Hacker News: hackcasual

New comment by hackcasual in "OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it"

hackcasual — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:30:20 +0000

JBIG2 does glyph binning, as you say not exactly OCR, but similar. So chunks of the image that look sufficiently similar get replaced with a reference to a single instance.

New comment by hackcasual in "How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM"

hackcasual — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 16:38:33 +0000

Interesting stuff. My first thought was "this is topaz" but if the font is bookerly, that makes less sense.

There's this old patent for earlier kindle web obfuscation, which used CSS layout to scramble text https://patents.google.com/patent/US8700991B1

New comment by hackcasual in "Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator"

hackcasual — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 13:34:03 +0000

Oooh, which one has a keyboard?

New comment by hackcasual in "Arm desktop: emulation"

hackcasual — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 16:59:02 +0000

There's a handful of Windows game emulators taking off for Android. Using a modern snapdragon GPU, folks are playing Witcher 3, GTA 5. Some suffering gamer is playing through Dark Souls 2 using touch controls

New comment by hackcasual in "Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty"

hackcasual — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 06:43:18 +0000

Wait for a sale, they happen regularly and you'll want the DLC bundle

New comment by hackcasual in "Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty"

hackcasual — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 06:41:19 +0000

Just started playing the game a few weeks ago. It's very pretty.

From a game perspective it can seem pretty simplistic at first but there are a lot of interesting systems with hidden depth

New comment by hackcasual in "Nvidia bets on robotics to drive future growth"

hackcasual — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 07:30:40 +0000

Last time I was in SF I took 3 waymo rides and attempted a fourth. The attempted one was cancelled after 15 minutes of waiting for it being 2 minutes away. As best as I can tell, the waymo was stuck at an intersection where power had been lost and didn't understand it needed to treat it like a 4 way stop.

2 rides went fine though neither was particularly challenging. The third though the car decided to head down a narrow side street where a pickup in front was partially blocking the road making a dropoff. There was enough space to just squeeze by and it was clear the truck expected the car to. A few cars turned in behind the waymo, effectively trapping it in as it didn't know how to proceed. The dropoff eventually completed and it was able to pull forward

New comment by hackcasual in "Maker Pipe – Structural Pipe Fittings for DIY Builders"

hackcasual — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:43:57 +0000

Wild stuff. You can see the bottom horizontal trusses bending when loaded. EMT is just too thin walled for serious structural applications

New comment by hackcasual in "Maker Pipe – Structural Pipe Fittings for DIY Builders"

hackcasual — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 06:44:56 +0000

EMT conduit isn't a great support material if you're handling human weight loads. The picture on the front page showing off the strength is visibly bending. It's kind of an awkward load profile, lower weight like an awning you're probably using ABS, higher weight you're using 1 1/4" system like steeltek or keeklamp

New comment by hackcasual in "UK electric car drivers should be charged per mile, say campaigners"

hackcasual — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 17:18:51 +0000

Petrol tax directly incentives fuel efficiency

New comment by hackcasual in "Thoughts on the Durov Arrest"

hackcasual — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 05:24:28 +0000

Trying to understand his legal situation by analogizing with US law understanding strikes me as some real Dunning-Kruegering. Surely someone like Preston Byrne has someone he can reach out to to get a better understanding of the actual French legal situation Durov is in.

New comment by hackcasual in "Meshtastic's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band"

hackcasual — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 18:20:10 +0000

I've got a mix of LilyGo and Rak devices, and a sew Station G1's. LilyGo gets criticized, but after I switched to Rak antennas on them they work great.

The meshtastic discord definitely leans pepper as well. I live in a coastal urban area and the nodes here seem to be more general hobbyist.

I'm hoping to have some sort of automated BBS type node to play around with

New comment by hackcasual in "Meshtastic's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band"

hackcasual — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 18:04:13 +0000

Antenna selection is less important with LoRa than other mesh networks, which is nice meaning you can have a meshtastic watch for example.

The link budget is massive (150 dB) meaning getting a really nice antenna is less impactful than bumping your speed down a notch

Edit: LilyGo devices for 900MHz are notoriously terrible, and getting a $3 one will see a definite improvement

New comment by hackcasual in "Meshtastic's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band"

hackcasual — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 03:26:17 +0000

Been running a Meshtastic node for awhile now. Really amazing piece of kit. I regularly make 2 mile distant contacts in an urban area with an indoor antenna. Soon I hope to be able to have an exterior mounted one.

Hope they're able to protect their bandwidth

New comment by hackcasual in "Orca: WebAssembly Apps Without the Web"

hackcasual — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 18:32:09 +0000

It's a 4 year old paper, and the biggest issue it brought up, malleable read-only data, is currently being addressed with the memory control proposal. The fact that a virtual environment can't prevent all types of erroneous program behavior is not particularly noteworthy. The fact of the matter, in particular when comparing WASM against containers, WASM is a generational step forward in terms of permissioning and isolation.

For my bonafides, this is me discussing this class of vulnerabilities 8 years ago: https://groups.google.com/g/emscripten-discuss/c/gGjklbJiX1c...

New comment by hackcasual in "Orca: WebAssembly Apps Without the Web"

hackcasual — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:38:41 +0000

If you think using containers provides improved security over WASM I don't think you understood the paper. At no point did they demonstrate compromising the host of the WASM program, just corrupting the state of POC's. There are obviously risks associated with that, but nothing that improves by going with isolated/containerized native code.

Yes currently lacking ASLR and read-only memory sites increase some risks, but strongly typed function pointers, control flow restricted to function entry points and call stack isolation more than make up for it

New comment by hackcasual in "Show HN: Execute JavaScript in a WebAssembly QuickJS sandbox"

hackcasual — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 02:26:38 +0000

IFrames are over-permissioned. For example an iFrame can exfiltrate data to a 3rd party

New comment by hackcasual in "Own Constant Folder in C/C++"

hackcasual — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 04:01:02 +0000

The f in that case stands for fruit

New comment by hackcasual in "Special-use domain 'home.arpa.' (2018)"

hackcasual — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 22:54:27 +0000

There's a ton of gTLDs too, I just grabbed a cheap one and ACME-fied all my lan services

New comment by hackcasual in "Bento3D"

hackcasual — Tue, 21 May 2024 06:33:34 +0000

Really nice workflow for a really common 3d print use case. I'd like to see the lid re-worked to print without support (the tall standing orientation is also asking for it to get knocked over). Not sure why they insist on 0.1mm layer height. That makes prints take forever.