Hacker News: amarshall

New comment by amarshall in "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"

amarshall — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:20:41 +0000

Certainly I would not say “don’t ever quote strings in Bash”, that’s plainly wrong. Actual advice I would give is to use Shellcheck for all shell scripting as it will generally correctly warn about missing quoting (e.g. of shell vars) and does warn about tilde not being expanded in quotes.

It does not warn about `echo "$PATH":~`, though, but that is perhaps an uncommon “error” that is more about your contrived test case (not that Calvinball is good, ofc).

New comment by amarshall in "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"

amarshall — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 13:46:21 +0000

Or you can just…not quote the tilde. Folks always seem to reflexively quote “strings” in Bash while not realizing that (almost) everything is a string and most strings are not quoted and it would be odd to do it (e.g. no one is doing `"ls" "-a" "foo"`).

New comment by amarshall in "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS"

amarshall — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:02:28 +0000

Use nixos-unstable-small branch or backport the change and build yourself.

New comment by amarshall in "DaVinci Resolve 21.1"

amarshall — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 01:48:23 +0000

H.264 is supported on Linux in DR Studio, it’s just not in the free version.

New comment by amarshall in "Sort branches by last commit date"

amarshall — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 05:48:01 +0000

I rarely care about the date of the commit on the branch to determine recency, I care about when I last switched to the branch.

This comment gets it correct https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49504860

I wrote my own version to do this nearly 10 years ago: https://github.com/amarshall/git-recent-branches

New comment by amarshall in "Arbitrary code execution in QubesOS via copy-to-VM error reporting backchannel"

amarshall — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 05:39:48 +0000

Qubes uses VMs, Jails use a shared kernel. So I wouldn’t say Jails are safer nor that they have a smaller exposed area with regard to host isolation than VMs.

New comment by amarshall in "FreeCORE TrueNAS Core – Continued"

amarshall — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:42:10 +0000

Bigger issue was that native encryption doesn’t (didn’t?) have a maintainer, so even though most bugs got fixed, it’s not a great thing to build on. Some of the key storage is also a bit outdated.

IMO use LUKS unless you really need the features of ZFS native enc.

New comment by amarshall in "The August 17 outage"

amarshall — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 03:32:12 +0000

Has it? Most of the LLM-generated commit messages and PR descriptions I read are needlessly verbose and miss the point: elucidating the why of a change rather than the what. If I actually pose a question based on them the author often tells me “yea that was some AI generated nonsense, I rewrote it now”.

New comment by amarshall in "Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)"

amarshall — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:38:50 +0000

Use uBlock Origin and add custom filters to block scripts on http:// ; e.g.

    http://$inline-script,domain=~localhost
    http://$script,domain=~localhost

New comment by amarshall in "Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight"

amarshall — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:47:55 +0000

It’s possible to make a fake display to avoid that; both Linux and Windows have this ability. No dummy plug is required (though it is simpler than software solutions).

New comment by amarshall in "How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s"

amarshall — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:36:45 +0000

Pretty light on details, heavy on fluff. 9.8s to 3.1s was userfaultd + hugepages, 500ms was PS/2 mouse and… where is the rest of the time to get to 400ms?

New comment by amarshall in "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"

amarshall — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 01:23:00 +0000

No, and having that is not required to know output speed nor the effect of thinking, so I don’t see the point in such a superfluous, indirect question.

As for the question you’re likely asking: benchmarks that include speed across many models and providers available at various places e.g. https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models

New comment by amarshall in "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"

amarshall — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:37:01 +0000

Thinking doesn’t change output speed. Anthropic’s models are ~ 40–60 t/s median output speed.

New comment by amarshall in "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"

amarshall — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:58:27 +0000

Can take the geometric mean of total and active parameters of MoE to get approximate equivalent quality to dense model params. So sqrt(35*10)≈18.7.

The trade-off of MoE is that it is worse but faster for the same total size.

New comment by amarshall in "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"

amarshall — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:52:22 +0000

What context length and kv cache quant (if any) are you using? And MTP?

New comment by amarshall in "Linux Terminal Memory Usage"

amarshall — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:56:09 +0000

Probably want `kitty --single-instance` to reduce memory usage when opening multiple.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/invocation/#cmdoption-kitty-...

New comment by amarshall in "Group averages obscure how an individual's brain controls behavior: study"

amarshall — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:08:15 +0000

The actual paper (linked in another comment here) is literally titled “Nonergodicity and Simpson’s paradox in neurocognitive dynamics of cognitive control”. Why they omit it from the blog post version, I’ve no idea.

New comment by amarshall in "Group averages obscure how an individual's brain controls behavior: study"

amarshall — Sun, 03 May 2026 13:12:27 +0000

Seems like a case of Simpson’s Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

New comment by amarshall in "Google releases Gemma 4 open models"

amarshall — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:25:39 +0000

If you are running on 4090 and get 5 t/s, then you exceeded your VRAM and are offloading to the CPU (or there is some other serious perf. issue)

New comment by amarshall in "Tinybox – A powerful computer for deep learning"

amarshall — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:02:21 +0000

Oh I missed the "quad" before 3090.