Hacker News: wging

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/

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.