Hacker News: 14113

New comment by 14113 in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

14113 — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:12:09 +0000

Incorrect: Star Labs have been shipping laptops since 2018, before Framework was even a company.

New comment by 14113 in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

14113 — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:08:43 +0000

Star Labs have delivered a number of other high quality linux laptops - I even used one as my daily work driver for a few years at a previous job. They're not a startup.

New comment by 14113 in "How the AI Bubble Bursts"

14113 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:42:18 +0000

> companies are supposed to lose money while they grow

At what point do we declare that a company has "grown" and now must make money? OpenAI is a multi-billion dollar company right now, surely that's a point at which they should be profitable, instead of propped up by further investment and borrowing.

> We have very strong indicators that inference is not a money loser for these companies

All of the economic analysis that I've read strongly states the opposite. Running a GPU is a net loss /even for the data centre operators/. For them to break even, they currently charge OpenAI/Anthropic/Etc more than OpenAI/Anthropic/Etc make per-token.

New comment by 14113 in "Nominal Types in WebAssembly"

14113 — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 18:38:25 +0000

This post is actually a joke, but it does bring about an important point: For an interpreter, having more information results in faster execution. WASM is much closer to Java bytecode than you might think, and SpiderMonkey/V8 are basically the JVM. WASM also undergoes multiple different stages and kinds of JIT compilation in most browsers, and detailed type and usage information helps that produce faster execution.

Also, don't forget that WASM is designed to replace JavaScript, thus it must interoperate with it to smooth the transition. Rosetta and Prism also work to smooth the transition from x86 -> ARM, and much of the difficult work that they do actually involves translating between the calling conventions of the different architectures, and making them work across binaries compiled both for and not for ARM, not with the bytecode translation. WebAssembly is designed to not have that limitation: it's much more closely aligned to JS. That's why it wouldn't make sense to use a subset of x86 or similar, as it would simply produce more work trying to get it to interface with JavaScript.

New comment by 14113 in "Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades"

14113 — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:32:34 +0000

There was a company that did compute-in-dram, which was recently acquired by Qualcomm: https://www.emergentmind.com/topics/upmem-pim-system

New comment by 14113 in "Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades"

14113 — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:31:45 +0000

That's not quite correct. Snapdragon chips that are advertised as being good for "AI" also come with the Hexagon DSP, which is now used for (or targeted at) AI applications. It's essentially a separate vector processor with large vector sizes.

Say Hi to Kit

14113 — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 13:15:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/kit/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834873

Points: 52

# Comments: 61

New comment by 14113 in "What We're Working on in Firefox"

14113 — Fri, 31 May 2024 09:47:30 +0000

> More streamlined menus

For everyone here complaining about this, have you ever looked at how many ways there are to access your history on Firefox? At my last count, there were 4 different ways to do it, depending on which menu you picked first. Cutting down this kind of inconsistent, and repetitive flow is something that we should be applauding.

New comment by 14113 in "What We're Working on in Firefox"

14113 — Fri, 31 May 2024 09:45:36 +0000

No, Firefox never targeted geeks. It's just that, when it came out, the only people who used a browser other than Internet Explorer happened to be geeks. The audience came to them, rather than them going to the audience.

New comment by 14113 in "Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang"

14113 — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 14:45:41 +0000

From the article: "[...] as developers get more and more senior, they tend to ignore more and more problems, because they've gotten so used to it. That's the way it's always been done, and they've learned to live with them, so they've stopped questioning it any more."

New comment by 14113 in "Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU"

14113 — Fri, 15 May 2020 12:56:05 +0000

This is wrong - triSYCL is roughly the same age as ComputeCpp, and hipSYCL is only slightly younger. There has been a lot of academic interest in SYCL, but as with any new technology (especially niche technologies) it's always going to take time to get people on board.

Also, from a quick look at your profile, you seem to have quite a lot of comments criticizing or commenting on CodePlay. Do you have some sort of relationship or animosity with them?

New comment by 14113 in "Celerity – High-level C++ for Accelerator Clusters"

14113 — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 09:41:21 +0000

DPC++ is basically "just" SYCL, so no MPI.

New comment by 14113 in "British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures"

14113 — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 15:36:40 +0000

Well maybe the other carriers have less awful legacy tech - I can't speak for what they have. All I know is what I saw while working at BA.

New comment by 14113 in "British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures"

14113 — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 15:36:00 +0000

That's a much more reasonable explanation - thanks, I appreciate it! The way I'd had it explained to me was more along the lines of "greedy pilots want to be able to fax because they can't be bothered to learn how to use email", but your explanation makes a lot more sense.

New comment by 14113 in "British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures"

14113 — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 11:07:27 +0000

Speaking as someone who (for a time) worked in the IT department of British Airways, the culprit is really just ancient systems that aren't well maintained, along with institutional and industrial pressure not to improve them or upgrade them.

For example, I worked as part of the team that managed the software that allowed pilots to submit flight plans. Any upgrades had to go through multiple weeks of reviews and testing (I don't mean code review - I mean reviews through managers and processes), and was run on some rather ancient hardware. Moreover, thanks to pressure from the pilots union, the system had to be able to accept flight plans by fax, so had a lot of legacy cruft to support that too.

The problem isn't agility, corner cutting or moving too fast - it's moving too slow.

New comment by 14113 in "The Long, Slow Death of Venice"

14113 — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 17:42:55 +0000

The issue is that pickpockets and others looking to target more "naive" tourists will be less likely to target you if you're dressed less like a tourist.

New comment by 14113 in "Zulip 2.0: Open source team chat"

14113 — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 23:23:05 +0000

Zulip also has a terminal client.

New comment by 14113 in "Implications of Rewriting a Browser Component in Rust"

14113 — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 16:21:00 +0000

It's not idiomatic, but it's still possible. I've got NullPointerExceptions while writing fairly complex, modern Scala, so it's about as possible as with Java in my experience.

New comment by 14113 in "Can AI Predict the Next Area to Gentrify?"

14113 — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 13:46:00 +0000

Really? There are at least two coffee places within ten metres of the train station on Rye Lane, right across from the Cinema. You're talking absolute rubbish.

New comment by 14113 in "Lisp and Haskell (2017)"

14113 — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 21:27:42 +0000

I would argue that C++ (or at least, modern C++) aims to /enable/ one to treat it as either. It gives the programmer the power to write very low level code if they wish, but also to define type safe interfaces and high level abstractions which allow the programmer to trust the glue that binds together their blocks of code.