Hacker News: rando1234

New comment by rando1234 in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

rando1234 — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:31:16 +0000

The point in the article that 'It's not about optimisations' really got my attention. I've previously done some work where we wrote an analysis pass under the assumption that it executed last in the transformation pipeline and this was needed for correctness. The assumption was that since no further optimisations happened it was safe. Now I'm not so sure...

New comment by rando1234 in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

rando1234 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:06:49 +0000

I recall seeing some pretty damning reports from a security pentester that was able to escape from a container on Azure and found the management controller for the service was years old with known critical unpatched vulnerabilities. Always been a bit sceptical of them since then

New comment by rando1234 in "The Resolv hack: How one compromised key printed $23M"

rando1234 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:32:36 +0000

Where did the 4.8% number come from? Is it based on the validator stake? How does that compare to the number required to fork Bitcoin as a function of it's supply?

New comment by rando1234 in "Language model teams as distributed systems"

rando1234 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:28:35 +0000

Where we've had some success is with heterogeneous agents with some cheap quantised/local models performing certain tasks extremely cheaply that are then overseen or managed by a more expensive model.

New comment by rando1234 in "Language model teams as distributed systems"

rando1234 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:09:46 +0000

Struggling to find anything interesting or non-obvious about this article. You give a bunch of LLMs various parallelizable task and some models manage to do it well but others don't. No insights as to why. As someone with a distributed systems background the supposed 'insights' from distributed computing are almost trivial.

New comment by rando1234 in "What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)"

rando1234 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:59:46 +0000

Interesting perspective re CXL synchronous API. Wouldn't things like OOO execution and speculation help with that? And anyway the latency is supposed to be comparable to NUMA latency, is that really such a deal breaker?

New comment by rando1234 in "Can I run AI locally?"

rando1234 — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 13:46:35 +0000

On a related question, I'm in the market to buy a new laptop for development and want to get something with good support for local models. What is a good recommendation in terms of GPU support etc? I currently have a Dell XPS 13. Should I just get a MacBook? Or are there good non-Mac options?

New comment by rando1234 in "The Isolation Trap: Erlang"

rando1234 — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 13:06:42 +0000

I actually disagree, thought it read reasonably well and didn't feel LLMy at all.

New comment by rando1234 in "A decade of Docker containers"

rando1234 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:21:52 +0000

Sure - I was just referring to the use of a Vagrantfile to configure the VM. The start of the article seemed to be pushing the Dockerfile itself as a big innovation.

New comment by rando1234 in "A decade of Docker containers"

rando1234 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:21:55 +0000

Didn't Vagrant/Vagrantfiles precede Docker? Unclear why that would be the key to its success if so.

New comment by rando1234 in "Triplet Superconductor"

rando1234 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:30:17 +0000

You should read them as publicity to convince stupid politicians to continue to fund basic research when they are more inclined to go for tax cuts for billionaires. Annoying, but a necessary evil.

New comment by rando1234 in "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence"

rando1234 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 09:33:25 +0000

Has this been peer-reviewed?

New comment by rando1234 in "Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester"

rando1234 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:45:54 +0000

You can pay proton anonymously according to some other comments here...

New comment by rando1234 in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

rando1234 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:45:26 +0000

Bombs for peace.

New comment by rando1234 in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

rando1234 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:45:00 +0000

My point is that any Americans claiming moral legitimacy for these actions due to human rights considerations should give us all a break.

And are you really claiming the CIA was not involved in instigating a coup to bring in the Shah?

New comment by rando1234 in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

rando1234 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:46:40 +0000

Don't know why you are being down voted. I mean Iran had a democracy that was toppled by the CIA when they tried to nationalise their resources in favour of a puppet dictator. If the US cared so much about human rights why not go invade Saudi Arabia.

New comment by rando1234 in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

rando1234 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:38:17 +0000

So I suppose you'll be attacking Saudi Arabia after this if you're so worried about humanitarian conditions?