Hacker News Reader

nereyeon I like the RP2040

One use case is related to the Nintendo Switch, as mentioned in another post.

E.g. see https://github.com/Ansem-SoD/Picofly.

nereyeon Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

If external F-RAM is an option, one can use F-RAM from, say Cypress (now Infineon, [1]) together with ARM chips from Ambiq, e.g. Apollo 3 Blue Thin [2], which likely have even better power consumption than an MSP430.

[1] https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/memories/f-ram-ferro...

[2] https://ambiq.com/apollo3-blue-thin/

nereyeon Show HN: I made a free app to calibrate your turntable by simply playing a song

In some countries there are legal and illegal BPMs, e.g. according to [0] only the BPM range from 80 to 116 is legal in Chechnya.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243632570/chechnya-music-ban...

nereyeon Twenty years is nothing

This is not an uncommon behavior in source code control systems, e.g. both Perforce and Mercurial behave like Git too.

E.g. see https://portal.perforce.com/s/article/3447 for Perforce.

nereyeon OpenFPGA

It also seems to re-use the name of a (from what I can tell) separate project:

https://github.com/lnis-uofu/OpenFPGA

https://openfpga.readthedocs.io/en/master/

nereyeon About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

This is assuming that the thief can tell which phone brand/model it is at the time of theft.

For phones which are in a case/cover, inside bags etc., it seems almost impossible so am unsure that this is an effective deterrent.

nereyeon GE Vernova announces order of 674 wind turbines, providing 2.4 GW of power

One of the main issues is that dams tend to block access to the upstream spawning grounds for species such as Coho salmon. E.g. see https://www.reuters.com/world/us/save-salmon-us-approves-lar....

nereyeon Raspberry Pi receives strategic investment from Arm

Korg uses the Pi Compute Module 3 [0] in at least three of their products (wavestate, modwave, opsix), with Korg being one of the major synth manufacturers and overall annual keyboard synthesizer sales in the US alone being over 100K units. Don't have hard evidence but am assuming that Korg has sold more than 10K units of those three products.

[0] - https://www.raspberrypi.com/success-stories/korg-synthesizer...

nereyeon YKK: Japan’s Zipper King [video]

YKK zippers: Why so many designers use them (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32656463 - September 2022 (157 comments)

Why YKK? The Japanese company behind the world’s best zipper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8655580 - November 2014 - (57 comments)

Why Do So Many Zippers Say YKK? (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11602988 - April 2016 (60 comments)

nereyeon Debugger Ghidra Class

See "Why did you fork radare2?" [1] from the Rizin FAQ.

For more details, see (well, listen to) the episode of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast which covered Rizin/Cutter [2].

[1] https://rizin.re/posts/faq/

[2] https://unnamedre.com/episode/45

nereyeon Paragraphica is a context-to-image camera

There have been a bunch of similar submissions recently, all with 0 comments save for this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36139729

AI camera with no lens (theprompt.io) 1 day ago | 84 comments

nereyeon DeviceScript: TypeScript for Tiny IoT Devices

FWIW, this lives again as .NET nanoFramework:

https://www.nanoframework.net/

Enterprising folks have even managed to run it on the Raspberry Pi Pico...

nereyeon The weird world of Windows file paths

That standardized marker is also known as the 'Mark of the Web' (MOTW) in case you want to search for more details about it.

In general, there is a tool which comes with the SysInternals suite that allows you to see which files have streams and their size:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/str...

nereyeon Why is GPT-3 15.77x more expensive for certain languages?

> Korean has couple of dozen of symbols in its alphabet.

While that is true (14 consonants, 10 vowels [0]), there are encodings for Korean that encode at the syllable level (where each syllable contains one or two consonants and one vowel) and the combinations for syllables are over 10000 (e.g. 11172 code points listed in Unicode, see [1]).

[0] in practice, more, both to cater for both modern and obsolete forms as well to distinguish the forms based on their position, i.e. with separate encodings for leading vs trailing consonants etc.).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Syllables

nereyeon Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

The other competitor was Borland Paradox.

