<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: rablackburn</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rablackburn</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 08 Nov 2026 20:30:46 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=rablackburn" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "In Hilbert space, all things are quantumly possible"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Finally, a well-formed question to which the answer "42 (times)" is a possible solution.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Oct 2026 03:30:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50175736</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50175736</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50175736</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Good type against all odds"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What a lovely example to end on.<p>Personally, I (guiltily) love using ol'fashioned contractions.
I wish it were more normalised.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Oct 2026 03:28:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50175726</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50175726</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50175726</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Pi 1.0"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I'm curious to see what you can do on an 8GB consumer GPU these days<p>Running smaller 4B-7B models entirely on the GPU VRAM will get you fast inference, but you will need to scope and define the tasks well. eg, using it the model as a classifier and just feeding it from a queue.<p>The best performing "agent"-like model to plug into a harness that I have found so far has been Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (mixture of experts) model as I can park most of it in system RAM and CPU, while the VRAM holds the attention/shared weights.<p>It's definitely workable as a local AI homelab. But expect homelab levels of tuning/fiddling with it.<p>With the improved support for AMD GPUs I'm finally considering getting a modern 16GB card (and maybe a second one in a few years assuming prices come down)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:16:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49928501</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49928501</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49928501</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "This Month in Ladybird – August 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It doesn't have to chase it down, just keep plodding along implementing the new standards as they become accepted.<p>Google likes to make up its own "standards" and push them out on chrome, but Safari tends to be the late-comer to supporting impactful standards, not Firefox.<p>Do you have a particular use-case where Firefox's lack of support blocks you?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 01:58:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49604873</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49604873</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49604873</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "This Month in Ladybird – August 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Safari has much, much better compatibility, but even then this browser is hated for it's quirks<p>I think this meme has almost run its course.<p>Funnily enough I just had to fix a Safari layout quirk yesterday (for iOS 16 & 17 devices only). I was excited to pick it up because it had been _so long_ since I had to deal with a CSS-related browser incompatibility. I was nostalgic :')<p>I raced Claude to fix it. I knew which CSS had the issue, but I needed to set up an iOS simulator to verify my fix. So I had to download xcode, which download 10GB of data for a current simulator and Apple's embedded code-assist model. Then another 8GB for the iOS 16 simulator.<p>Claude took about 5min to find the right CSS file and then got stuck at the same point as me: needing to simulate it to verify. It just got the old webkit binaries and hacked together its own minimal browserstack clone.<p>It finished before me because of those downloads, but it only found half the fix. So... I won!<p>Except...I made a typo (`no-wrap` instead of `nowrap`) and had to do a fixup commit.<p>So I guess we'll call it a draw :(</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 01:52:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49604842</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49604842</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49604842</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.<p>The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 02:17:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458672</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458672</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458672</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Low-Tech Ceramic Water Filter"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They probably could have loaded faster if they shipped less than 80mb(!) for a single page</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:35:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49327180</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49327180</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49327180</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The future set of people who once would have "work(ed) for free to design you a state-of-the-art kernel"? If the tail is long enough passionate hobbyists will do it because they love it...eventually.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 08:31:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308837</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308837</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308837</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> but way, way better at creative writing than Qwen and even better than Gemma 4 26 and 31b.<p>I suspect this is the only use-case I would consider...and I don't really have a use-case for "creative writing" that I would delegate to an LLM. I suppose for dialogue generation in games?<p>But yes, hard agree. Why on Earth would you ever want to write code with a model that is supposedly "jailbroken"? So it can put great backdoors into everything it touches? Pass.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:40:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252737</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252737</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252737</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> For contrast, the Newcomen steam engine (widely considered the first commercially useful engine) was used for over 60 years before the next major improvements. Now, 300 years later, we’re still finding ways to significantly improve heat engines.<p>Off-topic, but I stumbled upon the first Newcomen engine imported into Australia in a museum in Sydney and I was unexpectedly charmed (not an Engine Guy). It's large, but nothing like the awe of "mega-engineering", it's crude, but it clearly has such amazing utility (when compared to a reality without it) and it changed the world</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:37:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252709</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252709</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252709</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Underwater oxygen loss threatens earth's stability, researchers warn"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Nuclear weapons (so far)?<p>Banning CFCs perhaps?<p>If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:00:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091158</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091158</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091158</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Show HN: Echo – Fable-level results at 1/3 the cost using open-weight models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I daresay it's because the assistant training corpus is heavily biased towards one-shot solution answers.<p>Because the correct response to that query is "I have no idea -- you will need to provide more information"<p>and LLM Agents suck at that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:18:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49031185</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49031185</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49031185</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "It's a shame what's happened to radio"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Local community is probably irreparably damaged. But I was a kid with niche interests and I didn't start to find my people until the Internet entered my life in 1989.<p>Sounds like you should start listening to some community radio stations.
