Hacker News: montecarl

New comment by montecarl in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

montecarl — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:56:57 +0000

I had a raspberry pi 3a+ and the old raspberry pi touchscreen laying around. So I'm writing a custom dashboard for it using Rust/Slint[1]. It directly uses opengl without any display manager/window system. It mostly talks to home assistant. Right now, when I start a 3d print, it automatically switches to a view with live camera of the printer and some stats. I can monitor the status of my washer/dryer so I know when they are done (using cheap TP-Link Tapo smart plugs[2]). My favorite thing it does, is if any motion is detected on my Ring cameras, it just automatically pulls up that live feed. Took a little work to get decent playback performance but the pi 3a+ has hardware h264 decoding.

Its nice, overall, to have a little dedicated touchscreen on my desk that I can easily tweak to display whatever I want. Its silent and low power.

[1] https://slint.dev/

[2] https://a.co/d/044MIM3t

New comment by montecarl in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

montecarl — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:47:46 +0000

They also did this for the original steam controller, which I used a lot. When the back panel broke (its a trigger and battery cover) I was able to 3d print a replacement that has held up great.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/353370/announcements/detail...

New comment by montecarl in "My audio interface has SSH enabled by default"

montecarl — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:10:27 +0000

I get it! Thank you that is genius.

New comment by montecarl in "My audio interface has SSH enabled by default"

montecarl — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:34:39 +0000

I really want to know how he solved this problem, which I also face:

>last year i bought a Rodecaster Duo to solve some audio woes to allow myself and my girlfriend to have microphones to our respective computers when gaming together and talking on discord in the same room without any echo

New comment by montecarl in "Show HN: Differentiable Quantum Chemistry"

montecarl — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 07:23:27 +0000

When I read this, I thought that the author would be calculating the derivative of the potential energy with respect to nuclear charge for some reason. Here, the derivative being evaluated appears to be the atomic forces, using jax magic, as opposed to the standard Hellmann-Feynman theorem approach.

Calculating the derivative of the energy with respect to nuclear charge would be fun, as it would let you perform some type of "alchemy" smoothly changing from one element to another. I'm not sure that has any practical use.

I read a paper a while back doing something alchemical that I guess this reminded me of: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jcp/article-abstract/133/8/084104/1...

New comment by montecarl in "Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]"

montecarl — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 21:09:58 +0000

I think that the audio we are listening too is from some ground recording station that isn't necessarily near the airport. We aren't listening to a recording of what the pilots heard or what air traffic control hears.

New comment by montecarl in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

montecarl — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:27:21 +0000

I can't believe how affordable Hetzner is. I just rented a bare metal 48 core AMD EPYC 9454P with 256 GB of ram and two 2 TB NVME ssds for $200/month (or $0.37 per hour). Its hard to directly compare with AWS, but I think its about 10x cheaper.

New comment by montecarl in "AI cheats: Why you didn't notice your teammate was cheating"

montecarl — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 22:28:15 +0000

I play fortnite and marvel rivals with my family. We have lots of fun. I think this genre of game is fantastic if you play with people you know on voice comms. "Solo queuing" in these types of games is not fun for me at all, so I get what you are saying, but they are popular for a reason!

New comment by montecarl in "We were wrong about GPUs"

montecarl — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 06:21:05 +0000

Just currently exploring how custom AI workflows (e.g. text to sql, custom report generation using private data) can help given the current SOTA. Looking to develop tooling over the next 3-6 months. I'd like to see what we can come up with before dropping $50-100k on hardware.

New comment by montecarl in "We were wrong about GPUs"

montecarl — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 04:19:42 +0000

Do you think that you can use those machines for confidential workflows for enterprise use? I'm currently struggling to balance running inference workloads on expensive AWS instances where I can trust that data remains private vs using more inexpensive platforms.

New comment by montecarl in "The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE"

montecarl — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 07:09:26 +0000

Just in case anyone else reads this and is confused. MRIs only use radio waves. No ionizing (or visible or even IR) radiation is used. The strong magnetic fields are a risk (due to interacting with metallic items embedded in the body). The contrast agents also can cause some undesirable side effects.

