Hacker News: littlestymaar

New comment by littlestymaar in "Returning to Zig after losing trust in Rust's governance"

littlestymaar — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:10:23 +0000

> Not at all the take I got, it was a specific, very corporate, section about ”say nothing bad about LLMs”

It was merely a “can we please not start a flame war on LLMs and focus on what is relevant to the Rust project itself”.

New comment by littlestymaar in "Returning to Zig after losing trust in Rust's governance"

littlestymaar — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:23:15 +0000

TL;DR; the author feels betrayed because the Rust leadership didn't take a strong stance against LLMs like the Zig team did.

IMHO LLMs are causing lots of issues in the software world, especially in the open source communities but I don't think Zig's blanket rejection of everything AI-related is a good thing.

New comment by littlestymaar in "Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply"

littlestymaar — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 21:09:01 +0000

Back in 2018 it was already running on M5 Hosting, but still on a single server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041

(And honestly I don't see why it would have changed given that the hardware has been getting faster in the meantime).

New comment by littlestymaar in "Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply"

littlestymaar — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 21:04:37 +0000

> Does dang run HN on a single server?

I don't think Dang is responsible of that part, but I may be wrong.

HN used to run on a single server (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041), and I don't see why that would have changed given that the hardware keeps getting better.

> Why does HN use Algolia for search

Algolia is a YC company, it's pretty much free marketing for their asset.

> That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?

You don't need to run it for 24 hours a day, nor do you need it to be the only process running on your machine.

Jitsi is a bit heavy for a phone, but easily fits on an old M1 macbook/mac mini, whose idle power consumption is well below 10W (idle power consumption is what matters, since your machine isn't going to be handling calls all the time). If you shut it down at night, you're almost good. And for any additional service you serve from the machine, you reduce the cost per service further.

Modern computers are fast, and fascinatingly energy efficient.

New comment by littlestymaar in "Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply"

littlestymaar — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:40:08 +0000

> Even you use HN.

A website that runs on an infra that could sit in a cupboard under the stairs serving hundreds of thousands of users with very small loading time.

> My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house

> (where I pay $0.35/kWh).

Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that.

New comment by littlestymaar in "Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada"

littlestymaar — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:45:50 +0000

Linen is the most underappreciated fabric. It's cool in both ways. I don't understand why so few people wear linen in summer.

New comment by littlestymaar in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

littlestymaar — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:20:30 +0000

> HTML in its recent iterations made it very clear to try and separate itself from layout concerns.

That's what I'm saying, it's a general design principle for new developments, but that's it. (And I don't think that's a good one)

> It really isn't about the layout. It got abused for layout

It wasn't abused for layout, it was all about layout in the first place. If it was about data it would never have been possible to “abuse” it for layout, because an heterogeneous table with nested sub tables makes no sense from a “data” point of view. The fact that this was supported from the beginning shows what it was built for.

> but ideally the semantic meanings are useful. I have seen cases where "" emphasizes it by doing something other than bold for example

But I agree with that. I'm not saying we shouldn't have semantics elements in HTML, I'm saying that pretending that HTML “is only about data” is silly in a world were something like 80% of HTML tags in web apps are

and that are here only for layout purpose.

New comment by littlestymaar in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

littlestymaar — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:20:26 +0000

> Yes, really. Even
is used to represent the data, not the layout
Nope. It's a html tag to lay out data in a table form!
> but it's probably the only element that does such a thing.
, , all come with an associated layout implication. But the worst offender are
and , which carry zero semantic meaning and just means “I'm a block element” and “I'm an inline element”, those are pure layout element. In fact are the ones I'm using as template for my demand of or elements.
And html isn't just tags, it's tags and attributes on these tags, and things like hidden, height or width are indisputably related to layout and not to data.
The idea of HTML as a pure semantic layer with no layout consideration may be a general design philosophy for the language, but that's by no way a faithful description of what HTML actually is in practice. And pretending it is, isn't helping.

New comment by littlestymaar in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

littlestymaar — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:51:16 +0000

TIL thx!

New comment by littlestymaar in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

littlestymaar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:34:16 +0000

For that to work I would need to define a custom component from JavaScript, wouldn't I? (and I thought custom components had to contain an hyphen in there name, is that wrong?)

New comment by littlestymaar in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

littlestymaar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:32:50 +0000

Not really. This would not be different to
and associated elements, which are arguably better than a div soup.

New comment by littlestymaar in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

littlestymaar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:35:29 +0000

GP said:
> completely orthogonal and swappable css.
You're talking about having a single CSS and HTML page for multiple layouts, there aren't the same thing at all.

