Hacker News: ddeck

New comment by ddeck in "Sued by Nintendo"

ddeck — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 03:32:34 +0000

>Nintendo is a small privately-held company

Nintendo is a TSE-listed public company with a market cap of about USD 110 billion.

New comment by ddeck in "Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft"

ddeck — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 16:07:52 +0000

Just to add another data point, the co-CEO indicated on a podcast 18-months ago that the sensor package cost was <=$100k for the then current generation:

"But saying, you know, picking an upper bound, $100,000 worth of equipment on it, you amortize it over, you know, the lifetime, call it, say, 400,000 (miles), 25 cents per mile. Right. And, you know, it gives you some margin compared to the cost of paying a human driver."

He also mentioned that the next generation would see a "drastic reduction in the cost".

https://www.shack15.com/podcast - ep41

New comment by ddeck in "Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft"

ddeck — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:11:38 +0000

And GO in Tokyo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(Japan)

New comment by ddeck in "Alibaba's new AI chip: Key specifications comparable to H20"

ddeck — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:29:20 +0000

You're right, but it's not quite so black and white. They are certainly continuing to build out coal capacity, but they are building solar/hydro/nuclear/wind generation at a greater rate, such that the proportion of generation from coal has been falling, from over 70% ten years ago, to about 55% currently.

New comment by ddeck in "Fuck up my site – Turn any website into beautiful chaos"

ddeck — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 04:01:13 +0000

Firefox via "Google Safe Browsing" also:

>Firefox blocked this page because it may trick you into doing something dangerous like installing software or revealing personal information like passwords or credit cards.

>Advisory provided by Google Safe Browsing.

New comment by ddeck in "Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars"

ddeck — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:23:04 +0000

I think you meant capacitors. Resistors would just dissipate the energy as heat.

edit: Thanks for the correction. They do indeed use resistors and just dump the energy as heat. Unfortunate.

Hopefully this will change as supercaps continue to improve. Maxwell tech's modules are already used in light rail, and looks like some work towards smaller locomotives in Switzerland here:

https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/20823697

New comment by ddeck in "Electric cars produce far less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars"

ddeck — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:21:27 +0000

Not sure about the US, but the Japanese didn't stop focusing on hybrid development. More than half of all sales in Japan are hybrids, whereas electric is only a few percent [1].

Honda even recently announced that they're scaling back on electric to focus on hybrids:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/japans...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-19/hybrid-ca...

New comment by ddeck in "The $25k car is going extinct?"

ddeck — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 05:26:44 +0000

Chinese EVs are certainly strongly tariffed. The below Reuters article highlights how BYD are apparently shifting to plug-in hybrid sales to avoid the 27% tariff the EU imposes on its pure battery electric vehicles (plug-in hybrids attract a reduced 10% tariff).

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chines...

New comment by ddeck in "PicoEMP – A low-cost Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) tool"

ddeck — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 09:49:06 +0000

Just a reminder to ensure that you have brownout detection enabled on the CPU/MCU (assuming it's available) and are checking for it in your firmware. Supply drops can be very brief.

New comment by ddeck in "New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles"

ddeck — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 04:11:34 +0000

>I’m trying to find the directive to force student social media profiles to be public but can’t find anything yet.

It's on all the US embassy sites, although it says "are requested":

Effective immediately, all individuals applying for an F, M, or J nonimmigrant visa are requested to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media accounts to ‘public’ to facilitate vetting necessary to establish their identity and admissibility to the United States under U.S. law.

https://uk.usembassy.gov/visas/

https://ca.usembassy.gov/visas/

https://in.usembassy.gov/visas/

etc.

New comment by ddeck in "My experiment living in a tent in Hong Kong's jungle"

ddeck — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 15:19:06 +0000

True in many places, but in Hong Kong, the cost of an A&E visit or hospital admission for the author (presumably on a student visa) at that time was about USD15/day.

New comment by ddeck in "Hong Kong's Famous Bamboo Scaffolding Hangs on (For Now)"

ddeck — Sun, 25 May 2025 19:17:13 +0000

It is, but they fill them with silicone when they remove it. The brackets I was referring to are about 70cm wide, so no chance of leaving them there.

New comment by ddeck in "Hong Kong's Famous Bamboo Scaffolding Hangs on (For Now)"

ddeck — Sat, 24 May 2025 21:19:44 +0000

I find the single apartment scaffolding to be the most amazing. These guys turn up at the door of your 30th floor apartment with a bunch of bamboo poles and nylon strips and a couple of hours lated the entire side of the apartment is scafolded, like a spider's nest hanging off the side of the building.

