Hacker News: RantyDave

New comment by RantyDave in "Fermat's Last Theorem in Lean 4"

RantyDave — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:59:34 +0000

I love that “grind” is a keyword.

New comment by RantyDave in "HTTPX2 – A next-generation HTTP client for Python"

RantyDave — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 01:50:30 +0000

'urllib3' completely saved me once. We had to authenticate with the border proxy using a certificate, then make a request to a web service ... that needed authenticating with a certificate. Urllib3 was the only one that could do it.

Ask HN: How can I tell which LLM's have been trained on what?

RantyDave — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 02:44:10 +0000

I'm really no expert and attempting to come up to speed. But...

It strikes me that LLM's are a subtle combination of knowing the language and knowing some facts. If one were making a chatbot for helping (say) people understand their tax returns then you'd want a 'base' LLM that understood language and then add domain specific knowledge via RAG. So "yes" to knowing that Thursday comes after Wednesday; "no" to knowing how high Everest is; and questions regarding income tax have to reference the RAG. Is this correct?

So are there stock "thin" models for doing this? Is it better to train your own?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49218466

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

New comment by RantyDave in "FCC: Ban on Foreign-Made Robots Includes Robot Vacuums"

RantyDave — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:43:24 +0000

I'd like to disagree but can't. Letting a foreign power "sell" internet connected microphones and cameras into "our" homes is totally asking for it. I wonder what the rules are around security cameras and similar?

Not sure I mind the routers so much. By the time the traffic is traversing the router it had better be encrypted. OTOH an army of domestic routers can at the very least be made into a quite astounding botnet and if we were to dig deeper I'm sure the data around which hardware address comes online and when could be made extremely useful.

In short: you're right. It's not protectionist bullshit, it's a wide variety of reasonable concerns. It also might be a horse that's bolted.

New comment by RantyDave in "FCC: Ban on Foreign-Made Robots Includes Robot Vacuums"

RantyDave — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:36:08 +0000

I thought drones were banned already. Are they now un-banned?

Point AI at a "Proven" Microkernel?

RantyDave — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:23:09 +0000

Since it has become obvious that AI is great at finding security flaws, has anyone pointed it at some formally proven software? I'm thinking seL4. In theory it should find nothing, right?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49090089

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by RantyDave in "Python 3.14 compiled to metal – no interpreter"

RantyDave — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:11:22 +0000

Don't we have Nuitka for this?

New comment by RantyDave in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

RantyDave — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:37:04 +0000

Moving my crap onto an old laptop and some kind of tunnel thing ... tomorrow.

Those are some huge increases.

New comment by RantyDave in "Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks"

RantyDave — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:10:03 +0000

Right. But ... this would limit you to either extremely small models or extremely large FPGA's, yes? If there's a simple machine learning task that requires a sub microsecond latency I can see the point but otherwise??

New comment by RantyDave in "What Is a Direct Attach Copper (DAC) Cable? (2021)"

RantyDave — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:28:37 +0000

Were you not into SDI for broadcast stuff?

New comment by RantyDave in "Every GPU That Mattered"

RantyDave — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:51:13 +0000

The Nvidia NV1 mattered even if it was a misstep.

I'd say Voodoo 3 mattered because it killed 3dfx.

And the Matrox Parhelia mattered for much the same reason.

New comment by RantyDave in "Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI"

RantyDave — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:19:08 +0000

Ahhh, so is this a chip "more optimised" for connecting GPU's to reality ... or are they skipping the GPU step entirely? Are GPU's only for training now?

New comment by RantyDave in "Real-time PathTracing with global illumination in WebGL"

RantyDave — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:03:33 +0000

Damn, that's really impressive.

New comment by RantyDave in "Swift on Android: Full Native App Development Now Possible"

RantyDave — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 07:33:39 +0000

Likewise. It took me a while to "get" flutter but now I'm here, I 'aint leaving.

New comment by RantyDave in "1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5"

RantyDave — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 03:21:32 +0000

Couldn't you "just" use a honking fast SSD and set it as a swap drive?

New comment by RantyDave in "A Love Letter to FreeBSD"

RantyDave — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 23:56:19 +0000

"a thousand-day uptime shouldn’t be folklore"

I reboot a lot. Mostly I want to know that should the system need to reboot for whatever reason, that it will all come back up again. I run a very lightly loaded site and I highly doubt anybody notices the minute (or so) loss of service caused by rebooting.

Pretty sure I don't feel bad about this.

New comment by RantyDave in "A programmer-friendly I/O abstraction over io_uring and kqueue (2022)"

RantyDave — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 03:52:06 +0000

This is one of the things that changed when we moved from SATA to NVME. SATA has only a few "in flight" instructions and NVME does 64k.

Begs a question though: are there any NVME "spinny rust" disks?

New comment by RantyDave in "A programmer-friendly I/O abstraction over io_uring and kqueue (2022)"

RantyDave — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 03:49:04 +0000

There was a brief fascination with user mode TCP over DPDK (or similar). What happened with that? Can you get similar performance with QUIC? Does io_uring make it all a moot point?

New comment by RantyDave in "Basalt Woven Textile"

RantyDave — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 07:58:51 +0000

Quite. I don't see why we need this in a world that already has Kevlar, Dyneema and Carbon.

New comment by RantyDave in "Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used"

RantyDave — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:16:40 +0000

Thing is, I have stopped expecting Xcode to be any good.

Actual native macOS/iOS development got beaten senseless when the App Store made it clear that "unsustainably low" was the expected price point for third party developers; and that Apple were treating the store more or less as a market research exercise and good ideas absolutely would be stolen.

So it's an internal tool, really. And we're I-guess-lucky that they document it and release it for the proles.