Hacker News: Cadwhisker

New comment by Cadwhisker in "Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer"

Cadwhisker — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:10:43 +0000

Very impressive that I can sketch a character in the top-left and get a close match. That's a real highlight showing that there's more going on under the hood than a big look-up table.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "From Oscilloscope to Wireshark: A UDP Story (2022)"

Cadwhisker — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:52:42 +0000

I love the photo of the probe, and I bet it's very expensive. I wonder if the "A071626" sticker changes the impedance of the traces enough for you to notice :)

https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-08-11-udp/probes_full.j...

New comment by Cadwhisker in "We can't have nice things because of AI scrapers"

Cadwhisker — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 05:40:11 +0000

Thanks, I get it now.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "We can't have nice things because of AI scrapers"

Cadwhisker — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:06:21 +0000

I took a look at the https://tvnfo.com/ site and I have no idea what's behind the donation wall. Can I suggest you have a single page which explains or demonstrates the content, or there's no reason for "new" people to want to donate to get access.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]"

Cadwhisker — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 22:35:23 +0000

I had to replay that to appreciate how the transitions from night to day were done so very, very well. The dynamic range of the shots always seemed spot on.

That isn't easy to get right.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

Cadwhisker — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 02:53:04 +0000

Yes, IP usage is awkward and tricky. You can use the GUI to make the initial .xci file or .tcl file, but when you build a project, you need to use the same version of Vivado that the IP core was originally created in. Xilinx have improved that a little with 'write_ip_tcl' and 'write_bd_tcl' now having flags that let you ignore the version (or minor version). I've not had time to try those yet.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

Cadwhisker — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 01:24:09 +0000

I've managed to make nice 'make' flows for Vivado, ISE, Quartus and DC. Libero took a bit more poking, but it's also possible.

The GUI interfaces are what newcomers tend to aim for straight away, but they're not good for any long-term "repeatable" build flows and they're no use for CI. I think this is where a lot of the frustration comes from.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

Cadwhisker — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 01:17:17 +0000

# Here's the general flow for Vivado TCL projects that takes you from source code to a bit-file with no interaction. Read UG835 for details.

create_project -in_memory -part ${PART}

set_property target_language VHDL [ current_project ]

read_vhdl "my_hdl_file.vhd"

synth_design -top my_hdl_top_module_name -part ${PART}

opt_design

place_design

route_design

check_timing -file my_timing.txt

report_utilization -file my_util.txt

write_checkpoint my_routed_design.dcp

write_bitstream my_bitfile.bit

New comment by Cadwhisker in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

Cadwhisker — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 01:10:59 +0000

This article is a rant about how bad tools are without going into specifics. "VHDL and Verilog are relics", well so is "C" but they all get the job done if you've been shown how to use them properly.

"engineers are stuck using outdated languages inside proprietary IDEs that feel like time capsules from another century.". The article misses that Vivado was developed in the 2010's and released around 2013. It's a huge step-up from ISE if you know how to drive it properly and THIS is the main point that the original author misses. You need to have a different mindset when writing hardware and it's not easy to find training that shows how to do it right.

If you venture into the world of digital logic design without a guide or mentor, then you're going to encounter all the pitfalls and get frustrated.

My daily Vivado experience involves typing "make", then waiting for the result and analysing from there (if necessary). It takes experience to set up a hardware project like this, but once you get there it's compatible with standard version control, CI tools, regression tests and the other nice things you expect form a modern development environment.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "A guide to local coding models"

Cadwhisker — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 22:18:06 +0000

LMStudio? No, it's the easiest way to run am LLM locally that I've seen to the point where I've stopped looking at other alternatives.

It's cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux), detects the most appropriate GPU in your system and tells you whether the model you want to download will run within it's RAM footprint.

It lets you set up a local server that you can access through API calls as if you were remotely connected to an online service.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio"

Cadwhisker — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:44:26 +0000

OK, I take it back now that the HN hug has died off a bit. Bruno's site is a ridiculously neat thing to see in a web browser.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio"

Cadwhisker — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 04:48:23 +0000

I can't see Bruno's site and I assume it's because of the HN hug of death, but an impressive 3D website that always comes to mind is acko.net, with its 3D rendered tubular logo. He even describes how it was done in a blog post.

https://acko.net/blog/zero-to-sixty-in-one-second/

New comment by Cadwhisker in "Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release"

Cadwhisker — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 06:29:25 +0000

In the past, I'd find one wrong answer and I could easily spot the copies. Now there's a dozen different sites with the same wrong answer, just with better formatting and nicer text.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18"

Cadwhisker — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 22:03:08 +0000

I have to do tech support for grandma. Every few years, her Windows laptop gets so slow that we get her a new one. This time I will test out a switch to Linux instead of buying a new computer. Zorin is the most attractive option because it's the least strange.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "How the cochlea computes (2024)"

Cadwhisker — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 22:58:40 +0000

Just a warning that the video ends with a loud, high pitched tone that will make you want to rip your headphones off.

Ironic for a video about hearing.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "Ask HN: What software dev tasks have you found LLMs to be good at versus bad at?"

Cadwhisker — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 05:21:30 +0000

Helping me get up to speed with an unfamiliar API much, much faster than any online searching.

I can describe an example application and see which API is chosen, along with which functions/methods are called and in what order and with what data structures.

I take it from there and build on that by hand. Take Python UI development, for example. I can ask for a window with a zoomable bitmap image with scrollbars. I get an answer I can refer to in seconds. If I know that I want PySide6 or PyQt6, I can specify that, or I can ask for a list of Python UI APIs and their strengths/weaknesses.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "I miss using em dashes"

Cadwhisker — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 02:27:00 +0000

I'd switch to semicolons, but I need to re-read this book to be sure I'm using them correctly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves

New comment by Cadwhisker in "Fuck up my site – Turn any website into beautiful chaos"

Cadwhisker — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 02:43:29 +0000

Switching the font on apple.com to Comic Sans is a nice touch.

https://www.fuckupmysite.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapple.com&to...

New comment by Cadwhisker in "Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims"

Cadwhisker — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 23:36:41 +0000

That fine needs an extra zero on the end. They'll shrug it off as the cost of doing business.

New comment by Cadwhisker in "uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari"

Cadwhisker — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 10:48:18 +0000

I got the Australian one by replacing `cn` with `au` in the link.

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...