HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Lwrless

2,055 karma · joined December 14, 2015

submissionscomments
Lwrless··on Show HN: Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer
It's cool! Recently I built a space explorer-like WebGPU project inspired by Space Engine the game, and your implementation runs smooth with rich visuals, that's far superior to mine.

I do find it sometimes hard to navigate and has some visual glitches, but man it is good. I hope one day it becomes my go-to for space exploring, since Space Engine is Windows only and it does not run on my Mac. And building the space must be a huge amount of work, there's so much that has to go into it.

Lwrless··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
I found some on Reddit, and here are the two benchmark results from review sites: - against a desktop 5090: https://nanoreview.net/en/gpu-compare/geforce-rtx-5090-vs-ap... - against a laptop 5090: https://nanoreview.net/en/gpu-compare/geforce-rtx-5090-mobil...

With larger (also really fast) unified memory on the chip, it could easily load larger weights, and the thing is that the quantized results on the M5s are really good, I believe that for most local inferencing, users would be using INT4 (maybe more bits per weight sometimes) quantized models, that might be where the Neural Accelerators kick in. In raw power, a desktop 5090 easily outperforms the M5 Max, but for this specific use case, I believe that the M5 Max is good enough.

Lwrless··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
Thank you, found some benchmarks and they look really promising. To my understanding those Neural Accelerators are like AMX but for GPUs. With those accelerators the GPU performance on a M5 Max in LLM inferencing would totally be on par with a 5090, that's quite impressive!
Lwrless··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
The "4x AI performance" smells suspicious to me, M5 Pro does have slightly higher memory bandwidth than the M4 Pro, but there are also the new Neural Accelerators in the GPU cores, I've always wondered what they actually do, since the SoC has AMX (Apple Matrix Coprocessor) since the original M1 chip era.

So is this performance gain probably due to the new Neural Accelerators?

Lwrless··on Asus Bike Booster
I have to say, this looks really well designed and easy to use, I want one! But why Asus? I really want to know how they landed on this.
Lwrless··on Codex Resets
Those resets and the removal of the 5-hour usage limit are quietly anchoring me to a much higher usage baseline. I've stopped rationing and just spawn a bunch of agents to work at whatever pace I want, because there always seem to be more resets on the way (at least true for the last week). And now I am actually worried about that if one day they just stop doing so, my "normal" workflow will suddenly exceed the limit, and upgrading will feel like a step backwards.
Lwrless··on Phi Browser 2.0: Spaces, Profiles, and Room for Your Agents
Full disclosure: I work at Phi.

For context, Phi is an AI-powered Chromium browser for macOS. I think many people here may not be familiar with it. The closest reference point is probably Arc, although Phi's goal is slightly different: a browser that you and your agents can both use.

The main changes in version 2.0 are Spaces for organizing tabs and fully sandboxed Profiles, which keep cookies and sessions separate. In practice, that means things like multiple Google logins no longer collide. URL rules can also ensure that specific sites open in the correct space/profile.

The assistant now has whole-browser context, and the guardrail for removing sensitive data runs locally on your Mac instead of on a server. I recently worked on optimizing the local model path on the Apple Neural Engine because it seemed wasteful to leave that hardware unused.

I am also experimenting with a new memory visualization system (we call it Nebula). Rather than displaying browser memory as a list or force graph, it presents it as a spatial surface that you can explore over time. This feature is still evolving, but it has been interesting to work on.

Next, we want to enable agents such as Claude Code or Codex to control your actual browser window rather than a separate headless Chrome instance.

I'm happy to dig into any of this.

