Hacker News: lefra

New comment by lefra in "My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded"

lefra — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:46:25 +0000

Counterpoint: I know my car can brake and turn much harder than I do (it's not a sports car by any mean, but that's beyond the point).

I'd rather not change my tires and brake pads all the time though, and keep some margin for whatever unexpected stuff is hiding behind the corner. Also I don't like having to stop because everyone in the car got motion sickness.

New comment by lefra in "MorphoHDL: A minimalistic language for growing circuits"

lefra — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:38:38 +0000

Once any HDL is translated to a bunch of primitives (gates, LUTs, flip-flops, etc), that's the job of an automated place-and-route, which already exist. It's independent of the starting language.

New comment by lefra in "MorphoHDL: A minimalistic language for growing circuits"

lefra — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:35:56 +0000

The graphs are beautiful, however they're independent of the language (because they're a visualization of the resulting gates). You could get the same graphs from VHDL or Verilog.

I don't like the "fallback" mechanism, because it will be used when "something goes wrong", without being specific about exactly under what conditions should the fallback happen. Maybe I made a mistake, "something" fails at a step I didn't expect, and this will silently implement in a way I didn't mean (maybe the result is even correct, just using way more gates than needed).

New comment by lefra in "Designing and assembling my first PCB"

lefra — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:58:59 +0000

Good for american hobbyist I guess. It's not an option where I live unfortunately (orders above 75€ have free shipping though).

New comment by lefra in "Designing and assembling my first PCB"

lefra — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:55:18 +0000

Some still do, but they'll only send to businesses, not to individuals.

What's annoying for me is Digikey and friends insisting on only delivering with express carrier. I'd like to have a cheaper, slower option.

New comment by lefra in "FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky"

lefra — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:42:24 +0000

Assuming the orbit is at 200km, these mirrors could only focus the image of the Sun on a 1.7km wide disk (that's (Sun diameter)/(Sun's distance)×(Earth distance)).

Moreover, the Sun's illuminance is about 1kW/m2 around Earth. 10000×60m2 satellite will thetefore intercept 600MW, so that's 260W/m2 on the focussed area. You're not going to burn anything with that.

New comment by lefra in "Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)"

lefra — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:16:02 +0000

It's not for doing nothing, it's for fooling around at the edge of knowledge. Sometimes, very useful stuff emerges.

New comment by lefra in "Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland"

lefra — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:28:42 +0000

Conveniently, there's already an electric cable sized to transport a few MW nearby. This might reduce the cost of installation, also there'll be no land acquisition/impact study issues.

However, I agree that putting solar panels in between or near rails will increase the cost of maintenance: the technicians will need to travel longer times to the work site, and now they also need to be certified to work near railroads.

New comment by lefra in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

lefra — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 14:05:29 +0000

That "if it hits a populated area" reduces the probability by a factor 100 (because about 1% of the world's surface is urbanized [1]).

So the actual frequency of "city wiped" is more like once every 10000 years. Completely negligible compared to other city-wiping events (earthquakes or floods for example).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_land_use_for_food_...

New comment by lefra in "Europe's new climate in seven charts"

lefra — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:16:36 +0000

The french government (more pro-business than pro-ecology, but not climate deniers) is seriously planning for how to manage 55C heatwaves around the half of the century.

Because climate scientists agree that's what's coming (except for extreme, immediate reduction of fossil fuel burning).

New comment by lefra in "Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't"

lefra — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 04:50:53 +0000

European here. Maybe I'm not typical, but I know that the contiguous US is about as large as the EU (around 4000 km from one side to the other). And if you need 24h to get to the other side if a state, you're either on dirt tracks in Alaska, or got stuck somewhere in the worst traffic jam ever. Texas is about 1000km wide, just like the larger european countries, that's a 10 to 12 hour drive.

New comment by lefra in "CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt"

lefra — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:16:48 +0000

I don't understand this argument. When someone uses a tool to create something, they are the copyright holder. Why would it be different when the tool is an LLM?

New comment by lefra in "Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You"

lefra — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 11:22:38 +0000

Last year a research group managed to do just that, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052 for details.

New comment by lefra in "Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You"

lefra — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 07:08:15 +0000

Really nice article, I'll look closer to green lights next time I see one.

The most striking experience I had was working with a blue laser (430nm). The best way I found to describe its color is that it was screaming "blue" at me. Since then, I'm always disappointed when looking at a screen displaying #0000FF.

New comment by lefra in "US battery manufacturing output continues to break records"

lefra — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:44:19 +0000

You got it backwards, Watts are Joules/second (or joules are Watt•second).

New comment by lefra in "A generic dynamic array in C that stores no capacity and needs no struct"

lefra — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:43:20 +0000

Enjoy the annoying-to-debug errors when someone inevitably mixes arr[0] with arr[1] and tramples the heap (this could be mitigated by accessing the fields with macros), or writes arr[3] because they forgot this is not a regular array.

New comment by lefra in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

lefra — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:14:43 +0000

The second tome I had to do that for the same project (new computer), I sarted taking very detailed notes when doing this kind of unpleasant, supposedly one-off things.

New comment by lefra in "Tokenomics: Quantifying Where Tokens Are Used in Agentic Software Engineering"

lefra — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 06:48:25 +0000

Inference can only happen after having invested in training and datacenter construction. Arguing about "inference profitability" sounds a lot to me like ignoring large cost centers of these comanies.

New comment by lefra in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

lefra — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:22:00 +0000

To be clear, I was answering your second paragraph, about "funding oil extraction that is happening anyway". I understood this as "buying shares directly from the extracting company".

I agree that buying on the secondary market doesn't directly give money to the company. However, it increases demand (and therefore price) of shares in petrol companies, which might help them raise more money per share for new projects.

The earnings coming from such shares also comes from actively encouraging CO2 producing activities. Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.

New comment by lefra in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

lefra — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:48:55 +0000

Both are asking for money to extract oil (and hopefully sell it for more money). I don't see why the oil well being already drilled or not should make a difference if I don't want to invest in CO2-producing endeavours.