Hacker News: erik

Four hundred car batteries wired together [video]

erik — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:31:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC7sNfNuTNU

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109372

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by erik in "2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results"

erik — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 06:51:41 +0000

On top of this, I find ads on app store search results to be particularly bad. It's a business model that comes with all sorts of perverse incentives. It's so bad for users and legitimate developers.

New comment by erik in "1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5"

erik — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 05:59:43 +0000

The Mac Studio, in some ways, is in a class of its own for LLM inference. I think this is Apple leaning into that. They didn't add RDMA for general server clustering usefulness. They added it so you can put 4 Studios together in an LLM inferencing cluster exactly as demonstrated in the article.

New comment by erik in "GPT-5.2-Codex"

erik — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:11:47 +0000

Inference is almost certainly very profitable.

All the money they keep raising goes to R&D for the next model. But I don't see how they ever get off that treadmill.

New comment by erik in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

erik — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:13:31 +0000

> Gaming is the only area where I expect plugins have limited permissions.

Do you mean mods on Steam? If you do, then that's down to the individual game. Sandboxing mods isn't universal.

New comment by erik in "Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale"

erik — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 08:36:51 +0000

> many people have never actually seen the colour "violet" which is a single wavelength of visible light

The violet seen in a rainbow (in nature, not a photo) is legit single wavelength violet. Same with the rainbows created from shining white light through a prism.

It's true that you don't really get to see it in isolation very often though. Maybe some flowers, birds, or butterflies? Or maybe the purple glow you get from UV lights?

New comment by erik in "How Nintendo bled Atari games to death"

erik — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 22:16:39 +0000

The patent on the lockout mechanism has expired and clean software implementations of the algorithm have been created. So the old legal protections no longer apply.

And while Nintendo still aggressively enforces their copyright on their old games, they probably don't care very much about unlicensed games being created for their very old hardware. It's just not commercially relevant to them.

New comment by erik in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

erik — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 01:56:40 +0000

> But this means his pro and con opinions don't match typical opinions and this makes him polarizing. And hence some people will flag his articles reflexively or post reflexive dismissals. And Hacker News is heavily weighted to downrank polarizing articles.

I suspect this is it. A subset of users flag and/or downvote daringfireball on sight if it reaches the front page and the HN algorithm treats that as a strong single

New comment by erik in "Nine – seemingly impossible C64 demo"

erik — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:54:40 +0000

That works until you see what appears to be 9 sprites on the same scan line in the border region.

New comment by erik in "Reverse-engineering and analysis of SanDisk High Endurance microSDXC card (2020)"

erik — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 07:55:35 +0000

I've seen the same. I don't think it's the reboot. My understanding is that NAND undergoes wear-leveling even when it is read only. The card shuffles data around its storage even when it hasn't been written to. And the firmware is unreliable.

New comment by erik in "Reverse-engineering and analysis of SanDisk High Endurance microSDXC card (2020)"

erik — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 07:51:51 +0000

> Why mount the SD card read/write. Why not mount read-only.

I have seen dozens of name brand SD cards fail while mounted read only in a medium sized deployment of Pis. The problems mostly come from firmware bugs, not from nand wear.

New comment by erik in "Reverse-engineering and analysis of SanDisk High Endurance microSDXC card (2020)"

erik — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 07:49:50 +0000

> I've long wondered why it remains the problem only on Raspberry Pi.

SD card firmware is often buggy and only heavily tested with windows. Camera manufactures will specify SD cards that are know to work with their cameras for this reason.

New comment by erik in "I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig"

erik — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 02:50:52 +0000

Upper right quadrant would be an 8-bit (or maybe 16-bit) CPU paired with a 3D graphics capable GPU. SNES + the SuperFX chip is the closest example I can think of. Similarly, there is the Genesis/Mega Drive + SVP chip.

I can't name a fully 8-bit machine with a 3d focused graphics chip. Maybe there are arcade boards?

New comment by erik in "Apple Macintosh before System 7"

erik — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 23:07:37 +0000

Windows 95 was a big step forward though because it had actual process isolation and preemptive multitasking. While it wasn't very stable compared to Linux or NT, for the most part an application crash wouldn't bring down the whole machine the way it typically happened on classic Mac OS or Windows 3.1.

New comment by erik in "FuryGpu – Custom PCIe FPGA GPU"

erik — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 20:36:19 +0000

Larrabee was mostly x86 cores, but it did have sampling/texturing hardware because it's way more efficient to do those particular things in the 3d pipeline with dedicated hardware.

New comment by erik in "FuryGpu – Custom PCIe FPGA GPU"

erik — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 20:26:47 +0000

Modern retro computer designs run into the problem of generating a video signal. Ideally you'd have a tile and sprite based rendering. And you'd like to support HDMI or at least VGA. But there are no modern parts that offer this and building the functionality out of discrete components is impractical and unwieldy.

A FPGA is really just the right tool for solving the video problem. Or some projects do it with a micro-controller. But it's sort of too bad as it kind of undercuts the spirit of the whole design. If you video processor is orders of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the computer, then one starts to ask why not just implement the entire computer inside the video processor?

New comment by erik in "I turned my ThinkPad into a programmable USB device"

erik — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 19:47:51 +0000

This goes to an impressive level of depth.

The ability to use a PC as a USB device opens up lots of fun possibilities. It's a little bit tragic that the required xDCI option is there in the hardware on this device, but it's not exposed and requires firmware hacking to access.

The hardware is capable, but the vendor has just turned it off and locked away the controls.

New comment by erik in "Intel's Humbling"

erik — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 08:43:06 +0000

Youtube was also an acquisition.

Haven't heard much about successful Google acquisitions lately though.

New comment by erik in "Inside the Steam Deck's APU"

erik — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 08:16:08 +0000

I vouched for this comment, but it looks like you're shadow banned. You might want to email support.

New comment by erik in "Inside the Steam Deck's APU"

erik — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 08:10:56 +0000

The current and previous generations of xbox and playstation do use x86 CPUs with integrated AMD GPUs. But they aren't just PCs in a small box. Using a unified pool of GDDR memory* is a substantial architectural difference.

*except for the xbox one & one s, which had its own weird setup with unified DDR3 and a programmer controlled ESRAM cache.