Hacker News Reader

haddoniston Pebble Mega Update – July 2026

"The index is a ludicrous product"... for you, and most of the general public.

But there are 1,000s of us that heard about it, researched the limitations.. and still bought one immediately.

At $100 even if it only lasts a year it would still be worth it. For me.

haddoniston Pebble Mega Update – July 2026

The app has the ability to connect to any MCP Server. Could that be used for your use-case?

haddoniston Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors

https://shop.everythingsmart.io/products/everything-presence...

"Everything Presence Pro is our most advanced presence sensor ever, combining long-range static mmWave, tracking mmWave, PIR, PoE, Ethernet/WiFi connectivity, and optional CO₂ sensing (Sold separately) in a single, ultra-capable device"

USD$93.00

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https://apolloautomation.com/products/r-pro-1?_pos=1&_sid=f8...

Apollo Automation "R PRO-1 PoE dual mmWave Multisensor (LD2450 | additional LD2412 optional)"

- Dual mmWave Compatibility: LD2412 and LD2450 - TR390 for ambient lux and UV sensing - Optional SCD40 for high-accuracy NDIR CO₂ sensing (extra $20)

USD$69.99

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Also check out https://www.tindie.com/ - it's a site for small companies & individuals to sell tech-related stuff. A quick POE search turned up Radiation Dosimeters, Air quality meters, BLE gateways and more.

haddoniston ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is

Might be worth contacting the seller before buying.

The "Color" (ie: type/what's being sold) is "PDF Manual By Email", so it's possible they selling just the PDF assembly manual...

haddoniston More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

Looks good, but it'll probably take a while until it's anywhere close to the coverage of existing repositories:

https://templates.blakadder.com/ has almost 3,000 devices flashable onto Tasmota firmware.

For older Tuya devices there's https://github.com/tuya-cloudcutter/tuya-cloudcutter

OpenBeken https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App covers 800 of the newer generation Tuya devices.

And there's a large community adapting ESP32 devices onto https://esphome.io/

haddoniston Data centers in space makes no sense

You've invented a room-temperature superconducting material? No?

Didn't think so.

Currently available superconductors still need liquid nitrogen cooling, meaning they're not feasible for in-orbit installations.

haddoniston Loose wire leads to blackout, contact with Francis Scott Key bridge

One of the things Sal Mercogliano stressed is that the crew (and possibly other crews of the same line) modified systems in order to save time.

Rather than doing the process of purging high-sulphur fuel that can't be used in USA waters, they had it set so that some of the generators were fed from USA-approved fuel, resulting in redundancy & automatic failover being compromised.

It seems probable that the wire failure would not have caused catastrophic overall loss of power if the generators had been in the normal configuration.

haddoniston The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

Well There's Your Problem podcast, Episode 121: Therac-25

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EQT1gVsE6I

haddoniston CertMate – SSL Certificate Management System

This may be good for the selfhoster who is running more an a couple of sites.

But a GUI to manage enterprise-level SSL fleets? Doubtful.

Not when a change/configuration management system (Puppet, Chef, Ansible etc etc..) driven by git commits enables single-source-of-truth, peer-review, and automatic creation/monitoring/renewal of certificates.

haddoniston Alexa+

> In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control

Lots of people are running local LLMs with their HA Voice Previews, plenty of discussions about it in the forums

haddoniston Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal

This? Finding outbound/inbound requests to an app?

Not sure it's worth an entire post. But:

The application in question is NetLimiter for Windows https://www.netlimiter.com/ (I'm sure there are others, btw)

It acts as a per-application firewall. It also has the ability to block internet access completely, as well as Priorities (bandwith allocation) per application.

By default it will pop up a window every time an application makes web requests, either inbound or outbound.

You have the option to Deny or Allow the operation. And options to have that be temporary (next x minutes) or permanent.

After being set up an alarming number of applications will cause NetLimiter popups, but very soon everything will either be allowed or blocked.

haddoniston Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal

Nope. Very first request it makes:

From: Microsoft Edge WebView2 To: 13.107.42.16:443 - Redmond, United States of America

(very handy tools, per-application firewalls..)

haddoniston Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal

Try JPEGView - it is much faster than Irfanview for looking through a folder of images. Either preloads or has a better rendering engine, or both.

Make sure to get the currently supported fork, not the original.

haddoniston Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal

Why does Electro make multiple web requests on startup? Why does it need to make any?

And forcing windows to make your app a default, without asking the user about it at install time - not cool.

haddoniston Hands-on Assignment – Therac-25 (2007)

Well There's Your Problem Podcast (with slides)

Episode 121: Therac-25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EQT1gVsE6I

haddoniston The first release of OpenVox, the OSS implementation of Puppet

Configuration Management of one form or another is a way to ensure consistency across a fleet of servers, and reduce administration overhead. VMs aren't going away any time soon, despite SaaS companies best efforts.

Companies with 100s to 1000s of hours of investment in software like Puppet aren't going to rearchitect without being forced to. By the application becoming unsuitable for current needs, or due to cost.

Broadcom bought out VMWare and jacked the price up by unworkable amounts. Puppet is now owned by a venture capital company and the non-zero possibility is they'll follow Broadcom's playbook. That's why Puppet is being forked.

Why not contribute to Ansible or Salt? What individual programmers do in their spare time is irrelevant to the majority of users of those products.

haddoniston The era of open voice assistants

Fully on-prem can be done if you've got the LLM compute power in place.

haddoniston The era of open voice assistants

No, all of the voice parts are either inbuilt or direct addons.

haddoniston Ask HN: Can I check the connectivity of an ISP without being in its network?

You could follow a site such as https://downdetector.co.uk/ that aggregates reports of issues on sites including Vodafone.

haddoniston ESP32-C61: Delivering Affordable Wi-Fi 6 Connectivity

New generation of Sonoff products are mostly moving to ESP32. The older ones still available are ESP8266 or similar.

haddoniston ESP32-C61: Delivering Affordable Wi-Fi 6 Connectivity

Another example of a very successful commercial product is the P1x series of printers from Bambu Labs. The main chip is an ESP32.

haddoniston Building an occupancy sensor with a $5 ESP32 and a serverless DB

Make It Work have reviewed 18 different home mmWave sensors, Aqara included:

"Best mmWave Presence Sensors for Home Assistant!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt1FpRM8R18

haddoniston Obesity changes the brain, with ‘no sign of reversibility,’ expert says

"The dogma we've been promoting for decades - Eat Less, Move More - doesn't work, so don't stigmatize those listening to us"

No mention of processed food. No mention of carbohydrate restriction, time-restricted eating/fasting, paleo/keto/carnivore diet successes..

haddoniston Optimum Diet

Only one mention of "carbohydrate" and that in the context of intermittent fasting, no mention seed oils, no commentary on highly-processed foods?

Nothing "optimum" here.

haddoniston Ask HN: Is AWS suddenly blocking all ping requests?

I can ping my aws hosts from a VPC on a different hosting company, so it's unlikely to be all of AWS.

Tried the Telstra and Vocus Looking Glass services - both can ping my AWS servers.

List of Looking Glasses: https://www.ausnog.net/tools/lg

(note: Optus' Looking Glass doesn't seem to be returning results)

haddoniston I don't want streaming music, I just want to stream my music

https://www.mp3tag.de/en/ is a standalone batch tag editor

haddoniston Why diets don’t work, according to a researcher who has studied them for decades

"Lecturer ignores the last half-decade of successful low-carbohydrate whole-food success stories while promoting their own new book.."

"Diets" don't work if they are just about starving while eating what passes for food in the modern western style diet.

Eating minimally processed low carbohydrate whole foods works just fine.