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magnat

1,594 karma · joined November 15, 2015

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magnat··on F-Droid 2.0
And still no popularity rating, download count or any user review system whatsoever.
magnat··on Benchmarking Qwen3.8 27B quantizations: 4-bit holds up, 1-bit collapses
Those are multiple-choice questions. If some of them are "trick questions", where obvious answer (e.g. the value taken directly from question's text) is wrong, bad model might perform worse than a dice.

On the other hand, not sure where from 25% baseline for random answers come from. Since this is multiple-choice-out-of-4 test, random guessing should be correct in 1 in 15 cases, not 1 in 4.

magnat··on QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes
Especially when the page source actually contains all the content (so no need to fetch it in JS), part of which is even presented in title.
magnat··on Show HN: QR code renderer in a TrueType font
Selecting parts of the code (in F7 mode or with SHIFT-LEFT/RIGHT) highlights which individual pixels corresponds to the actual letters.
magnat··on Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
Some other examples:

- ACPI configuration for power management and platform stuff [1]

- Bitcoin transactions [2]

- TrueType fonts [3]

[1] https://wiki.osdev.org/AML

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/t...

magnat··on Show HN: Sweep, Open-weights 1.5B model for next-edit autocomplete
No, I mean Visual Studio (the IDE), not Visual Studio Code (the editor).
magnat··on Show HN: Sweep, Open-weights 1.5B model for next-edit autocomplete
Is there a way to use this (or similar) model in Visual Studio? Extensions on Visual Studio Marketplace are clunky and sluggish at best, if they even work at all.
magnat··on Why German Strings Are Everywhere?
Also:

* Reverse polish notation

* Chinese remainder theorem

* Byzantine generals problem

magnat··on Interstellar Mission to a Black Hole
Did you, by any chance, play Outer Wilds recently?
magnat··on Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator
If one node kept transmitting non-stop, it could push data out at 3.5kbps and no one else in that range can transmit at the same time.

However, in EU there is a legal limit of 1% duty cycle on 868MHz band and collision avoidance mechanism, meaning on average you can send a packet (up to 255 bytes) once a minute.

magnat··on Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator
Hard limit is 3.5kbps with 148dB link budget (Medium Fast preset in Meshtastic [1]). In practice - a packet worth of hundred bytes every half a second or so.

[1] https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/

magnat··on Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator
> LoRa can reach a range of up to 3 miles (4.8 km) in urban areas, and up to 10 miles (16 km) in rural areas

In mountainous area LoRa on 868MHz band reaches over 100km. Last month we had a stratospheric balloon with a Meshtastic node attached. It established direct (albeit intermittent) connection between Warsaw and Berlin.

magnat··on PuTTY has a new website
> I'm a c# dev with near 20 years experience

Which IDE do you use? JetBrains Rider?

magnat··on Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507
> if you run it at the full 262144 tokens of context youll need ~65gb of ram

What is the relationship between context size and RAM required? Isn't the size of RAM related only to number of parameters and quantization?

magnat··on How to reverse engineer an analog chip: the TDA7000 FM radio receiver
If RTL-SDR is a good reference - when demodulating FM it produces pretty much the same noise you'd expect from a mistuned oldschool radio.
magnat··on How to reverse engineer an analog chip: the TDA7000 FM radio receiver
The separate noise source is a bit of surprise here. Why is it necessary? Wouldn't RF noise produce same results?
magnat··on Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others
Try SolidGoldMagikarp
magnat··on Transition to using 16 KB page sizes for Android apps and games
Mostly for I/O, e.g. mmap requires file offset to be multiple of the page size.
magnat··on AI video you can watch and interact with, in real-time
It feels like an interpolated Street View imagery. There is one scene with two people between cars in a parking lot. It is the only one I have found that has objects you would expect to change over time. When exploring the scene, those people sometimes disappear altogether and sometimes teleport around, as they would when exploring Street View panoramas. You can clearly tell when you are switching between photos taken a few seconds apart.
magnat··on CO2 laser enables long-range detection of radioactive material
> The team also used a CMOS camera to capture visible-light emissions from the microplasmas (...) The CMOS imagers, however, had to be placed close to the measured radiation source, reducing their applicability to remote sensing

How can it be called long-range detector, if literally the detector has to be placed at measured object?

magnat··on Building an open-source Wi-Fi Mac layer for the ESP32
1. They might have used IP cores with license that forbids disclosing any technical details, including firmware implementation.

