HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

RandomBK

1,535 karma · joined September 22, 2014

submissionscomments
RandomBK··on NASA Discovers a Long-Sought Global Electric Field on Earth
Potentially dumb question: wouldn't the existence of a global magnetic field already imply the presence of a global electric field? Or is this discovery a separate unrelated electric field?
RandomBK··on Show HN: Llm2sh – Translate plain-language requests into shell commands
I've no plans for it myself, but that sounds like an interesting project! It should be fairly easy to hack together. The actual logic itself is just a few dozen lines of glue code around a single HTTP POST request.
RandomBK··on Show HN: Llm2sh – Translate plain-language requests into shell commands
Already exists :)

Set the `local_uri` setting in the configuration (`llm2sh --setup`), and either pass `-m local` on the CLI or set `"default_model": "local"` in the config.

PRs are always welcome.

RandomBK··on Show HN: Llm2sh – Translate plain-language requests into shell commands
I'm glad you like it! The whole point is to have a simple no-frills clean CLI experience.

> Is there a way to point at an arbitrary API endpoint?

Yes. Set the `local_uri` setting in the configuration (`llm2sh --setup`), and either pass `-m local` on the CLI or set `"default_model": "local"` in the config.

RandomBK··on Richat Structure (2011)
Were you there for fun, or research? What made you decide to visit in person?

From what I can tell, Mauritania is not particularly tourist-friendly. It has an active "Reconsider Travel" advisory with the US State Dept, and there was a coup there as recently as 2008.

How does one even go about planning the logistics of such a trip?

RandomBK··on NumPy 2.0
I'm starting to see some packages break due to not pinning 1.x in their dependencies. `pip install numpy==1.*` is a quick and hacky way to work around those issues until the ecosystem catches up.
RandomBK··on Anonymous Source Shared Leaked Google Search API Documents
I think GP meant <Author>, <Reviewer 1>, <Reviewer 2>
RandomBK··on Cost of developing new drugs may be lower than industry claims: trial
How is this not a blatent antitrust violation?
RandomBK··on Dali owner file petition to cap liability in Baltimore bridge collapse at $43.7M
It's a petition early on in the case, so it just needs to be based upon "information and belief". The fact-finding step of the multi-year process has yet to begin, but lawyers need to present the best plausible case possible at this stage.
RandomBK··on On the implausibility of the Death Star's trash compactor (2002)
I'm pretty sure the Death Star undid several eons of environmental conservation efforts on Alderaan.
RandomBK··on Lazarus and the FudModule rootkit: Beyond BYOVD with an admin-to-kernel zero-day
Yikes... In the same doc:

>"For example, the separation between kernel mode and user mode is a classic and straightforward security boundary."

>"Non-boundaries: [...] Administrator to Kernel [...] Administrative processes and users are considered part of the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) for Windows and are therefore not strong isolated from the kernel boundary."

The reasoning makes sense, but that's quite a mixed message for an unintuitive nuance.

RandomBK··on ZX – A tool for writing better scripts
Thanks, I hate it.

* I love the idea, and I'm interested to see more progress in this direction.

* I'm not a huge fan of the syntax - for me, the commands are the star of the show, while the async/await is a glue. This syntax emphasizes the async/await while the important stuff get shuffled into quotes.

* Don't make me install node - and especially not system/user-wide packages - to run a script.

Having said all that, this is a neat idea and a cool hack on top of javascript language features.

RandomBK··on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]
My job does not involve direct responsibility for the immediate life-or-death of hundreds of lives.
RandomBK··on In 1950, a U.S. troop plane vanished without a trace in the Yukon
Alternatively, the technique used for finding plane crashes has a 99% recall and we're just happening to talk about the 1% that slipped through. Survivorship bias is not out of the question here.
RandomBK··on Hugging Face and Google partner for AI collaboration
They're even more terrified of torch or another framework take up the industry. As ML is a research-heavy space, getting ML researchers to use your platform has benefits.
RandomBK··on Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England
No, it's a delve resonator, and its function is very well understood: https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Prime_Chaotic_Resonator
RandomBK··on Mixtral 8x7B: A sparse Mixture of Experts language model
True, yet many games are effectively single-threaded anyways.

The bigger problem is memory capacity and bandwidth, but I suspect folks will eventually figure out some sort of QoS setup to let the system crunch LLMs using otherwise unused/idle resources.

