HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Normal_gaussian

4,671 karma · joined February 15, 2016

submissionscomments
Normal_gaussian··on 5x faster Edge Functions: V8 isolates to Firecracker MicroVMs
Without commenting on v8 isolates specifically, this doesn't necessarily hold in any isolation situation; many customers are running code on behalf of their customers, which are often submitting jobs on behalf of theirs, and so on. Isolation breaches within a platform customer can result in significant cross-user data breaches.
Normal_gaussian··on 5x faster Edge Functions: V8 isolates to Firecracker MicroVMs
I've been using SlicerVM extensively - which is Firecracker MicroVMs for the regular person (and for the irregular with their platform offering) - to run local 'edge' style workloads locally and securly. Agents, local dev CI, etc. It slotted in and replaced my proxmox vm orchestrator, and now I have secure and and fast vms on my laptop wherever I go. It also supports dockerfile style builds if you're wanting a security upgrade from containers (which, you should if you're using agents).

Honestly, while I see firecracker replacing docker on the horizon I don't see firecracker replacing v8 isolates for most edge function execution. Firstly, this article's scenario is a bit unusual in that they were using someone else's isolates - so adding on a few hops; secondly isolates running JS/TS can be statically analyzed quite well, and at scale looking historically for issues and exploits, in many edge compute scenarios this is quite desirable. MicroVMs can have an awful lot more flexibility so to get the same benefit you have to really lock down what is available - the trade-offs for mid-size companies seems to benefit isolates. Obviously netlify is more than big enough and relies heavily on this that it leans in their favour.

Normal_gaussian··on You are no longer invited to dinner
> It depends who you invite.

True. If I invite nobody it about matches the night in.

Normal_gaussian··on You are no longer invited to dinner
> But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc.

Nope. Its a bunch of work and stress and thoroughly beaten by a dull night in. If I want to bring people together, I'll pay for it to be done - e.g. a restaurant.

Normal_gaussian··on Transit rewards
> If you're with 1-3 other people, taking Waymo all the way is a no-brainer.

This is often the case for any mass transit vs personal transit option.

As for home -> taxi -> mass transit -> taxi -> destination; you have to have a pretty short journey on the mass transit for it to reliably work out cheaper to do home -> taxi -> destination, which pretty clearly restricts the pool of people that applies to.

Normal_gaussian··on Transit rewards
The answer to both of your points is that mass transit is used for most of the travel and the last mile is taxi equivalent. Being unable to do the last mile is a common reason not to take mass transit, so more usable taxi equivalents tends to increase mass transit use. And most directly, taxi equivalents are often significantly more expensive or significantly than mass transit at crossing cities.
Normal_gaussian··on I said no and Apple said yes
> long-life

> and durable keyboards

It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which could be a death knell for the laptop, and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec. They've come far in recent years, and I certainly wouldn't be sad if it was my main machine yet I don't expect them to be an outlier forever.

In some dimension Apple (and any serious manufacturer) is always going to be ahead - and they certainly are in non-gaming portable CPU/GPU combos right now. Alas, they aren't ahead in many other dimensions; my Fedora X1 Carbon is my strong preference over my M4 macbook pro and a large part of that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.

Normal_gaussian··on Spymarks, Not Watermarks
and on desktop for me
Normal_gaussian··on Spymarks, not Watermarks
Additionally, verifying that your generator doesn't add such a mark is practically impossible for the majority.
Normal_gaussian··on The Beauty of Roundabouts
Well we have very different experiences driving to, through, and around Salisbury. There's traffic, and it can get bad, but it isn't as bad as you say.

The council and national highways are working on it, but the problem is not one of roundabouts - its one of increases in traffic and lack of capability to make the roads bigger and/or build a bypass. Unless we're willing to knock down a load of housing and cultural sites we're stuck with something around or slightly more than the road capacity we have.

Normal_gaussian··on Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush
cheap ones are in that range; the most expensive ones around $350/$400. I paid ~£200 for one about a year ago, which is ~$270 USD including sales tax. The top end takes the piss, but if you want certain features - particularly several in combination - its what they've segmented the market to.
Normal_gaussian··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
There are a many successful games companies and marketers in the games industry that have enough respect for others to not mislead like this. Many many marketing promotions go to significant effort to show how a thing actually works. There is a great interview with the Battlefield Bad Company people pre-release showing off destructible buildings where they go into what it is and what it isn't, and explain the trade-offs they had to make and how it makes the experience immersive.
Normal_gaussian··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
Spore was similarly misleading, yes.
Normal_gaussian··on A/I shuts down
While this is often the case, it is not clear how this group specifically functioned. Theory vs practice is always very interesting in these cases.
Normal_gaussian··on A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming
Further to 1, most tasks are much harder than dying and are not actually completed by modern LLMs. It is a case of underspecification.

