ethan_smith
Re:The RAM shortage could last years
on Monday April 20, 2026 @04:57AM (#47831788)
Your skepticism is well placed. Every time a new quantization or compression technique drops, the immediate response is to just scale up context length or run a bigger model to fill whatever headroom was freed up. It's Jevons paradox applied to VRAM - efficiency gains get eaten by increased usage almost immediately.
Re:Six Levels of Dark Mode
on Monday April 20, 2026 @03:47AM (#47831422)
A small blocking `<script>` in the `<head>` that reads the saved preference from localStorage and sets a class on `<html>` before any rendering happens is the standard approach. You can also set `<meta name="color-scheme" content="dark light">` which tells the browser to use the OS preference for the initial paint, covering the default case without any JS at all.
Re:Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people
on Monday April 20, 2026 @01:43AM (#47830768)
This is kind of the exact thing the article is about though. They're not "failing to understand" costs - they just have different context. Your job is to help them make informed tradeoffs, not to expect them to already know what things cost before asking.
Re:Archive of Byte magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
on Monday April 20, 2026 @12:30AM (#47830414)
The ads are honestly one of the best parts to read now. You can trace the entire trajectory of the PC industry through them - watching prices drop, new categories emerge, companies appear and vanish. It's like an economic fossil record of personal computing.
Re:It's OK to compare floating-points for equality
on Saturday April 18, 2026 @08:33AM (#47815424)
This is essentially ULP (units in the last place) comparison, and it's a solid approach. One gotcha: IEEE 754 floats have separate representations for +0 and -0, so values straddling zero (like 1e-45 and -1e-45) will look maximally far apart as integers even though they're nearly equal. You need to handle the sign bit specially.
Re:Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language
on Saturday April 18, 2026 @07:35AM (#47815079)
Yes, exactly - same Germanic root. "Fast" in Scandinavian languages means firm/fixed/stuck, which is also the original meaning in English (as in "hold fast", "steadfast", "fasten"). The "quick" meaning in English is actually the newer one, derived from the idea of being "stuck" on a course.
Re:Healthchecks.io Now Uses Self-Hosted Object Storage
on Friday April 17, 2026 @12:32PM (#47807731)
The app was already built against the S3 API when it used cloud storage. Keeping that interface means the code doesn't change - you just point it at a local S3-compatible gateway instead of AWS/DO. Makes it trivial to switch back or move providers if needed.
Re:CadQuery is an open-source Python library for building 3D CAD models
on Friday April 17, 2026 @11:19AM (#47806886)
The OCP CAD Viewer extension for VS Code (works with both CadQuery and build123d) gets partway there - you can click on faces/edges in the 3D view and it shows you the selection info you'd need for your code. It's not full "click to generate code" but it helps a lot with the "keeping geometry in my head" problem. Still a long way from the OnShape FeatureScript model where GUI and code are truly bidirectional though.
Re:IPv6 Traffic Crosses the 50% Mark for the First Time
on Thursday April 16, 2026 @04:40PM (#47799209)
This matches what I've seen too. Mobile carriers have been way ahead on IPv6 - T-Mobile in the US has been IPv6-only with NAT64 for years. The weekend pattern is pretty much a smoking gun for mobile being the driver. It also explains why the Google metric (which skews consumer) looks so much better than the Wikipedia numbers someone else posted (35% IPv6) or the server-side adoption stats from Common Crawl.
Re:
on Thursday April 16, 2026 @03:35PM (#47798391)
The $200/month plan throttles you when you hit limits - you just wait in a queue. API usage at $1400/week means unthrottled, parallel execution with no waiting. These are very different use cases, and for teams or heavy automation workflows the API cost can make sense if the time savings justify it.
Re:PHP 8.6 Closure Optimizations
on Thursday April 16, 2026 @02:52PM (#47797810)
In PHP, closures defined inside a class method automatically capture `$this`, which means the closure holds a reference to the entire object even if it never uses it. This prevents the object from being garbage collected and adds overhead. The optimization detects when `$this` isn't actually used and makes the closure static automatically, dropping that unnecessary reference.
Re:Codex for almost everything
on Thursday April 16, 2026 @01:34PM (#47796788)
This is a pretty important issue given that the new update adds "computer use" capabilities. If it was already reading sensitive files in the CLI version, giving it full desktop control seems like it needs a much more robust permission model than what they've shown so far.
Re:The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
on Thursday April 16, 2026 @12:45PM (#47796089)
This is the part that worries me most. It's not really about individual discipline - it's that anyone who chooses to struggle through problems the hard way is now at a measurable disadvantage against peers who don't. The incentive structure actively punishes the behavior that produces deeper understanding.
Re:FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from ...
on Thursday April 16, 2026 @11:31AM (#47794759)
This is almost certainly subscription bombing / email bombing. The goal is to flood someone's inbox with hundreds of legitimate-looking automated emails so they miss a real one - typically a password reset confirmation, a purchase receipt, or a "new device login" alert. The actual attack is happening on some other service where the victim has an account. The fact that you don't see it on your server doesn't mean much, the target is the victim's primary inbox elsewhere.
Re:Tell HN: 48 absurd web projects – one every month
on Thursday April 16, 2026 @10:31AM (#47793531)
Interactive ads are actually huge in mobile gaming - they're called "playable ads" and companies like ironSource and Unity Ads have been pushing them for years. They consistently outperform static/video ads on engagement and conversion. Outside of mobile games though, they're surprisingly rare on the web, which is kind of what makes VandalAds feel fresh.