To begin, one guy hangs out the window, drills a few holes in the outer concrete wall, and bolts a piece of L shaped steel to support the initial bamboo "floor". After that he's outside balancing on the first piece while he drills more and extends along the wall. Someone on the feeds the poles through the window.

He usually has a rope attached to a waist harness, which is initially held by someone inside, and then clipped to the braces outside... most of the time.

The whole thing is amazing to watch.

It's necessary every time you need to service something outside, like replacing or repairing aircon.

New comment by ddeck in "Hacking a Smart Home Device (2024)"

ddeck — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 08:26:06 +0000

It's certainly possible. Tracing the MCUs IO lines to LEDs/buttons/relays etc on a PCB is usually pretty straightforward.

I have just finished doing this and writing replacement firmware for the Aqara E1 series of Zigbee switches, after getting fed up with them not supporting basic Zigbee binding functionality.

New comment by ddeck in "Ethically sourced "spare" human bodies could revolutionize medicine"

ddeck — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 08:05:09 +0000

And Never Let Me Go, which was also made into a movie I believe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(novel)

New comment by ddeck in "How I Use Home Assistant in 2025"

ddeck — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 04:37:19 +0000

Aqara is a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of their switches are not Zigbee certified and don't conform to the standard. Specifically, they won't bind directly with devices from other manufacturers.

This might not matter if you're pushing everything through a hub like HA, but if you want to connect directly with other devices and remotes then it likely won't work.

New comment by ddeck in "Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon"

ddeck — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 09:50:13 +0000

I mean, it's not like it would be out of character. Calling such accusations propaganda is a bit much.

China forcibly returned nearly 10,000 in overseas crackdown: report

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220119-china-forcibl...

The Disappeared - China’s global kidnapping campaign has gone on for years. It may now be reaching inside U.S. borders.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...

Thousands of Chinese overseas forced home involuntarily: report

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Thousands-of-Chinese-overse...

40 Officers of China’s National Police Charged in Transnational Repression Schemes Targeting U.S. Residents

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/40-officers-china-s-national-...

China’s abductions of foreign nationals should carry costs and consequences

https://www.politico.eu/article/chinese-abductions-of-foreig...

New comment by ddeck in "Spacecraft Takes Close Up Video of the Sun, Revealing Otherworldly Hellscape"

ddeck — Tue, 07 May 2024 06:18:36 +0000

NASA released a very impressive 30-minute video of similar solar activity a few years based on images from their Solar Dynamics Observatory:

NASA | Thermonuclear Art – The Sun In Ultra-HD (4K)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tmbeLTHC_0

New comment by ddeck in "Mystery monk makes billions with 5-hour energy (2012)"

ddeck — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 03:57:33 +0000

>Forbes really hates Bhargava, for no apparent reason.

It's not Forbes, it's just a random contributor writing clickbaity articles for the $.

Forbes is trash and is closer to Medium in the way it is structured than to a typical news media site. It's generally just random contributors. You can see from the URL (forbes.com/sites/[contributer-name]). There are thousands of contributors with various incentives.

Forbes’ staff of journalists could produce great work, sure. But there were only so many of them, and they cost a lot of money. Why not open the doors to Forbes.com to a swarm of outside “contributors” — barely vetted, unedited, expected to produce at quantity, and only occasionally paid? (Some contributors received a monthly flat fee — a few hundred bucks — if they wrote a minimum number of pieces per month, with money above that possible for exceeding traffic targets. Others received nothing but the glory.)

As of 2019, almost 3,000 people were “contributors” — or as they told people at parties, “I’m a columnist for Forbes.”

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/an-incomplete-history-of-f...

New comment by ddeck in "Abandoned villages of Hong Kong"

ddeck — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 03:32:08 +0000

Surprisingly only 24% of Hong Kong is developed "built-up" area. The rest is mostly forested. This also means that despite the density being broadly equivalent to Singapore on that list, it is actually much more densely populated in the areas where people live and work.

Hong Kong has a mountainous topography. Of the total land area of 1,111 km 2, 24.3% (270 km2) is built-up area, with the remaining 75 .7% (841 km 2) being not-for-development or non-built-up area consisting mainly of country parks, wetland, reservoirs, fish ponds, etc

https://www.legco.gov.hk/yr17-18/english/panels/dev/papers/d...