New comment by littlestymaar in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

littlestymaar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:32:40 +0000

> so there often aren't semantic HTML tags that would make sense.
Pet peeve of mine: there should really be `` and `` elements, as well as `` (flex item) and `` (grid item) for the child element instead of relying on a div soup with CSS attributes everywhere.

New comment by littlestymaar in "Organic foods are not healthier or pesticide free"

littlestymaar — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:33:37 +0000

LD50 is a very poor measurement for this kind of stuff though, there are plenty of stuff that can severely harm you on the long term at relatively low doses but will never realistically kill you in the short term no matter how high the dose (asbestos fibers for instance). Many carcinogenic or reprotoxic stuff are like that.

New comment by littlestymaar in "Organic foods are not healthier or pesticide free"

littlestymaar — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:22:30 +0000

Maybe it's just because reducing treatment makes produces more fragile, which means by buying organic you end up eating fresher stuff just because it couldn't withstand the logistic that heavily treated food endure.

New comment by littlestymaar in "Organic foods are not healthier or pesticide free"

littlestymaar — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:20:10 +0000

The problem is that there's a part that's true (the “organic” label is based in part on “appeal to nature”, allowing certain stuff on the basis that it is natural, which truly isn't a great way of drawing the limit).
So of course, the (often paid) promoters of “YOLO agriculture” will use that as an argument, putting under the rug that the industry they defend is doing bullshit with people's health and the environment.
There ought to be a middle ground, but unfortunately we live in a permanent culture war so there cannot be reasonable discussion about anything, really.

New comment by littlestymaar in "UK sovereign LLM inference"

littlestymaar — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:27:42 +0000

It's still limited, but the shift has been dramatic over the past few month alone. It's hard to tell what the situation will look like in a few years. Unless the midterms are a democrats landslide (which the GOP has tried to prevent as much as possible with gerrymandering) I don't see the trend stopping anytime soon.

New comment by littlestymaar in "Orthrus-Qwen3: up to 7.8×tokens/forward on Qwen3, identical output distribution"

littlestymaar — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:52:40 +0000

> Does this translate into a similar reduction in compute?
No, quite the opposite actually. Like with speculative decoding this model will compute more tokens and discard the invalid ones.
> What's the catch?
LLMs[1] are limited by memory latency and not by compute[2]: because they process tokens one at a time, you spend more time loading and unloading the weights on the GPU registers from VRAM than waiting for compute to happen. Techniques like these allow to process multiple tokens in parallel instead of one by one, and as such exploit better the compute of your graphic card. They do so by predicting which tokens are likely to occur and then verifying that the guess was correct.
For instance if the previous token is “hello”.
A regular autoregressive LLM will compute:
“hello” => “! ”,
then “hello! ” => “how ”,
“hello! how ” => “are ”,
“hello! how are ” => “you”.
and finally “hello! how are you” => “?”
One at a time. Loading and unloading every weights 5 times from the GPU memory to its compute units.
With speculative decoding (I'd say this one isn't strictly speculative decoding, but it's a variant of the same principle), you have something that guesses that the whole sentence is going to be “how are you today?”, so the LLM can generate
“hello” => “! ”,
“hello! ” => “how ”,
“hello! how ” => “are ”,
“hello! how are ” => “you”.
“hello! how are you” => “?”
“hello! how are you today” => “?”
In parallel. So each weight would have been loaded only once from the VRAM instead of 5.
The last token will be discarded though, as the prefix “how are you today” doesn't match what has actually been generated. So in that particular example, you'd have gotten your 5 tokens 5 times faster than with pure autoregressive inference, but at the expense of a 6th token being generated and discarded immediately. So 5 times more token throughtput, but 20% compute cost increase per token.
[1]: autoregressive LLMs, that is. Which are the ones everybody uses because they are the most performant.
[2]: at least when run at low batch size, on your own computer for your personal use. On a datacenter, with many concurrent users, GPUs are actually compute-bound.

New comment by littlestymaar in "Orthrus-Qwen3: up to 7.8×tokens/forward on Qwen3, identical output distribution"

littlestymaar — Sat, 16 May 2026 07:46:17 +0000

So, it's D-Flash but at each transformer layer and share the KV cache of the original model? Very smart!

New comment by littlestymaar in "UK sovereign LLM inference"

littlestymaar — Fri, 15 May 2026 11:13:18 +0000

US tech is currently being weaponized against the ICC and its member judges in Europe[1], and the US is threatening to annex Greenland, as a result all (former) US allies are scrambling to get rid of their strategic dependency.
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...