Hacker News: wging

New comment by wging in "11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker"

wging — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:21:13 +0000

Rust does have undefined behavior, though.

New comment by wging in "An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord"

wging — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:20:07 +0000

Some of those details are available here: https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-estimates-age-without...

New comment by wging in "AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?"

wging — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:08:13 +0000

That first question is answered in the thread:

> Yes, when using either 32-bit or 64-bit number, the lowest portion can output a zero, as I suggested on the attached example file as a modification to fix the problem. But a true zero (fitting the requested size), on AMD, never happens.

Another person (on page 2) confirms those results on an older AMD processor (but failed to reproduce on a very new one, 9950X3D).

New comment by wging in "Introducing System One Models and Jev"

wging — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:38:06 +0000

I had a different initial confusion - it seems this company has no relation to the company formerly known as Typesafe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akka.io

New comment by wging in "Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side"

wging — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 18:35:51 +0000

The article is talking about symbols that were lost. The sentence should be interpreted as "these [symbols], for Insert (now gone) and Delete (still with us)". The photo is of a symbol for 'insert', an 'a' with a caret above it.

New comment by wging in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

wging — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:41:33 +0000

See also https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/, a 2012 game that did the same thing

New comment by wging in "Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings"

wging — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 05:58:05 +0000

They link to their code on GitHub - see footnote 2 on page 2. I don't see it linked anywhere else, which makes it easy to miss. https://github.com/rjha18/vec2vec/

New comment by wging in "Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%"

wging — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 18:56:36 +0000

I think they've gotten worse about this as an organization over the last few years(?). Earlier this year an update to their mobile app introduced loading time, and resulting slowness, for opening menus that used to be ~instant. To me that smacks of once having known not to do that, but that knowledge having been lost (or priorities having shifted).

More specifically, I'm talking about tapping the '...' on a track for the options menu. That should be latency-free, and used to be.

New comment by wging in "Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it"

wging — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 05:23:19 +0000

Years and years ago, there was an article about the way Amazon.com's menu dropdown worked. It had the same spark (of careful attention to user behavior and needs): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5330998 / https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...

New comment by wging in "Dolly Parton has died"

wging — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 19:17:21 +0000

Her husband was Carl Dean.

New comment by wging in "Show HN: How far do I have to go to run into 100k people?"

wging — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:07:20 +0000

Cities on the water make fun shapes for obvious reasons. Atlantic City, Seattle, Chicago, Galveston, New Orleans. The slices can go very far or even be omitted due to not hitting the contiguous US. Chicago's is probably the most interesting, they cross Lake Michigan before getting sufficient density to stop.

New comment by wging in "British runner Josh Kerr breaks world record for mile which stood for 27 years"

wging — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:39:39 +0000

> I'm sure the record standing so long is partially down to the fact the mile isn't run at major championships

I'm not so sure about that. The 1500 is the equivalent race run at major championships (and most paced time trials). But that record (3:26.00 by Hicham El Guerrouj) has stood one year longer, and is generally considered a stronger record. This is possibly the closest anyone's ever come to an equivalent performance to the 1500 record, in either the mile or the 1500. The second-fastest 1500m time ever is 3:26.34 by Bernard Lagat in 2001. The World Athletics scoring tables value a 3:42.66 at about 3:26.3, eyeballing the midpoint of given values. (Or taking the WA point values on the top lists, Josh Kerr's new mile record is 1298, Lagat's second-best 1500m is 1297, and El Guerrouj's 3:26.00 is 1302.)

I don't know whether the WA points or other conversion methods actually have small enough error bars to distinguish between the Lagat and Kerr performances, but the 1500 record beats the mile record by a big enough margin that I don't think we need to worry about that.

https://worldathletics.org/records/all-time-toplists/middlel...

New comment by wging in "British runner Josh Kerr breaks world record for mile which stood for 27 years"

wging — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:30:12 +0000

> I think El Guerrouj set the previous WR in a race without pacers.

El Guerrouj had two pacers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvCsj7eJKKA

In fact, looking at this race, Tanui (the second pacer) actually stays on the track for longer than today's pacers did.

New comment by wging in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

wging — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:52:29 +0000

I'd add rms/Richard Stallman to that list of famous emacs users. He's famous for way more than just gnu emacs, so it's not quite cheating.

New comment by wging in "Dumb ways for an open source project to die"

wging — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:06:08 +0000

Many OSS licenses are also free software licenses, even if they are not viral and don't impose severe restrictions on the licensee in the way the GPL does. The MIT license, for example. "Free software" and "GPL" are not synonymous, even GNU doesn't say so. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicen...

New comment by wging in "Networking changes coming in macOS 27"

wging — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:50:45 +0000

Longer than that, even. A similar requirement for iOS apps was in the cards 10 years ago. https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=12212016b

(Yes, this article is about an extension of the deadline. I don't remember what happened after that.)

New comment by wging in "Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race"

wging — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:12:33 +0000

Truer than you'd think just from the information I provided. He has two world championship silver medals over 10,000m.

New comment by wging in "Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race"

wging — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:11:15 +0000

What does 'harder to recruit' mean though?

New comment by wging in "Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race"

wging — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:40:32 +0000

It's his first marathon ever, but he's a very experienced runner. It would be hard to find a better prospect for a good first marathon. He's a multiple (former) world record holder and medalist at shorter distances from the mile up to half marathon. His half marathon is still 2nd all time.

I wouldn't have predicted this out of nowhere, but if you told me a marathon debut went this well and asked me to guess whose it was, I like to think I'd have come up with Kejelcha in my top few picks.

That said, great 5000/10000 athletes don't always have great marathon careers. An example from this race is the world record holder at both those distances, Joshua Cheptegei. He's run several marathons but none spectacular by his standards. He was in this race too but 7 minutes back.

New comment by wging in "Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race"

wging — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:55:24 +0000

I've read that even if you absorb it all, there's some question about whether it's useful. This Alex Hutchinson article suggests, among other things, that it may spare your fat stores rather than your muscle glycogen:

> Even if you can absorb 120 grams per hour, it might not make you faster. In Podlogar’s study, cyclists burned more exogenous carbs when they consumed 120 rather than 90 grams per hour, but that didn’t reduce their rate of endogenous carb-burning—that is, they were still depleting the glycogen stores in their muscles just as quickly.

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/en...

https://archive.ph/Vpk0h

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9560939/