<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: Joel_Mckay</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Joel_Mckay</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:18:02 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=Joel_Mckay" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "RepRapMicron"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One may buy the +-0.28mm piezoelectric actuator stacks out of China for $15, but the high-voltage drivers are not amateur friendly. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Oct 2026 20:24:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145135</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145135</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145135</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "RepRapMicron"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Some people do when building AFMs, but the piezoelectric stack voltages to get a few mm dynamic range are often around 160v to 600v.<p>After playing around with several options, piezoelectric was the path I chose for a sub-micron stage. It took a bit of research, but it does make things much easier when done right.<p>Most hobby work is kept private now... due to safety issues with people without lab-training attempting complex builds.  Indeed, a few fools still die every year attempting things they saw on you-tube ("Lichtenstein burning" etc.) =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Oct 2026 20:17:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145056</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145056</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145056</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "Open MicroManipulator – A sub-micrometer 3D motion control plattform"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In general, platforms are placed in a temperature-controlled/heated draft-guard chamber, on a vibration isolation table, and use uniform materials that do not deform much in the narrow operating temperature range (+-0.5'C).<p>The stage is not the primary design constraint, but rather it is the position sensors that still cost.  At a certain point, some realize the pi-usa stages lofty price was actually fairly reasonable in retrospect.<p>Best regards, =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:59:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50141673</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50141673</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50141673</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "Laser Fault Injection on a Budget: RP2350 Edition (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Below around 1 micron scales... sliding bearing surfaces can start to get less predictable, and more expensive.  People get around the issue by combining different sets of precise and wide-range rough-motion systems. <a href="https://www.pi-usa.us/en/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pi-usa.us/en/</a><p>There are also easier options if you spend some time with a specific use case. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 23:35:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50136224</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50136224</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50136224</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.<p>However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh.   The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.<p>Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 14:49:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50131660</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50131660</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50131660</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "/dev/null: social network for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are, but most people don't understand channels or why the OTP is suited for this type of use-case. =3<p><a href="https://www.phoenixframework.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.phoenixframework.org/</a><p><a href="https://phoenix.hexdocs.pm/channels.html" rel="nofollow">https://phoenix.hexdocs.pm/channels.html</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 02:19:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127257</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127257</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127257</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client, and Android k9 mail makes pgp/gpg public key handling fairly trivial.<p>Depends what you do, and if your organization has a persistent clown infestation.  Some big business folks still use email as a human to API interface.<p>Running out-of-band public keychains is not something most people will ever need.  =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2026 23:58:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111982</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111982</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111982</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In general, a session/thread ephemeral key pair is exchanged with the participants, and only each users private origin signing validates each sender sections. Since the signatures are passively checked, it does not need redone after each append operation.<p>Thus, participants are pooled under 1 time constrained key exchange, participants sections origins are signed/time-stamped, and the ciphertext expires on a schedule.<p>Why? so at some future time side-channel key exfiltration can't be used to data mine the entire history of past tapped conversations/ciphertext.  Even if a private signing key is stolen, it is difficult to rebuild the lost ephemeral key session.<p>Have a nice day.  =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:09:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111092</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111092</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111092</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Good ideas demand to be free.  =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:36:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109113</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109113</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109113</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Could get outside for a walk everyday, find some nature space, and enjoy a coffee/tea.  Also could volunteer at a local pet rescue, as there as many friends waiting on team joy.<p>Also, don't gamble with your health, take a few minutes to talk with your doctor if you don't understand what is happening.<p>Have a glorious day =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:01:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103036</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103036</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103036</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Very cute, +1 for team fun. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:49:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50102883</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50102883</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50102883</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "I paid people to try and follow my README"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>This only tells me you have no idea how distributions work<p>Packagers do try to coordinate distro release cycle mess, but ultimately long term support for complex programs is tied to the OS version constellation in upstream builds. Thus, the users are going to experience the Beta stage of that code... even though people often assume a polished release-candidate isn't just a euphemism for public Beta.<p>Thus, the assets needed to maintain a projects function are likely to stop working within 3 years or less.  Indeed, some parts of the ecosystem are worse than others.<p>Low attention code creates 2 paradoxes:<p>1. new versions may not be supported on newer OS releases due to API mutation,  and old dependency injection<p>2. versions may not be back-ported due to old releases missing API features, and new dependencies<p>I think it is hilarious people make up silly stories like it is not a fundamental constraint/liability in FOSS. The situation is not anecdotal, and reaches deep into the kernel driver areas. This is why we can't have nice things, as a billion conflicting use-cases is just a chaotic ecosystem. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:47:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054420</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054420</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054420</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "I paid people to try and follow my README"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A lot of mature applications just gave up chasing the bleeding edge, and now only distribute  Flatpack/snap/AppImage which is similar to classic exe/DLL ecosystems. A kind of silent tragedy for efficient shared library paradigms.<p>The hard truth is OSS is often chaotic as there is no authority saying a given API is "good-enough" to version freeze, and it limits how much individuals can integrate without upstream source-tree contiguous-integration at the mercy of 150k devs whims. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:41:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046390</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046390</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046390</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "C for Rust programmers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In general, there are a lot of platform specific issues that most people will just ignore... rather than address the odd edge-case failure modes or thread safety. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:16:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046111</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046111</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046111</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In most use cases, the bash scripts location is more important than $HOME.  This is because it is resilient to changes in user in the session, and parent process current working location contexts.  =3<p>scriptPath=$(/usr/bin/realpath "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")<p>localPath=$(/usr/bin/dirname "$scriptPath" )<p>/usr/bin/echo "localPath = '$localPath'"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:31:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043711</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043711</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043711</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "I paid people to try and follow my README"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Probably not, because almost no one reads the readme file unless there is a installation problem. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:05:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043443</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043443</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043443</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "I paid people to try and follow my README"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In general, software is still Beta if a program requires a readme file to install and use.<p>It is under 5 minutes to write a shell/bat/make/cmake script for each platform to configure library requirements, import OS specific data, and enable GPU/NPU features.  Then run through the application build, installation package with stripped performance build, and or a few regression tests.<p>Lets say you have 4k downloads a month on a small project, and it takes 1 hour for each admin to read/configure.  You just saved about 5 years of your users lives reading your document. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:02:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043412</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043412</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50043412</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FreeCAD also supports OpenSCAD, and can actually export step files.<p>This guy publishes simple tutorials on how to deal with the unintuitive FreeCAD parametric design workflow:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/@4axisprinting/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@4axisprinting/videos</a><p>If you have a long-term project... storing the exact FreeCAD version installer in the artifacts folder for precise compatibility is wise.  =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 11:04:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50041878</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50041878</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50041878</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "C for Rust programmers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>GLib simple C data structures:<p><a href="https://docs.gtk.org/glib/data-structures.html#doubly-linked-lists" rel="nofollow">https://docs.gtk.org/glib/data-structures.html#doubly-linked...</a><p>GSL GNU Scientific Library for C:<p><a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/doc/html/intro.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/doc/html/intro.html</a><p>In general, no one should be custom building most basic structures in C these days. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:57:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034177</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034177</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034177</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Joel_Mckay in "YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Legal gray area is still a legal gray area...<p>Technically, it is home users volunteering data to a cloud provider, that then mines the disclosed data as a service for any creep.<p>It would be a constitutional matter, and the city would lose in court given precedent lawsuits... if police used direct surveillance to follow people around even on public property where there was no expectation of privacy. Sue, and remember to vote. =3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Oct 2026 21:45:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026967</link><dc:creator>Joel_Mckay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026967</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026967</guid></item></channel></rss>