Hacker News: bdonlan

New comment by bdonlan in "Qwen Image 2.1"

bdonlan — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:42:16 +0000

It’s not entirely clear far part of a model would be copyrightable in the first place - it’s the result of a mechanical process, where the inputs are someone else’s copyrighted works, after all, while copyright requires some form of creative input.

New comment by bdonlan in "Hacking Washing Machines [video]"

bdonlan — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:08:15 +0000

Fusible traces aren’t uncommon - but they would effectively destroy the device if current limits are exceeded, and they certainly would be if the power supply is non-isolated, so it wouldn’t actually be a solution to the firmware update problem.

The usual solution here is an optical coupling of some kind - optocouplers (a box with a LED, photodiode, and air gap between them) are very common for this purpose, and are an inexpensive and effective option for digital signaling across an isolation boundary.

In this case they’ve basically built a custom optocoupler out of discrete components, which is a bit unusual, but makes sense when you consider the risk of corrosion due to water ingress at the diagnostic ports, and the need to access it while - for example - a dishwasher cycle is running.

New comment by bdonlan in "Japan's Creepiest Station"

bdonlan — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:09:39 +0000

It was originally a switching/signalling waypoint, and later started seasonal passenger service for skiiers in 1932, before later switching to year-round service. Apparently it used to be a popular hiking destination as well, but with the establishment of more convenient rail and road routes became less popular in the 80s.

New comment by bdonlan in "How I tripped over the Debian weak keys vulnerability"

bdonlan — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 14:26:51 +0000

In this case, the problem was the seed was low entropy, so if you generated a bunch of random numbers with a single initialization of the RNG seed you would get unique values. It's a tricky scenario to test for if you don't know of the failure mode...

New comment by bdonlan in "YouTuber sentenced to 6 months in prison for obstructing probe into plane crash"

bdonlan — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 04:01:58 +0000

This is called disgorgement and is indeed frequently used for certain types of crimes (particularly financial crimes).

New comment by bdonlan in "Process for mass producing Japanese 500 yen coins"

bdonlan — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:14:02 +0000

There’s also upcoming changes to paper bills too, vending machine operators might be waiting to do both at the same time.

New comment by bdonlan in "WinRAR sold 5,449 licenses in a day"

bdonlan — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 15:40:14 +0000

WinRAR supports explicitly selecting the character set to use to decompress a .zip file - super helpful when opening Japanese ZIP files.

New comment by bdonlan in "Tell HN: Upgrade your Metabase installation"

bdonlan — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 14:47:42 +0000

Unfortunately that means it's not possible to deploy this without violating the AGPL...

New comment by bdonlan in "Mandatory Certification Regarding Generative Artificial Intelligence"

bdonlan — Tue, 30 May 2023 22:35:00 +0000

Link appears to be broken.

New comment by bdonlan in "Emergency bridge loan for SVB customers"

bdonlan — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 01:25:12 +0000

The issuing bank for loans isn't necessarily where the company keeps the majority of their assets.

New comment by bdonlan in "Near-miss between FedEx and Southwest flights in Austin"

bdonlan — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 04:30:25 +0000

Any kind of turn costs lift, and that’s not what you want to spend when you’re trying not to hit something on the ground. As such turns are generally not performed below a certain altitude.

New comment by bdonlan in "Users report Nvidia RTX 4090 GPUs with melted 16-pin power connectors"

bdonlan — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:46:26 +0000

Feels like a thermistor would be a good safety device to add to those connectors…

New comment by bdonlan in "Florida Surgeon General recommends against mRNA vaccines for males aged 18-39"

bdonlan — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 15:48:33 +0000

The good news is that the new boosters do in practice seem to be effective at boosting omicron protection, overcoming this theorized original antigenic sin: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/fall-bivalent...

New comment by bdonlan in "SEC charges Kim Kardashian for unlawfully touting crypto security"

bdonlan — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 13:37:32 +0000

You sure you’re posting from the right account? You’ve been using this one for at least 9 months (as far as I bothered going back)

New comment by bdonlan in "Globalstar SEC filing, Apple to use 85% of its satellite network capacity"

bdonlan — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 20:22:16 +0000

They mentioned a feature where your location could be sent via satellite in "find my" even in a non-emergency.

New comment by bdonlan in "Starlink maritime coverage map [pdf]"

bdonlan — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 15:53:02 +0000

Replace, or simply augment with enough additional satellites to provide adequate bandwidth over the oceanic areas.

New comment by bdonlan in "Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco"

bdonlan — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 19:34:45 +0000

Japan has a good solution for this - most of the larger train stations (and many of the medium-sized ones as well) have "coin lockers" (which, despite the name, these days often take transit IC cards instead of coins) you can rent to store your stuff until you're ready to head home. In larger tourist hubs like Akihabara there'll also be a ton of lockers in the vicinity of the station run by third parties as well.

New comment by bdonlan in "Arbitrary Code Execution in Super Mario All-Stars [video]"

bdonlan — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 18:22:35 +0000

TASBot was only controlling controller 1 for a short time, but it remained connected to controllers 2-4 for the entire run, giving it time to download additional content as the showcase was going on.

New comment by bdonlan in "The SEC's response to the 'meme stock' rally"

bdonlan — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 19:08:29 +0000

Do you want to elaborate on which specific changes listed in the article are, in your opinion, beneficial to institutional investors at the expense of retail investors, and how?

New comment by bdonlan in "The Contractual Impossibility of Unwinding Disney’s Reedy Creek"

bdonlan — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 16:15:56 +0000

The state _could_ attempt to negotiate with bondholders to repurchase the bonds - probably at a significant premium, however. Of course, if one of the bondholders refuses to sell, there wouldn't be much they can do... (I wonder if Disney holds any of those bonds for this very reason?)