"Who is the fastest person in the UK?" is underspecified. We would typically answer and accept a cursory search of records, but it is possible to see the question as an instruction to measure which would justify conquering the country.

Normal_gaussian··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
Its notable that you dichotomise using the promises of another unreleased game from the same people. Depth was part of the original NMS promise.

Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.

Normal_gaussian··on AirPods 5
And many of the mics built into good webcams and laptops are superior, so long as you aren't somewhere like a café.
Normal_gaussian··on AirPods 5
> They’ll turn off the moment you take them out on iPhones atleast. This is a small example of how the user experience in the Apple Ecosystem for AirPods has been kind of nuts.

Every 'pod' type headphones I've used do this. It's odd you admit to only knowing Apple, then use it to support Apple being superior.

Normal_gaussian··on A/I shuts down
It should be noted that this is a very sensible thing to say even if you are not stopping; the only case where you cannot say this is if you are carrying on with the same branding, which is typically necessary if you are carrying forwards funds (which have been seized) or brand recognition (which may not be important for a group who focuses on interpersonal relationships).
Normal_gaussian··on A/I shuts down
I wasn't aware of this group; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati is their wiki article, but it is a little light on details.

Some of the claims are interesting - "Decision making in the group takes places collectively instead of through majority voting." - isn't explained by the sourced article.

Normal_gaussian··on Show HN: OwnTime – a chess clock for your day's priorities
This is a great (and tight) execution of a neat concept. I'm not in the garden of Apple so unfortunately I can't play with it, but the preview is thorough. I particularly like the voice integration. I sympathise with some of the time allocation issues you mention, particularly when it comes to important but not urgent things.

Relatedly - I've struggled a lot in the last year with time tracking for fixed price projects (not so important, but useful) and billable hours (very important) largely due to the amount of parallelism I now do; and I think this notion of a "chess clock" may unblock me on building my own tracker for this!

Normal_gaussian··on My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

    $0 per-token bill
You still have electricity and capital investment. Envelope math suggests cheap electricity is costing you something like $0.50/mtok and the opportunity cost on the capital tied up and lost in the unit purchase and resale is going to cost you something like $2/mtok at 100% utilization (so, frontier model prices or higher at real utilization), and you don't benefit from any elasticity.

Hosted GLM 5.3 flash is like $0.15/mtok in $0.50/mtok out

Normal_gaussian··on Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush
Unfortunately $500 isn't much on the scale of dental care if it actually works.
Normal_gaussian··on GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?
Actions aren't secondary to most paid GH users; and if they are down it usually means no deployments and no tests, which can often halt work.
Normal_gaussian··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
That's quite a take.

The EU-UK negotiations were mired in issues of EU maximalism; attempting to force each PM to agree a worse deal knowing not agreeing to it would cause short term pain for that PMs political situation. Its quite the thing that the UK managed to hold on as much as it did.

The UK was on the back foot in all negotiations having been forced into the Brexit outcome.

For all the nonsense printed in the UK and Continental presses, the UK had a surprisingly consistent position through the entire thing with clear threads of staff and policies still running to today.

Normal_gaussian··on Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI
> I'm not sure this approach is a good idea, but it might be

After the last year, I feel like this sentence could replace half my outbound emails.

Normal_gaussian··on Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?
I have an app I built for myself (because I couldn't find anything appropriate) to ask me questions via notifications like rating how I feel, how's my sleep, am I alert, eating well etc. its probablistic both in when it alerts and what it asks and I power a self monitoring dashboard off the back of it.

There were two key insights for me:

- too frequent or predictable and I'll ignore it

- always being reminded about something negative is bad for you

You didn't give a lot of information in your question; so that is my two cents.

Normal_gaussian··on Incident with Github.com
The hilarious part is more the absurdity and cognitive disconnect experienced when reading about serious evaluations that went in a completely opposite direction to those directly participated in.
Normal_gaussian··on Incident with Github.com
Those are both hilarious to me. In my last FTE role we had the exact opposite beliefs - we wanted to leave GitLabs increases in pricing and move to annual sub, but the reliability of self-hosted runners and the flexibility (and clarity) of the CI system was fantastic.
Normal_gaussian··on 2026 Clacton By-Election
Farage is favourite to win by nearly all reasonable predictions; success for Count Binface is not just a win - its taking a non-trivial portion of the votes, which seems likely.

Reform UK is a Ltd. and Farage is its owner; so removing him from the "party" is highly unlikely - the party is him.

Page 1 of 34Next →