Hacker News: surround

New comment by surround in "Minecraft Java raises recommended memory to 16GB ahead of Vulkan transition"

surround — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:19:04 +0000

I highly recommend using the open source Sodium and Lithium mods to improve performance. And I hope you're not still using OptiFine!

https://github.com/CaffeineMC/sodium

https://github.com/CaffeineMC/lithium

New comment by surround in "Show HN: Optimize and serve models with Fable quality at half the cost"

surround — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:26:51 +0000

The title is misleading. This is model routing, not distillation.

New comment by surround in "An old patent inspired the new "Y-zipper", a three-sided fastener"

surround — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:52:01 +0000

Poles. The video shows a tent they set up just by zipping up the y zipper.

New comment by surround in "Which streaming service was that on again"

surround — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:32:06 +0000

Netflix never had everything. I seem to remember watching a skit 10 ish years ago that joked that Netflix only had bad movies.

The ads are what get me.

New comment by surround in "Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3"

surround — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 05:58:09 +0000

Minecraft gained popularity super fast in its early days, probably because it was a free-to-play game that worked in the browser (thanks to Java). Notch had no reputation or marketing at the time.

New comment by surround in "Rewriting Bun in Rust"

surround — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:10:20 +0000

It seems that Deno made the right decision by choosing Rust from the get-go.

New comment by surround in "GPT‑Live"

surround — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:19:06 +0000

How does the voice model delegate requests to GPT-5.5? Can the voice model generate text?

New comment by surround in "Great Salt Lake Tracker"

surround — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:11:44 +0000

If you look at a satellite image of the Great Salt Lake [1], it looks like there's a digital seam/glitch between the north and the south half of the lake. In reality, a railroad was built through the middle of the lake in 1904, separating the water. The salinity of the north half has since become toxic to all organisms except some algae and cyanobacteria.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1985997,-112.4903027,201762m...

New comment by surround in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

surround — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:04:23 +0000

I'm not sure what you're referring to. If corn is replaced with solar panels that doesn't solve the fact that there will still be a ton of cars that demand ethanol-infused gasoline.

New comment by surround in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

surround — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:09:50 +0000

Its more efficient energy-wise, but isn't the issue that energy from solar panels can't power gas cars?

New comment by surround in "Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock"

surround — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:23:52 +0000

Fair enough. Though they certainly could still break in if the laptop isn't encrypted, so this tool is only useful when combined with disk encryption.

New comment by surround in "Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock"

surround — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:35:38 +0000

How do you define "state-level actor?" Police departments certainly have access to state and federal forensic resources to access unencrypted data in memory.

New comment by surround in "Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock"

surround — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:19:08 +0000

> in sensitive situations, law enforcement and border agents in many countries can compel a biometric unlock in ways they cannot with a password.

If the threat model includes state-level actors, then disabling biometrics won't prevent data from being retrieved from physical memory. It would probably be wiser to enable disk encryption and have a panic button that powers down/hibernates the computer so that no unencrypted data remains on RAM.

The website says shutdown "takes time" and "kills your session" but a hibernation button would take effect just as fast and would preserve the session.

New comment by surround in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

surround — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:18:20 +0000

It seems like Google's policy is unconcerned with the intent of the practice. If a website JS redirect ruins the user experience by breaking the back button, it will be demoted in search results. It doesn't matter whether or not the redirect was meant to be deceptive or malicious, websites shouldn't be ruining the user experience.

New comment by surround in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

surround — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:46:51 +0000

It seems Sam Altman has the same suspicion, based upon his response:

> There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me.

https://blog.samaltman.com/2279512

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921

New comment by surround in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

surround — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:20:09 +0000

> There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me.

For context his blog post seems to be a response to this deep-dive New Yorker article:

"Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135

New comment by surround in "Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead"

surround — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:53:03 +0000

Yes, DMCA made the mere act of breaking DRM illegal, even if what you do with the media is legal.

New comment by surround in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

surround — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:17:32 +0000

That's what the comment I was originally replying to was saying.

New comment by surround in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

surround — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:46:45 +0000

Try asking an LLM a question like "H o w T o P r o g r a m I n R u s t ?" - each letter, separated by spaces, will be its own token, and the model will understand just fine. The issue is that computational cost scales quadratically with the number of tokens, so processing "h e l l o" is much more expensive than "hello". "hello" has meaning, "h" has no meaning by itself. The model has to waste a lot of computation forming words from the letters.

Our brains also process text entire words at a time, not letter-by-letter. The difference is that our brains are much more flexible than a tokenizer, and we can easily switch to letter-by-letter reading when needed, such as when we encounter an unfamiliar word.

New comment by surround in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

surround — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:35:03 +0000

But for lisp, a more complex solution is needed. It's easy for a human lisp programmer to keep track of which closing parentheses corresponds to which opening parentheses because the editor highlights parentheses pairs as they are typed. How can we give an LLM that kind of feedback as it generates code?