Hacker News: barbegal

New comment by barbegal in "The and Wonderful Evolution of the Waterproof Jacket"

barbegal — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:16:03 +0000

Interesting but I can't deal with the AI generated prose. Sentences like "This was not a garment for walking between a carriage and a doorway. It was ..." show me no human has proof read or edited the text.

New comment by barbegal in "Humanoid Robot Actuators"

barbegal — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:29:52 +0000

Yeah I couldn't get past so many issues in the AI generated illustrations. Not useful at all when they are completely wrong.

New comment by barbegal in "Copy Fail"

barbegal — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:52:00 +0000

Yes I would imagine lots of those type of services would be vulnerable if they hadn't updated to the latest kernel versions.

New comment by barbegal in "Running Bare-Metal Rust Alongside ESP-IDF on the ESP32-S3's Second Core"

barbegal — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:57:46 +0000

Yes you can pin it to core 1 whilst pinning all other tasks to core 0. Then will never be interrupted or preempted (except by interrupts created on core 1)

New comment by barbegal in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

barbegal — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:33:06 +0000

The actual research paper shows it's pure nonsense

https://cdn.skoda-storyboard.com/2026/04/Skoda-DuoBell-Resea...

As expected ANC headphones cancel less noise at low frequencies so I guess the 780Hz is a trade off between high enough frequency to be a bell and low enough frequency to get attenuated a little bit less than high frequencies.

The research paper is pretty poor quality and this is mainly a marketing exercise.

New comment by barbegal in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

barbegal — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:38:38 +0000

I don't understand why people get so hung up on Chrome using so much memory. A lot of this memory is "discardable" so will get dropped when the system is under memory pressure and the amount of memory allocated for this type of usage will depend on how much memory your system has available. If Chrome is using lots of memory then it's almost always because your system has lots of available memory. It allows the browser to cache large images and video assets that would otherwise have to be re-downloaded over the internet.

New comment by barbegal in "What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?"

barbegal — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:13:07 +0000

Does the KV cache really grow to use more memory than the model weights? The reduction in overall RAM relies on the KV cache being a substantial proportion of the memory usage but with very large models I can't see how that holds true.

New comment by barbegal in "Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)"

barbegal — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 07:00:59 +0000

This series of graphs https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/387/bmj-2024-082194/F1.large... shows that whilst those two professions are at the bottom of the distribution they are not particularly outlying and cherry picking of those professions has occurred. The statistical analysis should have adjusted for picking the best 2 occupations of the 443 in the study. That would likely show very little statistical significance.

New comment by barbegal in "25 Years of Eggs"

barbegal — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:40:46 +0000

Total receipts were over 11,000 so more like 100 hours or around $2000 so a similar price to the LLM.

New comment by barbegal in "How many branches can your CPU predict?"

barbegal — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:59:05 +0000

This is good work. I wish branch predictor were better reverse engineered so CPU simulation could be improved. It would be much better to be able to accurately predict how software will work on other processors in software simulation rather than having to go out and buy hardware to test on (which is the way we still have to do things in 2026)

New comment by barbegal in "Black-White Array: fast, ordered and based on with O(log N) memory allocations"

barbegal — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:25:46 +0000

The memory overhead is fairly significant it uses between 1.5 and 3 times the space of the data stored.

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

barbegal — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:40:50 +0000

For a real spinning top over engineered https://youtu.be/QLTsxXNekVE?si=S31kpZQHiYlUSedx

New comment by barbegal in "Giving university exams in the age of chatbots"

barbegal — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 08:33:08 +0000

Only 2 students actually used an LLM in his exam, one well and one poorly so I'm not sure there is much you can draw from this experience.

In my experience LLMs can significantly speed up the process of solving exam questions. They can surface relevant material I don't know about, they can remember how other similar problems are solved a lot better than I can and they can check for any mistakes in my answer. Yes when you get into very niche areas they start to fail (and often in a misleading way) but if you run through practise papers at all you can tell this and either avoid using the LLM or do some fine tuning on past papers.

New comment by barbegal in "MTOTP: Wouldn't it be nice if you were the 2FA device?"

barbegal — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 08:40:32 +0000

An interesting idea but in theory just three correct pass codes and some brute force will reveal the secret key so you'd have to be very careful about only inputting the pass code to sites that you trust well.

It's definitely computable on a piece of paper and reasonably secure against replay attacks.

New comment by barbegal in "4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin"

barbegal — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:14:29 +0000

The energy comes from the metal electrodes not the potato. Potato is just an electrolyte carrying current between the cathode and anode.

New comment by barbegal in "Predict your house price"

barbegal — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:02:03 +0000

https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/215242 seems to be a copy

New comment by barbegal in "Show HN: My Tizen multiplayer drawing game flopped, but then hit 100M drawings"

barbegal — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:16:45 +0000

Congratulations! Works amazingly well.

Does it generate enough revenue to be self sustaining?

New comment by barbegal in "Is Your Bluetooth Chip Leaking Secrets via RF Signals?"

barbegal — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 20:55:15 +0000

That 90,000 traces did take 225 hours to capture so it is truly a huge amount of data and not a trivial attack.

New comment by barbegal in "Cheese Crystals (2019)"

barbegal — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:05:57 +0000

Thanks, good to know that I'm wrong!

New comment by barbegal in "Cheese Crystals (2019)"

barbegal — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:47:34 +0000

Is it just me or does this have a familiar "edited by Chat GPT" feel to it? I can only take this chatty writing style in moderation but it seems everyone is using Chat GPT to edit their work in the same way.