Hacker News: eichin

New comment by eichin in "I built a 500k-domain search engine for makers in a weekend for $10"

eichin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:44:01 +0000

I still can't find pics of the boards (other than on ebay :-) but https://seltzerbooks.com/alta.html has quotes like "To get a sense of the relative size of the RAM in AltaVista Search, consider that a typical personal computer today comes with 8 to 16MB of RAM, and the AltaVista Index Servers each have 6GB of RAM—about 500 times more." and "AltaVista shows the practical value of machines that have more than 4 gigabytes of physical main memory." (Dick Sites, DEC SRL) The book is from 1997.

New comment by eichin in "AI At Home Part 1: A Box Of Scraps"

eichin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:37:05 +0000

mmm the early Dell 2U servers (2003 or so?) didn't have very good linux support, so the fans always ran at full speed. I think the happiest I've ever seen people about a kernel upgrade was (2.5 era?) when it got fan support for that hardware and finally it was still loud at boot, but once the kernel came up it switched to thermally managed and slowed way down :-)

New comment by eichin in "I built a 500k-domain search engine for makers in a weekend for $10"

eichin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:27:34 +0000

Reminds me that AltaVista's servers ran in 4G of RAM (there were famous, at the time, pics of the circuit boards - DEC was rightfully proud of this, 30 years ago) and that a modern AltaVista should run on a decent laptop :-)

New comment by eichin in "Karpathy’s Pelican"

eichin — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:54:50 +0000

Is anyone else getting "mongodb is webscale" vibes? (Except 16 years ago that was a lot smoother, because it used some sort of "render this conversation" engine...)

New comment by eichin in "The 14 Steps it takes to open my office door with a new phone"

eichin — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:08:21 +0000

it's sold as harder to copy (and easier to revoke when you're doing layoffs - which shouldn't have been a really challenge for card-based systems, they're just old and didn't keep up.)

New comment by eichin in "Nano Banana 2 removed from Google Earth"

eichin — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 01:12:08 +0000

Even the Microsoft Kin lasted 48 days (I thought it had been cancelled on launch day, but digging back it was just the tech press saying "This was a mistake from Day One" which is certainly true, but not the same thing :-)

New comment by eichin in "A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands"

eichin — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:58:18 +0000

800VDC at (merely) hundreds of amps is a high-end electric car charger. (Those are a lot easier to shut down individually, though.)

New comment by eichin in "The coolest use for the Vision Pro"

eichin — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:37:54 +0000

Or to the drug-assisted VR scene in Minority Report. (Though that's even darker...)

New comment by eichin in "First Robotic Satellite Servicer Launched"

eichin — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:18:54 +0000

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7487913... via https://bsky.app/profile/jfoust.bsky.social/post/3mrqa6o24as... says that they're having attitude control problems including "Currently, the LINK spacecraft has two of three reaction wheels non-functional and partial RCS functionality" but they have already made some attempts to use the thrusters to stabilize it and they seem to be working. The note comes across as "busy but hopeful" (and pleasantly but unusually transparent.)

New comment by eichin in "First Robotic Satellite Servicer Launched"

eichin — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:57:37 +0000

They should be close to the end of the checkout stage, then it'll take 4 weeks to get in the right orbit and another 2 weeks of inspection ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_boost_mission#Boost_oper... has an easier all-in-one-place timeline than the NASA pages.)

New comment by eichin in "LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals"

eichin — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:56:12 +0000

At least in the US, no, not many, and the fish itself is very import restricted to keep the toxic parts from reaching the market. Hmmm.

New comment by eichin in "Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models"

eichin — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:56:36 +0000

it's a little weird but most of the sub $50 ESP-32 boards on waveshare include an MP3 player as one of many demo bits of code (primarily because it shows off code for "read from microSD card" and "drive the DAC".) It's not quite what you're asking for, just a benchmark that it's kind of "too easy to build" which might get in the way of actual products.

New comment by eichin in "Astronomers may have found the first exomoon"

eichin — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:37:46 +0000

Monitoring "space weather" (paying attention to the sun/solar flares/CMEs etc) is important to keeping our earth orbiting satellites functioning. (That's without getting into what a modern "carrington event" would look like.)

New comment by eichin in "98.css"

eichin — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:52:59 +0000

Textual? https://textual.textualize.io/

New comment by eichin in "Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample"

eichin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:11:08 +0000

ugh, I had some text book that used R for a scalar value and (edit: \u{MATHEMATICAL BOLD FRAKTUR CAPITAL R} here) for a matrix that was related to the scalar and I had to go back and re-learn a month of material once I figured out that the font was being used with intent

New comment by eichin in "10 REM"_(C2SLFF4"

eichin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:27:59 +0000

BASIC is older than most people realize, but it's still half a decade younger than Lisp.

New comment by eichin in "Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds"

eichin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:10:31 +0000

The description of Gallus Gallus ("Red Junglefowl" but also described as the "original chicken") mentions it being an introduced species in Hawaii (but also that it's interbred with "feral and domestic chickens" so it's hard to identify specifically.)

New comment by eichin in "I'm Making Strandfall, a Solarpunk Orienteering Larp"

eichin — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:17:25 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by eichin in "The Kimi K3 Moment"

eichin — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:00:57 +0000

The only ones getting paid this time around had registered copyrights (in the US at that.)

New comment by eichin in "GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization"

eichin — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:45:15 +0000

what's getting built is more like Asimov's Spacers/Solarians, though. (Vastly reduced population wielding thousands of robots each)