Hacker News: femto

New comment by femto in "Ask HN: Are you still using a Vision Pro?"

femto — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:44:09 +0000

> At least here in the EU they do

In that case it was a cheap USB supply, though there are other reports of similar. "Good" consumer power supply are designed to IEC standards, but to keep the cost down they are different standards to those used for wearable medical equipment. Medical equipment has to conform to IEC 60601, which governs things like electrical isolation and safe failure modes.

> i feel pretty safe

So be it. It is unlikely, but even a good power supply can fail in the face of a voltage surge on the mains. Absolutely don't wear it plugged in if there is any hint of a thunderstorm!

New comment by femto in "Ask HN: Are you still using a Vision Pro?"

femto — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:45:04 +0000

> so i used it plugged into the wall.

Careful using body-worn devices when plugged in. Medical power supplies have special requirements to avoid electrocution, because they are often powering equipment in contact with a person's body. Consumer power supplies probably don't, on the assumption that the device will not be charging whilst being worn.

People have died from using headphones plugged into USB chargers.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/faulty-usb-phone-charger...

New comment by femto in "Magnifica Humanitas"

femto — Mon, 25 May 2026 22:27:29 +0000

The electricity infrastructure where I was live was owned by the government. It's only in the last 15 years it was sold off to private interests [1]. I suspect you will find that the electricity systems in many regions are still government owned.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Commission_of_New_...

New comment by femto in "Starship V3"

femto — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:17:24 +0000

There's an argument that Earth, as a biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere, also isn't self sustaining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day

I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.

New comment by femto in "DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved"

femto — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:18:56 +0000

Sobriety is just factor to be weighed in an emergency situation. 30 years ago I was at a ski resort with about 50 friends having a drinking competition in the resort's main bar. Late that night two ski lodges collapsed, trapping people inside. Around midnight, soon after the winner was announced, the police entered and asked "who's able to drive a crane truck?" The winner of the competition put his hand up and informed them of how much he had had to drink. Don't care they said, so he drove a crane big enough to lift a building up a single lane 35km mountain road in nighttime ice conditions. (The crane made it, but sadly most of the people in the ski lodges didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Thredbo_landslide )

New comment by femto in "Gap between national food production and food-based dietary guidance (2025)"

femto — Tue, 05 May 2026 06:01:47 +0000

> As for fish, we prefer to maintain sustainable local fish stocks, and choose import.

There's hard evidence for this in the form of a map [1]. The light pixels close to the Australian coastline are Australian vessels fishing close in. The solid light areas further from the coast are other countries' vessels stripping the ocean bare. It's particularly obvious to the north east of Australia, where the solid line is the edge of Australia's exclusive economic zone. Minimal activity (dark) inside the zone, being stripped bare (light) outside the zone.

China may be listed as self-sufficient in fish, but its fish are not coming from near China [2]. Mind you, Australia's not helping if it's just buying from countries that are stripping stocks.

[1] https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/index?longitude=126.00884...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-19/how-china-is-plunderi...

> We're screwed on coffee and chocolate.

If things get desperate, AU does have small coffee and cacao goring industries!

https://www.agca.au/

https://www.thechocolateprofessor.com/blog/australian-cacao

New comment by femto in "Welcome to Gas City"

femto — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:39:28 +0000

I think it's because LLM output tends to be snippets of truth, connected in such a way as to be subtly false. It leaves you disoriented because it is in the uncanny valley of truth: you know it's not right, but can't put your finger on why it is not right. It's made worse buy its asymmetric nature: it takes seconds to generate pages of words and hours to figure out what is wrong with them, for little to no gain to the reader.

New comment by femto in "California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws"

femto — Sat, 02 May 2026 23:12:40 +0000

Full liability. It's a machine with predictable performance.

The law applied to humans needs to account for their fallibilities. Not so with a machine.

New comment by femto in "Men who stare at walls"

femto — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:33:57 +0000

As captured by the Leunig cartoon "TV sunrise"

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/68809bfcd88dbd...

New comment by femto in "Stealth signals are bypassing Iran’s internet blackout"

femto — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 03:58:26 +0000

It's a sound solution. They are describing forward error correction with a variable code rate. Reducing the code rate increases the amount of redundancy, allowing the signal to be retrieved when the signal-to-noise ratio is lower. It's a standard part of communications theory and has a strong theoretical basis. A low enough code rate will overcome almost any level of jamming at the cost of reduced data rate, provided the receiver does not saturate.

