Hacker News: amaterasu

New comment by amaterasu in "Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?"

amaterasu — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:57:18 +0000

I love the way they buried the “we are no longer supporting an entire operating system” in a small missing tick, half way down the page…

New comment by amaterasu in "Code and Trust: Vibrators to Pacemakers"

amaterasu — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 04:48:43 +0000

I'm trivialising, but a lot of software in medical devices is turning a GPIO pin on/off in response to another pin, then announcing that it did so. The piece missing from the article is that the assumed probability of software/firmware (or anything really) failing is 1.0. Everything is engineered around the assumption that things (_especially_ software) WILL fail and minimising the consequences when they do. LLM's writing the code will happen soon, it's a GPIO pin control after all. LLM's proving the code is as safe as possible and that they have thought about the failure modes will be a while.

New comment by amaterasu in "Australians to face age checks from search engines"

amaterasu — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 02:22:21 +0000

The co-leads on drafting the code are rather interesting:

> Drafting of the code was co-led by Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), which was contacted for comment as it counts Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo among its members.

New comment by amaterasu in "White House unveils Cyber Trust Mark program for consumer devices"

amaterasu — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 05:53:13 +0000

Underwriters Laboratories, UL. Look at the back of pretty much any mains powered device and you'll see their mark. They were founded 130 years ago, and test and warrant devices (typically high voltage) to be safe. Security is a new thing for them, but they're well suited to provide the services.

New comment by amaterasu in "Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced"

amaterasu — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 23:03:11 +0000

In which shell?

New comment by amaterasu in "Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad"

amaterasu — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 21:09:40 +0000

Ignoring the common trope that developers are bad testers (I am, but not all devs are), QA presence allows teams to move faster by reducing the developer test burden to automated regression, and developer acceptance testing only. Good QA can often assist with those tasks too, further improving team velocity. Also, moving tasks to people who specialise in them is not usually a poor decision.

The best way I've found to sell QA to management (especially sales/marketing/non-technical management), is to redefine them as marketing. QA output is as much about product and brand reputation management as finding bugs. IMO, nothing alienates customers faster than bugs, and bad experiences result in poor reputation. Marketing and sales people can usually assign value to passive marketing efforts, and recognise things that are damaging to retention and future sales.

New comment by amaterasu in "Log is the "Pro" in iPhone 15 Pro"

amaterasu — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 06:06:31 +0000

If I was a prosumer/hobbyist video equipment company, I'd be terrified about what Apple does next. They already have significant penetration into the editing market (both with Final Cut, and codec design), they control a number of the common codecs, and they have _millions_ of devices in the field along with substantial manufacturing capability. The cinema end aren't in trouble yet IMO, but the rest should be concerned...

New comment by amaterasu in "Log is the "Pro" in iPhone 15 Pro"

amaterasu — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 06:02:40 +0000

Some sensors do this internally, unusual though. The rest of the high-end ones apply curves manually in software directly at the egress of the sensor. The reason they don't in all cases is that it complicates black level correction, gamut transforms and demosaic operations (without some assumptions).

New comment by amaterasu in "Batman easter egg (click the bat signal)"

amaterasu — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 23:50:27 +0000

For the Australians reading this, Gotham city is a brothel in Melbourne, ymmv on clicking this link at work or school.

New comment by amaterasu in "Australia has almost eliminated the coronavirus – by putting faith in science"

amaterasu — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 22:34:23 +0000

Still ending really... There are still travel restriction from metropolitan Melbourne to regional Victoria - expected to end Sunday at midnight. Retail capacity is also limited still, but ramping back up.

New comment by amaterasu in "Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package"

amaterasu — Sun, 03 May 2020 23:10:36 +0000

I've been using Kicad for the same workloads as you, and Altium + Cadence for heavier ones over the years, and I must say they hit the nail on the head here with their comments about KiCad: https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/why-another-eda...

I'll have to find a simple project to test this out on though, because as you say, It needs to be a huge improvement on KiCad to warrant a switch.

New comment by amaterasu in "Australia fires: Aboriginal planners say the bush 'needs to burn'"

amaterasu — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 19:41:16 +0000

Also, there is significant political opposition to this, specifically in the Victorian highlands.

New comment by amaterasu in "New South Wales rolls out mobile phone detection cameras"

amaterasu — Sun, 01 Dec 2019 20:44:31 +0000

Seconded it not being about safety. In Victoria, traffic infringement revenue is included in the state budget. I'm assuming that the NSW government does the same, so at $344-$457AUD per offence, this is likely just another revenue generating exercise.

New comment by amaterasu in "Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi stops working at 2560 x 1440 screen resolution"

amaterasu — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 06:51:29 +0000

Every SoC I've dealt with containing a WiFi core has a dedicated coprocessor (RPU is a common name, depending on vendor) running its' own firmware. So more likely, _that_ core would go funky, then crash. The kernel might have code to recover that, but I doubt it, and it certainly would complain the whole way as you say.

New comment by amaterasu in "Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi stops working at 2560 x 1440 screen resolution"

amaterasu — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 06:23:09 +0000

And unlike hdmi 2.0, 1.4 wont have scrambling in, so any termination issues will sing quite well.

New comment by amaterasu in "How to run your own mail server (2017)"

amaterasu — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 06:01:15 +0000

Not just the big players, I had a conversation with the administrator of the Australian ISP Bigpond about why my server was being spammed. Their response was verbatim "We blocked Digital Ocean, because we get spam from there" Even with good reputation servers, admins are happy to reject legitimate mail for any reason.

New comment by amaterasu in "Developing open-source FPGA tools"

amaterasu — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 20:46:17 +0000

The situation for Vivado (Xilinx) is more or less the same, Tcl for everything but terrible documentation.

New comment by amaterasu in "Australia Will Join U.S. for 2024 Moon Mission, Mars Exploration"

amaterasu — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:57:38 +0000

Because Australian politicians are loath to invest in anything, after spending ~20 years convincing the public that government spending is bad.

New comment by amaterasu in "FAA Bans Recalled Apple Laptops from Flights"

amaterasu — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:33:16 +0000

Mine was repaired by apple prior to the recall, and is still listed as requiring replacement via the serial number search too...

New comment by amaterasu in "FAA Bans Recalled Apple Laptops from Flights"

amaterasu — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:30:25 +0000

This database is inaccurate, my machine was repaired early this year prior to the recall (irritatingly at my cost as the batteries were swollen). It is still listed as requiring replacement batteries via this search...