2. Manipulating RF registers could cause the device to operate outside of regulatory parameters, perhaps invalidating FCC certification for the whole device. By not disclosing how to use MAC directly, they can claim they did their best to prevent device from misbehaving.

magnat··on Optimistic Locking in B-Trees
If your data/leaf/heap pages hold indexed cells PostgreSQL-style [1], 16-bit in-page offset limits your page size to 64KB. On the other hand, physical memory frame size usually is 4KB or larger, so going below that is not really productive.

Having said that, both PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL has 8KB page size, while original SQLite had 1KB pages, before switching to 4KB, while still supporting 64KB pages. On top of that, Microsoft SQL operates internally on extents of 8 pages (64 KB) instead of a single page, but still pretends to use 4 KB pages [2].

In other words - no idea.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/storage-page-layout....

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/p...

magnat··on Show HN: I created a language called AntiLang – breaking all the conventions
C-like equality (==), inequality (!=) and assignment (=) is such a missed opportunity here. One could go with "=", "=/=" and "<-" here while both preserving some sanity and shock factor.
magnat··on Linux running inside a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator
We have tax forms available as interactive PDFs, which:

   * auto-computes formulas
   * enables and disables whole sections of the document depending of filled values
   * performs complex validation, beyond checking for required fields and regexp patterns
   * offers inline help
   * can be filled, saved and printed completely offline
   * when printed, looks exactly the same as traditional, paper form
   * don't require external software beyond a PDF reader
magnat··on Show HN: Interactive game teaching dark patterns in UX design
Similar vibes to https://userinyerface.com/

Also, for some reason, hogs 100% CPU recursing like hell between two methods:

    o0 [https://games.productartistry.com/_next/static/chunks/4bd1b696-98e9308c101e0794.js:1:90345]
    o2 [https://games.productartistry.com/_next/static/chunks/4bd1b696-98e9308c101e0794.js:1:90778]
magnat··on I Reversed a Drone and Landed It with My PC
BetaFlight doesn't deal with over-the-air bits, it just receives PWM/PPM/S-Bus/whatever signals your receiver provides. There is no point to have encryption in firmware, because connection between RX and FC is hardwired and can be trusted.

Lack of OTA frames encryption, as far as I can tell, is mostly due to legacy reasons. In DYI FPV there are only couple of transmission standards, most of them using 2.4GHz FHSS or some CC2500 clone so you can mix-and-match transmitters and receivers as you wish. If you use custom TX/RX devices, you are pretty much locked in to that specific vendor. Also, designing a nice transmitter UX-wise requires quite a different skillset than designing nice transmitter RF-wise, so manufacturers tend to choose off-the-shelf RF modules.

magnat··on I Reversed a Drone and Landed It with My PC
Lots of no-name or DIY drones use flight controller running a BetaFlight [1] firmware, which is open source and quite hackable. If you want low-level real-time programmatic control (like manipulating servos, lights or camera), that is most likely the easiest way. There is also ArduPilot [2] firmware, which is focused more on the high-level control (like managing GPS waypoints and autonomous takeoff/landing).

In both cases you can piggyback your control signals using standard radio or use serial port via dedicated wireless bridge.

[1] https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight

[2] https://ardupilot.org/

magnat··on Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
> people who blindly click OK on every pop up are not representative of your typical user

You could unbias the data by including the metric determining how long did it took them to click "Ok" and whether they actually reviewed the data before agreeing.

magnat··on Show HN: Agent.exe, a cross-platform app to let 3.5 Sonnet control your machine
> the default project they provided felt too heavyweight

> This is a simple Electron app

ಠ_ಠ

magnat··on Ask HN: What do you use to backup your VMs?
lsyncd for live replication to warm standby, LVM+rsync for offline backup, restic for keeping file-level version history.
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