Hacker News Reader

loire280on Using an open model feels surprisingly good

Rolling your own Linux is nearly free and could be done on any computer you had lying around. Dropping >$5k on a computer to run a local model (badly) doesn't really scratch my "hacker" itch. The author of this article works for an AI infrastructure company and ran Kimi K3 on their infrastructure - this post reads like marketing.

loire280on Minecraft Java raises recommended memory to 16GB ahead of Vulkan transition

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-java-editi...

> For minimum requirements, the new target is 1080p at 30 FPS using the Fast preset. This means a 64-bit system, 8 GB of RAM with a discrete GPU or 12 GB with integrated graphics, a 4-core processor, and a Vulkan 1.3 capable GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM.

> For recommended requirements, the new target is 1080p at 60 FPS using the Fancy preset. This includes 16 GB of RAM, a stronger modern processor, and a more capable graphics card with 6 GB of VRAM.

This blog post also implies that the requirements bump is due to numerous changes to Minecraft over the years, not just the change to Vulkan.

> If you already play Java Edition without issues, you may not notice anything changing right away. If your game often struggles, the new requirements may help explain why and give you a clearer target for a smoother experience.

loire280on CrankGPT

I agree this type of web design sucks. It's been common for more than a decade - I remember Apple getting criticized for using this on the product page for the old "trash can" Mac Pro in 2013, and it was already widely used back then.

However, it seems pretty clear to me they did this in service of a joke - you have to "crank" your scroll wheel to get to the content, just like you have to crank this device. I think it's funny...

loire280on Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

> Anthropic's own scaffold is described in their technical post: launch a container, prompt the model to scan files, let it hypothesize and test, use ASan as a crash oracle, rank files by attack surface, run validation. That is very close to the kind of system we and others in the field have built, and we've demonstrated it with multiple model families, achieving our best results with models that are not Anthropic's. The value lies in the targeting, the iterative deepening, the validation, the triage, the maintainer trust. The public evidence so far does not suggest that these workflows must be coupled to one specific frontier model.

The argument in the article is that the framework to run and analyze the software being tested is doing most of the work in Anthropic's experiment, and that you can get similar results from other models when used in the same way.

loire280on 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

This happens to everyone's fingers to some extent because the fingertips dry out as you age. It's a huge source of frustration for elderly folks since it adds to the confusion around using touch interfaces. My family members have had some success moistening their fingers with a wet paper towel periodically as they use their devices, though of course that is impractical on the go.

loire280on Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

I've seen engineers I respect abandon this way of working as a team for the productivity promise of conjuring PRs with a coding agent. It blows away years of trust so quickly when you realize they stopped reviewing their own output.

loire280on AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

Unless you're suggesting the toy company secretly rigs the magic 8 ball to never recommend nuclear war, I'll take my chances with the organizational changes.

loire280on GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

It's easy to fall into a negative mindset when there are legions of pointy haired bosses and bandwagoning CEOs who (wrongly) point at breakthroughs like this as justification for AI mandates or layoffs.

loire280on A shortage of tenors

I sing tenor in a university choir as an older male community member and we encourage anyone to sing tenor whose voice is low enough. Over 1/3 of our tenors are women and our voices blend very well IMO.

loire280on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

The Fremen followed a messianic figure into a galaxy-wide holy war because the Bene Gesserit seeded their culture with manufactured prophecy as a failsafe.

loire280on Yawning has an unexpected influence on the fluid inside your brain

Reminds me of a recent finding that attention lapses in a sleep-deprived brain correlate with flushing of cerebrospinal fluid (almost a garbage collection pause).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771636

loire280on Voxtral Transcribe 2

They don't claim to support Polish, but they do support Russian.

> The model is natively multilingual, achieving strong transcription performance in 13 languages, including English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Dutch. With a 4B parameter footprint, it runs efficiently on edge devices, ensuring privacy and security for sensitive deployments.

