Hacker News: phh

New comment by phh in "Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it"

phh — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:31:46 +0000

> "You can just make it type words, what's the risk in that?"

I don't know if it's a useful answer to people saying this kind of stuff, but here are some examples of other attacks arbitrary USB pwn allows.

A USB device can appear as a network adapter and most OS will happily route all your traffic there, so your speaker can know which porn you're looking at!

It can also appear as a DisplayLink dongle, so it can see what's on the screen (it does require those specific drivers installed, and uh yeah, no way in hell it's technically possible on that MCU).

It can also turn it into a mouse jiggler to prevent lock screen (yes it's technically the same thing as your first point, just HID, but different angle).

It can also appear as a USB-storage: You don't trust the cloud, so you're writing those super secret documents to give to your boss on the USB drive you just plugged in? Surprise, you actually sent it to the attacker.

New comment by phh in "Roku LT Operating System open source distribution"

phh — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:57:00 +0000

You can do an IR remote without a RTOS, but as soon as you do BLE you realistically need a RTOS. You have timers for keep-alives, connection states, competing interrupts, CPU-"intensive" tasks that can be preempted (for crypto)

New comment by phh in "Nvidia RTX Spark"

phh — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:26:45 +0000

I'm sorry to announce this to you, but the last PowerBook was released 21 years ago

New comment by phh in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

phh — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:21:09 +0000

I agree with you that it is the very obvious conclusion, but it isn't obvious to everyone. But it could still be relevant to you if you find yourself discussing with someone saying "why do we even spend money making an API, the AI can just control my computer?"

New comment by phh in "Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors"

phh — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:29:10 +0000

I'm on the side of "clever, fun, but feels useless". But to defend the project, all sensors require a powered central system. It's pretty common for Zigbee to have one repeater per room [1], which is just what is needed for this system.

[1] Because any AC-powered Zigbee device is a repeater, so just a bulb or a plug is enough

New comment by phh in "We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G""

phh — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:38:46 +0000

Laying out the math (assuming earth is an homogeneous sphere) just in case it's not clear:

F_gravitational = G m1 m2 /r^2

g = G Mass_earth / r_earth^2

Mass_earth = r_earth^2 * g/G

Density_earth = r_earth^2 * g/G / V_earth

Density_earth = 3*g / (4*Pi*G*r_earth)

Prior to Cavendish we already new g and r_earth, just missing G.

New comment by phh in "CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes"

phh — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:26:02 +0000

TFA says "After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said."

I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car, though i think that 1000 fast charges is reasonable. It should probably be able to push to 5000 slow charges and 500 fast charges, which should fit a lot of use-cases.

New comment by phh in "Reminder: Enable ZRAM on your Linux system to optimize RAM usage"

phh — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:22:53 +0000

Well, you stopped hearing about it, not because it stopped being used, but because its support became mainstream for a very long time. Google strongly recommends using zram on all devices, even on devices with a lot of RAM since like Android 10?

New comment by phh in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

phh — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:25:21 +0000

Unironically. Every time I asked a LLM to make something faster, they always tried blind code optimisations, rather than measure.

New comment by phh in "Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP"

phh — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:15:24 +0000

Absoultely.

I'll add to your comment that it isn't a bug of MCP itself. MCP doesn't specify what the LLM sees. It's a bug of the MCP client.

In my toy chatbot, I implement MCP as pseudo-python for the LLM, dropping typing info, and giving the tool infos as abruptly as possible, just a line - function_name(mandatory arg1 name, mandatory arg2 name): Description

(I don't recommend doing that, it's largely obsolete, my point is simply that you feed the LLM whatever you want, MCP doesn't mandate anything. tbh it doesn't even mandate that it feeds into a LLM, hence the MCP CLIs)

New comment by phh in "Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock"

phh — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:06:51 +0000

An ESP32-C3 Super Mini can be found for below 3$ (cheapest I had was 1.58€). Since the original clock is 3.88$, it can't be that much cheaper.

New comment by phh in "When compilers surprise you"

phh — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 16:33:25 +0000

Since GCC is lacking such an essential optimization, you should consider have one of your junior interviewee contribute this basic optimization mainline.

New comment by phh in "A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine"

phh — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:13:58 +0000

You can make frequency inertia with solar (even without batteries if you accept running with a constant reserve so with reduced efficiency). Spain showed that there is a learning curve, that's for sure, but their issue was a "simple" oscillation problem that can be fixed by adjusting frequency-follow rate and grid-disconnect rules. It wasn't like a peak of energy consumption or loss of energy production that only a rotating mass could compensate.

New comment by phh in "Implications of AI to schools"

phh — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:55:51 +0000

80% is catastrophic though. In a classroom of 30 all honest pupils, 6 will get a 0 mark because the software says its AI?

New comment by phh in "High-resolution efficient image generation from WiFi Mapping"

phh — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 10:49:41 +0000

Is there a survey of SoTA of what can be achieved with CSI sensing you would recommend?

What is available on the low level? Are researchers using SDR, or there are common wifi chips that properly report CSI? Do most people feed in CSI of literally every packet, or is it sampled?

New comment by phh in "That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus"

phh — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 09:36:14 +0000

I'm curious why they are using actual modems rather than just doing it with VoWifi that merely requires a SIM card reader (pretty much just an UART)

New comment by phh in "OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems"

phh — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:16:15 +0000

Except I'm guessing they are not selling their equity, they are making debt backed by their equity?

New comment by phh in "Finnish City Inaugurates 1 MW/100 MWh Sand Battery"

phh — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:18:15 +0000

Well you can't really do -600C sand (or anything), so the benefits of sand VS water largely diminished. "just" freezing water already gives you around 300C equivalent of sand (if my napkin is correct).

Also the point of this plant is to exploit the counter-correlation of cheap electricity and cold. Usually there is a bigger correlation between cheap electricity and heat.

New comment by phh in "OpenRouter is down"

phh — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 12:03:49 +0000

Well in FP4

New comment by phh in "Kiwi.com flight search MCP server"

phh — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 16:31:43 +0000

I dream of getting mcp with interoperable micropayments before ads.