Hacker News: donquichotte

New comment by donquichotte in "Claude Glass (Or Black Mirror)"

donquichotte — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:38:36 +0000

Same here, I expected an "openclaw powered google glass", leading to a "Black Mirror"-esque world full of glassholes regurgitating LLM output at each other.

New comment by donquichotte in "PCB Rework and Repair Guide [pdf]"

donquichotte — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:27:47 +0000

Beautiful illustrations!

New comment by donquichotte in "Cherry gives up German production and wants to sell core division"

donquichotte — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 19:35:10 +0000

Interesting, do you have any examples of the latter two categories? Looking for a replacement for my Cherry-Keyboard.

New comment by donquichotte in "I Run LLMs Locally"

donquichotte — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 20:10:27 +0000

Are you using an external provider for image generation or running something locally?

New comment by donquichotte in "VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles"

donquichotte — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 06:45:50 +0000

In Europe, this is mandated by law.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall

New comment by donquichotte in "Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z"

donquichotte — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 08:46:29 +0000

I recently installed NetBSD on a Thinkpad T430s, it is surprisingly snappy and usable, except when firefox is running.

With i3wm, tmux and helix with clangd it is a capable development machine with a surprisingly modern feel, only the compile times give away that the machine is from the early 2010s. Even WiFi is working, and pkgsrc is fast and well-stocked with the newest software.

New comment by donquichotte in "Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make"

donquichotte — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:18:11 +0000

cnlohr is in his own league, this guy is bordering on genius.

Dissatisfied with the state of the vendor SDK for CH32V003 microcontrollers (ultra-cheap RISC-V MCUs), he created his own [1], which is a pleasure to use. He also has a header-only RISC-V emulator that runs Linux (and Doom!) [2], and hacked an ESP32 to emit valid LORA frames with clever use of aliasing [3].

[1] https://github.com/cnlohr/ch32v003fun

[2] https://github.com/cnlohr/mini-rv32ima

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIdHBDSQHyw

New comment by donquichotte in "Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking?"

donquichotte — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 07:54:15 +0000

It's an interesting question, but only looking at energy expenditure probably does not cut it.

I hike a lot and started running races in alpine territory (e.g. this one [1]) about a decade ago and think if you take into account fatigue (mental, muscle, tendons) and exposure to the elements (sun, rain, wind, snow), a light running pace can definitely make you arrive at your destination less exhausted than walking the same distance, given that you can move confidently in the given terrain.

So it is a multi-dimensional optimization problem (as opposed to only optimizing for energy expenditure) and very dependent on how comfortably you can move at the given velocities.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-12ghcODMM

New comment by donquichotte in "Scrum's Built-In 'Get Out of Jail Free Card' Against Criticism"

donquichotte — Fri, 24 May 2024 07:50:04 +0000

I agree, but I have seen an implementation of a middle ground (Scaled Agile for Enterprises, SAFE) that combined the worst of both worlds, with quarterly, one-week, all-hands-on-deck mammoth PI (product increment) planning sessions down to the story point (whatever unit that was, apparently it has magical self-calibrating properties) that were thrown out of the window 4 weeks into the PI.

New comment by donquichotte in "Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine""

donquichotte — Thu, 09 May 2024 05:40:34 +0000

> There was no incentive to carefully consider where to place a sticker. Players didn’t have enough agency to advance the plot through their individual action. This limited creativity to simple patterns like tiling similar stickers or forming lines.

Ah, the game turned into a big corp job!

New comment by donquichotte in "STM32 MCU family goes 64-bit with the STM32MP2x (Cortex-A35)"

donquichotte — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 19:33:40 +0000

STM64 subsystem for STM32

New comment by donquichotte in "Europe's deepest mine to become giant gravity battery"

donquichotte — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 14:07:42 +0000

If I understand it correctly, ~20MWh is for the full size model at 700m depth and with a radius of 15m (prototype radius is 1.5m and it is located at a depth of 100m).

And building concrete spheres that can withstand the pressure of a 700m water column is probably an interesting design challenge on its own.

New comment by donquichotte in "Europe's deepest mine to become giant gravity battery"

donquichotte — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 12:03:20 +0000

My thoughts exactly. It makes the engineer in me go mad if I see projects like Energy Vault [1] getting massive funding that could be used to try and develop technologies that make sense. Thankfully there are some people who see through the charade [2].

