Hacker News: blackguardx

New comment by blackguardx in "Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence"

blackguardx — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:54:56 +0000

You don't need rivers for nuclear reactor cooling, they are just very convenient.

New comment by blackguardx in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

blackguardx — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:38:17 +0000

It is almost like the flip-flopping policy was never meant to boost US manufacturing, but to secure kickbacks and deals from big companies and countries to get favored treatment.

Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

blackguardx — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:27:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c0l9r67drg7t

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089213

Points: 1527

# Comments: 1291

New comment by blackguardx in "Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All"

blackguardx — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:33:52 +0000

555 timers were everywhere back in the day. It was one of the most mass produced chips at the time with over 1 billion made per year.

New comment by blackguardx in "AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected"

blackguardx — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:34:17 +0000

Altium isn't great, but you must not have tried the others...

New comment by blackguardx in "Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15"

blackguardx — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 04:29:44 +0000

My minivan has more 50% weight capacity than a Toyota Tacoma. I can haul more construction debris and load/unload them easier because my tailgate is lower. I wouldn't want to try to haul mulch or manure though. That being said, most of my friends with trucks have caps on the back and can't haul mulch any easier than me.

New comment by blackguardx in "Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15"

blackguardx — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:24:01 +0000

Loading drywall into my minivan is a lot easier than a truck. I can fit whole sheets and close the back gate so I don't need to strap them down and they are protected from the elements.

New comment by blackguardx in "Eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)"

blackguardx — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:31:37 +0000

mm/hr is more useful for areas that get lots of rain. When I was living in Seattle, chance of rain was meaningless but mm/hr made the difference between being able to do an outside activity or not. In California, chance of rain makes sense because it rains very little.

New comment by blackguardx in "We recreated Steve Jobs's 1975 Atari horoscope program"

blackguardx — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 06:01:38 +0000

Jobs was actually a technician at Atari, assembling circuit boards during the night shift. Jobs was later paid by Atari to make Breakout, but basically subcontracted it to Wozniak for 50% of the contract. Jobs ended up paying Wozniak less than 1/10 of how much Atari paid him.

New comment by blackguardx in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

blackguardx — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 21:02:56 +0000

VHDL is based on Ada, so it also inherits from sequential programming models.

New comment by blackguardx in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

blackguardx — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 01:53:42 +0000

I think this can just be summarized to "write any HDL like you are modeling real hardware." Both VHDL and Systemverilog were primarily intended for validation and synthesis is a second class citizen.

New comment by blackguardx in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

blackguardx — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:48:04 +0000

You can pretty much do everything in Vivado from the command line as long as you know Tcl...

Also, modern Verilog (AKA Systemverilog) fixes a bunch of the issues you might have had. There isn't much advantage to VHDL these days unless perhaps you are in Europe or work in certain US defense companies.

New comment by blackguardx in "US Administration halted largest Offshore Wind project in the U.S."

blackguardx — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 16:56:14 +0000

I live near both wind turbines and oil/gas fracking sites in Colorado. The wind turbines are far less obtrusive. Fracking sites produce a lot of noise and they try to hide them with these giant walls that look like a post-apocalyptic fort. On top of that, because they don't disclose their fracking fluids you always kind of have ground water contamination near your home on the back of your mind.

I'm not even against fracking but the alternatives to wind and solar are more a public nuisance to live around.

New comment by blackguardx in "After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up"

blackguardx — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 12:02:12 +0000

They have plenty of mines for iron amd otber metals in western countries as well. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana

New comment by blackguardx in "Bad Dye Job"

blackguardx — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:50:31 +0000

TouchID doesn't really for me on my Macbook or iPad. It has about a 25% success rate. I think one issue is that I work with my hands a lot.

New comment by blackguardx in "Microsoft is quietly walking back its diversity efforts"

blackguardx — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:25:47 +0000

Who was president when Microsoft introduced D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) initiatives in 2019? AFAIK, they never called it DEI internally.

New comment by blackguardx in "Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill"

blackguardx — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 19:53:31 +0000

You say smaller political entity, but the city of Washington D.C has 100k more people than the entire state of Wyoming...

New comment by blackguardx in "Our LLM-controlled office robot can't pass butter"

blackguardx — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 04:05:34 +0000

We'll probably end up with the doors from Philip K. Dick's Ubik that charge you money to open and threaten to sue you if you try to force it open without paying.

New comment by blackguardx in "Steve Jobs and Cray-1 to be featured on 2026 American Innovations $1 coin"

blackguardx — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:18:16 +0000

Caltrain stations' automated machines used to famously give $1 coins as change when buying tickets as well. Getting like 10 $1 coins as change for a $20 bill really weighed your pants down.

New comment by blackguardx in "Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot"

blackguardx — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 21:51:11 +0000

Why do you think a humanoid robot will be cheaper than a robot arm?