Hacker News: bacon_waffle

New comment by bacon_waffle in "USB-C for Lightning iPhones"

bacon_waffle — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:18:04 +0000

Thanks for the link - PCBWay recently offered me sponsorship, and this video has provided some good inspiration to make use of it :)

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars"

bacon_waffle — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:55:10 +0000

The additional battery weight would be something under 250kg (having handled a few Leaf battery packs), and wikipedia says the Niro EV is about 1700kg

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Touching the back wall of the Apple store"

bacon_waffle — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 04:57:25 +0000

I regularly notice bugs when using iOS Mail; one that springs to mind would display one email's body with the header info from another email, it seems to have recently been fixed but was easily reproducible for weeks if not months.

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2025)"

bacon_waffle — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 01:30:36 +0000

Location: South Island, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rust, electronics, insulation

Résumé/CV: https://ianrees.nz/tech/about.html

Email: code atsign ianrees dot en ze(e|d)

Microchip: please hire me to work on the Rust HAL for your ATSAM chips, which I currently volunteer the odd hour or two to help maintain. Between Rust bringing robust modular software in to embedded, and companies like Adafruit pumping out ATSAM boards, there's huge potential in this space.

https://github.com/atsamd-rs/atsamd

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Show HN: Rotary Phone Dial Linux Kernel Driver"

bacon_waffle — Sat, 24 May 2025 20:19:35 +0000

Fun historical twist: New Zealand rotary phones used a reversed mapping between digit and pulse count - here the number of pulses was 10-digit.

New comment by bacon_waffle in "The Solid-State Shift: Reinventing the Transformer for Modern Grids"

bacon_waffle — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 21:57:08 +0000

There are techniques for "stack"ing transistors so that the individual swtiching devices see potentials that are within spec and much lower than the voltage switched by the overall circuit.

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?"

bacon_waffle — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 04:52:37 +0000

"The 8th blade sends an electronic pulse to the center of the brain, which destroys the part of the brain responsible for hair growth and 4 other nonessential functions"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjAZnGeBcgg

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Deploying Rust in existing firmware codebases"

bacon_waffle — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 03:47:31 +0000

Usually the HAL is between the main firmware and the PAC, so whether the PAC methods are marked as unsafe could almost be considered an implementation detail.

But yes, there has been a lot of discussion around how to handle DMA peripherals - the embedded_dma crate offers some abstractions that I've found handy.

New comment by bacon_waffle in "'Virtually intact' wreck believed to be Royal Navy warship torpedoed in WWI"

bacon_waffle — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 12:53:58 +0000

Whoops, yes you're correct. Serves me right for looking at some SEO spam link!

Main point was that bronze is much more common in marine applications than brass - I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's been an error upstream as well.

New comment by bacon_waffle in "'Virtually intact' wreck believed to be Royal Navy warship torpedoed in WWI"

bacon_waffle — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 01:55:52 +0000

I believe bronze (copper + zinc) is a lot more common in marine applications than brass (copper + tin)

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Why isn't Colorado's snowpack ending up in the Colorado River?"

bacon_waffle — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 06:25:29 +0000

It was a stupid riff on the title. But, the Arkansas River does start in Colorado, and so some amount of Colorado's snowpack does wind up in Arkansas' river.

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Why isn't Colorado's snowpack ending up in the Colorado River?"

bacon_waffle — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 04:17:00 +0000

Because it's in the Arkansas River drainage?

New comment by bacon_waffle in "How to build a 50k ton forging press"

bacon_waffle — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 04:13:18 +0000

Ah, that helps, thanks.

It's a bit academic, but set theory doesn't really apply to such fuzzy human things as knowledge and experience. Repairing and designing are different pursuits which might have a lot of similarities, but I wouldn't presume that a design engineer could competently do the work of a technician.

Just consider that any particular field of engineering as might be described by a lay person, can be far too broad and deep for an individual to be competent in all facets of it. I'm reminded of my neighbour asking for some help configuring email for her new iPhone, because she knows I do computer work. Mainly firmware.

New comment by bacon_waffle in "How to build a 50k ton forging press"

bacon_waffle — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 02:19:20 +0000

I've rebuilt several motors, transmissions, various other mechanical contrivances. Sometimes with decent documentation, sometimes not so much. Also done a bit of amateur machining, and worked as an engineer on physical products.

Under no circumstances would I claim that rebuilding a motor was essentially figuring out how to build one from scratch. In software, maybe that's like claiming that figuring out how to configure a new Linux box is essentially the same thing as figuring out how to write an OS.

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Heat exchanger masks for cold weather cycling (2019)"

bacon_waffle — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 23:27:04 +0000

The 300 club might be of interest :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300_Club

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Coming home from the South Pole"

bacon_waffle — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 22:42:02 +0000

Directly, the temperature isn't as big an issue for operating tapes/drives/computers, since they are inside temperature-controlled buildings. There are indirect problems though; the incredibly low relative humidity that results from heating outside air - that dryness leads to problems with static. Various solutions were tried to keep the tapes humidified, but in the end I think everyone was relieved to switch to hard drives :). South Pole is also fairly high elevation, which combined with the low humidity makes air cooling work a lot less well than it might in other places - the air just doesn't have as much heat capacity as in more moderate environments.

As far as transport, it's about a km (in winter, typically a walk) from the main station to the "dark sector" where the CMB telescopes and IceCube Lab are. As another comment points out, there are cables between the main station and the dark sector so typically data flows through them. When you do need to move equipment, it's usually not too big of a deal to carry it inside a parka or something if it's smallish, or arrange a vehicle for bigger items.

Things like cables can be a bit of a learning experience; a friend hand carried a PVC-insulated monitor(?) cable outside, coiled up, then promptly tried to uncoil it and found that PVC gets quite brittle at low temperatures...

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Coming home from the South Pole"

bacon_waffle — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 07:39:08 +0000

If by "station wagon" you mean LC-130 ;) IceCube switched from tapes to hard drives I think in 2015 or 16.

In 2014 we spent a lot of time fiddling with tapes and drives... At that point, all the data was recorded to tape and flown North in the summer. Additionally, software at Pole filtered out the more interesting events to upload over satellite within hours. I assume it's still basically the same.

New comment by bacon_waffle in "'Glacier mice' baffle scientists"

bacon_waffle — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 19:18:19 +0000

Yukimarimo are a thing:

https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/yukimarimo...

New comment by bacon_waffle in "USB Made Simple (2008)"

bacon_waffle — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 23:36:04 +0000

Cool! Just in case you haven't come across this, we've got a (rather quiet lately) chat that might be useful.

https://matrix.to/#/#usb-rs:matrix.org

New comment by bacon_waffle in "Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses"

bacon_waffle — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 01:49:59 +0000

Natural Intelligences, it was an attempt at humor.