HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

boutell

397 karma · joined January 12, 2011

submissionscomments
boutell··on fx :Tiny, open, native coding agent.
[cries in TRS-80 Model III]
boutell··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
This is exactly the argument that gave us the Affordable Care Act. It was literally a republican plan from Massachusetts. It was supposed to be broadly acceptable and that's why it was implemented with a billion compromises.

But the Republicans called the Democrats commies anyway and refused to participate. And that has been their playbook ever since. That is what they are going to do, no matter what we propose.

So we may as well propose actual universal healthcare. But I agree with you that we need to create strong majorities to keep it in place until it reaches the kind of momentum it has in Canada or Sweden and opposition to it becomes a practical impossibility, like opposing social security.

Maybe someday we can have a system where losing health insurance isn't a motivation for not starting a company. Our current system is a complete disaster for entrepreneurial capitalism.

boutell··on Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
The original question was certainly specific to coding. It's right in the title.
boutell··on Don't classify, hallucinate
I regularly ask Claude to find that one book, that one short story, that one meme, you know the one, it had the guy and the thing, no not quite like that...

It nearly always works.

boutell··on Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview
LOL. Conveniently, electron is everything other than the kernel. Also, as much wasted RAM as an entire second instance of chrome that shares nothing, but oh well.
boutell··on Qwen3.8-2.4T
I'll just fire that up on my Intel n100...
boutell··on F*: A general-purpose proof-oriented programming language
I guess responsive stylesheets can't be implemented without side effects...
boutell··on The coolest use for the Vision Pro
Love this. I started doing something similar... back in 2000... in Quake 3. I got off to a good start modeling our future home, but I never got 'round to figuring out how to remove all the terrifying guns and blood-soaked demonic textures.

Should have done it. Should have called it Project Plowshare.

boutell··on Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac
This is really neat! Question, on that MacBook Pro with presumably more RAM, is it still holding itself back in the RAM department?
boutell··on Qwen 3.8
I'm making good use of the next button on original replies, but it's true that walking back through the parent button is a long walk sometimes.
boutell··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
I thought that this was just an initial translation to unsafe rust in which they haven't actually gained any of those benefits yet, although presumably they can go there quickly now.
boutell··on Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries
Thank you. Among other important points there:

"That said, Japan isn't the only country pursuing lithium recovery. In the US, Redwood Materials – the recycling company founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel – says it's already recovering 95% of lithium from the equivalent of about 250,000 EVs per year."

EV batteries are too large and valuable to wind up in landfills, although I'm sure it has happened somewhere. I do like that Japan is is making it harder to just throw out smaller lithium batteries. That strikes me as a more probable source of waste.

boutell··on Show HN: Super Dario
Thank you, I missed that.
boutell··on Show HN: Super Dario
Strong agree. Very much part of the joke.
boutell··on Since Linux 6.9, LUKS suspend stopped wiping disk-encryption keys from memory
https://xkcd.com/538/

(No, no, I take this stuff seriously too, but it had to be said)

boutell··on Claude Sonnet 5
Until now we've been using Sonnet 4 to power an editing agent in ApostropheCMS. Sonnet is a good price/quality/speed compromise, but sometimes when giving it a large set of instructions it would miss half of them. At least until we told it to go back and try again.

In my early tests tonight, Sonnet 5 is a LOT better out of the box. It's one-shotting complex instructions. It also recovered independently from bad instructions that led to an uninformative 400 error by using its schema-fetching tool to figure out there were was too much input.

If I have to gripe about something: it interpreted another impossible instruction by quietly discarding the input in question. But, the way it did it is... kinda exactly what anybody else would do, if they weren't in a position to change the implementation.

