Hacker News: acidburnNSA

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

acidburnNSA — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:26:45 +0000

I asked it to make a valid MCNP model of a sphere of plutonium and it did!

Department of Energy Celebrates First Advanced Reactor Criticality

acidburnNSA — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:08:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-celebrates-first-advanced-reactor-criticality

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407141

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Indoor Wi-Fi Roaming with OpenWRT"

acidburnNSA — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:55:03 +0000

I spent a long time recently setting pretty much this same thing up. When in my office my Android phone battery rapidly died, I guess because usteer kept trying to steer it or something. I ended up turning off usteer and 802.11r and just deal with slow roaming. Maybe I should try again with the static neighbor reports.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

acidburnNSA — Wed, 13 May 2026 02:03:29 +0000

I always find this sentiment curious for 2 reasons:

1. Radioactive waste gets less toxic over time unlike many toxins like mercury, lead, and cyanide. People seem to emphasize the duration of toxicity for radiation while apparently giving 'forever toxins' a total pass.

2. Short-lived radiation is what's really dangerous. When atoms are decaying fast, they're shooting out energy that can cause real damage fast. Longer-lived radioactive stuff with billion-year half-lives like natural uranium can be held in a gloved hand, no problem. In the extreme, and infinite half life means something is stable and totally safe (radiologically at least).

Yet people still want to emphasize that radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have long half lives. I don't really get it.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

acidburnNSA — Wed, 13 May 2026 02:00:33 +0000

This is often used within the industry to mean many dozens of commercial nuclear power plants.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Apocalypse Early Warning System"

acidburnNSA — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:14:43 +0000

I made something like this in like 2007 called Apocalypse Feed. It took in a few factors and aggregated them into a 0-to-100 number that updated and published over RSS. First it pinged debian mirrors around the world and made a map based on mirror city's lat/long: green for online, red for offline. If there was a cluster of red, that part of the world was considered gone. Then it checked space weather data and nearest asteroid, increasing the value if it was looking bad. It scraped news headlines looking for key words like zombie, pandemic, virus, war, bomb, etc. These fed into a pie graph showing what "type" of apocalypse was most likely at any given time.

It was all fun and games until my VPS host banned me for pinging too many people every few mins.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110516084503/http://www.apocal...

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Fully Featured Audio DSP Firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:12:57 +0000

I don't use it and so haven't compared. I'm interested as well.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Fully Featured Audio DSP Firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:43:30 +0000

Tangentially related, I recently had some hand-me-down high-end full tower speakers lose their integrated subwoofer amps. I bypassed them and wired in an external amp but people said the integrated DSP would be missing. That's when I learned about CamillaDSP [1] and CamillaFIR [2]. I got a calibrated UMIK-1 microphone and did a frequency sweep in the room. Then I applied the Camilla-computed FIR filter to my snapcast-sourced music stream on the Raspberry Pi 3 B I have networked into the living room. Now I have room-corrected and loudspeaker corrected fancy DSP and the speakers sound better than ever. Pretty fun, and very cheap. The Pi3 runs it using about 20% of its CPU. Not bad! I did the same process up in my office with some desk speakers and they sound great too (that time using EasyEffects to apply the filter in real-time rather than CamillaDSP).

[1] https://github.com/HEnquist/camilladsp

[2] https://github.com/VilhoValittu/CamillaFIR

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

acidburnNSA — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:17:38 +0000

I did a book in rst and liked that it had cool admonition, import, glossary, and index features that made it better than markdown for me. Still hate the heading conventions.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)"

acidburnNSA — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:28:51 +0000

On the plus side, mine misdetected a wake word during a funny conversation and said "Sorry, I can't find any area called _____[60 second repeat of funny conversation]___" and it made my family laugh harder than we've laughed in a really long time. I even went into the tts cache and saved the wav b/c it was sooo funny.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Animated 'Firefly' Reboot in Development from Nathan Fillion, 20th TV"

acidburnNSA — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:37:46 +0000

The announcement on instagram is here in case anyone wants to see it directly. Pretty well done. Nathan did a bunch of teasers with the other stars earlier. Kinda funny and goofy.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DV6Js56jT3F/

New comment by acidburnNSA in "My Homelab Setup"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:07:59 +0000

Ryzen 5950x cpu, 64 gb ecc ram, dual 16 tb drives for zfs, Nvidia 5070 gpu.

