Hacker News: dcanelhas

New comment by dcanelhas in "Electric motors with no rare earths"

dcanelhas — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:03:45 +0000

Clearly making a motor with induced magnetic fields both for the stator and rotor isn't the innovation here, since a large fraction of industrial motors do not have permanent magnets.

I would assume the innovation here would need to be making it small and efficient for any meaningful torque output? Usually when you see claims of a 93% efficient electrical motor its the result of taking an absolute beast of a 2kW machine and operating it at 400W. Does anyone have insights into what Renault are doing here?

New comment by dcanelhas in "Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused"

dcanelhas — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:06:46 +0000

KeePass is just an encrypted database file with UI around it for usability. You can keep the db on a USB drive, sync it through a cloud storage, e-mail it to yourself, whatever ... It's really not that complicated. BitWarden is the above as a service, I reckon.

Nb. The above refers to KeePassX. No idea what the KeePass without the x is about. Naming things. So hard.

New comment by dcanelhas in "5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens"

dcanelhas — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:39:09 +0000

I figured 2x4 would be the theoretical minimum since ascii characters are 1 byte each (without extensions). 1x5 with color is impressive, even if it is sort of like a faux 3x5

New comment by dcanelhas in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

dcanelhas — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:42:00 +0000

After the transition to digital TV our broadcasted signals mostly look like noise, though. Maybe an outside observer would assume that our civilization ended sometime in 2010.

New comment by dcanelhas in "CERN uses ultra-compact AI models on FPGAs for real-time LHC data filtering"

dcanelhas — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 09:36:49 +0000

I'm half expecting to see "AI model" appearing as stand-in for "linear regression" at this point in the cycle.

New comment by dcanelhas in "You can use newline characters in URLs"

dcanelhas — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:59:38 +0000

Wait, does that mean that you could make an ASCII representation of a QR code that points to the URL that the QR code was made of?

New comment by dcanelhas in "Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better"

dcanelhas — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:08:05 +0000

How shocking!

New comment by dcanelhas in "Cistercian Numbers"

dcanelhas — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:05:28 +0000

Shouldn't 523 in that list of "other numbers" actually be 522?

New comment by dcanelhas in "The mathematical mystery inside the legendary '90s shooter Quake 3"

dcanelhas — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:01:30 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root for those who just want the info without AI filler

New comment by dcanelhas in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

dcanelhas — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:27:10 +0000

> I wrote my first line of code in 1983. I was seven years old, typing BASIC into a machine that had less processing power than the chip in your washing machine

I think there may be a counterpoint hiding in plain sight here: back in 1983 the washing machine didn't have a chip in it. Now there are more low-level embedded CPUs and microcontrollers to develop for than before, but maybe it's all the same now. Unfathomable levels of abstraction, uniformly applied by language models?

New comment by dcanelhas in "xAI joins SpaceX"

dcanelhas — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:34:59 +0000

The opposite of down is up, so it wouldn't be completely illogical.

New comment by dcanelhas in "Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica"

dcanelhas — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:37:43 +0000

Indeed, 15 or 25 mph (24 or 40 km/h) are the speed limits in school zones (when in effect) in CA, for reference. But depending on the general movement and density and category of pedestrians around the road it could be practically reckless to drive that fast (or slow).

New comment by dcanelhas in "Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica"

dcanelhas — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:13:44 +0000

It does sound like a good outcome for automation. Though I suppose an investigation into the matter would arguably have to look at whether a competent human driver would be driving at 17mph (27km/h) under those circumstances to begin with, rather than just comparing the relative reaction speeds, taking the hazardous situation for granted.

What I would like to see is a full-scale vehicle simulator where humans are tested against virtual scenarios that faithfully recreate autonomous driving accidents to see how "most people" would have acted in the minutes leading up to the event as well as the accident itself

New comment by dcanelhas in "“Fluid gears” invention offers promise for improving mechanical devices"

dcanelhas — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:49:08 +0000

Indeed, then this design will truly have come full circle.

New comment by dcanelhas in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

dcanelhas — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 21:45:29 +0000

I remember the pitch for Julia early on being matlab-like syntax, C-like performance. When I've heard Julia mentioned more recently, the main feature that gets highlighted is multiple-dispatch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc9HwsxE1OY

I think it seems pretty interesting.

New comment by dcanelhas in "I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude"

dcanelhas — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 19:25:30 +0000

Even with text, parsing content in 2D seems to be a challenge for every LLM I have interacted with. Try getting a chatbot to make an ascii-art circle with a specific radius and you'll see what I mean.

New comment by dcanelhas in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

dcanelhas — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:47:48 +0000

I think the selfishness here is related to being fine with generating a pile of electronic waste that becomes a problem for everyone else, as long as he can avoid carrying a few ounces extra.

It's hard to recycle electronics, because separating materials that are chemically bonded together is very labor intensive and isn't worth it from the price of aluminum, copper, lithium, etc alone.

It would have to cost more to dispose of a laptop for this to work out financially.

New comment by dcanelhas in "Testing shows automotive glassbreakers can't break modern automotive glass"

dcanelhas — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 10:37:30 +0000

In 15 years: Testing shows that automotive shaped charge glassbreakers can't penetrate the armor on most modern automotive glass.

Was drone-proofing civilian cars a mistake?

New comment by dcanelhas in "Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state"

dcanelhas — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 07:48:46 +0000

I wish there was an active dev community that could patch win10 going forward, but without access to source code for the kernel, perhaps that isn't really viable.

Ideally I would want to use Linux but I also want to play games that are only supported on windows.

Does using WSL help or is an outdated windows base still going to be the weakest link in the security onion?

New comment by dcanelhas in "It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead"

dcanelhas — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 06:53:47 +0000

It's an interesting read. I guess the difference between this situation and the ideal case is that he would have been admitted for observation as a precaution in a world where there was plenty of room and staff to take care of even the less obvious emergency cases.

Even in a very well functioning system similar cases might happen eventually, anyway (but at a much lower frequency). ROC plots come to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...