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RantyDave

Re:Much Ado About None: Sentinel Values in Python on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:16PM (#50319696)
"A simple cache returns None both for a missing key and for a key that maps to None."

No, it returns KeyError. Or at least it should.

Re:Formlabs Studio 1 $699 Resin Printer on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @09:02PM (#50283144)
Is it "actually carcinogenic" or only if you use it 8 hours a day?

FWIW I run the printer in a downstairs bathroom with its own extractor fan and cure in the sun.

Re:Formlabs Studio 1 $699 Resin Printer on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @08:25PM (#50282832)
I have a resin printer (elegoo mars 2p) and have done a number of small "production" runs of things that don't really matter.

I have to say that it is the biggest pain in the arse thing I even own. While the prints come out "good", I find that dimensional accuracy is often really not good at all; and that the whole rinse in isopropyl, finish in the sun process is just a sticky, irritating, and probably carcinogenic drag.

And I can't imagine why USD700 is regarded as a bargain.

So this has served as a fine reminder - I need to sell this damn thing, it just takes up space.

Re:Unikernels were hard. key word: were on Saturday October 10, 2026 @05:31PM (#50037387)
I've had limited adventures in embedded software and as part of that became a fan of Zephyr (http://www.zephyrproject.org) and wonder about its potential application as a unikernel.

On the plus side: it's a unikernel. You compile it and your application together and get a binary. It has support for running on virtual hardware (https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/hardware/virtualizatio...) and virtio is the new bios, right?

On the minus side: I think porting "traditional" software - say Nginx - to it will be agonising. And I can't make any guarantees about its performance in the same way that Alpine Linux container images are not necessarily fast.

But there's an entire toolchain, debugging story, drivers etc. for something that compiles to tiny and starts up basically instantaneously. Surely that's got to be useful for something?

In theory: it's not greenwashing, it's so that the humungous amounts of resources they put into developing F1 engines are not completely wasted ... so that some of the tech can "trickle down" to road car engines. Hence, the interest in hybrids. At least they get to learn how to charge a battery really, really fast.

In practice, of course, it's all going to go a bit south when road cars go to 90% EV. There is already a "formula E", of course.

So if nothing moves, you can't make an array that grows?
Re:Getting 50 GB/S Back from the Apple Neural Engine on Saturday September 12, 2026 @07:27PM (#49678301)
Ummm, wow. That's really bad.
Re:Fermat's Last Theorem in Lean 4 on Friday September 04, 2026 @07:59PM (#49571599)
I love that “grind” is a keyword.
Re:httpx2 on Friday August 28, 2026 @09:50PM (#49486187)
'urllib3' completely saved me once. We had to authenticate with the border proxy using a certificate, then make a request to a web service ... that needed authenticating with a certificate. Urllib3 was the only one that could do it.

Ask HN: How can I tell which LLM's have been trained on what?

I'm really no expert and attempting to come up to speed. But...It strikes me that LLM's are a subtle combination of knowing the language and knowing some facts. If one were making a chatbot for helping (say) people understand their tax returns then you'd want a 'base' LLM that understood language and then add domain specific knowledge via RAG. So "yes" to knowing that Thursday comes after...

( Read More... | 3 comments | on HN )
Re:FCC: Ban on Foreign-Made Robots Includes Robot Vacuums on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @11:43PM (#49105917)
I'd like to disagree but can't. Letting a foreign power "sell" internet connected microphones and cameras into "our" homes is totally asking for it. I wonder what the rules are around security cameras and similar?

Not sure I mind the routers so much. By the time the traffic is traversing the router it had better be encrypted. OTOH an army of domestic routers can at the very least be made into a quite astounding botnet and if we were to dig deeper I'm sure the data around which hardware address comes online and when could be made extremely useful.

In short: you're right. It's not protectionist bullshit, it's a wide variety of reasonable concerns. It also might be a horse that's bolted.

Re:FCC: Ban on Foreign-Made Robots Includes Robot Vacuums on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @11:36PM (#49105874)
I thought drones were banned already. Are they now un-banned?
Re:Python 3.14 compiled to metal – no interpreter on Monday July 06, 2026 @05:11PM (#48810563)
Don't we have Nuitka for this?
Re:Hetzner Price Adjustment (June 15th, 2026) on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @05:37AM (#48552773)
Moving my crap onto an old laptop and some kind of tunnel thing ... tomorrow.

Those are some huge increases.

Right. But ... this would limit you to either extremely small models or extremely large FPGA's, yes? If there's a simple machine learning task that requires a sub microsecond latency I can see the point but otherwise??
Re:What Is a Direct Attach Copper (DAC) Cable on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @06:28PM (#48301638)
Were you not into SDI for broadcast stuff?
Re:Every GPU That Mattered on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @04:51PM (#47681205)
The Nvidia NV1 mattered even if it was a misstep.

I'd say Voodoo 3 mattered because it killed 3dfx.

And the Matrox Parhelia mattered for much the same reason.

Re:Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI on Monday March 16, 2026 @06:19PM (#47405762)
Ahhh, so is this a chip "more optimised" for connecting GPU's to reality ... or are they skipping the GPU step entirely? Are GPU's only for training now?
Re:Real-time PathTracing with global illumination in WebGL on Sunday February 15, 2026 @09:03PM (#47030066)
Damn, that's really impressive.
Likewise. It took me a while to "get" flutter but now I'm here, I 'aint leaving.
Re:1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 on Thursday December 18, 2025 @10:21PM (#46321956)
Couldn't you "just" use a honking fast SSD and set it as a swap drive?
Re:A Love Letter to FreeBSD on Sunday November 30, 2025 @06:56PM (#46101758)
"a thousand-day uptime shouldn’t be folklore"

I reboot a lot. Mostly I want to know that should the system need to reboot for whatever reason, that it will all come back up again. I run a very lightly loaded site and I highly doubt anybody notices the minute (or so) loss of service caused by rebooting.

Pretty sure I don't feel bad about this.

This is one of the things that changed when we moved from SATA to NVME. SATA has only a few "in flight" instructions and NVME does 64k.

Begs a question though: are there any NVME "spinny rust" disks?

There was a brief fascination with user mode TCP over DPDK (or similar). What happened with that? Can you get similar performance with QUIC? Does io_uring make it all a moot point?
Re:Basalt Woven Textile on Thursday November 20, 2025 @02:58AM (#45990116)
Quite. I don't see why we need this in a world that already has Kevlar, Dyneema and Carbon.
Thing is, I have stopped expecting Xcode to be any good.

Actual native macOS/iOS development got beaten senseless when the App Store made it clear that "unsustainably low" was the expected price point for third party developers; and that Apple were treating the store more or less as a market research exercise and good ideas absolutely would be stolen.

So it's an internal tool, really. And we're I-guess-lucky that they document it and release it for the proles.

Re:Django 6.0 alpha 1 released on Thursday September 18, 2025 @10:57AM (#45290507)
A built in task framework? Good BYE celery, you will not be missed.
Re:The future of 32-bit support in the kernel on Monday September 01, 2025 @09:36PM (#45098232)
Zephyr is not an OS in the conventional sense, it's more a library you link to so the application can "go".
Re:Can Cheaper Lasers Handle Short Distances? on Saturday August 30, 2025 @06:52PM (#45078687)
Sorry, waveguide? For light? I thought that’s what fibre was.

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