Hacker News: craftkiller

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:19:42 +0000

Ah I didn't know Apple put their repair parts under a different domain. I stand corrected!

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:46:53 +0000

> That sure doesn't apply to this situation though does it?

It sort-of does. Naturally this situation can be resolved much cheaper with a flasher, but in this situation you absolutely have the option to replace the "broken" motherboard, while still keeping your screen, laptop chassis, battery, ram, SSD, wifi card, expansion cards, sound board, webcam. Another commenter said the board is available on Ebay for $270 which is going to be less than just the ram for a new laptop.

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:38:08 +0000

In addition to no longer charging off 5V chargers (their first laptop could literally charge off a USB type A with no USB-PD), on the AMD 7040 I've got ~10% chance every time I plug it in to my dock that it will simply not start charging. Everything else will connect (display, USB) but power won't flow. Resolving that is as simple as unplugging and replugging in my laptop but if I don't notice until I'm in a video conference then it is a problem because my webcam, microphone, and headset are also going over that cable. Oh how I miss the OG 11th gen framework charging.

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:19:59 +0000

Strain relief would be nice, but framework has been shipping laptops for 5 years. Has this hypothetical happened to anyone? It sounds unlikely to me.

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:14:43 +0000

As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't sell the daughterboards so you have to go spelunking for salvaged parts with your macbook. I can get all my first-party brand-new replacement parts at https://frame.work/marketplace .

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:01:50 +0000

That specific issue, but they didn't get the other benefit of expansion cards: being able to "change" the ports on your laptop without needing some external dongle. Also, your fists must be tiny.

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:55:02 +0000

But in that situation, you know the damage _wont_ be to the USB ports on the motherboard. The motherboard is screwed to the case, and the expansion cards are locked to the case, so they won't move relative to each other. You expansion card might get damaged by the initial tripping over the cord, and some other parts might get damaged from the fall, but you can trivially buy first-party replacement parts for anything you broke. MagSafe would be nice, but the expansion cards are doing their job to protect the motherboard.

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:38:51 +0000

The ports on the motherboard are soldered, but you don't use them directly. You attach "expansion cards" which slide into a slot on the laptop case which locks them in place. So those ports seldom see any forces applied to them. All your day-to-day wear (plugging/unplugging, twisting, yanking) is going to be on the port on the expansion card which you can replace for $10. It's basically like a daughter board that is trivially user-replaceable rather than a daughter board that you have to open up your laptop to replace.

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:34:29 +0000

> If you are inserting/removing cables like a gorilla

You've never moved your laptop without realizing it is still plugged in? I've done that a couple of times. My framework gives me peace of mind because I know the only port that will be damaged from that is the one on the $10 card because the card is firmly attached to the laptop body. Your suggestion of a 3" dongle doesn't have that benefit so yanking a plugged-in laptop could still cause a loose or broken port on your motherboard.

New comment by craftkiller in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:29:47 +0000

Yeah, I started with their first laptop (11th gen Intel DDR4 ram) and upgraded to the 7040 AMD board with DDR5 ram. Now there's even newer boards available with desirable features like LPCAMM. Framework has absolutely delivered on the "upgradable mainboard" promise.

There's also 3rd party ARM and RISC-V mainboards, but I'd recommend the average user sticks to the x86_64 boards.

New comment by craftkiller in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

craftkiller — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:02:23 +0000

DisplayPort Alt-Mode is important for when you smash your phone but you _need_ to access data that is on it. Maybe its your photos, text messages, or access to a banking app. Without DP Alt-Mode you're going to be waiting for a screen replacement to ship, with DP Alt-Mode you're just plugging your phone into your dock like a laptop.

Personally I would have seriously considered this phone if it wasn't for the lack of DP Alt-Mode. It would be a tiny portable Linux computer with an unlimited internet connection available anywhere. It would be the perfect thin-client. My cellular plan limits my tethered bandwidth so using the phone as my computer rather than as my computer's modem has real benefits.

