Hacker News: nullsmack

New comment by nullsmack in "Skymizer HTX301 – IP Licensable AI Accelerator Card with 384GB for 700B Models"

nullsmack — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 03:52:38 +0000

That's a lot of big promises, but is this going to be a real product? It seems too good to be.

New comment by nullsmack in "Show HN: Qwen3-4B with the AI writing tics trained out"

nullsmack — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 15:59:26 +0000

why are there multiplayer mouse cursors on that page

New comment by nullsmack in "QNX Demo Disk"

nullsmack — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:52:07 +0000

Wow now that's a throwback. I remember trying out one of the QNX floppy disks on my Pentium 2 and connecting to the internet with my 56k modem to try out the browser on it. The floppy disk was pretty impressive, fitting an OS and programs including a browser in 1.44mb.

New comment by nullsmack in "Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived"

nullsmack — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:49:18 +0000

I'm shocked in general at the lack of open source Rapid Application Development software.

New comment by nullsmack in "A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game"

nullsmack — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:26:31 +0000

oh wow, idk where I got it from but I had a zip file of this game back in the later 90s. It might've come from one of the shareware cds I bought back then.

New comment by nullsmack in "A 386 PC for Your RP2350"

nullsmack — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:37:47 +0000

I tried installing it on my 20mhz 486 IBM but the install never would finish even though the minimum specs listed 386. I always thought that was being too generous. I did use it on faster 486's at some point in school (I think 66mhz or faster?)

New comment by nullsmack in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

nullsmack — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:04:24 +0000

Even with AI pressure I'm willing to bet there's no need for prices to be this high. There has to be some price gouging/fixing going on. Same thing for nand and GPUs. Or else they're doing it to try to pressure people not to use local compute instead of the "cloud"

New comment by nullsmack in "Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word"

nullsmack — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:21:49 +0000

I kinda miss the various electronics hobbyist magazines that used to exist too. They didn't always show you everything, and I think some things had to be acquired via snail mail or bbs.. especially code was usually left out of the magazines I read.. but the schematics and articles were usually interesting.

I saw the tail-end of being able to get schematics for consumer devices. I miss that too. Even commercial devices used to be way more open than they are now. Nowadays even farmers have to fight drm to repair their tractors.

New comment by nullsmack in "Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk"

nullsmack — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:01:18 +0000

I had no idea this was still around.

It helped me buy a Battlefield 2 "Special Forces" expansion pack back in the day.

Well, I could've bought it either way but buying it didn't impact my normal income because I did Mechanical Turk in my free time enough to get it.

New comment by nullsmack in "Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For"

nullsmack — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:01:42 +0000

We need some kind of modern equivalent to the old proposed Digital Media Consumer's Rights Act but which protects people's rights to digital media they buy. These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this. We need a law that forces companies to treat digital files the same as a physical purchase. They can't take it away and have to allow people to resell and loan out as well. And in cases of online games where you can buy something, and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price. It should also ban EULA's and TOS from defining these things as only licenses even though they are structured as a purchase in a store.

I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)

New comment by nullsmack in "OpenAI misses revenue, is the AI bubble bursting?"

nullsmack — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:53:44 +0000

The Dot Com bubble burst and it didn't materially affect anything. Some of the things that failed then even came back later. Buying stuff online ate retail, sadly enough. Some dumb business plans went away, but the core of the commercial web never did. There's an idea, mostly from the anti-AI folks, that AI will magically "go away" once the bubble finally bursts and I hate to burst any more bubbles here but AI isn't going back in the bottle. For better or worse.

New comment by nullsmack in "Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline"

nullsmack — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:08:44 +0000

Qwen2.5 is quite old at this point. The new Qwen3.5 series is good, and it has a 27b dense model too. I have to watch it but I've gotten surprising results out of the 4b model even. They're also vision enabled and pretty good at ocr. These were released in just the last few weeks.

New comment by nullsmack in "Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026"

nullsmack — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:34:08 +0000

This sucks so much. I exclusively use messenger.com because it gives me a nice big window to view the chats in. Pictures and video work better there too. I don't want a tiny chat in the corner of the main website that I never use.

New comment by nullsmack in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

nullsmack — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:40:35 +0000

Depends on how long the hose is.

New comment by nullsmack in "The Rise of AI Denialism"

nullsmack — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:25:23 +0000

People act like AI is going to go away when an "AI bubble" pops.

What happened to the web when the dotcom bubble popped?

New comment by nullsmack in "1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises"

nullsmack — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:19:27 +0000

I know one area of computing that has dramatically risen in price in the past 10-15 years or so is GPUs. Cards that fit into midrange today sell for prices that would've been considered ultra-highend just a few gpu generations ago. Today's highend prices for just a graphics card are higher than I've paid for entire computers in the past. It's ridiculous.

New comment by nullsmack in "PicoIDE – An open IDE/ATAPI drive emulator"

nullsmack — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:20:37 +0000

I've been waiting on something like this for years, I'm surprised it took so long for someone to do it since there's been those gotek floppy drive emulators and things like bluescsi for forever.

This seriously just made my day.

New comment by nullsmack in "Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM"

nullsmack — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:37:55 +0000

They better watch the price because you can get a 128GB AMD Strix Halo mini pc for ~1700-2000 today, and those will be even cheaper a year from now. If they're trying to be competitive then it really needs to be more in that ballpark than the massively overpriced Nvidia range.

New comment by nullsmack in "Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM"

nullsmack — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:32:40 +0000

whoa, shoot this directly into my veins

New comment by nullsmack in "Qwen3 30B A3B Hits 13 token/s on 4xRaspberry Pi 5"

nullsmack — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 14:58:05 +0000

The mini pcs based on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) are probably pretty competitive with those. Depending on which one you buy it's $1700-2000 for one with 128GB RAM that is shared with the integrated Radeon 8060S graphics. There's videos on youtube talking about using this with the bigger LLM models.