Hacker News: neilalexander

New comment by neilalexander in "I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)"

neilalexander — Thu, 28 May 2026 10:17:52 +0000

HaLow is just Wi-Fi on sub-1GHz frequencies and narrower channels. You get normal MTUs and TCP & UDP work just fine.

New comment by neilalexander in "I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)"

neilalexander — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:18:23 +0000

None of MeshCore, Meshtastic or Reticulum will scale well, especially not on top of a heavily constrained radio technology like LoRa. Flooding is inefficient for obvious reasons, AODV-esque routing (which MeshCore tries to do for DMs and Reticulum tries to do in general) is prone to almost-immediate path failure on unstable underlying transports, and the hidden node problem always bites on haphazard/unplanned mesh radio deployments where people show up with nodes in random locations on the same frequency.

The cracks are already extremely visible in MeshCore in the UK, where overheads from adverts and dropped packets from collisions mean it is already horrendously unreliable and most of the chatter in the Public channel is people sending test messages and being unsure whether anything they sent was ever heard by anyone.

Most other routing protocols (BATMAN included) are also not that well suited to situations where the underlying transport ends up asymmetric, e.g. one node can't hear others but it can be heard, and that's an extremely common occurrence/failure mode in wireless meshes like this. It's a difficult problem to solve with coordination between nodes, let alone without.

New comment by neilalexander in "Tesla Wall Connector bootloader bypasses the firmware downgrade ratchet"

neilalexander — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:57:08 +0000

Incoming voltage monitoring is a requirement for EV chargers in the UK. The sudden huge demand would result in a voltage drop, the chargers would then detect the under-voltage condition and they'd stop charging.

New comment by neilalexander in "An Introduction to Meshtastic"

neilalexander — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:15:08 +0000

If only I had a penny for every HN comment about naming conflicts.

New comment by neilalexander in "Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop"

neilalexander — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:39:07 +0000

They didn't. Apple contributed the core logic to the Wi-Fi Alliance to build Wi-Fi Aware, which they now also support.

New comment by neilalexander in "Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop"

neilalexander — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:34:51 +0000

That's precisely what Wi-Fi Aware (NaN) is and it is heavily based on AWDL. It's even built into recent versions of iOS and Android.

New comment by neilalexander in "Iran war sparks renewables boom as Europeans rush to buy solar, heat pumps, EVs"

neilalexander — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:24:16 +0000

Vegetable oil will cause long-term damage in modern diesel engines with direct injection or common rail injection systems. Older indirect injection diesel engines could tolerate it much better because of the pre-combustion stage.

New comment by neilalexander in "Starlink Mini as a failover"

neilalexander — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:28:00 +0000

I'm a fairly average HN user but I earn my livelihood by working from home. Backup connectivity is cheap.

New comment by neilalexander in "Windows: Microsoft broke the only thing that mattered"

neilalexander — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:39:54 +0000

No platform is perfect but I'd argue that desktop Linux still has far more many rough edges to contend with when something goes wrong. There are way too many problems for which "well just open the terminal and..." is the only solution.

New comment by neilalexander in "Firefox Nova – our first look at the browser's big redesign"

neilalexander — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:06:33 +0000

Useless padding and borders seems to be par for the course in the last couple of years. Another thing redesigned for no tangible benefit.

New comment by neilalexander in "What your Bluetooth devices reveal"

neilalexander — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:51:05 +0000

Random Bluetooth MACs are already possible. iOS devices have been doing it for years alongside the random Wi-Fi MACs.

New comment by neilalexander in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

neilalexander — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:09:25 +0000

There is not a single good XMPP client for macOS or iOS either. There are a couple of minimally functional ones that are aesthetically dreadful, but nothing that would come even close to replicating what people would expect even from Signal or WhatsApp, let alone a monster like Discord. Certainly nothing that I could ask friends or family to use.

New comment by neilalexander in "FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled"

neilalexander — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:45:22 +0000

You might want to check that charger. I have the same option set to ask every time and it never appears for chargers.

New comment by neilalexander in "Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires"

neilalexander — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 11:52:57 +0000

I have been using the exact same G4201TM devices at home for approaching five years now to do much the same: reuse some unused telephone wiring for a meaningful purpose. They are rock solid and have needed exactly zero attention since being installed.

New comment by neilalexander in "Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI""

neilalexander — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:40:39 +0000

One advantage with LLMs is that they are often more able to find things that you can roughly explain but don't know the name of. They can be a good take-off point for wider searches.

New comment by neilalexander in "Designing an IPv6-native P2P transport – lessons from building I6P"

neilalexander — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:17:21 +0000

If you assign a subnet to a host, or allow the host to claim multiple addresses via ND from the link subnet, then you can use as many addresses as you want. You could give every process on your machine its own IPv6 address for example.

New comment by neilalexander in "iCloud Photos Downloader"

neilalexander — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 21:10:57 +0000

You can go to https://privacy.apple.com, log in with your Apple ID, select "Request to transfer a copy of your data" and then select "iCloud photos and videos to Google Photos".

New comment by neilalexander in "IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world"

neilalexander — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:29:13 +0000

Because there isn't "empty space" in the IPv4 packet header (or even the pseudoheader format from which TCP or UDP checksums etc are derived) to expand your new bits into. By breaking the packet format, you just invented a new network protocol that all of the routers, firewalls and middleware of the world don't know how to handle.

New comment by neilalexander in "Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach"

neilalexander — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 12:15:25 +0000

> Old farts making laws about things they know nothing about.

Who's going to stop them?

New comment by neilalexander in "Rivian Will Add Lidar in 2026, Says Tesla's Cameras Aren't Enough"

neilalexander — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 10:52:18 +0000

As I understand it, Volvo's relationship with Luminar broke down, not that there was an obvious problem with the technology itself.