Hacker News Reader

synackon LCD, Please

EEVblog did a whole series on designing a segment LCD, getting it manufactured, and integrating it into a product. Worth the watch if you're at all interested in low power embedded systems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYvxgl-9tNM

synackon “Absurd”: Google, Amazon rebuked over unsupported Chromebooks still for sale

I've spent a fair amount of time messing with the ChromiumOS source tree and I think Google's EOL dates mostly coincide with dropping support for older kernels. Hardware vendors only ship drivers and patches for the LTS kernel at the time the device is built, they don't test or port those patches to newer kernels.

OEMs don't want to spend time/money on kernel updates for old devices. They'd rather sell you a new one.

synackon Pico Serial Bootloader (2021)

The ESP32 requires closed source binary blobs, RP2040 does not. For a lot of projects, it is important to keep these things separate.

synackon Ask HN: Do you still use a hand held/desktop calculator?

TI-30Xa, I use it regularly. I do find myself opening an interactive Python interpreter for more complex things though.

synackon AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge and Public IP Insights

I tried to setup an IPv6-only VPC last month and ran into lots of edge cases. For example, Terraform's aws provider doesn't support the http_protocol_ipv6 metadata option for EC2 instances, you can only set it in a launch template. It's a two year old issue: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws/issues/2...

I'm glad to see AWS driving people towards IPv6, but the tooling and documentation need to get a lot better.

synackon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://synack.me/

Mostly about embedded programming in Ada.

synackon Air quality monitors: paying more does not get you more accuracy

There's some good empirical data about the cheap PM2.5 sensors that Adafruit sells on their forum. The sensor itself has a microcontroller that filters the raw values and you need to keep this in mind when interpreting the data.

https://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=136528&p=76...

synackon Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

There was an internal alpha build of Digg v4 that had "verticals", which were kinda like subreddits. If there weren't enough stories to fill up the front page, the backend would run a search query and fill in relevant stories from other verticals, or even external search engines. As a vertical got more users, the user-voted stories would be given priority over the algorithmically chosen ones.

From a user perspective, this meant that there was already a subreddit for any topic you could conceive of, even if nobody had ever submitted a story to it. It was pretty magical.

Sadly, this whole system was axed in order to get the thing launched before we ran out of money. I bet you could do an even better version of it now with recommendations based on LLM prompts.

synackon AT&T Buildings Around US Reportedly Used as Part of NSA Spying

This is not news. This article was published in (2018). There has been publicly available evidence of NSA wiretaps since 2006 [1] and rumors of such activity extend back to the 1980s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

synackon Beej's Guide to Network Programming

It's useful to understand the socket API so that you can do things like read the output from strace, notice that accept() returns EAGAIN too often, and know what that indicates.

synackon Using io_uring for network I/O

My initial impression of io_uring a few years ago was that it involves a lot of pointer manipulation in userspace, leaving a lot of room for alignment and overflow bugs.

...or maybe I'm just being paranoid.

synackon OpenBSD 7.3

I wish I could run OpenBSD on the arm64 EC2 instances. Last I checked, there's no driver for Amazon's ENA network interface.

synackon Original Prusa MK4

New electronics (AVR upgraded to STM32)

Lighter, stronger, faster extruder

Easier to swap/maintain hotend

Faster and more automated bed leveling

Better stepper motors

synackon Microsoft's Software Is Malware

Useful and harmful are not mutually exclusive.

synackon Ask HN: RHEL vs. Ubuntu and Debian relevance in 2023?

I don't think it matters much these days, all of the mainstream distros are going to provide more or less the same functionality.

IBM and Canonical will both sell you support contracts if that's something you need. If you're on AWS, consider Amazon Linux too, their paid support is quite good and covers the whole platform, not just the OS.

synackon Texas Instruments MSPM0 Arm Cortex-M0 microcontrollers sell for 39 cents and up

The MSPM0G350x chips do have CAN-FD. https://www.ti.com/product/MSPM0G3507

synackon Thousandth of an Inch

Essentially, yes. Older components tend to have imperial footprints, newer ones metric.

synackon Thousandth of an Inch

When doing PCB layout, you're basically forced to think in thousandths, but work in millimeters... You end up memorizing multiples of 2.54mm (0.100in)

synackon AWS will offer HF’s products to its customers and run its next LLM tool

I was hoping this was about Harbor Freight

synackon Setting up an electronics workshop

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

synackon Which programming languages are the closest to 'finished'?

I would call Ada mature, but not finished. There are still plenty of issues under discussion.

https://github.com/Ada-Rapporteur-Group/User-Community-Input

synackon Internal pull-up resistors are insufficient for I2C

The I2C spec gives you a minimum and maximum rise time, but does not specify resistor values. Those values should be selected based on the total capacitance of the bus to meet the rise time requirement, either calculated or measured.

The I2C specification is full of these kinds of ambiguities, which creates a lot more work for implementers. SMBus's physical layer is a subset of I2C that tightens these requirements and specifies pull-up current, making these calculations quite a bit easier.

http://www.smbus.org/specs/SMBus_3_2_20220112.pdf

synackon How a cup of coffee contributes to climate change

There are a few synthetic coffee startups that claim to have a lower carbon impact, though it's hard to tell if this is just marketing guff.

For example: https://atomocoffee.com/pages/beanless-coffee

synackon A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

Evince on Linux is by far the best program I've found for reading large PDFs. It's worth the trouble to setup a VM or WSL just to run Evince if you're not natively on Linux.

synackon Haskell, Ada, C++, Awk: An Experiment in Prototyping Productivity (1994) [pdf]

Ada projects tend to start slow, but readability and flexible namespacing make refactoring and maintenance much easier.

synackon Introduction to Embedded Systems Programming (Ada)

It's more than a proof of concept; there are lots of examples, unit tests, and the linked documentation.

Pico Keys (https://www.tindie.com/products/fabien-c/pico-keys/) is a good example of a complex project built with rp2040_hal.

Note that this library is specific to the RP2040, not the larger Raspberry Pi boards. Some Ada drivers for those exist, but are not as well documented.

I also gave a short talk about some of the challenges I encountered earlier this year: https://youtu.be/Pwd9Q5ELAGM

synackon Introduction to Embedded Systems Programming (Ada)

AdaCore's docs are fantastic for understanding why things are done the way they are. However, when I'm learning a new platform or language I prefer to see a lot of practical examples first. That's what I tried to do with my "Ada on the Raspberry Pi Pico" project:

https://pico-doc.synack.me/

synackon Disk Prices

Thanks for pointing this out. Fixed.

synackon Python 3.11.0 has been released

Release notes: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110/

synackon Ada Programming Language

The GNAT toolchain that Alire installs automatically is built by GitHub Actions runners from the GNAT-FSF-builds [1] repository.

You can download the toolchain as a tarball from the releases page and use it separately if you'd like. If you use Alire, it'll take care of downloading and unpacking the tarball and add it to your PATH when called via alr build.

[1] https://github.com/alire-project/GNAT-FSF-builds/releases