Hacker News: dyselon

New comment by dyselon in "Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support"

dyselon — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:41:09 +0000

Sure, it's just a poor analogy. YouTube doesn't show up at your door unprompted as junk mail does. You go there intentionally for the purpose of watching a video. You can pay for that video with your time or your money. No one is being "paid off" in that scenario.

New comment by dyselon in "Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support"

dyselon — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:06:09 +0000

Heaven forbid someone pay for an online service they use and enjoy.

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

dyselon — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 04:35:43 +0000

We finally gave up our Prius after 12 years, and we never changed the brakes once. The brakes were just peeking into the yellow on its last service upgrade. I was really impressed with how well the "normal" hybrid could take advantage of regenerative breaking, honestly.

New comment by dyselon in "FPGA Dev Boards for $150 or Less"

dyselon — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 17:15:13 +0000

I really like the DE0-CV in particular for having the 7 segment displays and accessible buttons and switches. When I was first getting started in FPGA stuff, I spent a lot of time just getting basic circuits to work, and you need some physical IO to get any feedback that your stuff works. It gives you a lot of things to learn on before you start worrying about VGA output or whatever (but does have a lot of interesting stuff on board for when you do want to mess around with that stuff!)

New comment by dyselon in "FPGA N64"

dyselon — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 02:43:29 +0000

There's a ton of of dev boards out there, but I would say to be sure to get something with hardware buttons and LEDs, as it really helps with some of the Hello World level of things, and many of the cheapest options won't have those.

I started messing with FPGAs with the DE0-Nano, but eventually got so frustrated with the tiny buttons that I upgraded to a DE0-CV, which I really enjoyed my time with. It has some 7 segment LEDs, physical switches, and buttons, and it also has a VGA port, PS/2 port, and Micro SD card slot, so you can build a pretty snazzy little PC if you want to.

New comment by dyselon in "Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo"

dyselon — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 23:28:22 +0000

Not the gp, but I used Duolingo quite a bit, and recently learned Spanish to an upper intermediate level. In my opinion, Duolingo is just as weak with pure reading as with spoken language. You'll learn some vocabulary and be introduced to ideas, and that's valuable, but not enough. Just like spoken, to learn to read, you have to read a bunch of stuff you can understand. I jumped straight from Duolingo to children and young adult books, and it was a difficult transition with lots of intensive looking-up-every-other-word study, but, I mean, you do that long enough, and eventually you're just reading.

New comment by dyselon in "Recompiling the Lost Vikings"

dyselon — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 17:17:08 +0000

Accessing the cart was as fast as accessing RAM, and you didn't have much RAM to go around, so I imagine there just wasn't much advantage to it.

New comment by dyselon in "94-year-old Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor Introduces Solid State Battery"

dyselon — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 23:28:57 +0000

Op's point is that the lower nominal voltage is the culprit in the battery's lower energy density. If you and I each have a 1 kg battery that stores 1 amp hour, but yours puts out 3.7v and mine puts out 2.5, then your battery is storing more total energy than mine. We can both manipulate that output voltage (via boost converter, or more commonly just using multiple batteries in serial) to get whatever we need, but given the same load, my battery's just going to drain faster than yours.

New comment by dyselon in "Beating the World’s Best at Super Smash Bros. with Deep Reinforcement Learning"

dyselon — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 06:22:55 +0000

Can I ask what the feature set looked like? I always kind of wanted to do this with the Skullgirls AI, but never had the time while we were developing it. As a developer, I obviously had full access to the game state, but I'm still not really sure what the best way to represent that state to a neural network is.

New comment by dyselon in "Circuit building: stop using antique parts (2014)"

dyselon — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 20:14:05 +0000

Is there a good reference for potential upgrades to old, obsolete-ish parts? I definitely understand that many of the old logic ICs, transistors, and op-amps have been displaced by better parts, but I don't always know how to identify them short of a parametric search on digikey and hoping there's not some sharp corner I missed. I'd find a lot of value in a page that had some recommendations for "Are you using for ? Consider !"