Way way overspeced for what I listed, but I use it for lots of video processing, numerical simulations, and some local AI too.

I have a similar subset of this stuff running at my mom's house on a 16 GB ram Beelink minicomputer. With openvino frigate can still do fully local object detection on the security case, whish is sweet.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "My Homelab Setup"

acidburnNSA — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:54:11 +0000

I have something like this, in the same case. I have beefier specs b/c I use it as a daily workstation in addition to running all my stuff.

* nginx with letsencrypt wildcard so I have lots of subdomains

* No tailscale, just pure wireguard between a few family houses and for remote access

* Jellyfin for movies and TV, serving to my Samsung TV via the Tizen jellyfin app

* Mopidy holding my music collection, serving to my home stereo and numerous other speakers around the house via snapcast (raspberry pi 3 as the client)

* Just using ubuntu as the os with ZFS mirroring for NAS, serving over samba and NFS

* Home assistant for home automation, with Zigbee and Z-wave dongles

* Frigate as my NVR, recording from my security cams, doing local object detection, and sending out alerts via Home Assistant

* Forgejo for my personal repository host

* tar1090 hooked to a SDR for local airplane tracking (antenna in attic)

This all pairs nicely with my two openwrt routers, one being the main one and a dumb AP, connected via hardwire trunk line with a bunch of VLANs.

Other things in the house include an iotawatt whole-house energy monitor, a bunch of ESPs running holiday light strips, indoor and outdoor homebrew weather stations with laser particulate sensors and CO2 monitors (alongside the usual sensors), a water-main cutoff (zwave), smart bulbs, door sensors, motion sensors, sirens/doorbells, and a thing that listens for my fire alarm and sends alerts. Oh and I just flashed the pura scent diffuser my wife bought and lobotomized it so it can't talk to the cloud anymore, but I can still automate it.

I love it and have tons of fun fiddling with things.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Put the Zipcode First"

acidburnNSA — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:43:48 +0000

Yeah, but autofilling everything down to the neighboring city is still a huge improvement.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Put the zip code first"

acidburnNSA — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:43:22 +0000

I think they can just skip the zip code entry and enter everything else as usual.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Show HN: Omni – Open-source workplace search and chat, built on Postgres"

acidburnNSA — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:27:48 +0000

Are all people with physical access to the servers or network access to the hosts guaranteed to be US persons? Are all physical and network accesses logged for audits? That's the kind of thing govcloud promises that export control auditors want to see.

I felt like "Confidential Compute" tech could solve this issue once and for all but I'm not so sure after seeing some of the attacks people can do with physical access.

Another option of course is to not use cloud at all and have your own rack in a locked room with a good security system and/or armed US person guards.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Show HN: Omni – Open-source workplace search and chat, built on Postgres"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:39:29 +0000

Even self-hosting on AWS, GCP, or Azure isn't local enough for certain application, such as people doing export-controlled work where any sysadmin or person with physical access to the server/data is required to be a US Person (or equivalent in other countries). This is the niche that the govcloud solutions are aimed at serving. But some people just want to build big actually-private, actually self-hosted systems and do their own physical and network security.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Show HN: Omni – Open-source workplace search and chat, built on Postgres"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:16:27 +0000

* "Self-hosted: Runs entirely on your infrastructure. No data leaves your network."

* "Bring Your Own LLM: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or open-weight models via vLLM."

With so many newbies wanting these kinds of services it might be worth adjusting the first bullet to say: "No data leaves your network, at least as long as you don't use any Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini models via the network of course"

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

acidburnNSA — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:23:24 +0000

That is a common and reasonable sentiment. I can't help wonder if Claude Code will move this needle. Maybe people will stop relying as much on excel?

New comment by acidburnNSA in ""Operation Windlord": C-17 Airlifts a Micro Nuclear Reactor for the First Time"

acidburnNSA — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:48:14 +0000

Note that the headline means it's the first time a C-17 airlifted a reactor. Of course we airlifted many reactors in other types of aircraft: a swimming pool reactor from ORNL to Geneva in 1955, a TRIGA to Geneva in 1958, the PM-1 military microreactor from Baltimore to Montana in 1961, a few TOPAZ-II space reactors in 1992.