IIRC there is an easter egg in Microsoft Access 1.0 where the About box changes to an animation of a pond with two ducks in it that are then hit by lightning from a cloud above. I.e. a cirrus and a 'pair of ducks'...

nereyeon The end of Type 1 fonts

For other examples, see http://luc.devroye.org/randomizedfonts.html.

Amongst other things, assuming what that page says is true, only Type 3 fonts support that (randomizing glyphs at render time), not Type 1.

nereyeon Show HN: I built a little online drum machine using 808 style samples

Or follow the swing recipe from "Roger Linn on Swing, Groove and the Magic of the MPC's Timing (2013)":

https://www.attackmagazine.com/features/interview/roger-linn...

as previously discussed on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425861).

nereyeon Korg: Tekt NTS-2 Oscilloscope Kit

Not an interstitial (and am not the original poster), but, somewhat related, ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation)'s logo is a Lissajous curve:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corpor...

The article does mention that 'In the early years of television, the ABC had been using Lissajous curves as fillers between programmes.'

nereyeon Taking over a Dead IoT Company

On the other hand, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33892009, https://www.raspberrypi.com/success-stories/korg-synthesizer... for example on how some companies use Raspberry Pi compute modules in their products.

Am assuming here that they're adopting strategies to minimize/work around the problems you mention.

nereyeon The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

Talking of MREs, some airlines do not allow them as carry on luggage, see https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/....

nereyeon US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

The part about 'was awarded academic positions based on that' is debatable, e.g. this claim was investigated by a newspaper (article below is titled 'Ethnicity not a factor in Elizabeth Warren's rise in law'):

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/09/01/did-claim...

nereyeon The Town of Pullman

In case it's not obvious, this is Pullman, Chicago, Illinois.

Not Pullman, Washington, home of Digilent Inc. (purveyors of fine FPGA dev boards, the Analog Discovery 2 and other HN-relevant hardware) and of Washington State University, etc.

nereyeon Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

For the record, she was a Labour MP, not conservative.

nereyeon Koch method to learn Morse

As well as dedicated hardware, to list but two examples:

http://www.morserino.info/

http://wb7fhc.com/m2-cw-decoder.html

nereyeon Joni Mitchell learned to play guitar again after a 2015 brain aneurysm

One more: Edwyn Collins, from Wikipedia:

In February 2005, Collins was hospitalised after two cerebral haemorrhages which resulted in aphasia, and he needed months to recover. He resumed his musical career in 2007. A documentary film on his recovery, The Possibilities Are Endless, was released in 2014.

nereyeon Has the world become less colourful?

Would normally try to resist but, just as FYI, from https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/30/palate-palette-pallet/:

palate / palette / pallet Your “palate” is the roof of your mouth, and by extension, your sense of taste. A “palette” is the flat board an artist mixes paint on (or by extension, a range of colors). A “pallet” is either a bed (now rare) or a flat platform onto which goods are loaded.

nereyeon Can a biologist fix a radio? Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis (2002)

Some previous posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120457 76 points|breck|4 months ago|18 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624695 22 points|Maro|13 years ago|4 comments

nereyeon LTSpice Tutorial

There is an interesting 6-part LTSpice overview/training on YouTube by none other than the creator of LTSpice itself (Mike Engelhardt) and at the very start he mentions why he thinks that the best simulators are written by the concerns that need them (e.g. Linear Technology at the time, Analog Devices now) as opposed to software companies. See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6gKThjZIj-s.

nereyeon Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

Intel acquired Altera in 2015, Altera has been producing FPGAs with ARM cores since 2011 at least (https://www.embedded.com/altera-integrates-arm-processor-in-...).

The Xilinx devices above are also FPGAs with ARM cores (a natural evolution from FPGAs with soft cores, MicroBlaze in the case of Xilinx and Nios in the case of Altera).

nereyeon Whatever Happened to “Programmable” Analog? (2019)

See also https://anadigm.com/ (which styles itself as "The FPAA Company" where 'FPAA' is Field Programmable Analog Array) and https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/products/greenpak (GreenPAK™ originated with Silego Technology, which Dialog bought in 2017, Dialog itself is now part of Renesas as of last year).

The GreenPAK line includes a variety of ICs, some of them are more like traditional FPGAs and some have analog components too.