Hacker News: xal

New comment by xal in "QMD - Quick Markdown Search"

xal — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:08:44 +0000

Heh, literally was training qwen3 finetunes during test sessions. Yea cruel sport, but its the low lows allow the high heights.

New comment by xal in "QMD - Quick Markdown Search"

xal — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:55:12 +0000

hi orange page, author here. QMD is an implementation of the best practices that I picked up in meetings with teams that work in search and retrieval. I tried to make it not overkill and keep things local. Currently working on finetuning better models for query extension and reranking (finetune branch). Feel free to jump in help. Self written and AI PRs welcome.

The tech behind Shopify BFCM globe this year

xal — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:09:52 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/pushmatrix/status/1994241257497931944

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46084018

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by xal in "Rails Needs New Governance"

xal — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 22:55:29 +0000

Heh. That’s news to me too

YJIT 3.4: Even Faster and More Memory-Efficient

xal — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:28:51 +0000

Article URL: https://railsatscale.com/2025-01-10-yjit-3-4-even-faster-and-more-memory-efficient/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705879

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Algorithms we develop software by

xal — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 18:47:42 +0000

Article URL: https://grantslatton.com/software-pathfinding

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41284409

Points: 270

# Comments: 106

New comment by xal in "Cve-rs: Fast memory vulnerabilities, written in safe Rust"

xal — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 17:41:03 +0000

looks like https://starship.rs/

New comment by xal in "I Love Ruby"

xal — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 21:58:26 +0000

same

New comment by xal in "Shopify live dashboard"

xal — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 14:56:44 +0000

We have been doing BFCM dashboards for the past 10 years now. It's always one of the most fun projects at Shopify and a great tradition now.

You know, it's pretty abstract to run internet software companies. Seeing a visualization like this makes it a lot more relateable even for the folks that work here.

This year we packed it with lots of fun details ( https://twitter.com/Shopify/status/1728040379163771020 ). Like you might see fireworks when a store has their first ever sale, and there are lots of fun city stats which are part generated by GPT4. On desktop you can also open the nerd menu and play around with the settings and share the link to your creation.

New comment by xal in "LLama.cpp now has a web interface"

xal — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 02:45:31 +0000

I had an entire implementation that used a proper state machine but I couldn’t get it simple and small enough for this single file thing. The regexp chain is dumb but clear.

New comment by xal in "LLama.cpp now has a web interface"

xal — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 21:15:13 +0000

I've tried to eliminate language around being "too busy" from my vocabulary and attempt to replace it with "can't prioritize". That's sometimes a bit awkward, but really trains better habits. Sometimes I prioritize hobbies if I feel I need it, and doing this seemed fun and useful besides!

New comment by xal in "LLama.cpp now has a web interface"

xal — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 19:54:37 +0000

I agree, I ended up getting rid of it. Only one dependency is downloaded (via bash script) and everything is baked into the binary now.

New comment by xal in "LLama.cpp now has a web interface"

xal — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 19:53:35 +0000

Nat coined this usage https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1668656170645749761

New comment by xal in "LLama.cpp now has a web interface"

xal — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 19:51:13 +0000

GG would just say no and that's that. No hard feelings, that's what makes open source so great.

LLama.cpp now has a web interface

xal — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 17:33:04 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/1998

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603816

Points: 328

# Comments: 49

New comment by xal in "Welcoming Shopify as a Ladybird sponsor"

xal — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 15:31:12 +0000

I share some rationale here: https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1674065759754936327

> The web is one of the most amazing and unlikely products of humanity. Free and deeply egalitarian. No app store would allow the web to launch today.

> But it's a gargantuan task to build a new browser from scratch, and there are few people with the range of skills to pull it off. Andreas is one of the few and we are lucky that he can focus on such a task.

> I think of Shopify as one of the 'killer apps' of the open web. Not unlike office to windows, visicalc to the apple2 or half-life to steam. As such, we love to support open source that makes the web better. This is why we support Rails, Remix, and now Ladybird. (and many many others)

New comment by xal in "Perspective: Open Source WebAssembly-Powered BI"

xal — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 17:08:17 +0000

Awesome project.

If there is ever a project that needed an electron app it’s this one. I’d love to have a Perspective.app that efficiently loads local data style files.

New comment by xal in "Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready"

xal — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 17:21:41 +0000

Creating and sharing powerful tools for people to build the things that they want to exist is kinda in Shopify's DNA.

It's also important to me to give back to open source. It's done so much for us.

New comment by xal in "Shopify tells employees to just say no to meetings"

xal — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:38:43 +0000

Hey, "in perpetuity" isn't right. We have done this multiple times before and it's part of the culture. One culture value is "Thriving on change" and the recurring meeting GC run is one opportunity for people to discover if they do!

Historically we did this event in `rand(600)+300` days anniversary of the previous run (to make it somewhat unpredictable) but we had enough chaos during COVID so that we queued this run to get a fresh new start this year.

New comment by xal in "Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com"

xal — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 19:38:56 +0000

Everything you need and highlight here can be done on a basic Shopify plan and via the liquid templating engine. It would run super fast, edge deployed globally.

The problem is that no one wants this, so we don't even have templates like this anymore. We used to ~10-15y ago and those would still work perfectly.