New comment by montecarl in "A generative model for inorganic materials design"

montecarl — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 23:23:35 +0000

I agree that DFT is an approximate solution to the Schrodinger equation, but what would you like to see them do? Quantum monte carlo or configuration integration? These methods do not scale well especially when heavy elements are involved. DFT is the current sweet spot for accuracy vs computational complexity in this field. Making DFT better has been an on-going effort for the 30-40 years at least. It is not an easy task. For many real world materials, DFT is the best we can do.

New comment by montecarl in "Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience"

montecarl — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 01:36:02 +0000

I'm in a similar boat. A UK bank thinks I'm one of their customers (someone with a similar name). The reply address is no-reply@ and I'm not about to call a foreign bank.

New comment by montecarl in "Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly"

montecarl — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 21:41:40 +0000

I use fusion 360 several times a week, but I'm not quite able to follow what you said. Can you provide an example or a link to where they announced this feature?

New comment by montecarl in "Buildroot"

montecarl — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 23:25:35 +0000

I would love to know. I currently have an embedded product using buildroot and as it is not exposed to a network at all, I don't have any worries about security. However, I'd love to hear of a nice mechanism to basically upgrade the system image in place. I imagine you could use something like a pair of partitions and just change the kernel boot parameters to point at the most recent one, but I'm curious about what solutions people use.

New comment by montecarl in "Raspberry Pi Pico does line rate 100M Ethernet"

montecarl — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 16:50:43 +0000

Why is the transfer rate non-linear with respect to the system clock? At 100 MHz the rate is 1.38 Mbit/s and at 200 Mhz it is 65.4 Mbit/s.

New comment by montecarl in "Turing's topological proof that every written alphabet is finite (2010)"

montecarl — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 18:13:41 +0000

It is even easier to just say, given a fixed area of paper, and a finite printing resolution, there is a finite number of symbols possible?

Say you have a 1 in by 1 in area of paper and a printing resolution of 300 DPI then there are 300*300 total dots. If the printer is monochrome and each dot is either black or white then there are 2^(300^2) possible symbols.

New comment by montecarl in "A rudimentary simulation of the three-body problem"

montecarl — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 06:37:54 +0000

Thermostats ensure that the average _kinetic energy_ remains constant (on average or instantaneously depending on how they are implemented). Your parent post wants to enforce the constraint that the total energy remains constant. So its a bit different from a canonical ensemble (NVT) simulation. This is a microcanonical ensemble simulation (NVE). This means you don't know if you should correct the position (controlling the potential energy) or the velocities (controlling the kinetic energy).

Basically, there will be error in the positions and velocities due to the integrator used and you don't know how to patch it up. You have 1 constraint; the total energy should be constant. There are 2(3N-6) degrees of freedom for the positions and velocities (if more than 2 bodies). The extra constraint doesn't help much!

Edit: Also, the only reason thermostats work is because the assumption is that the system is in equilibrium with a heat bath (i.e. bunch of atoms at constant temperature). So there is an entire distribution of velocities that is statistically valid and as long as the velocities of the atoms in the system reflect that, you will on average model the kinetics of the system properly (e.g. things like reaction rates will be right). In gravitational problems there is no heat bath.

New comment by montecarl in "Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption"

montecarl — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 04:25:52 +0000

What you just wrote reminds me of the song Secrets From the Future by MC Frontalot.

> You can’t hide secrets from the future with math

> You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh

> At the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed

> To enforce cryptographs in the past

New comment by montecarl in "Show HN: Elodin – A better framework for physics simulation"

montecarl — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 06:53:13 +0000

> there are comments for every line.

I used to work at a company that wrote an atomic scale simulation package. Every dev was a physics/chemistry PhD turned coder. We didn't quite hit one comment for _every_ line of code, but we were close! At first I really hated this style; one comment every few lines. However, I eventually learned to kind of like it, even though it was a bit redundant.

I don't really have a point here, but I just wanted to echo your statement that the physicists-turned-coder style is real!