Hacker News: Taniwha

New comment by Taniwha in "Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen"

Taniwha — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 02:21:30 +0000

A friend did that too, a lot of his job was going out in the snow and changing tapes, I guess better internet connectivity changed a lot

New comment by Taniwha in "Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics"

Taniwha — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:44:24 +0000

It's worth noting that LNT is also a requirement of the space (a BLM wilderness area) and their permit. I've been involved in organising rocket launches at the same site (well slightly north) and we are required to do the same thing - the BLM inspects our site (and Burning Man's) afterwards, it's a condition of our ongoing permit.

When I first started going out there (before Burning Man) there was a century's worth of junk out there, we spent a lot of time helping the BLM clean it up - well most of it, there are millenia old archeology sites there and 200 year old covered wagon debris which are protected, but the tires, car wrecks, all sorts of junk had to go - we appreciate people putting in the work to keep it clean

New comment by Taniwha in "Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?"

Taniwha — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 06:28:09 +0000

Yes that early pdp-11s had core memory, its contents survived power cycling. We'd hand toggle in the bootstrap into high ROM and start it, it would load whatever we were running from paper tape - unless you did something stupid that trashed that high memory you'd get to reuse the bootstrap over and over

Having said that the bootstrap was something like 8 16-bit instructions, a pain but not impossible

New comment by Taniwha in "Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM"

Taniwha — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:27:59 +0000

HBM dies are designed to be physically mounted on top of other dies in the same package, they can have up to 2048 data pins (compared to 8-64 on consumer dies which are in their own packaging) - to do what you propose you'd need an interposer chip of some type which would push the price back up

New comment by Taniwha in "Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM"

Taniwha — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:17:29 +0000

You just know that the AI bubble is going to break and they're going to be stuck with tons of HBM4s.

The big problem is that this will not depress the consumer DRAM market and mean we can all afford DRAM again

New comment by Taniwha in "BYD Slashes Price of Electric Car and Becomes Cheapest in Australia [video]"

Taniwha — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 08:27:55 +0000

So essentially the same thing the AI companies are doing

New comment by Taniwha in "I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul"

Taniwha — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:36 +0000

Blackrock used to be pretty wild-west (I was going before Burning Man started), pretty scary stuff at times (a friend once did something silly and hurt himself badly, Clinton was doing something in Reno, the SS heard about it, thought it was nearby and MiB showed up looking hot and bothered in their suits), over time the BLM realised that they needed to police the area a bit more and things got toned down (doesn't help that BM situates itself across multiple law enforcement jurisdictions, these days there's a surfeit of police)

New comment by Taniwha in "My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes"

Taniwha — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:32:15 +0000

From my observation Scientology starts by teaching you to be selfish, more self assertish, in the process you end up pushing your friends and family away, but guess what, you have some new friends in the 'church'

Just in case anyone here finds themselves falling into their world I'll save you $0.5M: all your problems are caused by you being infested with murdered space aliens

New comment by Taniwha in "How I developed an Am29000 C compiler and web browser"

Taniwha — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:53:19 +0000

I think that has more to do with the amount you could get onto a die at that time, architecturally they had to move the MMU onboard first which left the cache(s) offboard

New comment by Taniwha in "Norway should buy OpenAI"

Taniwha — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:46:40 +0000

Maybe, but Norway should still wait until the inevitable AI crash

New comment by Taniwha in "How I developed an Am29000 C compiler and web browser"

Taniwha — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:28:40 +0000

They're from roughly the same era (and the same as 68020s/396s/88ks/mips) - 29ks came out of AMD and sadly didn't fly as high as we hoped at the time - their unique stack management may have been part of that

New comment by Taniwha in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

Taniwha — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:38:35 +0000

The other thing he doesn't mention is time, I live in AoNZ and we do get free shipping from Digikey if we order over a minimum (~$60US) - but the big deal is time - you have to order everything you need ahead of time and get it all to arrive - miss one thing and you're stuck with a PCB and a box of bits and are sitting on your hands for a couple of weeks - you have to be incredibly organised - it's why I have a cabinet of SMD reels most of which I'll never use (reels of common components are ~$2 while visiting Shenzhen a couple of hundred $$ saves you a bunch of pain)

Living in the US and having free overnight delivery is 1st world luxury

New comment by Taniwha in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

Taniwha — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:05:20 +0000

ESP32-P31s are cheap - samples are cheap ($5-6 for WROOM modules) production prices are going to be lower - and twice the number of pins ESP32s are known for (but say goodbye to castelated modules hand soldering is going to be harder)

New comment by Taniwha in "Eclipse: The Xiaomi 17 Ultra Confuses the Moon and the Sun"

Taniwha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:20:06 +0000

I wonder if it gets the moon the right way up in the southern hemisphere

New comment by Taniwha in "US conducted mass spying campaign against leftwing and anti-ICE protesters"

Taniwha — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:18:37 +0000

Not even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

New comment by Taniwha in "Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word"

Taniwha — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:40:06 +0000

Yeah but when I started the words weren't in common usage - we understood "freeware", but not really for hardware yet

New comment by Taniwha in "Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word"

Taniwha — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:29:28 +0000

In the mid to late 90s I was selling a rocketry flight computer kit:

http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/fc/index.html

We didn't have words to describe "Opensource" yet, I wrote (from the above page):

  This page is designed to be a home for the Taniwha Flight Computer which 
  I'm building and kitting for a number of other interested people. This is 
  NOT a for-profit enterprise - the idea is to get a critical mass of people 
  up and using the same hardware so that they can write cool and interesting 
  code (or make cool and interesting hardware) and share it with everyone else 
  who's using the design.

  A quick note about copyrights etc - all the stuff here is marked with my 
  copyright - this is something I do with everything I design to retain control 
  of my designs should I decide to sell them for profit in the future. However 
  everything in these pages, the design itself and the software that runs on it 
  (at least the stuff I provide) is hereby provided it for anyone's use - but I 
  retain ownership and copyright (even feel free to build them commercially if 
  you want).

You can see the gem of what later became GPL/etc there, using copyrights to retain control while releasing it to the world. Later I added:

  "Open Source" is now all the rage - we've been running this project that way
  for the past 4 years - so as always "feel free to steal anything on these web
  pages".

New comment by Taniwha in "New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it"

Taniwha — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:57:35 +0000

This is probably the place to say if you want to come play in this space you really ought to go to KawaiiCon - AoNZ's kinder/nicer DEFCON - in Wellington over the Halloween weekend, tickets available now, be in before they sell out

New comment by Taniwha in "New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it"

Taniwha — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:49:58 +0000

Yeah, we had a very strict initial lockdown, and closed the border, once the number of cases went to 0 we opened up again, we then had regional lockdowns after cases broke the border quarantine.

New comment by Taniwha in "Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?"

Taniwha — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 05:59:24 +0000

You might is they included DFT (design for test, stuff to make sure when you make a chip all of it actually works) - a scan chain thru all the internal flops will provide you with info about the internal flops and how they are connected - reverse engineering this into a model of reality would certainly be extremely hard, but maybe not impossible