They don't even have to be your local community, I promise that somewhere in your timezone there is a community radio station broadcasting something you want to listen to.<p>Try our local one in Brisbane (where Bluey is from) that has been running since 1975 and started as a university student protest station: <a href="https://4zzz.org.au" rel="nofollow">https://4zzz.org.au</a><p>You might not like the show you hear when you click, but look at their catalogue of shows and you'll find something.<p>Community can always be rebuilt.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:36:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49017680</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49017680</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49017680</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Why Vanilla JavaScript"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How many companies have 1000 frontend developers?<p>Do they need 1000 frontend developers?<p>Aside from the Giants maybe some consultancies or hire-firms have that many? But they use whatever the client uses. If you're not in the business of selling frontend development services then a big part of your competitive advantage is _being able_ to make technology choices that are more-optimal than the labor market's lowest-common-denominator slurry.<p>Between JS/ECMAscript being abandonware for a decade and CSS' historical immaturity (cross-browser layout, custom properties, more pseudoclasses, etc) the Web was more of a wild west "whatever you we can cobble together" place. So of course we built an entire toolchain ecosystem for all the cool new tools we would reinvent from scratch.<p>but Things Are Pretty Good these days. We even have the world's only fully system portable assembly language: WASM! And the browser's Web APIs are becoming something like the missing Standard Library (shoutout to Deno).<p>The author's point seems to be that we are past a tipping point where we need all that additional complexity. You don't _need_ a separate system of reactivity these days, you can write a (closer to pre-hooks React, even!) React-style component library with Web Components now.<p>Personally I would need for Type Annotations to be a fully supported part of the spec before I made the point to "use the platform" professionally. Until some market force causes the core web technologies to truly fork my skills are useful for life. It's like a pale shadow of how UNIX users must feel :')</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:22:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888610</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888610</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888610</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints.<p>Which is why dieting and quitting smoking are famously easy things to do! ;)<p>There's something to be said for the "scrappyness" of resource limitations inflicted upon you when solving some problem. A sense of Triumph against the Universe itself is a nice pay-off</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:51:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48857018</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48857018</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48857018</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in ".gitignore Isn't the only way to ignore files in Git"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>and in today's world of constant supply-chain attacks, you do probably _do_ need it!<p>We've adapted:
- our CI and git hooks so that our dependency or .lock files are visible when they change, and error if they change inconsistently
- and our team procedures to confine dependency updates to dedicated commits<p>The idea being that when you see one of those "messy" .lock file changes...you were expecting it. If you see one and are annoyed by it (like OP) that's actually a waving red flag that a dependency changed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:13:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48594441</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48594441</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48594441</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Tabs vs spaces don't matter they are equivalent.<p>Just to nitpick (because what else is this thread about? :))<p>They aren't equivalent! Tabs carry more semantic information than spaces. 1 Tab character == 1 Level of nesting<p>Space-based systems _can_ provide the equivalent semantic information if they are 100% consistent.<p>...but part of the argument in favor of spaces is that they allow an escape hatch of the strict indentation in order to allow pleasing visual alignments.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:48:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421479</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421479</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421479</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Everything old is new again. This is basically the debate over IRC Bouncers all over again.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 07:50:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48305943</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48305943</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48305943</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Show HN: Hallucinate – Massively Multiplayer Online Rave"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>if you type "I use Arch btw" you'll be unshadowbanned</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 07:36:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48305850</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48305850</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48305850</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rablackburn in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Literally implemented PR guards today to prevent the team merging any dependencies that didn’t have explicit versions pinned (and that matched the resolution in the lock file).<p>People lamented semver not being trustable but that ship sailed a long time ago, and supply chain attacks are going to get worse before they get better.<p>Our team is pretty minimal when it comes to enforced hooks (everyone has their own workflow) but no one could come up with an objection to this one.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 05:09:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058813</link><dc:creator>rablackburn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058813</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058813</guid></item></channel></rss>