I wonder how much having languages with the same roots (e.g. the romance languages in the list above or multiple Slavic languages) affects the parameter count and the training set. Do you need more training data to differentiate between multiple similar languages? How would swapping, for example, Hindi (fairly distinct from the other 12 supported languages) for Ukrainian and Polish (both share some roots with Russian) affect the parameter count?

loire280on No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

I may not be using the same definition of "motivation" as the author, but understanding what motivates your people, putting the right mix of people together to work on the right problems, and knowing how and when to apply pressure to get people to do their best work are absolutely something managers can do to motivate their teams.

loire280on Eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)

I still mourn the loss of Weatherspark's old Flash interface, which brilliantly displayed all of this data in a single pane to give context to the recent, current, and forecasted weather. I've never seen as concise a visualization of current and historical weather data.

loire280on How will the miracle happen today?

That's not the point of his piece, and spending time virtue signaling to the reader would undermine the message that this kindness is a form of grace, given freely without expectation of reciprocation.

loire280on How will the miracle happen today?

I think this was rhetorical hedging - the author was expressing false doubt to underscore how extraordinary the actions of his hosts were, but he didn't literally mean he wouldn't do the same for others. The tone of the rest of the piece implies he is very grateful for the kindness of strangers.

loire280on Eat Real Food

Since it has no calories, it's not "food" by even a very loose definition.

As someone who lives in a neighborhood where most tapwater is still delivered by lead service lines, I'm sympathetic to the argument that it provides hydration. I'd prefer that my tax dollars went to solving that problem more directly, however.

loire280on This is not the future

I read this comment as implying a similar kind of exceptionalism for technology, but expressing a different set of values. It reminds me of the frustration I’ve heard for years from software engineers who work at companies where the product isn’t software and they’re not given the time and resources to do their best work because their bosses and nontechnical peers don’t understand the value of their work.

loire280on Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres

There is a finite and relatively narrow range of ratios of CPU, memory, and network throughput in both modern cloud offerings and bare hardware configurations.

Obviously it's possible to build, for example, a machine with 2 cores, a 10Gbps network link, and a single HDD that would falsify my statement.

loire280on Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres

In fact, a properly-configured Kafka cluster on minimal hardware will saturate its network link before it hits CPU or disk bottlenecks.

loire280on America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

There's a lot of population centers in the US that could be better connected without crossing the Rockies.

Beijing to Shanghai is roughly the same distance as Chicago to New York City. Travel time via train is 4.5 hours vs 22 hours.

Boston to New York is almost 4 hours on the Acela!

loire280on America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

Every software company I've worked at that is more than 5 years old had major features that nobody understood anymore, even features that were core to the product.

loire280on The collapse of the econ PhD job market

You're right that the orange man has been a big factor, but not because of his effect on the stock market. The stock market isn't the economy, and most Econ PhDs are not working on modeling stock prices.

As the article indicates, a huge portion of the market for hiring PhDs is directly or indirectly dependent on federal funding. Universities are freezing hiring and reducing PhD cohort sizes, institutions like the IMF and World Bank are in crisis, and US government agencies have been reducing staff sizes. There was hope that the tech industry would provide another big source of jobs for PhD economists, but that hasn't panned out.

Source: the article, and my wife works in the UChicago economics department.

loire280on A computer upgrade shut down BART

Buses are the resilient backup for trains, especially if road infrastructure has been designed to prioritize transit (e.g. Chicago highways with shoulders designed to let Pace buses bypass traffic jams).

loire280on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

Sure, but if you're 10+ years into your career and have been financially conservative (i.e. have a positive net worth), a lump sum of $1m could be enough to retire to a lower-cost location.

loire280on The Rise of Whatever

A great solution to this problem, but it doesn't seem like this approach will generalize to problems in other fields, or even to more suble coding confabulations that can't be detected by the compiler or static analysis.

loire280on Hydra: Vehicles on the island – 'After the works they abandon them here'

I've started calling them "acoustic" bikes, like non-electric guitars. Not technically accurate, but folks almost always get it and smile.

loire280on Vanguard 50-year anniversary CEO letter

Living below your means and saving is absolutely important, but the Vanguard-style index fund is what made the compounding you mention available to the general public. Without that investment vehicle, cash saved would lose value relative to inflation or be subject to a lot more risk, making retiring at a reasonable age much harder.

loire280on GSA prepares to sell over 400 federal properties

Unbelievable that they'll be selling the federal buildings in downtown Chicago in this property market. Very short-sighted to give up those prime locations in a fire sale.

loire280on Netflix's Key-Value Data Abstraction Layer

You're probably right, but Netflix does a good job building their engineering brand by writing up and sharing their technical work publicly.