Hacker News: cmos

New comment by cmos in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

cmos — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:09:13 +0000

Booked a time!

New comment by cmos in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

cmos — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:39:00 +0000

My mother is living alone in her house and we are getting to the point where she might not be able to live alone. I built "Still Kicking", a picture frame that monitors her motion and sends back basic reports and can detect falls and sleep quality to a phone app, to help give her more time at home.

It's just an mmWave sensor connected to an ESP32. But it works nicely, and I'm thinking of starting a company making them, though I'm not clear if the elderly would be ok with this minimal (no camera) intrusion.

It would just work out of the box.. the real one would have a small cell modem so it wouldn't need any networking setup, and it would act as a gateway if you have more than one in a house. There are industrial versions of this for nursing homes. This would be a bit more warm and fuzzy for home use.

https://moveometer.com

New comment by cmos in "Lunar Flyby"

cmos — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:00:41 +0000

What a trip. They must all be so excited!

I hope they will come back as ambassadors of peace.

New comment by cmos in "Peter Thiel's big bet on solar-powered cow collars"

cmos — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:15:03 +0000

New comment by cmos in "Nobody is coming to save your career"

cmos — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:09:43 +0000

I always talked with the people I managed about their career goals, and always tried to adapt their job to be a closer fit to those goals. When I couldn't do that I would acknowledge that and even help them find a different job that did fit.

How else can we expect to get the best out of people?

Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements

cmos — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:05:42 +0000

This is likely a bit unrealistic, but why can't we make a half rack server to go in someones basement that can also heat up their hot water and use the basement floor as a heat sink as well?

It seems like a lot of the blight of data centers is the energy to remove the heat. By distributing them into cool basements and even connecting them into the home heating system we could reduce that making them more efficient.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587597

Points: 74

# Comments: 65

New comment by cmos in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

cmos — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 01:08:58 +0000

51 year old electrical engineer here, same thing! (minus the retiring part cause finances)

It's given me the guts to be a solo-founder (for now). I

New comment by cmos in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)"

cmos — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:17:39 +0000

Building a faster and more accurate replacement for the BOD5 (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) 5 day test used in wastewater.

New comment by cmos in "VW is bringing physical buttons back to the dashboard with the ID. Polo EV"

cmos — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 15:34:29 +0000

Great.

But make climate control 3 knobs: Fan speed + off, temperature and output ports. Put the AC button inside the temperature knob, and the 'recirculate' button inside the output ports knob.

With the radio have a push on/off volume knob that starts up at the SAME volume as always (i.e. relative, not absolute) and NOT the previous volume. The volume knob should have some resistance to it. Opposite that have a tune knob for precise tuning, and pressing that gets you into setup and navigates you through it. This should have the same resistance, but the outside has some indents so you know it's not the volume knob. Have 6 preset buttons and 3 'banks' with a single 'next bank' button. pressing and holding a preset will save it with a beep for confirmation. On the steering wheel: up/dn for radio should be seek, not next/previous preset. There are 6 nice big buttons for presets but when traveling seek up/dn is the main way we change music.

On the door have the rear view mirror controls, and above that have a knob for dashboard light brightness.

2008 Honda Fit was close to a perfect car. https://www.carsdirect.com/honda/fit/2008/pictures/interior

New comment by cmos in "The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure"

cmos — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 02:27:23 +0000

I loved this game. I want to make it into a mud.

New comment by cmos in "How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)"

cmos — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 15:10:31 +0000

Same with "Odie" in Garfield.. kindof.

New comment by cmos in "I made a downdetector for downdetector's downdetector's downdetector"

cmos — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 15:10:35 +0000

A good start, but let's see more.

New comment by cmos in "Indefinite Backpack Travel"

cmos — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 13:30:25 +0000

I biked around the US for 1.5 years, and loved every minute of it. Initially I had a hammock (Hennessey) and then a 1 person tent. Lived at a whitewater rafting company, was invited into a music festival, and was invited into people's homes and fed 2-3 days a week. I stopped to do the family thing, but gearing up to take them on bike trips soon.

New comment by cmos in "The QNX Operating System"

cmos — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 13:49:39 +0000

Used QNX for an audioserver.. got MP3 encoding and playback ported to it. Visited the headquarters and Dan Dodge instructed his team to help us in any way we needed it.

We needed the help. Thank you Dan!! We eventually ported to linux about 6 years later, but you helped our startup get up and going.

New comment by cmos in "I Met Paul Graham Once"

cmos — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 22:01:34 +0000

It's time for tech to go back to its roots and starve the kings and 'noblemen' of our talent.

Stop working for billionaires.

New comment by cmos in "Sky lapse in two tone"

cmos — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 18:43:02 +0000

I work in Oceanography.. The solar panels on individual buoys also get cleaned by rain, and can work ok vertically because of reflections. We have special diode bypass panels made so if 10% is covered in poop (SeaLion poop in our case) only 10% of the power is reduced.

Our biggest problem with small wind turbines on buoys is fishingpeople throwing line into them.

But yea, solar for power generation at sea is not realistic.. and you are stealing it from the tiny animals that make up our carbon sink. https://twilightzone.whoi.edu/explore-the-otz/value-of-the-o...

New comment by cmos in "Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code"

cmos — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 22:04:38 +0000

I agree - also an EE - and I think it is similar to 'programming music' packages like Sonic Pi. If you are used to reading and writing standard music coding will be an odd and difficult change. Right now we have a comfort for seeing the layout and such physically, and since that is how we manufacture it this is going to be an output anyway, but there is some future world where it is all put together automatically within the requirements we specify and we have an entirely new way of designing circuit boards. Each component would come with not only a footprint but an array of basic design implementations that would mix and match with others.. autorouting on steroids of sorts.

New comment by cmos in "Ask HN: How do I stop wasting time?"

cmos — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 18:35:45 +0000

search youtube for motivational videos. Play one when you are down. Skip if you don't like it - there are an infinite number of them.

New comment by cmos in "Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002)"

cmos — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 16:40:08 +0000

I did a startup making a mp3 player that was attached to whole house audio distribution systems. We got an angry email from a customer saying he woke up to ABBA playing full blast at 3:00am. While it was likely an integration/timer issue, he was wondering 'why ABBA? what is the player trying to tell me?"

The control system was sending 'play' with nothing else, which was more of an edge case based on our UI, and so it started at the beginning of the list of artists, and ABBA was at the beginning of that list.

Other players might have started at the beginning of the list of songs, but for some reason (25 years ago) we chose the beginning of the list of artists. Later on it was configurable - random, favorite playlist, etc.

New comment by cmos in "Ask HN: Best Resources and Books for a Soon-to-Be-Dad?"

cmos — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 17:45:18 +0000

We just started putting our kids on the potty around 5 months old.. they liked to sit on it and we would read to them. Sometimes stuff came out. But more importantly it was part of our routine before and after naps, and so by 1.5-2 they were fully trained mostly by themselves.

Waiting too long can create issues with sitting on a seat with a hole in it - at least make that a common thing you do.