Hacker News: em3rgent0rdr

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings"

em3rgent0rdr — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:57:17 +0000

portmanteaus are great, actually.

Didn't know that about facebook.

Non-dictionary names don't need to be as wierd as Mosptnspg. Could simply be Frodel.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings"

em3rgent0rdr — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:54:47 +0000

didn't know that... In that case I should count "Facebook" as another violater.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings"

em3rgent0rdr — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:54:01 +0000

Nah. "Google" is pronounced the same as the English word "Googol", so I do consider it appropriating. Meanwhile, Invidia is a latin word, which as a dead language, and it is pronounced differently from "Nvidia", so I don't consider that the same as appropriating a living language word.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings"

em3rgent0rdr — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:13:35 +0000

Pet peeve: companies that appropriate a dictionary term for their name, e.g. Apple, Google (& Alphabet), Amazon, Oracle. It's really not too hard to create a new name for your company, e.g. Microsoft, Facebook and Nvidia.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "My security camera shipped a GitHub admin token in its login page"

em3rgent0rdr — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:04:31 +0000

ESP32-CAM

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard"

em3rgent0rdr — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:19:28 +0000

Well the title and premise is a bit silly. If you're designing easy hardware by wiring parts together that already do all the hard stuff, then "hardware is not so hard" is something you might conclude, but that only applies for designing easy hardware like this. But if you are doing anything that pushes the limits or involves analog signals and having to worry about signal integrity and EMI and impedances and Laplace transfer functions all that other stuff that requires degrees, then "hardware is hard".

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard"

em3rgent0rdr — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 19:25:32 +0000

> "actual regulations...emissions"

yeah, and looking at their board I see they use one of "ESP32-WROOM" modules, which has the wifi & blutooth & antennae (pre-certified by Espressif for FCC, CE so itself doesn't need testing) & flash & processor (which even has its own RC oscillator), which takes care of a whole ton of difficult stuff so all the designer needs to do is plop that module down and power it up and wire some SPI/I2C peripherals which I'm guessing don't need super fast clocks or electrical constraints. Without something like those ESP32 modules, this would be much more difficult.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip"

em3rgent0rdr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:54:22 +0000

Star Trek used the fictional "gigaquad" unit of computer data storage, and conveniently deliberately avoided defining how many bits the base unit of a "quad" is, so they never would get embarrassed if such an amount of storage became commonplace nowadays.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators"

em3rgent0rdr — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:18:49 +0000

Noise and component imprecision has always limited analog computing.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

em3rgent0rdr — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:08:04 +0000

Presumably any new Android 17 features that aren't counter to GrapheneOS's mission, such as "Bubbles allows you to turn any app into a compact, floating window" https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM"

em3rgent0rdr — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:34:09 +0000

"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/

"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

em3rgent0rdr — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:53:49 +0000

With more bits, then SUB is going to be more and more expensive to fit in the same number of clocks as XOR. So with an 8-bit CPU like Z80, it probably makes design sense to have XOR and SUB both take one cycle. But if for instance a CPU uses 128-bit registers, then the propagate-and-carry logic for ADD/SUB might take way much longer than XOR that the designers might not try to fit ADD/SUB into the same single clock cycle as XOR, and so might instead do multi-cycle pipelined ADD/SUB.

A real-world CPU example is the Cray-1, where S-Register Scalar Operations (64-bit) take 3 cycles for ADD/SUB but still only 1 cycle for XOR. [1]

[1] https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CRAY-1-HardRefMan/CRAY-1-HRM...

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC"

em3rgent0rdr — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:33:58 +0000

Some old guitar effects used -9V DC.[1] And the convention with guitar effects power adapter is the barrel is center negative (which is motivated with facilitating easy wiring of the socket's switch to connect to a 9V battery inside).

[1] https://www.analogisnotdead.com/article26/what-is-going-on-w...

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd"

em3rgent0rdr — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:28:43 +0000

> "download a pre-prepared disk image directly to your disk"

Well not quite direct; the bits go through your RAM in between.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma"

em3rgent0rdr — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:24:09 +0000

Too bad can't access $CorpStreamingVideoService full-resolution on linux :(

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Show HN: RetroTick – Run classic Windows EXEs in the browser"

em3rgent0rdr — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:28:06 +0000

Impressive. Noting however that double-clicking is not working in Minesweeper. :)

Quick Share compatibility with AirDrop expanding to more Pixel devices

em3rgent0rdr — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:55:07 +0000

Article URL: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/409524163/quick-share-compatibility-with-airdrop%C2%AE-expanding-to-more-pixel-devices?hl=en

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47124929

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?"

em3rgent0rdr — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:48:13 +0000

That curricula is often more specifically called "Computer Engineering". CS students meanwhile usually aren't bothered by anything below the compiler.

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?"

em3rgent0rdr — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:35:49 +0000

> "CS majors could be taught to design hardware, and the EE curriculum"

"Electrical and Computer Engineering" (ECE) departments already exist and already have such a major: "Computer Engineering".

New comment by em3rgent0rdr in "Ring owners are returning their cameras"

em3rgent0rdr — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 07:20:59 +0000

Stallman was right.