New comment by femto in "Cal.com is going closed source"

femto — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:06:52 +0000

Will it make any difference to security? LLMs are excellent pattern matchers. The source is a sequence of tokens, the binary is a sequence of tokens. Whats the difference to an LLM?

New comment by femto in "Team from ETH Zurich make high quality quantum swap gate using a geometric phase"

femto — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:49:09 +0000

That's progress, if fusion is always only 10 years away now! The running joke used to be that it was always 30 years away.

New comment by femto in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

femto — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:28:55 +0000

Railway preservation (full size, not model). It looks crowded when a steam train is running and the moths gather around. The reality, when the trains are not running, is typically quite different, with a small dedicated group. If a place looks too crowded, pick a smaller museum.

Think of all the jobs that have to be done to run a railway and you will be able to find a museum that does it: heavy maintenance, boiler work, fitting and turning, blacksmithing, woodwork, upholstering, painting, catering, engine driving, fireman, signalling, customer service, ...

It's a great way to meet people, learn new skills and work with physical things.

New comment by femto in "Bourbon waste could provide next-gen supercapacitor components"

femto — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:27:18 +0000

Bourbon sales are in decline. A combination of sales not recovering post Covid pandemic and US tariffs (and presidential belligerence) putting off consumers in export markets.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckglnk6yxlko

New comment by femto in "The Australian government has announced gambling advertising reforms"

femto — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:17:51 +0000

That's one of the myths the gambling dens propagate: that they are there for the veterans. There is no technicality about it.

https://www.rslaustralia.org/rsl-sub-branches-and-rsl-clubs-...

The "RSL sub-branch" is a not-for-profit welfare organisation, that looks after veterans. For the most part they are small and if they are lucky they get the use of a meeting room in the RSL club.

The "RSL Club" is a multimillion dollar commercial enterprise that looks after its own interests, conducts political lobbying, makes millions of dollars off gambling addicts and hands out token grants in the community to give the impression that they are there to benefit the community. Typically nothing to do with the RSL sub-branch.

New comment by femto in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2026)"

femto — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:00:54 +0000

Location: Sydney, Australia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: WiFi, Deep knowledge of drone radio protocols, LTE, P25, LMR, Electronics, Electrical, Systems Engineering, Programming including real-time embedded, Commercialisation, Manufacturing, DSP, FPGA.

Résumé/CV: Built world's first OFDM WiFi modem. Professional engineer with 35 years experience. Have served as Chief Engineer / CTO for multiple companies.

Email: jd.web@jwdalton.com

New comment by femto in "The carcinogenicity of e-cigarettes: a qualitative risk assessment"

femto — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:14:23 +0000

With an associated article in the mainstream press:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/it-s-dangerous-and-that-...

The carcinogenicity of e-cigarettes: a qualitative risk assessment

femto — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:14:23 +0000

Article URL: https://academic.oup.com/carcin/article-abstract/47/1/bgag015/8555982?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47583805

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by femto in "I'll buy your electronics to feed our robot"

femto — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:23:10 +0000

My intuition in this area is based on chips having a specification on maximum soldering temperature and duration. I'm not sure to what extent that is cumulative. I gather the vulnerability is the bonding of the gold whisker wires to the pads on the silicon, but you would want to check that.

Apart from the absolute temperature, chips have a recommended heating/cooling cycle, including heating/cooling rates. That suggests that differential expansion is a factor, which would likely be cumulative (more cycles = more likelihood of fatigue and damage).

The above is intuition, not the hard data you want.

I think what you are doing is a great idea (effectively demanufacturing). I'm hoping you can solve the practicalities, which as far as I can see are quality assurance and being able to guarantee a steady supply of components and a price point below new.

Any plans to retape the components so they can be put though a pick-and-place machine, or are you looking more towards manual rework? I can see that there is room for innovation in efficient ways to get components off boards at volume, as most component removal is in the form of manual rework.

New comment by femto in "I'll buy your electronics to feed our robot"

femto — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:25:53 +0000

That's a fair point: that heating due to repeated (de)soldering can cause degradation.