Hacker News: MegaDeKay

New comment by MegaDeKay in "How Motorola’s 2N2222 and 2N3904 transistors became the default NPNs"

MegaDeKay — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:46:23 +0000

That is the DigiKey price for the metal can version. Plastic packaged versions can be bought for ten cents each individually or 2.443 cents each in quantity 1000. Buy all you like - there are over 18000 in stock ready to be at your door the next day.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/shenzhen-slkormic...

New comment by MegaDeKay in "Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975"

MegaDeKay — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 14:43:27 +0000

You nailed it with BYTE & Radio Electronics.

Steve Ciarcia was incredibly influential to young me. His projects were wild. I only built one of his designs: an 8052AH-BASIC microcontroller board that I still have in the basement. He did more "mainstream" stuff like the series of articles on building your very own 8088-based PC compatible (a huge effort back in the day). But then he'd do crazy stuff like an 8051-based board that calculated the Mandelbrot set networked to a PC, and the more of the boards that you built and connected to the network, the faster the computation of the result.

Radio Electronics was gold for articles on cable & satellite TV descramblers. The only problem was that too often, the parts list would have one inductor that was basically made of Pure Unobtainium where I lived :-(

New comment by MegaDeKay in "State of Kdenlive"

MegaDeKay — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 21:41:49 +0000

You make it sound like the same bugs have been there for 25 years. That again isn't fair given that many, many, many new features have been added to the project since its inception in 2002. They are also somewhat at the mercy of the MLT framework that they depend on for a lot of the heavy lifting.

And they do fix crash bugs. All the time. You can see that in the announcements they put out after each release. I think the general perception is that it is indeed becoming more robust as time goes on as new developers have come on board to help. The project is gaining momentum that it hadn't really had before.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "State of Kdenlive"

MegaDeKay — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:35:26 +0000

Kdenlive being crash prone is a known thing, but for the parent to say the devs don't care goes too far.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

MegaDeKay — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:46:06 +0000

A lot of people have answered that it is a useful tool for job searching. My experience was a bit on the other side of the coin. Our company wanted more of a presence on the site to gain visibility so managers like myself were encourged (told) to sign up and post on it. We also received video training on how to write catchy descriptions of ourselves (under 50 words ofc) and stuff like that.

The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]"

MegaDeKay — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 03:02:38 +0000

If you like this kind of thing, check out Coding Secrets on YouTube. He goes further back in time to show how they pulled off seemingly impossible effects on a really old console: the Sega Genesis.

https://www.youtube.com/@codingsecrets

New comment by MegaDeKay in "AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip"

MegaDeKay — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 04:05:15 +0000

I'll see your Atari 800 and raise you my Atari 2600 with its whopping 128 bytes of RAM. Bytes with a B. I can kinda sorta call it a computer because you could buy a BASIC cartridge for it (I didn't and stand by that decision - it was pretty bad).

New comment by MegaDeKay in "FreeCAD v1.1"

MegaDeKay — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:46:24 +0000

I really like Mango Jelly Solutions on YouTube but DeltaHedra is very good as well.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "FreeCAD v1.1"

MegaDeKay — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:19:41 +0000

The downside of spreadsheets is they can really slow your model down. Every cell change triggers a full recompute of the 3D model. VarSets offer much faster performance while sacrificing a couple spreadsheet features. So always choose VarSets over spreadsheets if you can.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "Canada's bill C-22 mandates mass metadata surveillance of Canadians"

MegaDeKay — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 02:37:22 +0000

Yep. em-dashes everywhere.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

MegaDeKay — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 01:06:46 +0000

To make matters worse, falling while the deliveries of their competitors are rising.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "The Hunt for Dark Breakfast"

MegaDeKay — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:54:22 +0000

My money is on the amount of lactose in all that dairy. There's a lot of lactose in a half gallon of nog.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

MegaDeKay — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:19:29 +0000

A fringe benefit is the discard. We refresh ours every day 10g/10g/10g so it adds up slowly but steadily. Two great uses are waffles and pizza crust.

