Hacker News: alhirzel

New comment by alhirzel in "Over 400 Linux CVEs published in the last 24 hours alone"

alhirzel — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:52:39 +0000

I was too busy waxing my armchair and didn't do any reading on the actual practices. Thank you for replying with this. It makes sense. I wonder if this level of purity will survive the test of time; since there are paid kernel developers, the situation could be very different from e.g. an entirely volunteer-maintained project.

New comment by alhirzel in "Over 400 Linux CVEs published in the last 24 hours alone"

alhirzel — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:32:55 +0000

I am assuming that many of these are found with automatic analysis tools that are very creative (i.e. LLMs) and there may be a high proportion of very "cornered" cases. I think there needs to be a triage method that would amount to the severity, likeliness, and detection dimensions used to rank risks in a systematic framework [1]. I think if this could be submitted (or estimated) along with such bug reports, it could go a long way toward sustainable intake patterns for this number of possible defects.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analy...

New comment by alhirzel in "Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling"

alhirzel — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:24:28 +0000

I think it depends on how good is "good enough". Personally, I think as long as tasks are not coding, there would be a ton of "good enough" value in having your own personal Google on a hardware device. I think the company that designs and licenses the architecture that packages the silicon for the largest market share will be the winner in commercializing this product. Wouldn't be surprised if this is part of Apple's roadmap to retaining existing customer loyalty.

New comment by alhirzel in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"

alhirzel — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:41:23 +0000

Thank you for sharing this!

New comment by alhirzel in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"

alhirzel — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:46:05 +0000

Didn't know about sunshine request - the website[1] - until I searched for this term!

[1]: https://www.sunshinerequest.com/

New comment by alhirzel in "Atomic Force Microscope [video]"

alhirzel — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 03:37:10 +0000

"I'll spare you the total sample prep details"...

New comment by alhirzel in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

alhirzel — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:10:34 +0000

I am so glad to hear this. Thank you for your work in support of land conservation!

New comment by alhirzel in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

alhirzel — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:59:18 +0000

I have been on the board of directors of a land trust, and this situation is a poster-child for why an existent concern must retain standing to litigate. A lot of what the Land Trust Alliance (LTA) does is ensure things like the legal nuts-and-bolts of conservation stays possible and durable, including conservation easements. CEs can be a lot of work, especially as the legal landscape changes. I think the dismissal of this lawsuit is not necessarily a risk to CEs, but could be widened into one in the future. This is the risk that LTA exists to mitigate.

The land trust you work with - are they accredited with LTA?

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

alhirzel — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:36:39 +0000

85ms

https://github.com/WeebLabs/DSPi/commit/ba8e481570e6a5ce3d35...

New comment by alhirzel in "ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI"

alhirzel — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:04:09 +0000

You could consider similar devices and what they have used. Another angle is to look at ULPMark results: https://www.eembc.org/ulpmark/

New comment by alhirzel in "ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI"

alhirzel — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:33:36 +0000

The S3 (and other Espressif chips) are pretty power-hungry. May want to keep looking for a smartwatch application.

New comment by alhirzel in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

alhirzel — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:22:01 +0000

I love the symbol name: "AnalyticsMetadata_I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_CODE_OR_FILEPATHS`.

New comment by alhirzel in "NASA's DART spacecraft changed an asteroid's orbit around the sun"

alhirzel — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:29:06 +0000

It's the butterfly effect. After the momentum exchange (the rocket slamming, stuff being ejected in the impact, etc), the entire system was left with different properties. From now on, the equation F=Gm1m2/r^2 will have a different m1, and you can sum the equation over all m2 (literally every other massive object in the universe).

New comment by alhirzel in "KiCad 10.0.0 RC1"

alhirzel — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:46:19 +0000

So many new features! The little things like 45 degree crosshairs, dynamic animation of overlapping lines, indication when bumping up against a selection filter - truly great polish. Board variants, propagation delay profiles, groups - the future is here! I hope KiCad is the next Blender-grade success story in OSS. It is certainly poised to disrupt commercial options.

New comment by alhirzel in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

alhirzel — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:39:21 +0000

This is going to get crazy as soon as companies start to assert their control over open source code bases (rather than merely proprietary code bases) to attempt to overturn policies like this and normalize machine-generated contributions.

OSS contribution by these "emulated humans" is sure to lever into a very good economic position for compute providers and entities that are able to manage them (because they are inexpensive relative to humans, and are easier to close a continuous improvement loop on, including by training on PR interactions). I hope most experienced developers are skeptical of the sustainability of running wild with these "emulated humans" (evaporation of entry level jobs etc), but it is only a matter of time before the shareholder's whip cracks and human developers can no longer hold the line. It will result in forks of traditional projects that are not friendly to machine-generated contributions. These forks will diverge so rapidly from upstream that there will be no way to keep up. I think this is what happened with Reticulum. [1]

When assurance is needed that the resulting software is safe (e.g. defense/safety/nuclear/aero industries), the cost of consuming these code bases will be giant, and is largely an externalized cost of the reduction in labor costs, by way of the reduced probability of high quality software. Unfortunately, by this time, the aforementioned assertions of control will have cleared the path, and the standard will be reduced for all.

Hold the line, friends... Like one commenter on the GitHub issue said, helping to train these "emulated humans" literally moves carbon from the earth to the air. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

[2]: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/790

New comment by alhirzel in "Making Ferrite Core Inductors at Home"

alhirzel — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:28:39 +0000

Don't forget about ELI the ICE man!

New comment by alhirzel in "I overengineered a spinning top [video]"

alhirzel — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:14:47 +0000

The physics of magnetic torquing maybe could probably work in most if not all locations on Earth for a sufficiently small and power dense vertical top that spins sufficiently slow. Want the smallest possible local dot product of gravity vector and magnetic field for an ordinary top (without considering "sideways" tops), which may lead to better performance in some locations on Earth (could map this with e.g. IGRF). 3D field actuation would be beneficial to allow higher efficiency and longer periods of actuation around the window where the Earth's magnetic field is maximized in the spun plane, while minimizing imbalance: this actuation timing is probably the only strategy that would make practical sense for most of the magnetic power, because you will need to take a break once in a while for sensing. Another practically difficult part would be avoiding on-board soft iron noise in magnetic field, because higher spin speed would require the device and environment to damp out the device-induced magnetic field at a higher minimum rate to afford any budget for accurate sensing of the background field during the "off"-time. That is: sensing trades with spin speed because it takes non-zero time and requires a stable environment.

To implement this, I think you'd first want to test in a controlled environment with a larger magnetic field and then gradually turn down the applied field until it is Earth-like. I am honestly unsure whether you could practically get there, so earlier I used the words "maybe could", but humans are crazy so I appended the "probably".

This would be a fun YouTube video to watch.

New comment by alhirzel in "3D-Printed Mathematical Lampshades"

alhirzel — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:50:03 +0000

Try cadquery also!

https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery

New comment by alhirzel in "Postmortem: Our first VLEO satellite mission (with imagery and flight data)"

alhirzel — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 06:39:59 +0000

I'd love to read this paper! This was on my mind when I was GNC lead for an undergraduate project at Michigan Tech (Oculus-ASR - Nanosat-6 winner). We had a combined controller for reaction wheels and magtorque rods.

New comment by alhirzel in "New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis"

alhirzel — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 13:24:27 +0000

PDFs are just a table of objects and tree of references to those objects; probably, prior versions of the document were expressed in objects with no references or something like that.