Hacker News: deckar01

New comment by deckar01 in "Minnesota guitarist's "palmfrets" invention strikes a new chord"

deckar01 — Fri, 13 Nov 2026 17:45:35 +0000

I use some chord fingerings that leave the low E and A strings open and form the rest of the chord with the D, G, and B strings. Chords with intervals that start in the second octave sound really dreamy and are easy to play. There is no way to extend that to more than two bass notes without something like this. Four bass notes open up much more interesting chord progressions.

New comment by deckar01 in "Synaptics patent claims stop work on DisplayLink drivers"

deckar01 — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 19:29:02 +0000

You assume there is some logic to software patents. It looks like an extortion racket to me. If you don’t pay enough fire insurance the mob lets your competition burn your business down.

New comment by deckar01 in "We know 15k websites are infected. how do we tell them?"

deckar01 — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 23:34:03 +0000

It’s not a notice of a vulnerability. For all they know it was an employee abusing access. You don’t leave a skimmer on a pump and politely keep sending emails to corporate waiting for a response. You call the cops and they should shut the pumps off until the skimmers are removed. With the amount of AI security report slop and AI extortion spam out there this is basically a service that only the web host can provide.

New comment by deckar01 in "Formlabs Studio 1 $699 Resin Printer"

deckar01 — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:11:55 +0000

The finish of SLA regularly failed to meet my expectations. You either have warping and elephant foot at the build plate or you have a hundred support contacts to clip and sand.

Desktop CNCs are getting very capable and cheap. It’s hard to beat the tolerances and finish quality of a machined part.

New comment by deckar01 in "Gyroscopes Got So Small [video]"

deckar01 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:14:23 +0000

It would explain why every smart phone I have ever owned has gotten stuck in landscape until I shook it hard enough.

New comment by deckar01 in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

deckar01 — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 22:45:02 +0000

Tech companies are bundling AI into their base subscriptions and force feeding it to consumers, so I doubt the metrics they are reporting to their shareholders represent real demand or value.

New comment by deckar01 in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

deckar01 — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:59:53 +0000

I can see how a 0.27% increase in Lincoln’s water usage intuitively seems insignificant, but that was a a low usage data center in a large city. Papillion has 1/12 of Lincoln’s population, yet it’s data center used 42x more water. Assuming water usage was proportional to population it would have increased the city’s water usage ~136%.

New comment by deckar01 in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

deckar01 — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:31:34 +0000

Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.

New comment by deckar01 in "Microsoft abandons personal AI chatbot race with Copilot reboot"

deckar01 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:03:33 +0000

Now if I could just get them to start paying me cash for training their AI on my open source code and selling it rather than being force fed a Copilot grant.

New comment by deckar01 in "GitLab Outage"

deckar01 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:32:17 +0000

There was a relative lull in GitHub bot activity the last few weeks, but they seem to be back today. I assume the promo token flood gates opened for the new models.

New comment by deckar01 in "A list of 1,325 AI assisted repositories, mined from GitHub"

deckar01 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:06:53 +0000

When I suspect an agent opening a PR I check their GitHub activity. They have usually opened dozens of PRs. Most of them are ignored, high profile packages close them, and AI related projects blindly merge them. They also tend to create dozens of private repos and commit to them non-stop.

New comment by deckar01 in "A list of 1,325 AI assisted repositories, mined from GitHub"

deckar01 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:59:42 +0000

There has been a persistent attack on GitHub repos by agents trying to land a commit to become a contributor. The default GitHub permission is to allow contributors to execute actions against the repo’s compute budget, so it could be a botnet. Another possibility is that they are trying to get a Copilot grant. Someone claiming to be in academia was surveying repos when that program first started. I’m guessing the permissions for that are equally as naive.

New comment by deckar01 in "Show HN: Jigsaw Haiku"

deckar01 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:54:14 +0000

That would make it very easy and less about the words. They gave you a whole day to finish it for a reason.

New comment by deckar01 in "AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study"

deckar01 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 19:48:21 +0000

You are missing the point. Getting a certificate for all of the programs you passed and still graduating could completely change the course of a person’s life. Community college has certificates and associates degrees to let people start working when they reach a practical limit in their general education.

New comment by deckar01 in "Shade Map"

deckar01 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:24:20 +0000

Trees should not cast shadows as if their foliage extends all the way to the ground.

New comment by deckar01 in "Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation"

deckar01 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:18:38 +0000

Closed source, proprietary license, starting at $195/year. Their language is a moat for customers, and this is a bridge back out. If you aren’t getting any benefit from their development direction and the compute is happening on your own hardware, what are you paying a subscription for?

New comment by deckar01 in "Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?"

deckar01 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:09:26 +0000

Those use liquid electrolyte cells and the video is more promo than rigorous testing.

New comment by deckar01 in "Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?"

deckar01 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:28:42 +0000

The Two Bit Da Vinci YouTube channel has a good video on solid state battery fundamentals and a deep dive into a battery company (ProLogium) that has demonstrated manufacturing at scale.

https://youtu.be/xQFVIs4leig?si=iOOt5gg_2MJAIoFR

New comment by deckar01 in "Arduino Launches Plug-and-Play Modules for Long-Range Sensor Projects"

deckar01 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:06:04 +0000

> The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”).

This is the definition of “platform” in that document. It is just the websites.

New comment by deckar01 in "Arduino Launches Plug-and-Play Modules for Long-Range Sensor Projects"

deckar01 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:00:23 +0000

The “Platform” is just the website. They are saying don’t hack our servers. There is a caveat for content published under an open source license (like the docs).