Hacker News Reader

mkarron My BC-250 Journey (With 40 CUs Unlocked)

You could find these under $100 yesterday on AliExpress with some referral + coupon stacking (rakuten + coupon + paypal pay-in-4 discount). The cheapest sellers often only put out a limited number of items each day, so you have to check back every few hours.

mkarron Project IceStorm: open-source toolchain for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs

Is your 6502 SBC in any state to share more info on? It seems like an interesting project.

mkarron NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

pg down

Sigh.

pg down

Sigh

...

Repeat for hours.

mkarron Dr. Leonid Rogozov operating himself to remove his appendix in Antarctica, 1961

I have often heard the feeling called "squick". Or being "squicked out".

mkarron Chipmaker Analog Devices to acquire Maxim Integrated for $21B

> (and there was some startup - in NYC I believe - that you could give Eagle files and a product order list and they would buy you the components at Digikey and manufacture the board for you... anyone remember their name?!)

Are you thinking of MacroFab (https://macrofab.com/) located in Houston? I believe they have been featured here before.

mkarron Japan plans to lower age of adulthood to 18 (2018)

In my experience, the vending machines near and in hotels, etc, did not require any form of ID. However, the random ones I found out on the street required you to have obtained an ID/Authorization card beforehand.

mkarron Aviation’s Largest Piston Engine (2016)

A large part of these technologies making their way into consumer automobile engines was advances in material science, lubrication, manufacturing, etc, that allowed for them to exist economically and reliably. Those WW2 era piston engines were horrifically expensive, and required dozens to hundreds of hours of maintenance per hour of flight time.

mkarron A legend reborn: Microsoft brings back the iconic Classic IntelliMouse

I couldn't stand the constant nagging and focus-stealing the Razer software did regularly. To the point that I just went back and bought the same Logitech mouse that I had been using before (and had broken). That's what I get for trying new things occasionally.

mkarron SNES preservation project on hold due to missing $10,000 package

Have you ever written up or documented the technical aspects of your whole process to scan one of the cartridges you receive? That would be something that I would find interesting to read.

mkarron SNES preservation project on hold due to missing $10,000 package

As a hopeful note of optimism: I recently sent a large, expensive package (worth around $1500) cross-country via USPS. The package was sent out mid-December. According to the tracking it made it all the way to the destination Post Office. After that...nothing. It just never progressed. I filed both a mail search requests, and an insurance claim. I received nothing but radio silence on those as well. Fast forward to about a week ago when the package just shows up on my doorstep without notice. Hopefully byuu's package eventually does show up.

mkarron Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

When the ESP8266s were first introduced, they came with a closed firmware that simply responded to AT commands over a serial port. To do anything with the chip, you had to have another micro controlling it.

However, sometime after the hobbyist/maker market started to take notice of the devices, an SDK was released, allowing for code to be run natively on the devices without a separate micro.

Nowadays, there are multiple options for running code on the devices. You can do it natively via C/C++ with the SDK, or you can try out one of the other firmwares that various parties have produced, like NodeMCU (Lua) or MicroPython.

The chips are actually pretty damn powerful compared to the Atmega series micros used with the classic Arduinos. And cheap too. You can get a NodeMCU module that already has a voltage reg. and USB->UART controller on it for around $3. Very hard to beat.

mkarron How a Diode Changed My Life

Either not getting a good ground, or not having a long enough antenna are two issues I have commonly seen with some of the more basic kits.

mkarron Writing a Game Boy Advance Game

One of the easiest ways to get code running on the GBA is via the multiboot protocol over the link port. This was the primary way I ran code on the GBA circa 2003ish using a link cable spliced into a parallel port plug.

Unfortunately, parallel ports are exceedingly uncommon these days. However, it looks like this can be done easyly enough using something like a Teensy [0] or Arduino [1].

[0] https://github.com/tangrs/usb-gba-multiboot

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100815071014/http://blog.evildr...

mkarron Assembly 2015 demo party winning entry

In my opinion, a demo, in addition to artistic expression, is a showcase of the technical skill of its creators.

Using a pre-built engine is not quite up to the standard I would normally expect to see.

However, an argument could be made that the Unreal Engine itself is a platform (like the C64, PC, Windows, etc.), and pushing that platform's boundaries is keeping with the spirit of the demoscene.

If we restrict one from using something like Unreal, do we restrict also the use of something like OpenGL or DirectX? Or Windows/Linux itself? There are a lot of layers of abstraction we can remove.

mkarron Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

Hi Hunter. Do you all plan to offer the battery in a minimal form factor (without the group 35 adapter)? I currently am running one of the Shorai LiFePo4 batteries in my track car. I really love the small size and weight, and would be willing to work around the smaller form factor.

mkarron Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

What happens when you (somehow) fail to set the status of a toy you track to "recalled" during some part of the recall period, and then one of your subscriber's kid harms themselves with said toy? Have you anticipated how to protect yourself from your subscriber in such a case?

mkarron Malaysia B772 has crashed near Donetsk

If you do decide to keep the ticket, you will probably have an entire couple of rows to yourself to stretch out on...

mkarron Every C99.php shell is backdoored

There are thousands of variations of C99 used by various 'hackers'. Many of which are obfuscated (base64, gzip, other more obscure encodings). Generally, searching for a combination of 'base64_decode', 'gzdecode', and 'eval' will find a great deal of them. Others may require more manual inspection. Just searching for 'eval' alone tends to find a lot.

There are a few tools floating about that try to use a more signature-based approach to searching, and clamav has some signatures for the shells, but they can be hit-and-miss, as the obfuscation often changes.

mkarron The Design Flaw That Almost Wiped Out an NYC Skyscraper

A full text of the article can be found here:

http://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm

This is much more comprehensive and interesting than the source linked in OP and elsewhere.

I discovered this a few years back while doing some reading for an ethics class, and was fascinated by it.

mkarron How We Decoded Some Nasty Multi-Level Encoded Malware

A few months ago, I removed an almost identical piece of malware from a client's account. Looking through the server logs, I noticed that the script was still being accessed on a fairly regular basis. I dropped a simple script to dump the contents of the cookies and request variables to a file when accessed. It didn't take very long to obtain the key.