Hacker News Reader

mastaxon Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

That seems unlikely when I get a response that says “You have been unsubscribed - Bob Loblaw for Senate” or whatever. I suppose that could be pre programmed.

mastaxon AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

I believe I’ve heard them say they have 100% yield. They haven’t made very many yet though, on the order of 100.

mastaxon Geothermal Energy Could Outperform Nuclear Power

Horizontal drilling is one thing, but also literally fracking - creating fractures in rock underground with high pressure. These fractures vastly increase the surface area of contact between the water and the rock as it flows between the two wells.

mastaxon GeForce RTX 5090

I expect it to be $2000+ MSRP. They don’t have to worry about AMD competition in the high-end. (They didn’t last time either, but there were strong rumors they would and they had the 4090 Ti ready for that eventuality). They’ll also be aware of its value for AI and what people are willing to pay for it.

mastaxon Why are my ZFS disks so noisy?

https://wintelguy.com/zfs-calc.pl

mastaxon Reconductoring: Boosting U.S. Grid Capacity Efficiently

Wouldn’t increasing the voltage require new towers in most cases? The towers are sized to give sufficient isolation.

mastaxon Tracy: A real time, nanosecond resolution frame profiler

https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/issues/887

MSVC changed the mutex constructor to constexpr, breaking binary backward compatibility. They say WONTFIX, you must use the latest MSVCRT with the latest MSVC. But I have the latest MSVCRT installed? Whatever - a workaround was pushed to master yesterday.

mastaxon Tracy: A real time, nanosecond resolution frame profiler

Of course I come into work the next day and now I can't run my custom built one either...

mastaxon Tracy: A real time, nanosecond resolution frame profiler

This article is a good quick introduction to Tracy: https://luxeengine.com/integrating-tracy-profiler-in-cpp/

mastaxon Tracy: A real time, nanosecond resolution frame profiler

I just started using this yesterday, it looks really good. Haven’t really dug into it.

Is the latest windows build broken for anyone else? It doesn’t start. In WinDbg it looks like it dereferences a null pointer. I built it myself and it works fine.

mastaxon iPhone 16 Pro Storage Expansion 128GB to 1TB [video]

Generally most memory uses standardized physical/electrical/firmware interfaces from JEDEC, an industry consortium. I do not know for certain if the iPhone memory is standard.

Mobile RAM/Flash packages are usually made in larger capacities by stacking several dies within a package. This can involve die thinning - grinding the dies thinner so they fit within the same space after stacking.

mastaxon The Death of LCDs, Means New Life for Chips

TVs generally have a service menu with color calibration options.

mastaxon Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

It’s not clear to me that the PS5 supports Vulkan at all (excluding third party translation layers). I would be happy to see any evidence. In any case I’m confident the large majority of PS5 games use its native api GNM.

GNM could certainly be implemented for Intel GPUs, but it’s an additional cost to account for.

mastaxon Show HN: iFixit created a new USB-C, repairable soldering system

I like the quick 957dw+, the airflow is very adjustable.

mastaxon Linux's Bedtime Routine

There was an article a while back, I think it was Marc talking about OpenBSDs pledge(), which argued that just taking a string argument of space separated flags is better than the traditional enum flags argument for a syscall. Sort of orthogonal but I found it very persuasive, even as someone who also breaks out in hives when I see my kernel full of stringly typed APIs.

mastaxon Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux

Is this what you were thinking of or something else?

https://nix.dev/tutorials/nixos/building-and-running-docker-...

mastaxon Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux

Yeah I really like networkd as well, switched my Debian servers to it. Netplan also seems fine.

mastaxon AnandTech Farewell

It's very sad but not unexpected. Hard to live off advertising when your demographics are prime adblock users. I did disable adblock on AnandTech when I remembered to, and gritted my teeth at how awful it was to have ads covering every square millimeter of free space.

mastaxon How I learned to stop worrying and love userspace networking

I once updated my graphics driver in the middle of a CS match. There was a second of black screen, a few seconds of lower frame rate, then everything was back to normal. I was amazed.

