Hacker News: wmedrano

New comment by wmedrano in "Show HN: Boxes.dev: ditch localhost; run Claude Code and Codex in the cloud"

wmedrano — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:35:58 +0000

Well, I wouldn't use this since I have my own box. In case its useful:

- I run hermes on the box and it has some scheduled cron jobs.

- I gave it an account on a custom Git forge. It cannot commit without my direct permission, though it can blow the setup up in other ways lol.

- I interact by assigning it issues and talking through Discord.

New comment by wmedrano in "Why Janet? (2023)"

wmedrano — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:05:16 +0000

I started writing a Scheme interpreter about a year ago and got pretty far. I dropped it a few months back since I got a new job.

I'm thinking of getting back and am wondering if the niche (and difficult for me to implement) features are worth it. I might be better off skipping dynamic-unwind, maybe even ripping out call/cc, in favor working on the debugability, ecosystem, performance, and package management story.

New comment by wmedrano in "Why Janet? (2023)"

wmedrano — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:23:18 +0000

Ironically, the top comment (this) is now about AI.

New comment by wmedrano in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

wmedrano — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:54:27 +0000

Zig gives you more control than Rust, which should theoretically lead to a higher performance ceiling.

There's not much magic in Zig. Keep hitting goto-definition and you can eventually see the OS switch statements and syscalls.

New comment by wmedrano in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

wmedrano — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:28:00 +0000

Try it if you want full control over every memory and IO operation and "drop". If you hit "goto-definition", you eventually get to see the OS switch statements and syscalls. There's not much magic.

Do not try it if you are scared of memory management and memory leaks.

New comment by wmedrano in "Is AI Profitable Yet?"

wmedrano — Sat, 23 May 2026 03:47:03 +0000

We're talking about ~1 trillion $$$ valuations here tho

New comment by wmedrano in "A History of IDEs at Google"

wmedrano — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:41:05 +0000

When I joined in 2016, it CitC would make it look (and still does) like you had the entire monorepo on your local filesystem on your machine.

Git5 would copy some directories but builds would still fallback to files from the monorepo if you didn't track them. It was convenient for me since I could just grep and do fuzzy matching from my editor. Now I have to do some extra work to avoid grepping the entire monorepo. LLMs sometimes still try to grep the entire repo lol.

Now, you could use a perforace, mercurial, or jj interface and it works fine.

New comment by wmedrano in "A History of IDEs at Google"

wmedrano — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:53:16 +0000

From the user interface perspective though, it does essentially look like you've pulled all of google3 into your disk.

New comment by wmedrano in "A History of IDEs at Google"

wmedrano — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:48:38 +0000

Luckily, they still support the text editor + CLI tools workflow so I can still use Emacs effectively.

New comment by wmedrano in "A History of IDEs at Google"

wmedrano — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:31:35 +0000

We've moved on from Git5. Although it was a pain, I kind of liked that Git5 made the monorepo less monolithic to my editor.

New comment by wmedrano in "A History of IDEs at Google"

wmedrano — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:21:15 +0000

Yeah, under my desk. I rarely remote which is a good excuse for me to disconnect from work anyways.

New comment by wmedrano in "A History of IDEs at Google"

wmedrano — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:11:20 +0000

I use a workstation specifically to improve latency. Needed to get approval at some point to get a refresh though.

New comment by wmedrano in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

wmedrano — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:07:38 +0000

I tried going from a budget Lenovo Linux to a Macbook Pro after graduating from university. The hardware was solid, but it is probably my most disappointing purchase.

Right now, I'm extremely satisfied with my workhorse Linux desktop and less so satisfied with my Linux laptop battery life, but I mostly use desktop anyways.

New comment by wmedrano in "Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu"

wmedrano — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 03:46:29 +0000

Do you have a screenshot? I just tried Zed out on Linux and biggest issue was that it assumed an rgb subpixel layout.

- https://pasteboard.co/ZDnQm80dHANx.png

- Top is wezterm which is correct.

- Bottom is Zed which uses rgb.

- Both are using Inconsolata though wezterm claims size is 16 and Zed is at 18. I don't have any screen scaling.

*edit formatting

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

wmedrano — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:34:34 +0000

https://wmedrano.dev

I'll write more this year, I promise

New comment by wmedrano in "A brief history of Times New Roman"

wmedrano — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 18:24:10 +0000

I'm too dumb as well. I flipped this to make it about text editors. Personally, I love my Emacs:

This, like almost all writing about fonts, is bewildering to me. It just doesn't matter. For me, there are just 3 text editors in the world: IDE's, terminal editors, and weird editors (Ed, Teco, etc.)

What's even more strange is reading strong opinions on how great Emacs is, or how terrible NeoVim is ("Gnu good Apache bad", I know.) They're the same thing! I guess I'm too dumb to notice the subtle differences between Lisp and Lua.

New comment by wmedrano in "Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to"

wmedrano — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:08:27 +0000

"valid security strategy"

Did you mean reliability? At this point I don't care if my server gets DDoS, but may be more convinced by security practices.

New comment by wmedrano in "Why is Zig so cool?"

wmedrano — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 04:52:52 +0000

I haven't looked to deeply, but I haven't noticed any performance impact. Inlining probably helps too.

New comment by wmedrano in "Why is Zig so cool?"

wmedrano — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 04:49:01 +0000

Zig makes the standard library accessible. Just by clicking "go to definition", you run into all the weird cases.

For example, apparently the plan9 OS gets special page_allocator handling: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.heap.page_...

New comment by wmedrano in "I see a future in jj"

wmedrano — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 03:02:48 +0000

I hope it sticks around so that I can use the same workflow at work and home. I'm really enjoying how fast all the jj operations are compared to mercurial.