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mNovakon Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons

Very cool. I've seen a lot of these out there for DnD specifically, and am always impressed by how polished they seem, but I've long since wished there was a better way to play WH40k or other wargames online. The closest thing seems to be Tabletop Simulator, which just feels strange as a full 3D simulator.

It strikes me as slightly ironic, since games like 40k are traditionally extremely high $ investment hobbies, so seemingly a good market for the side-hustle tech crowd.

mNovakon Tidal energy is not renewable

A direct link to the mentioned snippet:

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814....

mNovakon OpenAI predicted to generate over $1B

My Google results already have an AI response integrated, similar to the knowledge graph answers. So seemingly they are head on competing; no reason they can't still display ads next to that.

mNovakon Show HN: Not My Cows – Save your cows. Blast the meteors. Giddy up

FYI, you can move the character infinitely far out of the game window. Doesn't help you win, but confusing when I got "lost"

mNovakon Show HN: Not My Cows – Save your cows. Blast the meteors. Giddy up

Same happens on Brave/Windows

mNovakon Water

This actually strikes me as a good example (analogy?) to illustrate quantum effects -- if you let it sit it mostly approaches a flat average level, but there's still occasional "random" splashes that can reach much higher than you'd expect. Makes me think of things like electron tunneling

Don't know if that makes sense to anyone else

mNovakon A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

In the RF world (particularly at mm-wave frequencies), even copper has very non-negligible losses. In most passive circuits conductor loss is the limiting factor of performance. No idea if this material retains the same properties at such frequencies, and is compatible with typical lithography or other fabrication techniques, but it'd be amazing if so.

mNovakon Stable Diffusion WebGPU demo

How smooth and fast this is just makes me sad that every app on my phone requires 200MB to show a couple views and send API calls.

mNovakon Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

Thanks for sharing your story honestly. These are things I wish investors understood -- building good HW is just not as sexy as computer vision on the pitch deck

mNovakon A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

To be fair, most universities are great at interesting research but are also terrible at even preliminary productization. I highly doubt this $1.2M will go towards DOT paperwork and UL listing. This will go to a research prototype, then either get dropped off at the tech transfer IP office (good luck there), or spin out a startup. In the latter case, I'd have much rather seen this grant go directly to the startup, than pay the high Uni overhead.

mNovakon Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

Novaa RF, website [1] though it's really just a splash page

[1] https://www.novaarf.com/

mNovakon Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

Our company is developing affordable phased array antennas. The end goal is to serve the next-generation commercial wireless communications and sensing markets (e.g. 5G/6G, mmW imaging radar, etc), though as we're bootstrapped most of our work currently is in Defense.

On the very off chance there's other RF or antenna engineers out there, we're hiring (US remote)!

mNovakon Entropy: A little understood concept in physics [video]

Not my area of expertise, but in the video at least, they indicate that black holes have very high entropy. So if we imagine gravity eventually pulling all those planetary systems together into some number of black holes, isn't gravity indeed pulling the system towards a high entropy state?

The video actually directly addresses the gas cloud question, saying basically that a gas cloud is actually a highly improbable distribution of matter, whereas the eventual planetary system is much more probable. The claim being, that trend towards expected state is entropy increasing.

mNovakon LastPass users locked out due to MFA resets

BitWarden has custom fields too, though if LP doesn't export them, then yes that's a pickle. I don't know about attachments, but notes do transfer though they're stored a few clicks deeper in the "vault".

I would argue if password updates are required because of LP's insecurity, that's really not a migration issue, that's just a LP issue.

mNovakon UnsuckJS: Progressively enhance HTML with lightweight JavaScript libraries

The column layout is basically impossible for me to meaningfully navigate on my laptop -- the scrollbar and descriptions don't both fit on the screen (appreciate the repeated titles at the bottom, but ultimately they don't say much)

mNovakon An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

I use GnuCash for business too. My only complaint is that reports are still hard to customize. Instinctively that feels like something a web platform could do very well.

mNovakon An open-source alternative to QuickBooks

How hard would it be to export a Quickbooks file to hand over to the accountant (assuming read-only case)? Sort of like Google docs exporting to docx.

mNovakon RF test chambers and ranges

Do you need sensitive equipment to see if something is totally destroying performance? No. But arguably by definition, you need the ability to reliably measure at or below the noise floor in order to determine if some emitter is putting out interference that will raise the noise floor (thus degrade performance).

