Hacker News: binsquare

New comment by binsquare in "Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers"

binsquare — Tue, 12 May 2026 23:52:48 +0000

this is it for me

i bought the dang thing, let me decide how I use it.

New comment by binsquare in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

binsquare — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:48:26 +0000

amazon leaders are obsessed with "metrics" but they care very little about what those metrics actually measure

it's all a political performance.

Remember when they made the decision for return to office and just...decided to post no support data on why they need to do it?

New comment by binsquare in "Googlebook"

binsquare — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:51:08 +0000

How long will this be supported until it is in the google graveyard though?

New comment by binsquare in "Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal?"

binsquare — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:35:47 +0000

In 2008, I remember calling Comcast and taking hours of elevator music to get human support.

Today, I get ai support which fails to resolve my problem until a human steps in.

ai support is the new elevator music

New comment by binsquare in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

binsquare — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:48:32 +0000

Yes I have! :D that's a great way to leverage hypervisor isolation to avoid those issues

New comment by binsquare in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

binsquare — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:21:47 +0000

I'm working on building a virtual machine that has the fast boot and portability of containers.

It's called a smol machine free and oss, https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm

New comment by binsquare in "Introducing Stage: Engineers deserve a better code review platform"

binsquare — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:25:20 +0000

I can see this growing to replace github

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:46:55 +0000

Yes, the exact use case I'm targeting.

New comment by binsquare in "KV Cache Compression 900000x Beyond TurboQuant and Per-Vector Shannon Limit"

binsquare — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 04:15:26 +0000

You're right, thanks for the correction

New comment by binsquare in "KV Cache Compression 900000x Beyond TurboQuant and Per-Vector Shannon Limit"

binsquare — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:17:34 +0000

Incredulous claims and unreviewed paper.

Attention really is all you need.

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:04:27 +0000

pretty light weight!

About the same size as the docker image to be honest. Join the discord and I'm happy to give you a white glove experience with onboarding :)

https://discord.gg/E5r8rEWY9J

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:16:29 +0000

Wsl2 runs a Linux vm so it definitely feasible and has the api's necessary.

It is on the roadmap, but frankly I haven't used Windows in a decade. I would love for a contributor to take that on as part of the free and open source spirit.

Sounds like it could be you? :)

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:03:08 +0000

Smolvm is free and open source, help me build the integration with proxmox - I'm not familiar with it

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:23:25 +0000

probably, don't see why not based on cursory glance.

will look into it

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:49:30 +0000

it was a tongue in cheek response :), completely fair take

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:47:48 +0000

lxc/lxd are ~container managers, the kernel is still shared like docker containers. It runs on linux & needs to run in a linux virtual machine on macOS.

smolvm is a virtual machine with the ergonomics of containers like packaging and distributing, kernel is not shared. You'd run containers inside of smolvm.

Also, smolvm runs ontop of both kvm for linux and apple's hypervisor for macOS. So it's cross platform.

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:43:36 +0000

Their idea is actually more akin to cloning and a more refined implementation is used in Lambda's snapstart: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/snapstart.html

So directionally yes. But it relies on kvm. I focus on portability i.e. cross platform for local macOS and linux, so that is not top of mind for me right now.

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:40:41 +0000

it has directory mounts - so access the same files: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm/blob/main/AGENTS.md?...

It also has file copy from host to inside the guest: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm/blob/70c97930dda5a92...

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:49:11 +0000

not enough and too much at the same time

New comment by binsquare in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

binsquare — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:34:28 +0000

uhh sort of different things.

smol machines is a virtual machine that has properties and ergonomics of containers. It's not an ai project, it's designed to run any software inside.

docker sandbox sounds like it's running ai stuff inside of a microvm.

So if you need to use a virtual machine - use smol machines.

If you need a to run coding agents, use smol machines still because agents are just software.