Lwrless··on Sakana Fugu
Got myself the $20 subscription and tried it out. The 5-hour limit runs out surprisingly fast. Quality is okay but it feels slow, and even with my $20 Claude subscription on Fable, the credit usage ends up being lower. Fable usually catches issues in my Opus 4.8-generated code that I'd miss otherwise, but Fugu didn't. Makes me wonder if it's really at the Fable level. Hard to see the value here.
Lwrless··on Flipper One Tech Specs
I use my Flipper Zero weekly (or more frequent). This new model feels much more powerful than the ones based on RPi Zero as a handheld device. I like how they managed to include two RJ45 ports and a USB-A port for connectivity. However, it's still too bulky for me. Perhaps when I get one, I'll try carrying it around all day to see how it goes. There's also a nano SIM slot. With the two Ethernet ports, it's perfect for use as a mobile router. This use case alone is good enough for me.

For such a powerful device, I think the lack of a QWERTY keyboard and the inherited orange backlit monochrome display are two of its shortcomings. I don't want to carry a keyboard or screen with me, I want it to be able to take more human input/output without accessories.

For those interested in hackable, handheld Linux devices, the M5Stack Cardputer Zero is also worth a look. It will launch on Kickstarter soon, and I have reserved an early bird spot.

Lwrless··on Googlebook
I'm curious what this means for ChromiumOS and downstreams like FydeOS.

If Google is now pushing this "intelligence‑first" desktop experience, how much of that work is likely to stay in the proprietary ChromeOS/Googlebook layer vs. land in upstream ChromiumOS?

Lwrless··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home
Good catch — that was actually my mistake. I mixed up cm and mm from the marketing material, and when I actually measured just now it came out to around 0.9mm. So not quite as thin as I claimed, and I probably wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't asked.

I did find some Kevlar-reinforced options that are supposedly ~0.3mm, but they seem to be raw fiber without connectors, purposed for drones, and I'm not sure about global availability.

Lwrless··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home
And after getting 10Gbps working at home I was getting greedy, and looked at InfiniBand as well, 40Gbps and proper RDMA is very tempting compared to Ethernet. The catch for me was the practical side: IB needs PCIe slots and those chunky, inflexible cables. With most of my stuff being laptops, mini PCs and Macs, I just couldn’t see a clean way to route those or even plug cards in everywhere, so in the end the "door-frame‑friendly" skinny SFP+ fiber still won out for this apartment.
Lwrless··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home
I went a slightly different route. My switches are linked with 10Gbps SFP+ across the apartment, but it was way too late (and too much hassle) to pull proper in-wall fiber. Instead I used one of those ultra-thin (around 0.1mm), unshielded fiber cables, and just snaked it through door frames and taped it along the walls. I'm genuinely impressed this stuff exists, it makes retrofitting fiber into a finished space so much less painful.

Most of my edge devices are still on 2.5GbE though, and I'm increasingly aware that for anything with plain SATA disks, the drives are the real bottleneck. Once I LAG'd 2×2.5GbE to get a 5Gbps pipe, it became obvious the network wasn't the slow part anymore in a lot of cases.

And yeah, the 10GbE SFP+ modules run hot, so hot that I would not lay my fingers on them for more than 2 seconds. I stuck 2 copper heatsinks on my module, not sure they do much but the module runs smoothly. Even so, I'm pretty happy with the overall setup: from my 10GbE-equipped Mac I can saturate multiple machines at once and I no longer think about the network most of the time, which was the goal.

Lwrless··on Apple is running out of A18 Pro chips for the MacBook Neo
Yes, they are with one GPU core fused off. I came across a die shot on the internet[0], and the GPU cores look huge. With some rough calculation, I estimated that the GPU cores together take up about 15.5% of the die area. I don't know much about photolithography, but I assume the same percentage of single-defect dies could be limited to a single GPU core failure, it's actually pretty surprising that Apple can get enough of these "rare draw" chips to build and ship a real product.

If the shortage continues, I would expect that they start using fully functional A18 Pro chips with one GPU core disabled with software. It kind of reminds me of the AMD Athlon days when user could use a pencil to unlock extra cores.

[0]: https://chipwise.tech/our-portfolio/apple-a18-a18-pro-die-sh...