This is, obviously, early days but I'm impressed.

boutell··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
That 3090 is going to burn 750W and it will still cap you at a 4 bit quant and ~48K context. Here's someone who worked through it:

https://github.com/noonghunna/qwen36-27b-single-3090

Flies though (50-70tps is impressive for a model this smart)

I went through roughly the same process to get it working on my M2 Macbook Pro... at awful speeds of course, since models like this one are mostly bound by memory bandwidth.

boutell··on Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors
We all know what you mean. But doing what is necessary to make the overall automated system more autonomous = training, at this 30,000 foot altitude.
boutell··on A Nipkow Disk Mechanical TV Simulator
I have always wanted to see one of these
boutell··on Open source AI must win
Yeah it is ugly. I'm not convinced binding future leadership with corporate docs is even possible. Unless the shares are controlled by other reputable organizations from the start? Maybe?
boutell··on Open source AI must win
Everybody who understands the technical problems is proposing a government fix. There is another option, foundations / NGOs could do this. Of course, openai has shown how quickly that can pivot into something completely different.
boutell··on Open source AI must win
If weights can't be looked at almost instantly in bulk, it just doesn't work. It's a different problem from distributing file downloads.
boutell··on MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per second
They specifically said it's stock hardware, but... yeah, maybe highly specific stock hardware.
boutell··on Stop the Apple Music app from launching
I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE!

I actually nuked my music library off my Mac to mitigate this problem, but it's still a nuisance when the app launches.

Thank you for sharing this!

boutell··on Changing how we develop Ladybird
Recently I got a PR that is (1) genuinely correct and useful, and (2) not from someone who uses the software in question at all. A happy outcome, but clearly the economics of open source contribution have changed.

Although I no way suspect this particular individual of anything untoward, of course it's always possible it could be part of one of the long-term goodwill-generation campaigns mentioned by the Ladybird team. Generating credibility by making seemingly difficult genuine contributions over a long period, then abusing that credibility. But in our particular project we're not in the habit of delegating approval authority, so I'm less concerned about that.

boutell··on MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per second
I wonder about this too. The other objections miss the point: if it's faster, and otherwise the same, and doesn't require different hardware, then why not just announce that the standard tier of MiMo-v.25-Pro is now ridiculously fast and raise the price? What does "limited high speed resources" mean if it runs on the same hardware as the rest of their pool?

I think the answer is that there's a tradeoff here where additional throughput for a single person can be achieved only by tying up more resources than a normal request would, even when you take into account the fact that the normal request takes longer to finish. I'm not an expert, but some of the optimizations they describe, particularly the parallel prediction stuff, sound like they could take up extra resources.

boutell··on Speculative KV coding: losslessly compressing KV cache by up to ~4×
Isn't that nitpicking? It's a smaller representation of the data, if you have a certain appetite for decompression time. It could conceivably be worth it. I think it would make a great level 2 cache for older chats.
boutell··on Win16 Memory Management
In 1994 I was 2 years out of school. I'd written one windows shareware application and a whole lot of unix-y things. People were excited about the internet but most people didn't have access. Unix shell accounts via dialup were common though.

One day I was encouraged to write a Windows Sockets emulation layer for ordinary dial-up shell accounts like those offered by netcom. The idea was to allow the use of the recently released Mosaic browser without an actual internet connection. I figured sure, no problem. I'll use curl or some other tool in the shell account to do the actual fetching of URLs, transfer styles over zmodem, and simulate all the tcp/ip calls in the DLL.

I couldn't even get started. The reason is that I couldn't understand how the different Windows applications could all share memory allocated at runtime in the winsock.dll.

I asked a highly experienced ex Microsoft person, and he just said what are you talking about. There's no API to allocate shared memory.

So I gave up. 6 months later someone else did it.

Around then I realized the truth: Windows 3.1 had no memory protection at all. Specifically all global variables in DLLs were shared by default. The hard part wasn't sharing memory among users of a DLL. If anything, the hard part was having good discipline to avoid sharing it.

Since I'd only used multiuser Unix in school, and I knew Windows supported multitasking (even if only the cooperative kind), I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea that I'm multitasking operating system could exist without memory protection.

boutell··on Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity
Do they though? Are physics textbooks putting forward some version of string theory from the 1990s as proven fact?
boutell··on Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity
I believe there was a science fiction story all the way back in the early '80s describing a scenario where physics gets reclassified as a soft science or an art form because it is no longer feasible to prove anything.
← PreviousPage 2 of 6Next →