HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

zsellera

88 karma · joined May 9, 2013

submissionscomments
zsellera··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
It's been a struggle to allocate cost-optimized VPS at them for months now (in some regions), they were very often out-of-stock.
zsellera··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
RFID/transponder-based lap timing for RC-cars, using RTL-SDR/HackRF.

https://openstint.org/ -- https://github.com/zsellera/openstint

zsellera··on How bad can a $2.97 ADC be?
Most companies have region-specific price lists. My Spotify subscription costs about 60% of what the same plan costs in the US (2200 HUF vs. 11 USD). In the electronics industry, everyone has a separate price list for China.

Btw. the western list price is just an indicative at-most number anyway. Even a small-sized project gets discounted prices when you start talking to a sales rep.

zsellera··on Why does FM sound better than AM?
What you "more bandwidth more noise" people miss is the difference in randomness: the noise is random while the signal is not.

In case of gaussian noise, double the bandwidth means 1.41x more noise. For signal, double the bandwidth double the signal.

zsellera··on Scrum's “Product Owner” Problem
The same essential skills make a great PO/business analyst as a great engineer: the ability to think in abstract terms and the ability to debug.

When successful POs write a book or something, they present the best-practices. They don't share the most important wisdom though: there are pretty smart to start with... Applying their practices without the ability to think does not work, and it's not something one can pick up on the go.

Nothing comes from nothing.

zsellera··on Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
After doing some math it doesn't feel like a ddos:

- $104k at ($55 / 100 GB) = 189 TB of traffic

- It means the popular ~3.5 MB media file was downloaded ~54M times

- Which sound like a lot, but if you get popular in a country with 1.4B people, it's not (~3% accessed).

What if it happens at AWS Cloudfront? At $.1/GB it sums up to ~$18k. In the light of these, Netlify's offer of ~$5k seems generous.

zsellera··on Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
There is a little to no consumer market for quality stuff (ppl buy based on price, maybe lm/W, maybe CRI95+).

You'll see great LED installations at:

- offices & commercial buildings, where it was designed by an engineer

- medical, where identifying things like skin-tone is critical

- transportation (often street lights), where it's optimised for night-time contrast

zsellera··on Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
If you ever wondered what makes LED lights feel great: it's the strategic mixing of LEDs with different characteristics.

Here's a free tool that helps designing such fixtures: https://www.meerkatblog.com/ledmixing

zsellera··on Those who witnessed Castle Bravo looked into Armageddon
The risk of an accident is much lower than the risk of full-on wars w/o them. Nuclear weapons are the reason I can raise my children in a relative peace.
zsellera··on Launch HN: BlackOakTV (YC S21) – Netflix for black people
This project is a great showcase of what whitelabel streaming providers can do. Back when Youtube and Netflix started streaming, it was a huge deal technically (codecs, infrastructure, cdn). Now companies like uscreen offer this at a flat rate, and they themselves use 3rd-parties (Akamai/Cloudflare) for video storage and distribution.
zsellera··on Hungarian journalists and critics of Orbán were targeted with Pegasus
So far Orban's regime is the only eu/western government involved in this scandal. I see that no surprise.

There is no need of official government approval to conduct such surveillance. It's enough to have weak access contol to such technologies, political roles within the agencies, and poor work ethics in civil servants: there alway will be someone with will and motive to act in favor of the system, off the record. Orban deliberately shaped the government this way.

zsellera··on Home Gardening
Search ebay/etc for "EC/TDS meter", it's ~10 USD. Cheap ones do work, no worry. Keep your drain water at a stable EC, somewhere between 500 and 2500 uS/cm, and you're golden. If the drain water's EC is low, use irrigation water somewhat richer (+500..1000 uS/cm). Some tap water is already high on minerals, in that case use mainly nitrogen-rich solution.

Btw if your plants look healthy, no action is required.

zsellera··on The chip shortage could lead to an era of hardware innovation
My experiences are different.

I think most assembly-houses self-source some parts, and they do it in large quantities (like 1M+ parts/year). As such, they buy at extremely good prices. They overbuy themselves, and in order to get the same good pricing next year, they keep overbuying. Some of their inventory is then sold locally, and ends up in the Shenzhen market or at unauthorized resellers.

For the quantities I buy (sub-1000 pcs typ.) the pricing is usually 0.2-2.0 times the known good parts from known (authorized) sellers.

The problem is that I can not be sure what I get, and I have to implement really extensive testing for each batch.

zsellera··on The chip shortage could lead to an era of hardware innovation
LOL, no. It's hard to implement hardware functions in software if it's impossible to source the MCUs my software stack was built on.

What's really happening is that I (and likely many others) realised that Chinese-brand chips (which are not affected by the shortage) works just as fine as the western ones.

The other thing I realised was that non-authorized sellers works just as fine as well. Yep, I had to implement more thorough testing/QC, but I would not call that extra work innovation.

zsellera··on Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?
That waterfall doesn't look like any sensible digital modulation to me, or at least if I were doing HFT, the spectrogram would look totally different.