Lwrless··on Every GPU That Mattered
I don't see my first GPU on there, it was the humble GeForce4 MX440. It could run almost any game I cared about for a surprisingly long time, even if it's not a true modern card. These days almost all my machines are on iGPUs baked into the CPU. There's way less fun for me, but they are a lot more compact at least.
Lwrless··on ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI
I'm puzzled by Espressif's naming here. We had the ESP32-S3, so "S31" sounds like "S3, variant 1," but this part doesn't really look like a simple S3 variant. And then there's an ESP32-E22, but no E21 or even a plain E2 anywhere.

Edit: found an article explaining some of their naming logic, and said that the SoC naming will get its follow-up article, but sadly it never happened. https://developer.espressif.com/blog/2025/03/espressif-part-...

Lwrless··on DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
Got my RPi 5 16GB quite a while ago for around $160 and already thought that was expensive... It’s still powerful enough for almost everything I throw at it, honestly a bit overkill in most scenarios.

With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.

Lwrless··on Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player
It seems this model does not have a recording feature. There's an alternative model from Aiwa with Bluetooth and cassette recording support, but I'm not sure if it's available globally, could not find much information about it online.

https://www.syl-via.com/products/aiwa-t7-retro-bluetooth-cas...

It's surprising to see these kinds of retro cassette players still being updated in 2026.

Lwrless··on PCB devboard the size of a USB-C plug
I recently got my hands on an M5Stack NanoC6 (https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/M5NanoC6), it's also quite small and I'm pretty happy with it. It has onboard IR and a Grove connector, good enough for IoT projects at home.
Lwrless··on Sandboxels
See also: The Powder Toy (https://powdertoy.co.uk/)
Lwrless··on GitHub experience various partial-outages/degradations
I was mostly on macOS. It seems to me that there's an issue with GitHub's CDN or routing.
Lwrless··on GitHub experience various partial-outages/degradations
Recently my download speed from GitHub releases has decreased dramatically. But I'm sure they will be fixing that with Claude Code soon... Will they?
Lwrless··on Airfoil (2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39526057
Lwrless··on Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability
I'm kind of the opposite use case: I own four AirTags, keep them in different bags and suitcases, and I've literally never needed them. I don't lose any luggage or bags, so most of the time they just sit there quietly burning those CR2032s. For me they've ended up feeling more like they are preventing me from anxiety than doing something that actually changes my life day to day...
Lwrless··on Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? [pdf]
I'd heard of the "monkey" metaphor from my friend before, but I never really used it in my day-to-day work. When a report came my way with a technical problem they couldn't solve, my first reaction was always, "Okay, I'll take a look," instead of guiding them to take ownership and figure it out on their own.

Looking back, I wish I hadn't let those monkeys jump back onto my back so often. It ended up causing a growing backlog and a lot of pressure for me. It also made it hard for team growth.

This piece really speaks to me, and I'm curious how others here have experienced this in work.

Lwrless··on Show HN: iFixit created a new USB-C, repairable soldering system
Looks cool! My current one is an Alientek T80 soldering iron, it goes up to 100W, but does not have a heat-resistant cap. This FixHub kit by iFixit looks much more sophisticated, would like to try it sometime.
Lwrless··on UV-K5 is the most hackable handheld ham radio yet
I was surprised to see that it only costs around $14 in China, so I instantly ordered one. It would nicely fill the gap in VHF bands that are not supported by my Tecsun PL-365.
Lwrless··on Flipper Zero: Multi-Tool Device for Geeks
Cloned a 125KHz RFID keycard on my Flipper as a backup, my Android phone is able to clone 13.56MHz MIFAREs, but not these 125KHz ones.
Lwrless··on Fast JavaScript-to-WASM Call from FTL
The blog is cool. I know a little Japanese. I really appreciate that all the technical terms are written in plain English instead of Japanese Katakana words.
Lwrless··on The pocket guide to debugging
Thank you for the free zine! I found out that a discount is also available in my region, bought the 12-pack.
Page 1 of 2Next →