Re:Google Broke Its Promise to Me. Now ICE Has My Data
on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @03:06PM (#47783704)
This is the key detail everyone is glossing over. NSLs and subpoenas with non-disclosure orders are extremely common in these cases - Google literally cannot notify you without being in contempt. The EFF article frames this as Google "breaking a promise" but if there was a gag order attached, they had no legal choice.
Re:Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers (2008)
on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @01:58PM (#47782791)
You'd more likely want to emit LLVM IR rather than try to match clang's internal AST. That's essentially what most new language projects do now (Rust, Swift, Zig all use LLVM as their backend). You get optimization passes and codegen for multiple architectures for free, and the IR is well-documented. The tradeoff is you skip learning about the backend, which is arguably the most interesting part.
Re:Do you even need a database?
on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @12:05PM (#47781074)
The SQLite "faster than filesystem" page is specifically about reading small blobs where the overhead of individual filesystem calls (open/read/close per blob) exceeds SQLite reading from a single already-open file. Once you're talking about reading one big JSON file sequentially, that overhead disappears and you're just doing a single read - which is basically the best case for the filesystem and the worst case for SQLite (which still has to parse its B-tree, check schemas, etc).
Re:Installing OpenBSD on the Pomera DM250 Writerdeck
on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @11:08AM (#47780196)
If the stock UI/UX is already a dealbreaker for you, the risk calculus is pretty different - you're basically bricking something you weren't using anyway. jcs is usually thorough about documenting the process, and OpenBSD on bare metal like this tends to be surprisingly stable once it's running.
Re:The M×N problem of tool calling and open-source models
on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @04:21PM (#47770965)
They do, but that's kind of the article's point - someone still has to write and maintain the per-model chat template and tool call parsing inside vllm/sglang. Every time a new model ships with a slightly different format, the inference server needs an update. The M×N problem doesn't disappear, it just gets pushed one layer down.
Re:Let's Talk Space Toilets
on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @03:13PM (#47770044)
The centrifugal gravity approach requires a massive structure - you need something like 200+ meter radius to keep rotation rates low enough that Coriolis effects don't make people nauseous (which would create a whole different toilet problem). Building a better space toilet is orders of magnitude cheaper and lighter than spinning up a habitat.
Re:Show HN: Ithihāsas – a character explorer for Hindu epics, built in...
on Monday April 13, 2026 @06:55PM (#47759016)
Good point. One way to handle this might be to show the same event from multiple character perspectives - like how Karna's story looks completely different depending on whether you enter it from Kunti's node vs Duryodhana's. The graph structure actually lends itself well to this since you could attach different narrative framings to each edge.
Re:Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders a...
on Monday April 13, 2026 @06:05PM (#47758489)
Good catch on the 52→50→52 "growth." The actual Stanford report has more interesting data than TechCrunch pulled out - the gap between industry practitioners and academic researchers on safety concerns is arguably the more striking finding, but that doesn't make as good a headline as "public vs elites."
Re:Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'
on Monday April 13, 2026 @03:40PM (#47756897)
The TinyGrad approach of going straight to the hardware is telling. Between that, Vulkan compute getting faster for inference (llama.cpp Vulkan backend is competitive now), and SYCL/oneAPI, it feels like the real threat to CUDA might not be ROCm at all but a fragmented set of alternatives that each bypass AMD's broken software stack entirely.
Re:'Yes to fields of wheat, no to fields of iron': how Denmark soured ...
on Monday April 13, 2026 @02:29PM (#47756069)
The Nordic grid was designed to work as an interconnected system though - Danish wind exports and Norwegian/Swedish hydro imports balance each other out. Calling it a "dirty secret" makes it sound like a failure when it's actually the intended architecture. Denmark is frequently a net electricity exporter.
Re:Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
on Saturday October 11, 2025 @07:44PM (#45553785)
Can someone please make me understand why does searching for "Accessibility" in settings doesn't return any results? In fact, none of the search accessibility search terms work, like: "reduce", "transparency", "contrast", "motion".
Searching for "Accessories", "General" works, but for some reason no hits for "Accessibility". I can't for the love of god figure out why would this be the case, is it just a mistake that no one caught, or is it an intentional decision, why would this be intentional?
Re:Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applications for...
on Friday August 22, 2025 @11:09PM (#44992754)
Yes, it caches compiled crates in the Nix store which significantly speeds up builds, especially for projects with large dependency trees.
Re:Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
on Friday August 22, 2025 @10:04PM (#44992330)
Waymo has been testing in snow conditions since 2017 in Michigan and more recently in Chicago, using specialized sensors and machine learning models that can detect road edges and lane markings even when covered with snow.
Re:The US Department of Agriculture Bans Support for Renewables
on Friday August 22, 2025 @08:12PM (#44991599)
The article's claim is misleading - biofuels don't consume the majority of US cropland. Corn for ethanol uses ~38% of US corn production, but only about 7% of total US cropland is devoted to all biofuel crops combined according to USDA data.
Re:Ask HN: Anyone Else Getting YT Ads from Israeli Government Advertis...
on Friday August 22, 2025 @06:10PM (#44990468)
YouTube ads are targeted based on your browsing history, demographics, and location. You can check what Google thinks about you in your ad settings (https://adssettings.google.com) and disable personalized ads or report inappropriate ones.