Hacker News: cmptrnerd6

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era"

cmptrnerd6 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:34:38 +0000

Which company is building the silicon for Google? Is it tsmc? What node size? I didn't see it with a quick search, sorry if it was in the post.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "[dead]"

cmptrnerd6 — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:42:21 +0000

I don't get it, AI does some impressive things but I don't trust it to write any code that goes to production. I've used AI for many one off python scripts for visualizing some log files that mostly worked, which was convenient. Maybe AI is just bad at embedded C but the other day I had it write some code that resulted in a subtle error because the AI didn't account for C truncating, not rounding, when doing math with integers. It makes me wonder if most errors are going undetected since reviewing code can be harder than writing code.

So articles like this that someone is using AI in finance scare me. Maybe the big 4 are using AI as an excuse to put pressure to get lower rates, it doesn't mean they actually think AI is capable of it. Or maybe auditing was already a racket that is easily disrupted by another racket.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge"

cmptrnerd6 — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 02:14:13 +0000

I also recommend that podcast but I would suggest balancing it with '5-4' podcast or 'strict scrutiny'. Sara and David do a very good job explaining both sides and the law but there are times I think advisory opinions could spend more time on the arguments made by the other side or the weaker portions of their supported view.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Datacenters in space aren't going to work"

cmptrnerd6 — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:22:58 +0000

Cooling is more difficult in space, yes it's colder, but transferring heat is more difficult.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "How to live on $432 a month in America"

cmptrnerd6 — Fri, 23 May 2025 23:53:00 +0000

This is not true, in my experience, in rural Indiana. I hear the n word a lot for an area that I have yet to meet a black person. One neighbor was complaining about the California family that moved to town and brought all the drug problems with them, despite our county having been the meth capital of Indiana for years before they moved here. Somehow my first conversation with a friend's mom I met while visiting their rural farm involved how there were no black people in the area. But this is why all anecdotal data should be taken with a grain of salt.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Detecting if an expression is constant in C"

cmptrnerd6 — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:51:26 +0000

You'd probably still win the wager but I do want to say there are some of us using C23. We even use it in our embedded systems running on arm based microcontrollers. Though we still do maintain some C89 code :(

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

cmptrnerd6 — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 18:36:07 +0000

Or you get ostracized for saying you don't want to have to involve lawyers to get your wife the medical care she needs.

Depends on where you are in the country.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike"

cmptrnerd6 — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:27:25 +0000

I have never seen such a system that I thought worked or wasn't just gamed into uselessness.

Do you have any examples of systems that worked well?

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Ward Christensen (of BBS and XMODEM fame) has died"

cmptrnerd6 — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 02:12:39 +0000

Entirely possible I don't understand something as I'm not sure what you mean by taking advantage of higher data rates. We're sending data over UART at the max rate that doesn't introduce too many bit errors. Mainly we needed a protocol to correct for the bit errors (by rerequesting data) and I've always used x/y/z modem for that purpose.

I picked Kermit this time because I didn't want to implement x/y/z modem again and had never used Kermit.

This [1] claims Kermit is faster in some instances depending on what features you have enabled.

[1] http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/perf.html

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Ward Christensen (of BBS and XMODEM fame) has died"

cmptrnerd6 — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 01:29:26 +0000

We just upgraded from Xmodem to Kermit last week in our embedded device.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Owe your banker £1k you are at his mercy; owe him £1m the position is reversed (2019)"

cmptrnerd6 — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 13:10:19 +0000

It probably depends on the bank somewhat. My local community Bank in a small rural town won't have many, if any, million dollar home mortgages, maybe some of the farm or business loans are that large.

Also I hope you meant £1M is ~$25 M today and not £1 :D

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Guiding principles: How US dietary guidelines contribute to obesity"

cmptrnerd6 — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 12:57:40 +0000

Forgive my confusion, but, are you saying you would pay $15 for a meal that cost $35?

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Nanolog supports logging with 7 ns median latency"

cmptrnerd6 — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 13:16:09 +0000

I have not used this and it says it targets embedded systems but maybe it is close enough to what you might be looking for: https://github.com/knurling-rs/defmt

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Nanolog supports logging with 7 ns median latency"

cmptrnerd6 — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 13:14:47 +0000

I've used https://github.com/rokath/trice which is similar but targeting microcontrollers. It isn't immediately clear to me if nanolog could run on a microcontroller with its output directed over RTT/uart/etc or not.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Sourcetrail: Free and Open-Source Interactive Source Explorer"

cmptrnerd6 — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 12:29:54 +0000

Despite the project being archived and no longer maintained I continue to use it and recommend it. I use sourcetrail when diving into new codebases to help get a sense of the flow and organization of a program. I've mainly used it for C but also C++ a few times. If you have a compile_commands.json setting up sourcetrail is as simple as telling it where that file is located.

Though I do wonder if issues will start to crop up around new language features in C23 and beyond. We just moved our embedded C project to C23 and I haven't tried sourcetrail on it yet.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "Ask HN: How do you personally stay fit?"

cmptrnerd6 — Fri, 31 May 2024 12:33:37 +0000

Last year I discovered I really enjoy group workouts. The local YMCA has several group classes and I find it far easier to exert myself and go when there is a group of people all doing the same thing as me. When I was by myself it was too easy to slack off or just not workout. But when I'm in a class it's hard to slack off or skip, for me at least.

At the age of 34 I've also discovered I love dancing. I do Zumba, sha'bam, and Les Mills Dance every week. Just listen to music and mimic the actions of the instructor.

The YMCA also has childcare that the kids enjoy which helps too. I don't have to find time when I'm not watching the kids.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "A TV Show Forced Britain's Devastating Post Office Scandal into the Light"

cmptrnerd6 — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 15:15:03 +0000

Edge cases. If d is very large then 2*d might be larger than what can be computed.

Also I think the code could just multiply d by -1 which would "reverse the sign".

Even that has some edge cases that should be handled around the maximum value of an integer.

But the main thing to me is that as written this code is confusing and overcomplicating the easy part of the problem.

New comment by cmptrnerd6 in "DIY Home EV Charger"

cmptrnerd6 — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 01:23:56 +0000

Safety certifications add to cost. We recently took an EVSE through certification and although we passed on the first try it was still expensive and to pass on the first try we did extensive testing and documentation before submission.