Hacker News Reader

Neywinyon The viewers ditching streaming 'rot' in favour of DVDs

We pay for Disney+ and Hulu as a combo. It was great because Hulu had a good player, Disney+ had a good library. They've started splitting the two and now I wanted to watch a Disney show I'd missed from my childhood. The Disney+ player just wouldn't go. It would play the opening ad just fine, then nothing. Video preview on the scrub bar (?) would work, but it never played anything but a black screen stuck at 0 seconds.

It's always like this. It's always that the site won't play in HD let alone 4k, it won't let me turn off dumb settings, it won't let me guess 4:3 content without cutting it off... They've really ruined a silver platter. Just play the stupid video. We gave you the money. Just play the video, from your server, on my computer. It's all already pirated and stolen anyway, so I just don't get the point. I can screen share a DVD over discord with friends. Truly infuriating how terrible they've made a dumb video player.

Neywinyon Base Browser: A hard fork of Firefox with no AI slop

PaleMoon seems to be ground up different? Or is their rendering engine a fork?

Neywinyon Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington

But that was through transfer of data. If you don't transfer data, at best you can do what that one researcher keeps pumping out with like ramping fans up and down. But really you'd need to try. Unless the model has some controllable USB switch, physical network separation should do it. I'll also add that modern network security practice is that data flows one direction only. But ideally you're never bringing untrusted data in. Especially never out

Neywinyon Overdue library magazine returned after 132 years

https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2026-09-12/book-overdue-since-1...

Has a picture

Neywinyon A Model for Winning Survivor

It looks to just be a problem on my tablet. Phone is narrow so it adjusted for that.

Neywinyon UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8

Yeah that kind of line is what I see all the time in my chats. Even worse worse is when they put it in code comments.

Neywinyon A Model for Winning Survivor

Well I didn't want apoilers so I stopped reading. If the author is here, please remove the navigation floater from the side. The article is so narrow. I had to zoom all the way in on my tablet to get one graph to be full sized. Impresaiveely it wasn't pixelated. I want to see your graphs better.

Neywinyon Adventures in Microcontroller Circuit Debugging

Generally you shouldn't put a probe on crystals because the capacitive loading changes your circuit. I've had mixed success but especially if you think that's the issue, it's an iffy debug step. Some micros support a clock output mode that you can use, though. Another method is to form a basic loop antenna with the ground clip and hover near it.

But you'd need a few more than 100 millihertz for that lol

Neywinyon Adventures in Microcontroller Circuit Debugging

When I got to my current workplace I was surprised to see we always, invariably (unless it's really impossible with the chip) use an oscillator not a crystal. But every time I see one of these posts I think about the difference in cost for us relative to the math of capacitance and debugging, it's just not worth it. And of course the first board I worked that we basically built to print and had a crystal integral to the design... They got the capacitance wrong and it didn't go.

Neywinyon Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud

That's my approach too. I even added on a firewall container to the compose so it could fetch packages and that's it. It isn't impossible for it to exfiltrate data that way but I think I put a limit on the request size and limited to get requested so if it did it was relatively slow. But once it has all the tools it needs, that can be cut

Neywinyon Speeding up gearhash on ARM64

That's incredible to discount the entire embedded arm64 market, I believe starting nearly 10 years before that, because AWS and Apple (aka not embedded) hadn't done it yet. I mean obviously free to do whatever architectures, but that feels like it would be better to remove the reasoning from the article.

Neywinyon Bend – a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs

I suppose I could look it up but I wonder if people thought this of "high level" languages like C when it first came out. No more assembly. Or even assembly instead of machine code.

Neywinyon Better Vector Search for Long Documents: Chunking Inside Manticore Search

I still don't understand this. Whenever I ask a model how to go this they recommend rolling my own. Is this really too niche to be readily available and well maintained in a GitHub but also so common every LLM knows countless ways to do it?

