<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: jwatte</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jwatte</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:59:48 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=jwatte" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hard real time is a thing in some systems.
Also, the current approaches might have 85% accuracy -- if the LLM can deliver 90% accuracy while being "less exact" that's still a win!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:24:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255434</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255434</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255434</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Humans do it with access to the register-level data sheets, which are only available under NDA, and usually with access to a logic analyzer for debugging.<p>Usually, the problem with developing a driver isn't "writing the code," it's "finding documentation for what the code should do."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:09:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131501</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131501</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131501</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Tell me you've never developed a driver, without telling me you've never developed a driver.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:07:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131486</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131486</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131486</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Linux kernel devs tried Rust in the kernel -- you won't BELIEVE the reaction!"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:19:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219627</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219627</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219627</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Or run a VM in Windows? Hyper-V is pretty decent for many use cases.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2025 23:22:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894284</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894284</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894284</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ctrl-Z suspends the program in most UNIX shells. ("fg" to resume)<p>Ctrl-S may or may not end up stopping the program, depending on how much it's printing, and how much output buffering there is before it blocks on writing more.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2025 23:21:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894275</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894275</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894275</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>All my shell RCs turn off xon/xoff -- that's a relic from the PDP-11 days we can all do without.
Windows has the Scroll Lock button that's supposed to do this if you need it, but typically, just selecting a character in a terminal emulator will stop the scroll while still buffering the output.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2025 23:20:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894269</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894269</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894269</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Poker Tournament for LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think this analysis matches the underlying implementation.<p>The width of the models is typically wide enough to "explore" many possible actions, score them, and let the sampler pick the next action based on the weights. (Whether a given trained parameter set will be any good at it, is a different question.)<p>The number of attention heads for the context is similarly quite high.<p>And, as a matter of mechanics, the core neuron formulation (dot product input and a non-linearity) excels at working with ranges.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2025 15:38:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734279</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734279</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734279</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Poker Tournament for LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Tool using LLMs can easily be given a tool to sample whatever distribution you want. The trick is to proompt them when to invoke the tool, and correctly use its output.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2025 15:33:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734214</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734214</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734214</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Huh? It sounds to me like this is arguing one should be OK with /r/conservative doing it (and joining up, even) but then not OK that other subs do it, too.
That doesn't really pass the sniff test, so maybe I'm missing something.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Oct 2025 22:48:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45533834</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45533834</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45533834</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We had it, it was called "Aspie," but somehow that wasn't good enough.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 15:01:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45414696</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45414696</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45414696</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Luau – Fast, small, safe, gradually typed scripting language derived from Lua"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also, why would you need to compile it more than the one initial time?
Are you actually making changes to Luau itself, rather than just using it?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Sep 2025 21:45:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45295406</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45295406</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45295406</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Perfect! I will make sure to follow your instructions precisely.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Aug 2025 17:36:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891370</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891370</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891370</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Philz Coffee close to closing deal to sell to private equity firm for $145M"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Voting rights in founder-led public companies, and liquidation preference rights in private investments, are very different things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 Aug 2025 21:15:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762595</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762595</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762595</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Philz Coffee close to closing deal to sell to private equity firm for $145M"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Because someone who might invest some money, maybe wouldn't invest that money if they didn't get the preferred class protections?<p>This is similar to how different credit risks get assigned different interest rates.<p>Companies failing (or close enough to failing that they restructure and wipe out common) is not uncommon in start-ups. If you want a more or less sure thing, you'll have to work at a more or less sure employer, and the risk/reward will be different.<p>Now, whether those who exercised their Philz options and paid for the shares, were really aware in what they were doing -- I don't know! But there doesn't seem to be anything explicitly sinister about the way this was set up, or went down -- simply, the business didn't do well enough. Which is too bad, because I think their coffee is actually good.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 Aug 2025 21:14:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762587</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762587</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762587</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> they force their users to appraise their offering in terms of actual value offered<p>That's a good thing, right?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2025 17:27:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44726076</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44726076</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44726076</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Python is still a 10x or more performance sacrifice for anything that's actually CPU throughput limited.
Or, alternatively, your VM hosting cost will be 10x larger on Python, than something top of the line, if your workload is CPU throughput limited.
Whether you're actually CPU limited, and whether VM hosting costs is your largest cost, is a totally different question :-)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:13:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483665</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483665</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483665</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you're necessarily going to go with Lua (not recommended, IMHO) you should at least try luau.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:11:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483650</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483650</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483650</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "Websites are tracking you via browser fingerprinting"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a second side of this story, that nobody ever really talks about, because the cost is so diffuse.
There are real, legit, uses for fingerprinting.
One of the more common ones is anti-fraud for payments, as well as anti-abuse for social sites.
I'm sure you've been to forums or other social sites where ban evading trolls, astroturfers, card checkers, and the like cause constant pain for both legitimate users and site operators.
When I ran a large site with social interactions and payments/credits, I got deep insights into all the abusers who try to bilk the system for whatever they can.
Because fingerprinting is so hard, bad users have an easy time to return with a zillion sock puppet accounts.
As a normal user, my estimation is that I suffer more from the actions of those bad users who poison the well, than I would suffer from an internet that made everyone non-anonymous.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2025 23:01:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44323317</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44323317</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44323317</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jwatte in "GCP Outage"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Let's say a typical base service (network attached RAM or whatever) has 99.99% reliability.
If you have a dependency on 100 of those, you're suddenly closer to 99% reliability.
So you switch to higher-level dependencies, and only have 10 dependencies, for a 99.9% reliability.
But! It turns out, those dependencies each have dependencies, so they're really already more like 99.9% at best, and you're back at 99% reliability.<p>"good enough" is, indeed, just good enough to make it not worthwhile to rip out all the upstreams and roll your own everything from scratch, because the cost of the occasional outages is much lower than the cost of reinventing every single wheel, nut, bolt, axle, bearing, and grease formulation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:30:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262853</link><dc:creator>jwatte</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262853</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262853</guid></item></channel></rss>