New comment by craftkiller in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

craftkiller — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:21:38 +0000

An official OEM battery for the Pixel 7 along with all the tools you need is $50. It is not expensive. The process to replace it is easy. Certainly nerve racking the first time but I've opened up my pixel phones at least 6 times now and it is pretty trivial (on the non-folding pixel phones).

https://www.ifixit.com/products/google-pixel-7-battery-genui...

New comment by craftkiller in "A viral mosquito-killing laser device could be coming to the U.S."

craftkiller — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 05:13:31 +0000

While I don't have a remedy for house flies, I do have a remedy for fruit flies! Take a cup, fill it with 25% water, 25% monster energy drink original flavor, and leave the other 50% air. Put one small drop of soap in it. Then cover with plastic wrap and poke holes in the plastic wrap the size of pencils.

Fruit flies will be attracted to the monster, fly in expecting to land on the water's surface tension but the soap broke the surface tension so the flies end up drowning. It is surprisingly effective.

New comment by craftkiller in "My server is a phone now"

craftkiller — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:11:12 +0000

Cool project, but slightly better: before the rampocalypse I bought one of those aliexpress fanless linux boxes designed to be a router. I put a 32GB stick of ram in it and a 250GB SSD. I run opnsense in a virtual machine to serve as my home router and then I put the rest of my home server stuff on other virtual machines on that same box. It's still fanless/silent. It takes up zero additional space because it is my router. It would already be running 24/7 because it is my router so the additional energy usage of an additional VM is likely minuscule. The latency to my router is basically zero since it is on the same physical box. And it is using a real SSD so it has faster storage with almost certainly better endurance.

New comment by craftkiller in "Parsers don't have to be complicated"

craftkiller — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 17:04:29 +0000

The parsers doing this in the first place is the problem. The JSON spec doesn't specify how numbers should be stored/interpreted, so theoretically you could have a 2,000 bit integer in JSON. The lack of clarity around that could also be considered a flaw in the JSON spec. But from a practical standpoint, the most common JSON parser is in web browsers running javascript, and they'll parse to double-precision floats. So from a practical standpoint, if you don't want your numbers distorted, you need to be defensive about it and encode your numbers as strings (or use something other than JSON).

New comment by craftkiller in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

craftkiller — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:35:57 +0000

> Widespread diseases like measles, [...] - gone

Funny you mention that, we're bringing measles back. Check out the graphs on https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html . Seems it started Jan 2025.

New comment by craftkiller in "The USSR in 100 Photographs"

craftkiller — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:39:37 +0000

What's going on with the photo of the children standing around a light wearing sunglasses? My first thought was tanning booth but surely they weren't tanning children?

New comment by craftkiller in "The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded"

craftkiller — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:29:22 +0000

The two aren't mutually exclusive! I just finished porting my personal kubernetes cluster from running on Debian to running on NixOS. Now whenever I want to update the host OS on my kubernetes nodes, I just build a new bootable ISO from my Nix configs and upload it to my servers, swapping out the whole OS atomically. If anything goes wrong, I can swap back to my previous build. No more anxiety running `sudo apt-get upgrade` and hoping for the best.

New comment by craftkiller in "Parsers don't have to be complicated"

craftkiller — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:09:37 +0000

> JSON numbers are too often encoded as strings

There's a good reason for that, since JSON comes from JavaScript, many JSON parsers treat numbers as double-precision floats. By encoding your number as a string, you ensure that the JSON parser has not modified your number.

https://blog.json-everything.net/posts/numbers-are-numbers-n...

New comment by craftkiller in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

craftkiller — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 23:53:15 +0000

I think the real value here is not as a customer-facing agent/chatbot but for for automated processes. Think of all the companies out there that have LLMs doing simple tasks like categorizing customer feedback emails. For such tasks, you don't gain much from better models, so if you could run it 10x cheaper on a slightly older model, it would absolutely be worth it. Pretty much any place people are currently running a flash model could benefit from this since they're already deciding that speed+price is worth using a less capable model.