New comment by dyselon in "RISC-V Offers Simple, Modular ISA"

dyselon — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 04:21:17 +0000

I also made a VGA shield for my Nano! I got a couple pictures at https://mobile.twitter.com/dyselon/status/648020130471899136

That project is actually kind of what convinced me to go ahead and buy the CV. It was fun, but it just felt like a lot of work making things that I could just already have on the board.

New comment by dyselon in "RISC-V Offers Simple, Modular ISA"

dyselon — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 15:05:17 +0000

The DE0-CV is a bit more expensive, but I think it's probably better than the Nano for the FPGA 101 type experiments. It's got more on the way of switches and LEDs, and the buttons are a lot easier to get to. I have both, and I had a lot more fun with low level learning activities with the CV than the Nano. Moving past that, I also enjoyed messing with the VGA and SD card peripherals more than the ADC and accelerometer, and also found those easier to add on after the fact.

New comment by dyselon in "Nintendo Controller Teardown"

dyselon — Thu, 19 Nov 2015 21:55:28 +0000

SNES is a 12 bit shift register, as well.

New comment by dyselon in "Doing an HD Remake the Right Way"

dyselon — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 19:27:57 +0000

The art in Skullgirls was done somewhat similar to the way the article describes in "Recoloring". Each frame was composed of three different images and each sprite had a palette along with it. The palette was a list of color gradients. The first image was the black and white line work. The second image was a solid color key layer whose value acted as an index into the palette (i.e. which gradient should be selected). The third image was a monochrome shading layer which acted as the position into that gradient that should be drawn. The gradients were rendered to textures at runtime, and the shader did all the work of actually composing the layers.

It did have some downsides, in particular that it was a bit unnatural for artists to work with, and memory was a constant struggle on console. Skullgirls characters could have well over 1000 frames of animation, and the game supports 3 on 3 fights. Mike did a handful of clever tricks to optimize memory usage, including breaking the images into smaller tiles and throwing out all the empty ones, and compressing the images even in memory. I'm a big fan of the final effect; I think the sprites look great, are high resolution, and allowed artists to create an extremely varied set of palettes for the game.

New comment by dyselon in "NES graphics – Part 1"

dyselon — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 04:00:10 +0000

It's not particularly uncommon. Check out the mapper list at http://tuxnes.sourceforge.net/nesmapper.txt. All the 0k chr entries are carts that have chr ram. Just for funsies, I looked up one I had, and cracked it open so we could take a look at it. You can see on this Cobra Triangle cart the MB8464A 8k sram chip wired up to the chr lines. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2I5cGIsgvHbN1NFdUdLNTluNHM... It's also kind of cool to see the 74 series chips at work; the 74161 counter being used to select the prg rom bank, and the 7402 used to disable the prg rom during writes.

New comment by dyselon in "Game Modification: 60 FPS Hacks in Dolphin"

dyselon — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 06:57:49 +0000

Dolphin uses DirectInput on Windows, so basically anything works. If you're in the market for a PC gamepad, it's hard to go wrong with a 360 controller.

New comment by dyselon in "$19 postage stamp-sized Wi-Fi module for interacting with physical things"

dyselon — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 04:17:37 +0000

It's an ARM microprocessor and wifi module. It's powered via its USB port or whatever you hook up to the vin pin. It's basically another cheap embedded platform, but it's got built in wifi. I kickstarted the Spark, and really love it, so I preordered a couple of these. Looking forward to it!

PCB Web, free PCB layout software, now has a Windows version

dyselon — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 16:44:47 +0000

Article URL: http://www.pcbweb.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8493525

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dyselon in "Is it Pokémon or big data technology?"

dyselon — Fri, 02 May 2014 01:12:24 +0000

Ditto is one I recognize. That one is definitely a Pokemon.

New comment by dyselon in "Depixelizing Pixel Art"

dyselon — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 03:18:07 +0000

It'd be kind of hard, as what makes up a "sprite" lives in two different places - one that stores all the tile data, and another that basically describes which tiles make up which sprites. The latter is likely to change every frame, and potentially the former, too, so you'd still be rescaling some stuff every frame. You'd also have to rescale some things that are affected by palette changes, which sometimes change every frame (popular way to animate water, for example). Would you end up saving time this way? I'm not really sure. It's definitely an interesting idea.