Hacker News: cactacea

New comment by cactacea in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

cactacea — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:17:19 +0000

> I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field.

Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working on building weapons (i.e. defense) and being in the US?

New comment by cactacea in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

cactacea — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:23:09 +0000

Really shows where our priorities are at as a country. SMH

New comment by cactacea in "Show HN: I made open source, zero power PCB hackathon badges"

cactacea — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:50:45 +0000

yes NFC and with an e-ink display no battery needed from there

New comment by cactacea in "I hate: Programming Wayland applications"

cactacea — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:40:52 +0000

Yes.

New comment by cactacea in "Write up of my homebrew CPU build"

cactacea — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:19:35 +0000

Any time I see rounded corners on a PCB I know someone put love into that board. Well done

New comment by cactacea in "OpenClaw is changing my life"

cactacea — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:40:40 +0000

> A milestone in the evolution of our digital organ.

New comment by cactacea in "Listen to Understand"

cactacea — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:02:25 +0000

The author is describing active listening. You don't have to come off like a bot when reflecting either, "man that sucks" and just leaving space for the other person to keep talking goes a long way.

Anyone here that feels they could do better on this would benefit from a few sessions with a decent therapist.

New comment by cactacea in "Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch"

cactacea — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:36:23 +0000

> I did a lot of digging, before finding this hidden in the datasheet

Ah yes, gotta love it when you get screwed because you missed one sentence in a 642 page doc. I can relate

New comment by cactacea in "Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI"

cactacea — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:35:25 +0000

> do just a part of the process, which on their own are either legal, or less punishable by law

This is why conspiracy charges exist.

New comment by cactacea in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

cactacea — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:06:50 +0000

https://www.legislature.mi.gov/Laws/MCL?objectName=MCL-257-2...

Sorry but was this truly a good faith question? Kind of hard to see how it is.

New comment by cactacea in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

cactacea — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:03:58 +0000

Precisely this

New comment by cactacea in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

cactacea — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:03:33 +0000

I live in southern Arizona. My next door neighbor is Mexican and also owns a BYD. Longest he can keep it here is 90 days:

https://www.help.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-1686

New comment by cactacea in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

cactacea — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:02:01 +0000

Nice ackchullay there, thank you for your contribution to the discussion. It is pretty clear that OP is referring to new cars based on context but hey who cares about context.

New comment by cactacea in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

cactacea — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:44:16 +0000

This is entirely incorrect. You cannot permanently import or register a vehicle which has not undergone homologation. None of these vehicles have been certified to meet US safety standards and they cannot be imported permanently.

New comment by cactacea in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

cactacea — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:38:27 +0000

This is only correct if you're not planning on ever registering the vehicle. And good luck with the paperwork to prove that during import. This is a great way to waste a bunch of money and get your shiny new car crushed

New comment by cactacea in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

cactacea — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:37:13 +0000

No. Tarriffs aside this would be the problem:

https://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/importing-car

> As a general rule, motor vehicles less than 25 years old must comply with all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) in order to be imported permanently into the United States.

Without homologation there is 0 chance you'd be able to import and register one of these.

New comment by cactacea in "Eat Real Food"

cactacea — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:55:36 +0000

> Definitely want to get grass-fed or pasture raised though.

Yeah I mean if you're going to maximize your impact just go all out right. Eating beef, particularly in the US, is one of the worst actions you can take environmentally speaking.

More people need to understand how incredibly destructive cattle ranching has been around the world. In the US in particular pretty much all BLM and Forest Service land that isn't protected as wilderness or permitted for extraction (oil/forestry/etc) is used for ranching. That is an enormous area that has literally been turned to cow shit. Even where the cattle don't eat all vegetation in sight they trample habitat and entirely change the ecology of the area.

Source: I spent three years traveling around the western US from 2019-2022 and camped almost exclusively on public lands during that time. The number of beautiful places I've seen completely covered in cow shit is utterly appalling. Why should we let agribusiness use OUR land this way? It is truly such a waste.

New comment by cactacea in "Silicon Valley's tone-deaf take on the AI backlash will matter in 2026"

cactacea — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 16:59:25 +0000

We had to destroy the village in order to save it.

New comment by cactacea in "New reactor produces clean energy and carbon nanotubes from natural gas"

cactacea — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:32:51 +0000

Resource extraction is pretty much never a clean process. That gas came from somewhere.

New comment by cactacea in "Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers"

cactacea — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:18:05 +0000

> Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid).

Preseed is not new at all:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

RH has also had kickstart since basically forever now.

I've been using both preseeds and kickstart professionally for over a decade. Maybe you're thinking of the graphical installer?