Hacker News: ac29

New comment by ac29 in "Claude Opus 4.8"

ac29 — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:08:46 +0000

More interesting than that to me is "we’re working on developing and releasing models that provide many of the same capabilities as Opus at a lower cost"

Sonnet and Haiku look real outclassed for the price with current Chinese competition.

New comment by ac29 in "That Methyl Methacrylate Tank"

ac29 — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:42:08 +0000

The spark could have caused an explosion.

New comment by ac29 in "Omarchy Is Not A Distro"

ac29 — Sun, 24 May 2026 17:34:31 +0000

> Getting Laptops, both Framework and Dell are now on board, tested on Omarchy so they work out of the box. And so many other tiny things that just make the experience better. I say better but to most consumer, those are expected in the first place. And this "expectation" people have been waiting for more than a decade.

As a fan of boring Dell laptops/desktops and owner of many, I can tell you they have been well supported in every distro I have tried (Debian, Fedora, Arch, SUSE)

New comment by ac29 in "DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost"

ac29 — Sun, 24 May 2026 14:35:09 +0000

Kimi 2.6 is great. Qwen3.7-max benchmarks similarly but I havent used it yet

New comment by ac29 in "Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses"

ac29 — Sat, 23 May 2026 14:17:10 +0000

> The economy is in the gutters

Consumer sentiment is in the gutters certainly. But objective measures of the economy like unemployment and real wages look good to excellent

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

New comment by ac29 in "Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them better"

ac29 — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:58:07 +0000

> Everyone's been talking about breakthroughs for batteries for years.

Lithium iron phosphate has quietly gotten price competitive with lead acid and its wildly better tech. Not particularly sexy but its having a real world impact (LFP is commonly used for solar storage among many other uses).

New comment by ac29 in "OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon"

ac29 — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:26:27 +0000

> they unload the shares on the public market when they reach the top of their growth curve, leaving the public holding the bag

There are definitely some dogs that IPOd and went straight down, but investing in the broad stock market has absolutely not been a bag holding experience in the past decade+

New comment by ac29 in "Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame"

ac29 — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:02:47 +0000

I've had seasonal allergies for decades and haven't seen them trend more intense, though some years have more allergens than others.

Personally I only take allergy medication maybe 50-100 days a year, and usually just a half dose. I have definitely heard from people with worse symptoms that they get a tolerance to medications so it may help to switch between them if you take them year round.

New comment by ac29 in "Kv4p HT – A homebrew 1W radio (VHF or UHF) that plugs into an Android phone"

ac29 — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:13:33 +0000

> In the US all transmitting at 1W with these radios is contrary to regulations.

With a ham license the limit is 1.5kW, without one its zero

New comment by ac29 in "Kv4p HT – A homebrew 1W radio (VHF or UHF) that plugs into an Android phone"

ac29 — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:08:00 +0000

VHF doesnt need line of sight, it has excellent ability to penetrate obstructions due to its long wavelength. For example, its not difficult to receive FM radio transmissions indoors, even from tens of km away. Some obstacles will effectively block any radio signal though, such as solid earth or concrete (esp rebar reinforced concrete).

You are right that handheld radios wont get more than about 10km, but that is due to the curvature of the earth. Mountain top to mountain top, you could easily do 50-100km

New comment by ac29 in "Qwen 3.7 Preview"

ac29 — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:29:41 +0000

Just to be clear, "Plus" and "Max" Qwen models are closed. Seems likely smaller open versions will be released, but that's not what was announced today

New comment by ac29 in "Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"

ac29 — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:45:55 +0000

> When an agent hits an unfamiliar codebase it typically does "cat file" or reads the whole thing first, at least in my experience.

Depends on the size of the project and specific files. I have definitely seen agents make smart use of pi's "read" tool, which can take an offset and line limit (or defaults to a max 2000 lines/50KiB if the model doesn't specify). The bash tool also has the same max output, so if a model decides to cat instead of using the read tool it still wont blow out its context window with a single large file read.

But this sort of thing is going to vary with harness, model, project, and whatever the RNG delivers for the day.

New comment by ac29 in "AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise"

ac29 — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:56:06 +0000

Doesnt "a bunch of SRAM" top out at maybe a few gigs per chip (with zero area used for logic)? You'd need an order of magnitude more to fit even a fairly weak general purpose LLM model.

New comment by ac29 in "Tesla Wall Connector bootloader bypasses the firmware downgrade ratchet"

ac29 — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:30:06 +0000

I've never seen a charger in the US that doesnt operate 24/7 regardless of grid load, is this different in other countries?

New comment by ac29 in "Microsoft BitLocker – YellowKey zero-day exploit"

ac29 — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:04:47 +0000

> Microsoft has ensured the alternative is nearly impossible, constantly working to block any workarounds that users discover to use a local-only account.

Local accounts still work fine for Win 11 Pro, I installed it a few days ago using a clean ISO directly from Microsoft. No special patching or command line stuff needed, making a local account is part of the official install process.

New comment by ac29 in "New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater"

ac29 — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:20:55 +0000

> With CO2 emitting option is priced out or banned

GP was talking about injecting the CO2 back into the well, not releasing it to the environment. There are even standards for specific injection wells used for long term storage (EPA Class VI).

New comment by ac29 in "Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model"

ac29 — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:57:34 +0000

FYI, distilling Gemini is explicitly against the ToS:

"You may not use the Services to develop models that compete with the Services (e.g., Gemini API or Google AI Studio). You also may not attempt to reverse engineer, extract or replicate any component of the Services, including the underlying data or models (e.g., parameter weights)."

New comment by ac29 in "Googlebook"

ac29 — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:55:19 +0000

> ChromeOS meanwhile has the worst compatibility off all four

ChromeOS can run desktop Linux software and Android software, so it definitely isnt worse than Mac. Its probably even better than Windows. Of course, if you need Mac/Windows software, Web/Android/Linux alternatives might not exist or might be worse. But the devices are hardly lacking software compatibility.

New comment by ac29 in "Linux Terminal Memory Usage"

ac29 — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:18:04 +0000

Its horrible with memory, launching a single empty terminal uses 307MiB on my Linux system

New comment by ac29 in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

ac29 — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:58:08 +0000

> Enormous numbers of consumers own $50,000 cars, but a pair of $2000 GPUs is "not consumer"?

$50k is a median priced car in the US. I'd guess >99.9% of people do not own $4000 of GPUs. I consider myself a computer person and I dont think I even own $4000 of computer hardware in total