Hacker News: kosma

New comment by kosma in "Adventures in Microcontroller Circuit Debugging"

kosma — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 23:29:15 +0000

I've had the same happen with a production run, except the crystals were from the same manufacturer and the same part number, just different batch. It was fun to track down.

New comment by kosma in "I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone"

kosma — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:45:55 +0000

Surprisingly effective solution:

  Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
  
  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
  "ProductVersion"="Windows 10"
  "TargetReleaseVersion"=dword:00000001
  "TargetReleaseVersionInfo"="22H2"

New comment by kosma in "Kenvue stock drops on report RFK Jr will link autism to Tylenol during pregnancy"

kosma — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 18:28:56 +0000

There is research correlating autism and mothers taking certain medications (painkillers, antidepressants). Since autism is hereditary, there is a significant chance that these mothers are autistic too. Autistic people have a vastly high risk of depression, and often have unusual pain thresholds, requiring more painkillers. I would not be surprised of the correlation was real, but the direction of action was reversed; after all, it's plausible that autism causes the need for taking more medication.

New comment by kosma in "Can You Develop Film in a Jägerbomb?"

kosma — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 19:34:18 +0000

> Developing black-and-white film with coffee is a better option for younger analog photographers. As a bonus, it should smell better.

I've made Caffenol in the past. It stinks.

New comment by kosma in "They have not been trained for this"

kosma — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 21:13:01 +0000

The company was a bit too much in bed with the government to begin with...

New comment by kosma in "The magic of DC-DC voltage conversion (2023)"

kosma — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 12:16:09 +0000

That voltage spike only applies to flyback converter. Your typical buck/boost converter doesn't do that - the current waveform is a sawtooth, and voltage ripple is designed to be in the mV range.

New comment by kosma in "A Better Light Source for Scanning Color Negative Film"

kosma — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 17:39:16 +0000

Seconded. NLP is well worth the money - not just in results, quality, and time saved, but also in finding joy in shooting and scanning color.

New comment by kosma in "Stop Scraping My Git Forge"

kosma — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 18:48:44 +0000

They use the code without respecting the license terms. Just because the code is out in the open doesn't mean you can use it however you wish.

New comment by kosma in "How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop"

kosma — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 10:16:31 +0000

Hold onto it, these things are incredibly rare.

New comment by kosma in "Is it okay to daisy chain a UPS?"

kosma — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 09:51:00 +0000

The nature of surges is not simple like that - a lightning strike can easily blow MOVs and inrush limiting resistors in multiple devices. I come from a rural area and coming to someone's house with a bag of fresh MOVs and resistors is not an uncommon thing after a big storm.

New comment by kosma in "Is it okay to daisy chain a UPS?"

kosma — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 09:49:30 +0000

It's not very different from daisy chaining normal extension cords - safe if you know what you're doing (not exceeding the current rating on any of them). Most surge protectors are fused, making them safer to daisy-chain than normal extension cords.

New comment by kosma in "PaperMC/Paper: The most widely used, high performance Minecraft server"

kosma — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 21:09:26 +0000

Note that bstats only tracks Bukkit-compatible servers. It doesn't track Vanilla/Fabric/Forge/etc. installations, so take these numbers with a grain of salt.

New comment by kosma in "PaperMC/Paper: The most widely used, high performance Minecraft server"

kosma — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 21:07:27 +0000

There are several primary ways to run a Java Edition server:

1. Pure vanilla server.jar. Has horrible performance, little flexibility, but in the end, it Just Works. This is the server that Realms (Mojang's paid hosting service) uses. In recent versions, some modding is possible via datapacks.

2. Fabric Loader and some vanilla-compatible mods like Carpet etc. Here, "vanilla-compatible" means that a vanilla client can still connect. This is the preferred way of playing for the TMC (Technical Minecraft) community since the underlying server stays mostly vanilla, down to the smallest details and bugs, and no behaviors are changed. The TMC community becomes very agitated when someone tries to "fix" some bugs - they rely on those bugs.

3. Forge/Fabric with mods that change the gameplay, and require the mods to be present on both client and server. This is the traditional "modded" experience, as seen on TV.

4. Bukkit/Spigot/Paper/Purpur, various generations of server software that heavily patches the vanilla server, fixing bugs, adding new functionalities, and presenting a very comprehensive Plugin API, while still allowing vanilla clients to connect. This is the software used by servers that implement custom gamemodes, public servers that need griefing/duping/exploit protection. Many high tech farms don't work on Paper because of how many things it "fixes".

5. Folia - a fork of Paper that has multithreading support. It comes with its own can of worms.

Performance-wise, Fabric+Lithium is probably the most performant in the default configuration, though if you're willing to remove functionality, you can probably get better performance out of Paper (at the cost of losing gameplay features).

As for Bugrock Edition: well... there is Geyser that lets you connect to a Java Edition server with a Bedrock client. ;)

New comment by kosma in "Windows 10 warns me to use a "Microsoft-verified" app"

kosma — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 13:31:13 +0000

I've had Windows updates brick the motherboard by installing a faulty BIOS update. Multiple times.

New comment by kosma in "It's official: Smartphones will need to have replaceable batteries by 2027"

kosma — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 12:11:04 +0000

You won't have it, as it doesn't align with the manufacturers' incentive to sell you a new one every two years.

New comment by kosma in "Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics"

kosma — Wed, 10 May 2023 21:40:02 +0000

Digikey also ships DDP, they do the customs for you.

New comment by kosma in "Converting a WW2-Era Engine Cowl Flaps Indicator into a USB Peripheral"

kosma — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 22:54:54 +0000

...and good flux carries you the rest of the way.

New comment by kosma in "Extreme Integers – Doom from Below"

kosma — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 21:38:47 +0000

Let's not forget about unusual char sizes. The popular DSP platform TMS320 has sizeof(char) == sizeof(int), and both are 1. How? Because both are 16-bit, and by definition sizeof(char) == 1.

New comment by kosma in "USB-C naming to somehow get worse with USB4 Version 2.0"

kosma — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 20:34:37 +0000

An organization grows to a size where decisions are made by committee, bikeshedding is rampart, and one idiot in marketing can dismiss and derail the naming suggestions of an entire engineering team.

New comment by kosma in "Google Trying to Solve a UUID"

kosma — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 19:57:06 +0000

Moo!