Hacker News: RestartKernel

New comment by RestartKernel in "I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them"

RestartKernel — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 23:40:57 +0000

I bought a 3-meter long USB C cable from them for data and display transfer, which turned out to be the only USB C cable of that length capable of driving my display at its full resolution and framerate. However, after a year of use, it stopped transferring any sort of data. So while they're probably up to spec, the quality isn't necessarily what their pricing may suggest.

Support allowed me to send it back for replacement as a "one-time exception", though I was well within the common 2-year warranty period in the EU.

New comment by RestartKernel in ""Uncensored" open LLMs are measurably more optimistic than their base models"

RestartKernel — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:34:54 +0000

This post title is much better. Personally, I dislike how research papers have to beg for legitimacy with word soup. I'd much rather read something in plain language with qualifiers added further in.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Semantic/Hybrid Search in the Browser"

RestartKernel — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:01:30 +0000

This is very good. Super snappy and gives me what I'm looking for. Great write-up too.

How much more would it cost to use a multilingual tokeniser? I realise this is somewhat pointless for an English blog, but services like Uber Eats have something like that going on (server-side of course, and they may just be translating queries).

New comment by RestartKernel in "How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?"

RestartKernel — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 02:23:57 +0000

Implementing in native code and compiling to WASM would make for a good compromise.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"

RestartKernel — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:23:16 +0000

Thanks for the additional information information, but with the "ecosystem gripe" I meant that most Overleaf projects are inadvertently designed for pdflatex simply because it's the default. No matter how much better other compilers are, pdflatex is the de facto standard in certain circles, even if few within these circles are aware of this (e.g. university laboratories), so I've had to begrudgingly switch back to latexmk for most projects to accommodate this.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"

RestartKernel — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:34:13 +0000

A tool like this is sorely needed for LaTeX, and Tectonic is especially intuitive to embed into other applications, but the divergence of XeTeX from pdflatex makes it incompatible with most Overleaf projects. This is just an unfortunate ecosystem gripe, but for most workflows I end up having to reach for latexmk instead for this reason.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Sem: New primitive for code understanding – not LSPs, but entities on top of Git"

RestartKernel — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:25:58 +0000

This seems incredibly useful, but it's somewhat a shame you can't just organically grow language support through LSPs.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Writers Are Going to Extremes to Prove They Didn't Use AI"

RestartKernel — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:45:06 +0000

I've started using parentheses with notes/tangents to circumvent any false accusations of AI usage. They're nice to write, but bad form, so LLMs don't use them much.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Show HN: Fakecloud – Free, open-source AWS emulator"

RestartKernel — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:46:36 +0000

This is sold as an emulator, but couldn't it inadvertently replace AWS entirely in production too?

New comment by RestartKernel in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

RestartKernel — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 22:16:51 +0000

> I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.

Point taken. Most developers probably make do with Linux containers rather than MacOS VMs.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

RestartKernel — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:28:09 +0000

This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Industrial design files for Keychron keyboards and mice"

RestartKernel — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:15:34 +0000

I've been there, but it definitely felt like more of an enthusiast experience. Someone who's just looking into getting their first mechanical keyboard would do better at a larger shop stocked with cheaper keyboards and a greater variety of common switch types.

That being said, the shop is located in a surprisingly quiet area, surrounded by other small enthusiast shops. I especially liked "High Beam" a few stores down, which specialises in handheld PCs.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Perfmon – Consolidate your favorite CLI monitoring tools into a single TUI"

RestartKernel — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:42:25 +0000

But it's blazing fast though

New comment by RestartKernel in "Ask HN: How do systems (or people) detect when a text is written by an LLM"

RestartKernel — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:21:59 +0000

People look for tells, systems detect word distributions. Though neither is as reliable as active fingerprinting using an encoded watermark.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

RestartKernel — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:17:37 +0000

This is an entire Unity project that won't load due to however many content blockers I've got running on my phone. The incompetent one loads instantly, though it's admittedly laggy.

New comment by RestartKernel in "OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio"

RestartKernel — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:38:53 +0000

I think it's mostly just that a subscription seems weird for a tool like this. Most users would probably only need it occasionally, and with a subscription you can't just add it to your toolbox to grab when that time comes.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit"

RestartKernel — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 04:31:58 +0000

The real story is in the poison fountain dataset this uses:

https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

> [...] we want to inflict damage on machine intelligence systems.

This almost strikes me as roleplay, but maybe I'm childish for finding it difficult to empathise with this genre of hacker ideology.

New comment by RestartKernel in "A bad day to use Python [video]"

RestartKernel — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:07:00 +0000

This video is about the recent LightLLM security breach.

New comment by RestartKernel in "Intel Announces Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs"

RestartKernel — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:39:17 +0000

How many compatibility issues is MacOS realistically expected to spur? Windows DX felt unusable to me without a Linux VM (and later WSL), but on MacOS most tooling just kinda seems to work the same.

New comment by RestartKernel in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

RestartKernel — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:46:30 +0000

That's like avoiding the West because of fancy cutlery rules. Japanese people are not as thin-skinned as lists like these lead you to believe.