Hacker News: dcan

New comment by dcan in "What async promised and what it delivered"

dcan — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:15:58 +0000

I will agree - async rust on an operating system isn’t all that impressive - it’s a lot easier to just have well defined tasks and manually spawn threads to do the work.

However, in embedded rust async functions are amazing! Combine it with a scheduler like rtic or embassy, and now hardware abstractions are completely taken care of. Serial port? Just two layers of abstraction and you have a DMA system that shoves bytes out UART as fast as you can create them. And your terminal thread will only occupy as much time as it needs to generate the bytes and spit them out, no spin locking or waiting for a status register to report ready.

New comment by dcan in "10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea"

dcan — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 18:28:08 +0000

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

New comment by dcan in "AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan project is discontinued"

dcan — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:56:56 +0000

Patents and licensing, usually

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291

New comment by dcan in "Tesla Robotaxi misses left-turn and drives into oncoming traffic lane casually"

dcan — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 23:32:43 +0000

Austin, Texas: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

New comment by dcan in "Show HN: Luna Rail – treating night trains as a spatial optimization problem"

dcan — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 04:23:50 +0000

I see 15g CO2(eq)/km in the bottom left-hand corner

New comment by dcan in "Modifying an HDMI dummy plug's EDID using a Raspberry Pi"

dcan — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 17:27:52 +0000

Terminating HDCP is difficult, you’d have to downgrade it to HDCP 1.4 and then have a 1.4 ‘compliant’ (see: device on the end for it to be a dummy monitor. If you need anything newer than HDCP 1.4, it’s likely not possible.

New comment by dcan in "Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup"

dcan — Thu, 01 May 2025 01:07:16 +0000

Try reading a 40+ page document with track changes enabled (and 100+ changes) - it pins a full CPU core for 5 seconds when you go to the next page!

New comment by dcan in "I think we need a bigger boot partition"

dcan — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 13:13:24 +0000

Gray text on a black background is an awful colour choice for this website

New comment by dcan in "Half-Life 2 RTX"

dcan — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:18:17 +0000

I tried Portal RTX on a 9070 XT and got 20 FPS at full resolution (no frame generation). There’s no driver limitations, but I have no idea what the expected FPS is

New comment by dcan in "Rust on the RP2350 (2024)"

dcan — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 17:36:02 +0000

To be more precise, four CPUs - two ARM and two RISC. There is just a mux for the instruction and data buses - see chapter 3 of the [datasheet](https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p...).

It’s space-inefficient as half of the CPUs are shutdown, but architecturally it’s all on the same bus.

New comment by dcan in "Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting"

dcan — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:42:50 +0000

They already do - most of the components buck the 12V down to the 1.3ish volts that the GPU core needs

New comment by dcan in "HDMI 2.2 is set to debut at CES 2025"

dcan — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 21:39:33 +0000

I would argue the opposite - DisplayPort has won the computing format war, especially on laptops. Most laptops will have at least two USB-C ports with DisplayPort tunneling. Most business PCs have only DisplayPort connectivity, with the assumption that you'll buy a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter (if you have an older monitor that only supported HDMI).

True, we will never see them on the TV, but on the computer it is all DisplayPort.

New comment by dcan in "Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update"

dcan — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:57:52 +0000

Does Half Life Alyx not come with the headset anymore?

New comment by dcan in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

dcan — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 23:07:51 +0000

That github link gives a 404 - is the repo private?

New comment by dcan in "Dual-boot systems fail after Microsoft update"

dcan — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 13:31:51 +0000

Ah. I ran into this last weekend when installing Linux to a secondary partition. I just disabled secure boot, good to know there is a proper workaround

New comment by dcan in "The spinning ATR plane crash in Brazil"

dcan — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 18:52:28 +0000

> "The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1:21 p.m., when it dropped approximately 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed approximately 400 feet in about eight seconds."

> The last sentence suggests that they were actively trying to get back to their assigned altitude of 17,000′.

I believe the author is implying that if the pilots attempted to maintain speed rather than altitude, the aerodynamic stall wouldn't have occurred - if they descended below 12000', the icing would be reversible.

New comment by dcan in "Show HN: Vdm, a sane alternative to e.g. Git submodules"

dcan — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:05:55 +0000

For your first point, does ../../user/repo.git not work? I have a self hosted GitLab and that’s how I’ve specified all my submodules and it survived a top-level url change (with a new clone or changing the origin)

New comment by dcan in "The Google Pay app is dead"

dcan — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 13:59:12 +0000

I think you misunderstand the whole concept of P2P payment apps - it’s meant to be digital cash and replace physical money.

Credit cards can afford to protect you from fraud because of the high level of trust between companies and the point of sales - too many fraudulent purchases and they stop accepting the transactions. Not to mention the fees they charge to both the purchasers and sellers!

If you get scammed with a debit card, cash, or a P2P app, that’s a matter for small claims courts, and if you’re lucky, maybe the police will charge them with a crime. But the risk is on the individual, and that’s a feature, not a bug.

New comment by dcan in "HP bricks customers laptops with faulty automatic BIOS upgrade"

dcan — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 03:11:47 +0000

It was rolled out through Windows update, so I'm not confident the end users authorized it.

New comment by dcan in "Kernel developer write a USB driver in 3h for Apple Xserve front-panel [video]"

dcan — Sun, 26 May 2024 20:36:49 +0000

I wrote a USB host driver for the STM32F4 a couple months ago, and the most difficult part was the lack of good documentation - the peripheral had r/w registers mapped as read-only in the SVD, there was a bit you had to set that wasn't mentioned in the documentation, and then the whole USB bulk-only-transport pointing to a non-existent SCSI spec. I ended up finding a blog post stating that you have to basically copy what Windows does in order for USB drives to work.

Luckily I had an oscilloscope that could decode USB frames to save me a whole bunch of time to understand why things weren't working.

USB seems to depend on a whole lot of tribal knowledge, which makes it impressive that it is so ubiquitous and works out of the box for the most part.