If you are into this thing and looking for an even more stupid idea to store energy, I present to you the StEnSEA [3]. Rolls right off the tongue, right? It is a hollow concrete sphere that is lowered to the bottom of the lake. Pumps then remove water from it, creating a vacuum. Letting the water back in and using the pumps as generators, the energy is reclaimed. Curiously absent from all documentation of this project is the amount of energy stored. I did some back of the envelope calculations a while back and it is 3.8kWh, for a multi-million-euro prototype!

[1] https://www.energyvault.com/ev1

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGGOjD_OtAM

[3] https://www.iee.fraunhofer.de/de/projekte/suche/2013/stensea...

New comment by donquichotte in "Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again"

donquichotte — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 21:30:09 +0000

For anyone interested in the structure of the software that ran Ingenuity (and some hardware design aspects, such as the use of commercial off-the-shelve parts), there is an awesome and critically underwatched video of Timothy Canham explaining everything:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQu9m4MG5Gc&t=7s

New comment by donquichotte in "Liero – Sling'n'shoot Worms Game"

donquichotte — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 19:48:55 +0000

There was also Wurmz!, a networked multiplayer version of Liero. Some history and binaries of various version as well as the source code can be found on this website [1].

[1] https://mental-reverb.com/wurmz.php

New comment by donquichotte in "A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males"

donquichotte — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 12:46:43 +0000

So the inverse of the final scene in Patrick Süskind's "Das Parfum" is plausible?

1) collect women's tears from donations (kickstarter.com)

2) spread them as a fine mist at G20

3) world peace

Edit: maybe this is what Hugh Laurie was singing about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8chs2ncYIw

New comment by donquichotte in "Can a transformer represent a Kalman filter?"

donquichotte — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 12:04:40 +0000

> I see no reason to see why you should expect it to work in harder, nonlinear settings

I'm not so sure about this, maybe this is where the ML approach could outperform (in terms of estimation accuracy, not compute time) the traditional EKF and UKF approaches, by learning the nonlinear system dynamics?

This sounds very hand-wavy, and it is, because of my lack of understanding. For me it is just not immediately clear that if an optimal algorithm for the linear case cannot be matched or outperformed, that is also necessarily the case for nonlinear dynamics.

EDIT: And as mentioned above, the KF is optimal if certain conditions hold, e.g. additive, zero-mean, Gaussian noise on state dynamics and observation. In reality, you may have a multiplicative component of the noise nor non-zero mean or fancy noise distributions, and it would be interesting to see if these can be learned.

New comment by donquichotte in "Many Tamagotchis were harmed in the making of this presentation (2012) [video]"

donquichotte — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 12:24:46 +0000

Nice talk! Travis Goodspeed, who she mentions helped her decapping the chip, has some very interesting reverse engineering talks, e.g. a tear-down of a commercial glucose monitor:

https://filestore.fortinet.com/fortiguard/research/glucose-b...

New comment by donquichotte in "Dune 3D – an open source parametric 3D CAD app bassed on OCCT"

donquichotte — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 12:43:46 +0000

Very cool to see another contender in the open source 3D CAD space. I really want to like and use FreeCAD, but with Fusion360 (where my account has been banned because I accidentally once used it from my company's VPN to model something for private use) and Onshape I am just so much faster and tear out way less hair.

New comment by donquichotte in "Interfaces for prototyping hardware"

donquichotte — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 20:25:22 +0000

I have worked with a very similar setup to prototype devices for a customer. One of the peripherals controlled was also a pump and interestingly, our interface looked almost exactly like what is being proposed here.

In terms of hardware, I can highly recommend Tinkerforge [1]. They support a wide range of sensors and actuators and can be controlled either via USB from a computer (all major platforms and many programming languages supported) or, for standalone devices, with an ESP32-based base-board called ESP32 Brick or ESP32 Ethernet Brick.

Since their products are open source (code AND schematics!) a design can be easily transferred to a custom PCB once the design is working.

Add either a web interface (native on the ESP32 or on your host computer if using a USB brick) or slap on a DearImgui frontend, and you have very powerful prototyping platform at your hands.

[1] https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/