I think the source is rather an unintentional radiator in this case.

zsellera··on JupyterLab 3.0
Don't even try. Use docker, there are official pre-built images. It's easy:

  docker run -p 8888:8888 -v ~/Code/actual-project/:/home/jovyan jupyter/datascience-notebook
Note ~/Code/actual-project/ is a git repo or a mounted Google Drive folder. Moving from one machine to an other is pain-free.

[1] https://jupyter-docker-stacks.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using...

zsellera··on Show HN: UrlRoulette – Pass a URL to the next visitor
This was the most disgusting thing I clicked on this month.
zsellera··on Air-FI: Generating Covert Wi-Fi Signals from Air-Gapped Computers
Somewhat. Make sure the metal case is earthed, and the case is the only point where earth and internal grounds are connected.

Far field emissions rarely comes from pcb traces though. Memory (high speed) buses use amps of current on each transitions, and the return current create a significant (few mV) voltage drop on the internal ground and power planes. This results an AC voltage difference at the opposite ends of the bus on the same plane.

Take a look at the Raspberry Pi 3: it has a power usb connector at one corner, and the USB A connectors at the opposite corner. The memory/cpu are inbetween. The shields of these connectors are connected, and are connected to the internal ground. When the device is operating, there is likely some switching noise between them. When you connect a USB cable, the shielding on that cable and the shielding in the power cable may act as a dipole antenna. This is the most likely source of emissions, and the metal casing does little to nothing to prevent it.

zsellera··on 3D printers fill the air with volatile nanoparticles. More research is needed [pdf]
It's nothing new and is know in the community for a very long time. BfR scientists should rather focus on the safety of industrial injection molding, where the smell is barely bearable and rumor sais workers grow extensive fur.
zsellera··on Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)
I'm kinda into tomatoes: the same variety can result different taste and nutritional value (dry matter content) depending on the growing conditions.

I know two greenhouse growers, growing the same variety of tomato on the same rootstock in the same medium. One of them has ~5-5.5% DMC while the other has close to 8% in the mid-spring season.

They taste different, but they yield different as well (higher quality means lower yields).

zsellera··on Transmit Radio Signals via Ethernet
Just out of curiosity: the tone appearing is me connecting my CE-certified Dell computer to a CE-certified Asus router, using a standard cat5-e cable.

https://ibb.co/0rxKq6L

(CubicSDR ran on the same DELL machine, however both tones disappeared after disconnecting the antenna from the SDR)

zsellera··on Transmit Radio Signals via Ethernet
I think what happens is the transformer inside the rj45 connector couples a litte of the differential mode signal (that should not radiate significantly) to all wires in the cable harness (common mode), which will radiate. You can select the cable length so it resonates well, acting like a good antenna, but bad antennas radiate as well (worse efficiency). A few mV of noise is quite well detectable from 10m of distance.
zsellera··on Transmit Radio Signals via Ethernet
As someone recently participated in an EMC measurement, I really don't understand how anyone passes these tests without some kind of cheating (using double-shielded, very expensive industrial cables + hacking with functional earthing).
zsellera··on Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
I recently took an email-course on blogging for devs. One of the key points were to use your own domain, and the course showed a few tricks about creating traffic there.

If you're interested, here is it: https://bloggingfordevs.com/

zsellera··on Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
You can decrease such risks by mixing carbonate minerals (calcium-carbonate and magnesium carboante) into the AN fertilizer, as done in EU counties (and probably in the rest of the world as well).
zsellera··on What are the mysterious light sources on light pollution maps?
that's per a single tomato plant, summer time. I guess it's the same for any greenhouse crop, see the reasoning here:

water use is necessary to manage internal climate. the greenhouse was designed to keep heat inside. the plants have to cool themselves (hence the environment) by evaporation. the farmer manages evaporation rate by watering, temperature and humidity. there are many feedback loops, both negative and positive, balancing it is a non-trivial task.

btw. there's an average of 1.2-1.3 plant/m2 in most tomato greenhouses I've seen.

zsellera··on What are the mysterious light sources on light pollution maps?
As someone working in the greenhouse lighting industry, I might have some insight on this:

1. there is an existing technology called energy screen/curtain, with the primary function of retaining heat, but can also reduce light pollution by an order of magnitude.

2. light that escapes is essentially money lost, however it alone does not justify the use of energy screens.

3. as long as farmers have access to (relatively) cheap heat and electricity, they won't invest into this technology.

4. for the time being, it's a regulatory issue, just like water use (a single plant use 2-2.5 l/day), supplemental co2 use and nitrate recirculation from runoff water.

zsellera··on The TSA has a watch list of people who present “challenges” to screening
by doing so the content is now blocked from eu-based users because some gdpr shittery at la times
zsellera··on Why soap bubbles are colourful and windowpanes are not
Thanks, great. Slight addition: visible light spectra is between 400-700nm; sure you can still see 390nm and 730nm, but the sensitivity is rapidly decreased there.
zsellera··on Tetris for TS100 soldering iron
It's not an USB iron, but powered by a separate power jack, anywhere between 12-24V; at 24V it maxes out around 65W.

As the heater block is integrated to the tip itself, you get better thermal characteristics (quicker heatup / less thermal runaway). Search youtube for comparisons to Weller/Hakko irons, there are a few.

Page 1 of 2Next →