Neywinyon This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

They say that every generation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akNcZOoLKVk

Neywinyon This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

Lol all good. Please use this instead of slopping up something that'll let the smoke out

Neywinyon This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

?? I found the schematic here

https://atmosic.com/products_kit_atmevk-3430e-yqn/

Is this not it? They even have the .pcb file if you download the full board doc which I believe is everything you need.

This is a lot more than I thought you'd have to work with given your description. Full schematic, user guides, datasheet

Neywinyon PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

I just started using opus 4.8 and it's still trash at very domain specific stuff and debugging. It went down a rabbit hole trying to coerce the algorithm to work for 1 data point, which dramatically overfit the code. Later it did 11 experiments to try and figure out how to do the math, each one yielding an accuracy no better than a coin flip and each one it asserted beforehand that it had it this time, 100% accuracy.

We've got some time.

Neywinyon PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

What do you mean by power routing for an MCU? Like they wanted to fatten the traces or what?

Neywinyon Steve Wozniak launches merch store

https://wozmerch.com/

Neywinyon A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX

This seems worth the read but I didn't dig too deep https://medium.com/@sergiopr89/float-point-quantization-the-...

Neywinyon A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX

You may be conflating distillation, which may be a fault of other people getting it wrong. Going from floating to fixed point doesn't change precision or size. It changes representation. For example, if all your values are between 0 and 1 or -1 and 1, you're not using the entire range of a standard IEEE float. If you instead use Q31 format, you get basically 31 instead of 23 bits of mantissa. So it's an increase in precision if and only if you can basically stretch your sub-range that you were using over a larger range of bit representations. You have to think of the total number of values. 32 bit is 4 billion. 80 bit extended precision is a lot more than that. But he didn't say I think what his fixed point bit width was. That's what matters.

Now maybe you don't need to represent 1/2^32 in precision. Maybe you just need to know to 1/8th. That's where you can quantize to a lower precision to save space.

But if you start with 32 bit float and quantize to 32 bit fixed, I struggle to think how that saves storage.

Neywinyon A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX

That's what quantization and stuff is, basically. So yes. Been done for years on all neural net types not just LLMs.

Neywinyon A 386 PC for Your RP2350

Mixed signal means analog and digital

Neywinyon Built a Lego minifigure configurator. Shuffle until something makes you laugh

I'll be honest I thought you were being dumb but then I tried going back... 10 times and yeah no you're right. Everybody heed this warning

Neywinyon First Naval Drone Duel Results in Ukrainian Success

Thank you. Is there another article that you pulled that from? I'd prefer to read that source

Neywinyon Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?

I'm not much of an x86 person but on other architectures you can raise software interrupts/exceptions. Does x86 not have this or did those facilities not cover enough use cases?

Neywinyon Houthis Used Claude Code to Develop Missile Guidance Software: Anthropic

I tried to scan baseball cards recently. No app worked well. I probably tried 5. Each one was basically identical. So along with to-do apps, apparently baseball card scanner apps too.

Neywinyon First Naval Drone Duel Results in Ukrainian Success

So I'm still trying to figure out what exactly happened here. What I'm seeing is the Ukranian drone had a gun on it that it used to take out the Russian drone which didn't? Or was it EW or the missiles?

Neywinyon Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?

I think I can second this. I was offered an FAE job (essentially the sales engineer of hardware) and they were going to pay me more money to write no code and spend most of my time in the road talking to people about products. But I like writing code. Presumably a great job for somebody who doesn't/can't.

Neywinyon Mars astronauts could live in houses made of yeast and jello, say scientists

> Per the paper, testing the ability of the yeast-gelatin building foam to retain the pressure necessary to keep humans from succumbing to the Martian elements was outside the scope of the research.

> “A practical lunar or Martian habitat must integrate pressure retention, gas tightness, mechanical support, thermal regulation, radiation shielding, dust protection, repairability, and resource recycling,” the paper notes. “These requirements will likely require hybrid architectures” that include both the yeast foam and more traditional structures.

So no. They could very well need 99% "traditional" structures. All they did was find a way to make a semi-biological expanding foam. And that's cool. But it seems to be using Mars as a marketing crutch