A lot of applications don’t handle the DEVICE_RESET event, though, so you’re likely to see them crash if the driver resets. Firefox used to have a bug where video playback stopped working after a driver reset, but that’s been fixed.

mastaxon AMD's Radeon 890M: Strix Point's Bigger iGPU

How fortunate for Intel that as soon as they ruin their CPU naming scheme, AMD follow suit.

mastaxon Small Strings in Rust: smolstr vs. smartstring (2020)

It’s nice that rustc’s niche optimization lets smolstr be implemented with a simple enum, rather than having to do some unsafe union bit packing[0]. The only concession that had to be made to the compiler is using an enum for the InlineSize value to show that the last 3 bits of that aren’t used.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-analyzer/smol_str/blob/fde86a5c0cb8f...

mastaxon Zngur: A C++/Rust interop tool

Wow! Amazing how reframing the problem to exclude C++ types in rust makes it all so much more elegant.

mastaxon I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350

It's a bit surprising that they put so much effort into security for the second microcontroller from a young consumer-oriented* company. My first instinct was to distrust it's security, simply due to lack of experience. However, the "experienced" vendors' secure micros have lots of known security bugs and, more crucially, a demonstrated desire to sweep them under the rug. Two security architecture audits, a $10k bug bounty, and designing a board for glitching as the DEF CON badge shows a pretty big commitment to security. I'm curious about how the Redundancy Coprocessor works. I still wouldn't be surprised if someone breaks it, at least partially.

* By perception at least. They have been prioritizing industrial users from a revenue and supply standpoint, it seems.

mastaxon Maximal min() and max()

My question is, why isn't there a `min() and `max()` in the standard library? Even accepting C's philosophy of a minimalist stdlib, these feel like uncontroversial functionality to me. TFA shows there's enough complexity involved in doing it correctly that it makes sense to provide an implementation rather than have everyone write the same often-subtly-incorrect macros. They could use a `__builtin_cmp(type, a, b)` which can use the correct type-casts and prevent double-evaluation without needing any macro weirdness.

mastaxon I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350

My reflow oven is a $5 hot plate and a $15 toaster oven. I don’t know if that is very hobbyist averse.

mastaxon Bcachefs, an Introduction/Exploration

IIRC bcachefs is going to add a non-COW mode which should be good for databases.

mastaxon Polychromatic Pixels

Single chip DLP projectors strobe red, green, blue, white sequentially. Modern DLPs use separate light sources (LED/Laser) and pulse them at a high frequency - kilohertz I assume. Before we had high-power LEDs DLP projectors used a xenon lamp and a color wheel (https://www.projectorjunkies.com/color-wheel-dlp/) spinning at as little as 60 revolutions per second. This caused a "rainbow effect" which was very annoying to some people, but apparently enough people didn't notice it that those products got sold anyway. So somewhere around 180Hz is the bare minimum.

mastaxon Writing an MP4 Muxer for Fun and Profit

It looks like GStreamer has supported this for a few years: https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/isomp4/GstBa...

I always forget about GStreamer but I think I have a perfect application for it. Hopefully it’s easier to use as a library than MediaFoundation or FFMpeg.

mastaxon UK has almost 1M EV chargers, with new public one installed every 25 minutes

I don’t have an electric car but I watched a video of an owner on YouTube doing a roadtrip and he complained when the chargers were located at places more different from gas stations. Convenience stores are… convenient. Walmarts are almost as good. Hotel parking lots offer basically no amenities to non-guests though.

mastaxon Congress accidentally legalized THC six years ago

I’m dumbfounded that this seems to have gone completely under the radar. Does being passed by Trump make it immune to the culture war? Does it just feel right to people that weed is loophole-legal, such that it seems totally unremarkable?