Note also that not all measurements are about interference. Antenna patterns and such you just want a more accurate measurement.

mNovakon Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

For those wondering, the source including word list is linked [1].

At a glance, the base dictionary is 2280 words; jargon is 8800; science is 575. So, definitely consider adding all the lists! That gives (check my math) ~13.5 bits entropy per word.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/jvdl/correcthorsebatterystaple/src/mas...

mNovakon Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

Looks nice, congrats on launch! I hope to see this concept expand beyond SaaS.

My company deals a lot with government contracts, which is a slightly different beast in that they are actually semi-structured (via FAR and DFAR), but would be extremely useful to have tools to help us understand and track our contracts at a glance, and create compliant sub-contracts (for instance identify flow-down clauses).

Probably such tools exist, but gov contracting tools are typically extremely expensive, not targeting small business.

mNovakon Show HN: SineRider, a math puzzle game

Looks like this has advanced a lot since I last saw it, nice!

mNovakon Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

Wow that's very cool. The resulting super flat images of the trains is really interesting -- like taking a photo from immense distance

mNovakon Electricity from Space: The 1970s DOE/NASA Solar Power Satellite Studies

I bet the military would love/hate it (depending where deployed), because all that stray illumination would make for a perfect bistatic radar source. Suddenly many radars can be passive, and stealth techniques take a serious hit.

mNovakon xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

While a nice thought, the timeline (<18mo for the space-based sensor track) isn't aligned for developing anything truly new or revolutionary, just some quick reaction rehashing of existing tech (read: now with 'AI').

mNovakon RF Breadboarding System

Pretty cool--it seems very focused on FPGA type RF backends, so stretches a bit what I'd personally call RF breadboarding (compared to actual RF circuits, power dividers, etc).

I feel there's definitely a need for generally making RF equipment more hobby friendly. I've long had the thought to make a modular RF test station, similar to the NI-PXI [1], but you know, not $50k. Similarly at one point I actually starting making prototypes of a simplified, low-frequency clone of the X-Microwave [2] system, which feels more like what I mean by RF breadboard.

[1] https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/hardware/products/pxi-rf-multi...

[2] https://quanticxmw.com/reference-design-kits/

mNovakon Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten survival

Which agency is this from? 30% is an insanely low indirect rate. My experience comes dominantly from DoD SBIR, where for Phase I's you propose your own indirect rate.

But yes, this law is awful for SBIR companies, because we're forced to give a giant out of pocket interest-free loan back to the gov

mNovakon Calculating Position from Raw GPS Data (2017)

I have to imagine there's open source RTK codes out there, but I haven't looked into it. Note that depending on your application, you might not need the dual-frequency component -- that's just to reduce ionospheric error, but if you know to high precision where you base receiver is, the RTK solution at the rover should correct ionospheric delay as well.

mNovakon Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project?

https://www.bytebucket.co/

Made as a hobby during the pandemic -- it scrapes eBay listings for laptops, and provides a parametric search (RAM, SSD etc) inspired by the likes of Digikey and Mouser, and sorts on total value. I like to buy used electronics, but this kind of search is still shockingly bad on typical marketplaces (Amazon etc)

An example search to get you started: https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minram=12&minssd=500#t

pretty quickly finds for example an 11th gen Intel, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD laptop for ~$200. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. The really good deals get swiped up within a day or two though.

mNovakon Calculating Position from Raw GPS Data (2017)

If you're interested in running some code, there's [1] which is fairly active, but as I recall is Linux only. There is also [2] which is a Matlab (or Octave) GNSS receiver implementation; quite well documented and informative. It's meant to be a companion to the author's book [3], which itself I found quite concise and approachable.

[1] https://github.com/gnss-sdr/gnss-sdr [2] https://github.com/perrysou/GNSS_SDR [3] http://gfix.dk/matlab-gnss-sdr-book/

mNovakon Show HN: Google Analytics alternative with the most generous free tier

Appreciate the free tier. I seem to recall looking around at analytics options and them being too expensive for my idle projects.

Is there more documentation on "custom events" (listed on the pricing page)? I assume this is just an API I can arbitrarily ping. Can that be used for cohort/funnel analysis instead of a /page; e.g. for a single-page app?