maartenh (u/maartenh)

maartenh commented on Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use github.com/microsoft/fara... · Posted by u/maxloh

maartenh · 22 days ago

How much VRAM would this require, if I would want to run this locally?

I bought a 12GB Nvidia card a year ago. In general I'm having a hard time to find the actual required hardware specs for any self hosted AI model. Any tips/suggestions/recommended resources for that?

maartenh commented on Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware? · Posted by u/jwithington

Agingcoder · 2 months ago

The increase is massive ( I’ve heard x5 over existing contracts in some places )

maartenh · 2 months ago

Ah, 5x? At $WORK, the low code tool vendor that is used to build the monolith (and that of our sister company) is bought by a private equity firm. Our sister company will face a 7x increase. Another fun thing is that the license is based on a percentage of licensing cost to their customers.

Their game is clearly to squeeze very hard for a few years, and then deprecate the product. I can't imagine that there are companies that are fine with such price hikes.

maartenh commented on Test Postgres in Python Like SQLite github.com/wey-gu/py-pgli... · Posted by u/wey-gu

hardwaresofton · 6 months ago

Ding ding ding. Testcontainers is a fanatstic way to write the most important tests (arguably) for your app. Don't test E2E with a mock, just use a real database.

If that feels hard to you (to set up your app pointing to another DB, run a single E2E-testable part of your app with it's own DB connection, etc), fix that.

maartenh · 6 months ago

Yep. I do create fresh db's from a fixture db using postgres's ability to create a database from a template. Very quick, always correct.

maartenh commented on Google Fiber is coming to Las Vegas fiber.googleblog.com/2025... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

reassembled · a year ago

A couple of years ago I had my 6Mbps ATT DSL reduced down to less than 1Mbps, to the point of being absolutely useless. I had no forewarning or notice that my service had been compromised. Every attempt to obtain support from ATT was met with attempts to get me to switch to cellular internet.

Fortunately I was able to get accepted into the StarLink early access around that time and managed to cancel the DSL. Even though ATT clearly did not want my business anymore, they still made sure I had to jump through countless hoops to finally disconnect and terminate billing. I had to sit on the phone for a couple of hours, being transferred between phone reps and managers until I finally got one person with the authority to shut my account down.

maartenh · a year ago

Wow. In the EU, canceling subscriptions must be as easy as signing up for them by law.

My personal longest issue with ISP's was when the software config once went wrong in their side, took me a month and allmost daily phone calls until I got to 4th line support that was an actual techie who fixed it in 10 minutes.

maartenh commented on Starlark Programming Language starlark-lang.org/... · Posted by u/laurentlb

Rochus · a year ago

It's a rather traditional type system; the specification is here: http://software.rochus-keller.ch/busy_spec.html. The main advantage are the combination of modularization, types and formal declarations, so that if you make a change in a large build (such as my https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt or https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanCreator systems) incompatibilites are immediately found by the compiler. Without these features you can never be sure whether all effects were checked.

maartenh · a year ago

Which tool did you use to create that busy_spec.html file? They remind me of Engelbart's blue numbering system for documents, if I remember the name correctly.

maartenh commented on A Rust Take on Bsdiff github.com/divvun/bidiff... · Posted by u/ocean_moist

maartenh · a year ago

Very nice! I talked (~10y ago) at a Nix meetup to a company that did over the air updates of bicycle shed usage signs in NL that ran on embedded linux systems. One of their bigger challenges was that their downlink quota was very limited. I suggested them to peek at bsdiff, not sure if they ever got to it (or maybe would have gotten a better downlink ;))

I might give this idea another go myself with this nice rust library. With some heuristics one could partition the recursive closure of dependencies in a way optimizes for reuse (e.g. try to compute shared subtrees). Probably more efficient than a random tar of e.g. the entire root file system of a buildroot android system.

maartenh commented on Ask HN: Why does current interest in retro computing focus on the early 80s? · Posted by u/amichail

maartenh · a year ago

IMHO the constraints of these systems make them still quite fun to code for, just like solving sudoku puzzles can be fun.

I found about this [1] amazing live coding session by lftkyro on YouTube showing how to build a live music pattern editor on the C64.

[1] https://youtu.be/ly5BhGOt2vE?si=1EzOnELSb5fd-dqA

maartenh commented on Show HN: Shorebird 1.0, Flutter Code Push github.com/shorebirdtech/... · Posted by u/eseidel

maartenh · 2 years ago

TIL that self-updating mobile apps are a thing. It is quite surprising to me that the app store gatekeepers don't force all app changes through their vetting process! Has this always been the case, or is this a new development?

maartenh commented on Show HN: Wirequery – Full-stack session replay and more github.com/wirequery/wire... · Posted by u/wnederhof

maartenh · 2 years ago

Seems interesting. I can't decipher from the docs nor demo if this is about debugging _live_ behavior of the systems under observation, (e.g. it only captures stuff for which there are queries), or if it actually stores all your requests and responses in a psql db.

maartenh commented on Why Isn't Taxpayer-Funded U.S. Broadband Mapping Data Owned by the Public? techdirt.com/2024/02/26/w... · Posted by u/rntn

yellowbkpk · 2 years ago

It boils down to the fact that the United States does not have (public domain) knowledge of every address in the country.

The USPS knows about deliverable addresses but won't give that information to the federal government because then it'd be public domain and they would lose several of their primary data moats (Zipcodes, addresses, delivery routes, for example). The Census has very complete knowledge of every address, but won't give it up because it's illegal (see Title 13 of the US Code). There is an ongoing attempt by the DOT to collect a National Address Database (https://www.transportation.gov/gis/national-address-database) by collecting information from the address assigning authorities (usually county governments), but it's incomplete and unlikely to ever be complete because of holdout/underfunded local governments.

There are several address datasets that are private (Google has a fairly complete one, FedEx/UPS probably have the most complete, TomTom, CostQuest, etc.). I started https://openaddresses.io/ to try and collect them (NAD is based off this idea) into an open-licensed dataset.

The broadband companies have records that say "this address is connected to this network, which could theoretically have this service level", but (a) they won't/can't tell you where they think the address is and (b) won't spend the time to match their address string format with the government's address because both are private data.

Finally, without the address -> location data, even if we could get broadband providers to tell us what service is available at each address, we couldn't put that service level on a map because we don't know where the address is.

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The Markup published some work in 2022 where they used OpenAddresses to use ISP's own tools to gather per-address service offerings and put them on a map. This is what the FCC's broadband map should be doing, but can't for the above (and political) reasons: https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2022/10/19/how-we-uncov...

maartenh · 2 years ago

Wow, that's quite different from the Netherlands. Here, we have the BAG, Basis Administratie Gebouwen (Base Administration Buildings).

Muniplicities are the data owners, but data is also collated nationally.

See [0] for a viewer of this public data.

Also, all our surveying/road data is managed in a similar fashion, and this is regularly imported in e.g. openstreetmap.

[0] https://bagviewer.kadaster.nl/lvbag/bag-viewer/?zoomlevel=1