for side effects, ignoring the error is this easy.)