Hacker News: wwarner

New comment by wwarner in "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning"

wwarner — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 05:03:04 +0000

Sane & interesting enough to have been disproven, by Boaz Barak iirc. Maybe not surprising since simulated annealing never achieved the results of gradient descent + backprop.

New comment by wwarner in "Elasticsearch was never a database"

wwarner — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:15:05 +0000

These drawbacks are all true, but sometimes storing directly to elastic is still the best way forward.

New comment by wwarner in "Animated AI"

wwarner — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 03:30:50 +0000

I feel like these are helpful, and I think the calculus oriented visualizations of convex surfaces and gradient descent help a lot as well.

New comment by wwarner in "LLMs Are Not Fun"

wwarner — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 19:45:01 +0000

I reluctantly agree. It’s like ebikes — yes it’s great that I don’t have to pedal up hill, but on the other hand the cyclists that did it the hard way deserved the praise and glory for their achievement while weak and distracted ebikers definitely do not.

New comment by wwarner in "Installing Java in 2025, and Version Managers"

wwarner — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 07:12:29 +0000

The version manager approach feels like a giant step backward to me. Manage dependencies with containers.

New comment by wwarner in "Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence"

wwarner — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 02:40:27 +0000

holding my nose reading this. if scientific progress killed god, it seems unlikely that meaning would emerge from more ramblings of the same kind that gave rise to him in the first place. we have learned to disbelieve in miracles and to be skeptical of novelty, that change is excruciatingly slow and its cause is failure, pain and death. nature and the feelings that nature has given us should be our philosophical guide posts.

New comment by wwarner in "Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?"

wwarner — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 21:11:15 +0000

i run a basic emacs configuration within docker, so it has all the underlying executables & binaries installed where emacs looks for them. runs exactly the same on linux & macos. https://hub.docker.com/r/wwarner/emacs-native or https://github.com/wwarner/emacs-native-dockerfiles

New comment by wwarner in "Neovim Pack"

wwarner — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 02:03:00 +0000

M-x package-list-packages :)

New comment by wwarner in "Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs"

wwarner — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:13:18 +0000

I run emacs in docker to manage these issues https://github.com/wwarner/emacs-native-dockerfiles

New comment by wwarner in "Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs"

wwarner — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 19:20:45 +0000

This is great, and I need it and will use it, but what I need even more is some kind of integration with org mode (or just note taking generally). I found out the hard way that github/copilot deletes conversations after 30 days! So much for building a knowledge base with an AI assistant! I really need something a bit like Goog's `notebookllm` for capturing research, except I'd like to control it locally.

New comment by wwarner in "Slow"

wwarner — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:04:42 +0000

solid! thank you!

New comment by wwarner in "Slow"

wwarner — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 21:45:52 +0000

Regarding LIGO, if anyone finds the sensitivity of LIGO as shocking as I do, here's a 2002 lecture from Kip Thorne explaining how it's achieved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGdbI24FvXQ&t=495s

This video is one of about 60 recorded in a year long series of lectures that were delivered at Caltech early on in the project. They are archived by Pau Amaro Seoane at this address https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/

New comment by wwarner in "Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting"

wwarner — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:29:54 +0000

opposite :)

New comment by wwarner in "You Are in a Box"

wwarner — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 20:25:47 +0000

you create an output arrow table and populate it with rows. but w/r/t the original idea, arrow data always comes with a schema and is efficient and compact, so it makes it easier to share data between different programs.

New comment by wwarner in "You Are in a Box"

wwarner — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 18:40:59 +0000

The key point of the article is "your data is trapped inside your program", i.e. data models can't generally be shared between programs. One thing that has improved my life has been using apache arrow as a way to decrease the friction of sharing data between different executables. With arrow (and it's file based compressed cousin parquet), the idea is that once data is produced it never needs to be deserialized again as you would with json or avro.

New comment by wwarner in "Take Two: Eshell"

wwarner — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 16:51:52 +0000

I liked all the parts that were not about eshell. Wdired and its cousin wgrep are killer. I didn't see much value in the eshell examples provided.

New comment by wwarner in "Take Two: Eshell"

wwarner — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 16:49:55 +0000

As a longtime emacs user, this perfectly summarizes what is most awful about it! It makes me cringe when people wag their fingers to correct the "misperception" that emacs is merely a great text editor and IDE, but rather a programmable elisp application platform. In reality, vanilla emacs with only a little bit of configuration (and as with any other editor, substantially more tinkering with installation and configuration of supporting binaries), provides a really great programming environment for almost any type of application.

New comment by wwarner in "Go is a good fit for agents"

wwarner — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 01:28:58 +0000

I mean why not cpp? With AI support it’s much easier to write a safe cpp17 program.

New comment by wwarner in "The copilot delusion"

wwarner — Fri, 23 May 2025 01:09:37 +0000

> AI has no concept of memory locality. No intuition for cache misses.

Not true at all but you have to ask it.

New comment by wwarner in "ArkFlow: High-performance Rust stream processing engine"

wwarner — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:43:15 +0000

personally i think streaming is quite a bit simpler. but as you you point out, no one cares!