RandomBK··on Mixtral 8x7B: A sparse Mixture of Experts language model
It's worth noting that the 4bit quants can run on cpu at ~reading speed, which should unlock many use cases - especially if we can precompute some of the results async.
RandomBK··on Why are Apple Silicon VMs so different?
More cache never hurts. I'd imagine there were GPU perf gaps, though they were hard to distinguish from CPU-based performance hits. The most notable issues were random latency spikes caused by the multiple layers of hypervisors, which interfered with some games and occasionally caused audio/video desync on Youtube.

I ultimately tore down that setup and just swapped to dual-boot. The steps needed to set up high-performance VFIO (i.e. clearing enough contiguous RAM for 1GB Hugepages) meant most of the benefits of VFIO never really materialized for me.

RandomBK··on Why are Apple Silicon VMs so different?
Back when I ran Windows in a KVM VM for gaming, a lot of anti-cheat systems didn't take kindly to running in a virtualized environment.

Turning on HyperV to go KVM->HyperV->Windows effectively 'laundered' my VM signature enough to satisfy the anticheats, though the overall perf hit was ~10-15%.

RandomBK··on Twitter violated contract by failing to pay millions in bonuses, judge rules
I see this being misreported all over the place.

Twitter failed a Motion to Dismiss, which is basically the judge saying "Schobinger's arguments aren't completely bonkers and he may be on to something". The case hasn't even gotten to the trial stage yet - the actual decision on whether a contract was violated or not won't be until after the trial.

I'm not a fan of Musk's legal strategies, but it's quite frustrating seeing so many normally reputable sources making such a big deal out of so little.

RandomBK··on The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
> HP achieved a yield of 9%, meaning 91% of the dies failed.

This line really stood out to me - I was aware early semi yields were poor, but this poor? Was this par-for-the-course for technology at that time, or was this bad even by 70s standards? What do typical yield numbers look like today?

RandomBK··on Court: Cloudflare Is Liable for Pirate Site, but Not as a DNS Provider
As much as we may like/hate the entities involved in this dispute, net neutrality is a serious topic and we shouldn't be encouraging actions like this.
RandomBK··on Fast self-hostable open-source workflow engine
Got it! That's great to hear. It'd be great to explicitly clarify that in the README :)

Out of curiosity: Have you considered alternative licenses like SSPL or the Elastic license, which make a clear(er) delineation between whitelabelling/hosting vs simply using the application? I'm sure I'm not the first person to have written off Windmill because of the AGPL.

RandomBK··on Fast self-hostable open-source workflow engine
I would love to begin using this system, but the licensing is giving me serious pause. While most of the software is under the AGPLv3, the Commercial License section of the README [0] implies that the company takes on a fairly broad interpretation of the AGPL.

In particular, the line "[...] to build a feature on top of Windmill, to comply with AGPLv3 your product must be AGPLv3 [...]" seems to imply the company aligns with the stance taken by Google and other companies: that even calling the application via API is enough to trigger copyleft [1].

This implies that if I were to build a sign-up form that triggers a Windmill workflow in the backend, my entire application would either need to be AGPLv3 or I would need a commercial license.

That's perfectly reasonable, as it means any non-AGPL use will have to contribute back to Windmill via a commercial license. However, it does mean positioning this as an "Fully Open-source" alternative to Airflow is only technically correct. This is much closer in practice to "source available" than how most developers would think as "open source".

If this isn't how Windmill wants their license interpreted, I highly encourage clarifying things.

[0] https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill#commercial-license

[1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

RandomBK··on Fast self-hostable open-source workflow engine
One balance I've yet to find is how to handle the split between code-in-database (workflows stored in a database and edited via web IDE) vs code-in-git (workflows checked into the repo and only changed via the normal development+peer-review process).

It looks like Workflow is primarily the former (code-in-database), but provides an API to sync things from a git repo. Is there a mechanism to enforce the rule that certain scripts/functionality/secrets are locked behind workflows sourced from a provided repository?

RandomBK··on All design and engineering of the original Tesla Roadster is now open source
Probably this: [0], relevant part starts as 19:30.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=U7VwtOrwceo

RandomBK··on Is it legal to mix cash in a jar? How is Bitcoin mixing any different?
Yea, that's not going to hold up to a federal investigation.
RandomBK··on Stable Video Diffusion
Needs 40GB VRAM, down to 24GB by reducing the number of frames processed in parallel.
RandomBK··on Apple claims to have three distinct web browsers in the EU complaint
Your honor, what you see as "Chrome" is actually 2^x distinct browsers, with x being the number of A/B test groups currently deployed. Each distinct combination of features represent a distinct product experience and thus a distinct product.

We therefore submit that the HHI of the browser market is actually <10, which economists say represent a near-perfect competitive market.

← PreviousPage 2 of 11Next →