knuckleheads
knuckleheads on Hacker News
Ur is an (in-progress) universal formatter and linter for every programming language. It's in preview right now, which just means friends are messing around with it and having a good time pointing out all the bugs. Docs are mostly up to date, but buyer beware.
https://ur.dev/en/
Posted by
knuckleheads on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:26PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://powderworks.dev/
I got tired of patching Tree-sitter grammars while I was building linting tools, so much so that I ended up writing a custom parsing framework and a bunch of custom grammars for popular languages. I figured I wasn't alone and that others would be hitting the same problem, especially with all the slop code being produced out there these days. So, I'm happy to now offer commercial support for an...
If others find beauty in something, should I not want to also try and see it?
Some things take time to learn to enjoy. I've bounced off things in the past several times before I started to really enjoy them later on. I'd like to think my experience with media is not just a random walk through whatever is in front of me and that I can direct that experience, at least a bit.
I’ve tried both! Both fun in their own ways but they never caught me long term. Sausage rolls was fun but it just got too hard.
Posted by
knuckleheads on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:32AM
from the emhsoft.com dept.
I am generally not a fan of Sokoban puzzles, but I told myself that Order was the best chance to fix that so I’ve been forcing myself to play it. I don’t find myself actively wanting to sit down and play it, the puzzles don’t attract me that way, but once I do, I’ll play for about five hours at once. Great game.
It’s a neat idea. My impression is that it would go against the grain of the compiler currently. The rmeta file and lots of the other rust outputs aren’t meant to be that stable that it could be portable like that. I’ll certainly mess around with this some and see if anything comes of it though!
I would be very curious to know how that test went please!
Yes, if you mostly have no extra cores already or if you have very wide unrelated deps, this mostly does nothing. Typically, this is not the case though so there is some good perf gains.
I wanted everything in one repo and this worked well enough. For presenting to rust compiler team I forked the repos in question and made branches for review with the patches.
Yes it's a pretty well thought out policy. It feels bad for someone to put in a month of work and have their code ultimately rejected, but if an llm does something sloppy with some light guidance in a few days, then great, experiment with some weird stuff and see what happens, then once you know it probably should work, go in for that month of work and make it happen.
(Copying and pasting from what I posted in rust zulip)
There is an .early-rmeta file that is generated that contains the result of type checking the outer part of the functions (arguments, returns) that is then passed down to all the other dependencies that can use it and get a "headstart" on their work. -Zearly-metadata is the flag for Rustc here to turn that on. It also needed to learn how to swap the real metadata in for the early stuff that it was previously using, once the real stuff showed up.
Rustc needs to be able to pause and resume at certain points and Cargo needs to be know how to look for and react to that, which is what -Zheadstart does for Cargo. So there's some changes job_queue that happen to there. I haven't checked this directly yet, but my understanding is that it doesn't kill the process, it just has it sit and wait, which normally would occupy a slot, but doesn't any longer.
---
So not a cache, just being able to pause and start work and better utilize the available slots.
Talking with them presently! This specific set of changes won't get in (LLM written, little to no thinking through of the broader design), but I am hoping something like it shows up sometime.
Posted by
knuckleheads on Sunday October 04, 2026 @02:26AM
from the github.com dept.
Depends on what you are editing I would say, if it's something deeper in the stack then it should help. The last numbers I have is that this is a 6-8% improvement for incremental editing of the code for cargo itself, but I'm having the benchmark be rerun now, as I've landed a fair amount of changes since then.
I will email you when I have something up for sure! First cargo check has it at about 28% reduced on codex rs, from 383 seconds down to 277 seconds on a 16 core machine. No -Zthreads yet though, and that typically has a similar effect and reduces the speed up the early meta data gives.
Yes I think I read a post of his from like 2019 were something was tried like this before. My guess is that this will be an interesting and hopefully informative PR for you all to see, but will likely not be merged as is. I had to add the ability for rustc to pause after early meta data emission and that was hacked together I feel, not well designed per se.
I view this as speculative execution/compilation and just throw out any errors from a crate that depended on another crate that ultimately errors out. It has the same outcome (same errors are printed in both cases) you just have a chance of having totally wasted some cpu time (that was otherwise just sitting around though).
This thing is a monster, blows out the disk space on a Claude code web session. Will run it on my test server later and let you know.
Funny to see this now. I’ve got a private branch I am in the process of shaping up this weekend to show the compiler team. For deep nested projects like rust analyzer, if you emit the meta data about function types earlier for downstream slots to use, before successful type checking, you can start other crates earlier and use all the slots you have instead of sitting around waiting for the full type checking of the bodies (which other crates largely don’t care about). Something like 40% wall time speed up, maybe 10% to 15% if you have the parallel frontend on.
Better for who? If I don’t care about the welfare of mathematicians and just the advancement of mathematics, would AI doing the math not be better for me?
As well, if the open models were as good as the proprietary ones, do you think they wouldn’t still have complaints?
Maintaining the existing standards is in fact a form of protection from AI disruption. They are asking the AI companies to follow their norms, instead of them having to conform to new norms created by AI. They don’t want to have to change the way they do things, understandably!, and are asking the companies to accommodate their way of life.
Mother of Learning is pretty good, similar vein, does some interesting things. The Wandering Inn is also pretty good, I'd say more challenging than Dungeon Crawler Carl while still being entertaining.
I don't see why mathematicians should be protected from AI anymore than any other profession. It's either everybody or nobody, not fair on the face of it otherwise.
> One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand
which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.
> Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry
beyond its goal.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935
https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
Edit: to put a finer point on it, AI art like this is, through it's rigorous application in almost every previous medium, showing that there is a demand and energy for a new art form that depends on the changing technical standard and capabilities that AI has introduced. I don't know what it will be, but you can see some of the edges of it with how it is making waves in all the other mediums.
Posted by
knuckleheads on Sunday September 13, 2026 @04:15AM
from the rawtree.com dept.
Agents get a little upset when you ask them to do this and then check their work with a hook. They do not enjoy the process and create some weird looking text!
I couldn't get past all the network errors on OpenCode. Seemed smart enough, and was useful when I was low on usage on Claude, but beyond that, really hard for me to say whether it was Good or Bad.
Handcrafted software will find it's own market the same way that handcrafted clothing, furniture and other previously industrialized goods that became commodities did. They'll be more expensive generally and it'll be a smaller market overall, you'll always have some people who will love them all the same. Not my choice, but I can understand why they would want it.