Hacker News Reader

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?

mastaxon AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

I’d argue that a factor in CUDA’s success is their army of in-house researchers which use CUDA to do novel things. Sometimes those things get turned into products (OptiX) other times they are essentially DevRel to show off what the hardware can do and documentation for how to do it. Additionally I’m sure they use pre-release hardware and software and give feedback about how to improve it.

I don’t know what AMD has in mind for this acquisition but I could see there being a lot of value having an in house LLM team to create models for customers to build on, run in benchmarks, and improve their products.

mastaxon First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

During WWII Germany had limited access to chromium and cobalt so they developed alternative metallurgy for their engines etc. I know they nickel plated their cylinder bores. I’m sure there’s more detail available somewhere.

mastaxon Emergency rooms are not okay

I’m surprised to see no mention of Certificates of Need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need. In most of the US hospitals need to have a license for their number of beds, the idea being that regulators don’t want there to be too many beds because hospitals tend to find ways to fill them unnecessarily. I’m not familiar with the literature about how good of an argument that is. Intuitively you can see how that could be an impediment when there is a greater need for hospital beds.

mastaxon Inside a $1 radar motion sensor

The competition between Siglent Rigol and Uni-T will most likely drive down the cost. From a high baseline but still.

mastaxon Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

Have you heard of the Global Village Construction Set? I think you’ll appreciate it.

mastaxon Why do electronic components have such odd values? (2021)

I saw a video from the WS2812 factory and from what I remember all of the LEDs were tested individually on the die before assembly. I don’t know if that’s typical but those are pretty cheap for what they are.

mastaxon WinDirStat – Windows Directory Statistics

IO Minifilter drivers are the modern version: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/i...

mastaxon OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

There have been cases where it was decided that a person had rights[0] to their distinctive voice, as an extension of the Right of Publicity[1]. For example Midler v. Ford Motor Co.[2], and one or two other cases I've seen mentioned but can't remember.

[0]: Though not necessarily "copyrights"?

[1]: https://higgslaw.com/celebrities-sue-over-unauthorized-use-o...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

mastaxon NoTunes is a macOS application that will prevent Apple Music from launching

I never used to have this problem until recently, when it started happening every time I’d start my car - and even every time I’d stop playing other media in my car.

I ended up uninstalling Apple Music. At least they let you do that.

mastaxon TSMC unveils 1.6nm process technology with backside power delivery

Pardon?

mastaxon Argentina celebrates first quarterly budget surplus in 16 years

Milei has committed to dollarization, so at some point pesos are likely to be worthless. The government probably will (?) offer to exchange pesos for dollars but the government doesn’t have many dollars so their rate is likely to be terrible. He has removed many of the controls which were intended to protect the peso.

mastaxon Meta does everything OpenAI should be

> Making other peoples products less competitive by aggressively subsidising part of your business is not that cool of a move.

I don’t see it that way. Meta doesn’t have AI products, really, they have AI backend infrastructure. It’s like the Open Compute project for them, making their own infrastructure cheaper via openness, which seems perfectly cromulent to me. This could change.

Of course they’re doing good things out of self interest, but that’s how the system is supposed to work. It might even be preferable for us outside. Self interest tends to be more durable than altruism - particularly corporate altruism.

mastaxon The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword

Changes in the layout of the binary can have large impacts on the program performance [0] so it's possible that the unexpected performance decrease is caused by unpredictable changes in the layout of the binary between compilations. I think there is some tool which helps ensure layout is consistent for benchmarking, but I can't remember what it's called.

[0]: https://research.facebook.com/publications/bolt-a-practical-...

mastaxon Household size and the housing stock

You are correct, here is a better statistic: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N

mastaxon Household size and the housing stock

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHVRUSQ156N

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RRVRUSQ156N

mastaxon Amazon virtually kills efforts to develop Alexa Skills

Yeah I see the same and have thought it strange.

I think it’s just that footer was designed to promote their video content and Ars doesn’t produce much video so that’s the most recent thing to put there.

mastaxon Do You Need IPv4 Anymore?

> Traffic for that /48 will be routed to your router.

Okay, now it makes sense. I'm not sure how else I expected it to work.

mastaxon Do You Need IPv4 Anymore?

Related question: I asked my ISP for IPv6 and they gave me a static assignment like this:

    WAN: A:B:C:D::1/126
    LAN: A:B:110::/48

I tried to read up on this but am still confused. Why are they giving me WAN and LAN addresses? I thought the whole point of IPv6 is that you give your devices publicly routable IP addresses. If an address is publicly routable, what's "LAN" about it? I haven't been able to find a working configuration for Unifi, though their IPv6 support is like 20% implemented at best.

And no, the LAN subnet isn't in the ULA or link-local space.

mastaxon A 2-Axis, Multihead Light Positioner

Bunnie is developing (has developed?) a portable high security app platform of sorts, the Precursor. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

This post is tagged with Precursor, so I assume this project is to add another level of assurance about supply chain integrity for the components going into the precursor.

mastaxon 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth

Follow-up question. I understand how Richter Scale + depth could be useful, academically. But when communicating with the public, wouldn't it be easier to have a single number - rather than requiring the public to understand the relationship between two different quantities? Maybe: surface-equivalent Richter scale?

Of course transitioning to a new standard would be even more confusing for a while.

Edit: apparently there are many different scales in wide use already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_magnitude_scales

mastaxon BeagleY-AI: a 4 TOPS-capable $70 board from Beagleboard

But BeagleY-AI does have an R5 MCU.

mastaxon A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates

There are NAS devices from a bunch of manufacturers where you can just buy them, plug them in, run through the setup wizard, and click install on the Plex app in their built in App Store. Not much more difficult than getting printer drivers installed.

That’s certainly more than many people are able (or willing) to put up with, and it requires a several hundred dollar investment. But NAS ease of use for common tasks is pretty good theee days.

mastaxon After Thursday's flight, Starship is the most revolutionary rocket ever built

Perhaps because of the earnestness? It would be a shame if that were to become AI-coded.

mastaxon Tenstorrent unveils Grayskull, its RISC-V answer to GPUs

Nvidia has insane margins so it isn't hard* for a well-funded player to beat them in FLOPS/$. The hard part is the compiler toolchains, the libraries, the documentation, getting models to run fast.

* Everything is relative. It's hard to make even a simple microcontroller - but also it isn't hard, you know?

mastaxon Show HN: dockerc – Docker image to static executable "compiler"

— UEFI authors

mastaxon Open Beam Interface

> Built on Glasgow [Interface Explorer]

Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. It’s meant to be a sort of digital Swiss Army knife, where you can connect almost any digital interface to a computer and do basically anything with it programmatically. I’ll have to pick one up now that it looks like they’re released.

I’ll probably still end up using an arduino as my one-off IC-to-PC interface device just out of habit and not needing to read any documentation, but I love the idea.