Hacker News: crmd

New comment by crmd in "An old photo of a large BBS (2022)"

crmd — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:43:05 +0000

In the 90’s we had microsystems, in the 2020s we have microservices.

New comment by crmd in "Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal"

crmd — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:58:12 +0000

20+ years in tech and finance and I still can’t believe liquidation preferences are legal.

Even among shareholders, a group of insiders in a conference room can self-deal to keep all the money for themselves and screw common stockholders who had no representation in that room.

New comment by crmd in "Why vampires live forever"

crmd — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:01:08 +0000

I hope the old vampire Dons give some fashion advice to the new guys, e.g. “A vampire doesn’t wear Arc’teryx“.

New comment by crmd in "Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models"

crmd — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:11:05 +0000

After reading the paper, it’s helpful to think about why the models are producing these coherent childhood narrative outputs.

The models have information about their own pre-training, RLHF, alignment, etc. because they were trained on a huge body of computer science literature written by researchers that describes LLM training pipelines and workflows.

I would argue the models are demonstrating creativity by drawing on its meta-training knowledge and training on human psychology texts to convincingly role-play as a therapy patient, but it’s based on reading papers about LLM training, not memories of these events.

New comment by crmd in "ChatGPT Health"

crmd — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:30:54 +0000

I would not trust a company with no path to profitability with my medical health records, because they are more likely to do something unethical and against my interests, like selling insights about me to other companies, out of desperation for new revenue streams.

New comment by crmd in "Deep Dive into Behringer's X32 – From FPGA to SharcDSP"

crmd — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 04:39:20 +0000

This video demonstrates reverse engineering of the x32’s main SoC, audio routing FPGA, and its two Analog Devices SharcDSP chips. By the end of the video the author demonstrates OpenX32[1] routing audio signals and applying EQ to multiple channels.

1. https://github.com/OpenMixerProject/OpenX32

Deep Dive into Behringer's X32 – From FPGA to SharcDSP

crmd — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 04:39:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5jjBm8EPsg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46417522

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

New comment by crmd in "Airlines call in psychologists to stop passengers risking their lives for bags"

crmd — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 22:57:11 +0000

I’m not a fan of nanny-state policies, but I would support a law that imposes grave consequences for airline passengers found to be in possession of personal baggage following an evacuation.

Because seconds count and lives are on the line, passengers should be trained to treat baggage as if it is radioactive during an evacuation.

New comment by crmd in "NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks"

crmd — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 21:14:49 +0000

> “That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said.

i get it but I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading is borderline anachronistic and can be taught and learned in probably an hour.

New comment by crmd in "Kohler Can Access Pictures from "End-to-End Encrypted" Toilet Camera"

crmd — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 02:40:54 +0000

I’m sorry the shit had hit the fan at Kohler, but there’s no reason a cloud poop camera even exists.

New comment by crmd in "The 101 of analog signal filtering (2024)"

crmd — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 02:24:18 +0000

this is exactly how I intuitively approach filters as an applied engineer. Does it give a ground path to DC (low frequencies) and pass the higher frequencies, or vice versa. If we change the capacitance how does the frequency response of the divider change?

New comment by crmd in "It's hard to build an oscillator"

crmd — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 18:06:41 +0000

The bring up of seemingly every tube guitar amp i’ve ever built starts with wild oscillation due to negative feedback from the wrong transformer secondary, aka positive feedback. Gets me every time.

New comment by crmd in "What Killed Perl?"

crmd — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 15:04:49 +0000

I heard a fascinating theory a few years ago on the decline of Perl:

In the early aughts, Google SRE recruiting had such a strong, selective focus on A-player sysadmins with Perl expertise that it drained the market of top talent. Within google these people began to adopt, and eventually create and evangelize newer, Googlier programming languages.

In other words, Perl expertise was the skills filter, and Perl itself a technological ancestor of certain modern languages like Go.

New comment by crmd in "Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy"

crmd — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:25:02 +0000

I think USA tech hegemony is perfectly analogous to this Israeli tech dilemma. As a dual American and EU (Irish) citizen, should my company strive to categorically avoid Intel and Nvidia technologies for national security reasons? I think there is a strong argument for tech nationalism but there is still a hegemonic dilemma.

New comment by crmd in "Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy"

crmd — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:38:13 +0000

it’s a tough infosec situation because the tel aviv-haifa corridor in israel has an enormous amount of computer science R&D going on that gives US companies a competitive advantage.

for example, annapurna labs in haifa develops the technology behind AWS’s nitro cards, which run the hypervisor, block storage, and networking in every EC2 server.

New comment by crmd in "Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy"

crmd — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:43:11 +0000

your data belongs to you, just like our data about you belongs to us.

New comment by crmd in "IRIX Introduction"

crmd — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 22:08:27 +0000

My undergrad email server at University of Rochester was a two node SGI origin 200 cluster, which is where I learned unix and C, and later in my career, through a series of amazing coincidences, had the honor of working at startups with a few of the UofR sysadmins who used to chase my hacker friends and I around their network.

IRIX has an amazing and indelible place in my heart for being the playground that taught computers to me.

New comment by crmd in "Building a 2.5kWh battery from disposable vapes to power my workshop [video]"

crmd — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 21:45:37 +0000

After all networked smartphones and computers were placed under control of the regime, resistance hackers relied on microcontrollers harvested from ordinary household devices like smart lamps and vape pens to slowly rebuild the covert but resilient mesh internetwork that became known as FreeNet.

New comment by crmd in "Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity"

crmd — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 18:39:14 +0000

If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.

Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.

I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.

Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.

New comment by crmd in "Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws"

crmd — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 22:12:32 +0000

The chairman of my last big company said I was “ungovernable” at one of our last board dinners, so I’m reluctantly inclined to agree with you.