Waffles: https://www.seriouseats.com/bread-baking-sourdough-waffles-r...

Pizza crust: https://www.sourdoughhome.com/sourdough-pizza-made-with-disc...

New comment by MegaDeKay in "Topological Naming Problem"

MegaDeKay — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 22:53:30 +0000

The ability to pull in projected geometry as real geometry or construction geometry is in the release candidate for V1.1 that should be released reasonably soon. There's a lot of other cool features in V1.1 as well.

I treat FreeCAD as a rolling release, using the dev version on a decently complex model [0] and it has been a really good experience so far. Lots of useful features and fixees going in all the time.

[0] https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/

New comment by MegaDeKay in "Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)"

MegaDeKay — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:58:48 +0000

It doesn't need to be "most". "Some" or even "a few" can be enough to make a hell of a mess if those few have created documents that are key to the business in one way or another (proposals, end-user documentation, etc). And there are the other components to the suite like Powerpoint, Excel, and Project to consider.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "Phil Spencer is exiting Microsoft as AI executive takes over Xbox"

MegaDeKay — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 01:04:26 +0000

Yep. There are no exclusives anymore, not even timed ones. Those releases that aren't Day 1 on Playstation now is only because they were too far along in development to make that happen. This is part of their "Everything is an XBox" mantra, giving people pretty much zero incentive to buy XBox hardware right now.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "FreeCAD"

MegaDeKay — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:00:29 +0000

> The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase. There's also a feeling that emulating competitors is surrendering one's own identity, and the idea that some of the rough edges are justified by "the powerfulness". Thus radically changing defaults, streamlining, simplifying and even just matching user expectations is often perceived as "taking the power away" and really difficult to have the daring-do to just do. Even though on the other side of the transition a much larger and happier userbase awaits.

I think it is unfair to say that they are "blinded to the pain". They are well aware of it from what I've seen of the Dev discussions on Discord. But the vast majority of the devs are volunteers so they can only do so much so fast. There are also some very nice usability improvements as of late that borrow from other programs, like the Solidworks-style navigation settings and the on-screen draggers for pad / pocket / transform type operations. Yes there are tons of preferences and some of the defaults might not be great, but they've added a "Search Preferences" field to help sort through them all. Then there are issues like in the link below where the discussion of how to improve FreeCAD considers comparisons with other pieces of software.

https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/issues/19440#issuecomment...

Another point I'll add is their creation of a Design Working Group to help sort through usability issues and generate a consensus for devs to subsequently implement.

New comment by MegaDeKay in "FreeCAD"

MegaDeKay — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:42:10 +0000

Set tip makes sense if you think of the steps taken to build up a parts as a history. Setting the tip isn't a rollback. It is saying "I want to insert a new step in the history".

New comment by MegaDeKay in "FreeCAD"

MegaDeKay — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:47:23 +0000

I've been treating FreeCAD like a rolling release by using the weekly Flatpack builds and it has been a pretty good experience so far. Based on a good model I was given as a starting point and a lot of Mango Jelly Solutions videos, I've developed a detailed model of the Virtual Pinball machine I'm building now. It has been huge in saving me from countless mistakes in the actual build.

https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/

New comment by MegaDeKay in "FreeCAD"

MegaDeKay — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:42:18 +0000

I've spent a decent amount of time on the FreeCAD Discord and more than one advanced user on there suggests treating FreeCAD like a rolling release. So I've been using the weekly FlatPack builds and have had a great experience. FreeCAD has been taking some big steps recently and by sticking with 1.0.0 / 1.0.2, you're basically missing out on almost a year's worth of improvements.

And the tutorial by Mango Jelly Solutions on YouTube are fantastic. They are generally very focused on one particular task per video so I think you'd find them really useful.