Hacker News: rkourdis

New comment by rkourdis in "LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent"

rkourdis — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:05:39 +0000

I had a mouse that would keep on installing its driver when plugged in, even with this setting off.

I remember Windows keeping a cache of autodownloaded drivers ("Driver Store") and reinstalling them when the device is plugged in, so the mouse bloatware kept on coming back.

Is this still the case?

New comment by rkourdis in "Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering"

rkourdis — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:22:52 +0000

It's been a few years since I've worked with this stuff but I'm under the impression that you can do this sort of replay only for a short amount of time. If so, is there a point?

If the receiver expects a key to have been revealed at a particular timestep, it won't accept a replayed message with that key after that, so you can't record and replay indefinitely.

EDIT: Unless you indeed meant to instantly replay - would the receiver accept the highest strength signal, ie. yours?

New comment by rkourdis in "How to earn a billion dollars"

rkourdis — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:46:40 +0000

Precisely, I like the term "diminishing work". I think a lot of disagreement comes from differing definitions of "earning", or "ethically earned", but working 12hr days hard labour to earn $1000 and putting $10k into a stock that goes up 10% intuitively seem different.

New comment by rkourdis in "Every Frame Perfect"

rkourdis — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:24:55 +0000

I've been learning a bit of Swift / SwiftUI recently while building a macOS app and this seems to be a problem all the way down the tech stack, even for simple apps.

While it's been surprisingly easy to animate things, I've spent way too long trying to synchronize the movement of different components, to make sure things don't jump around, etc. Window content snaps to size while the borders animate, the shadow doesn't refresh alongside the borders, that sort of thing. Maybe I'm missing something in terms of how I should set up my code, or maybe it's a hard problem to solve automagically in a framework.

In some cases I basically gave up on slow animations (which make the issues obvious) and rely on fast movement to hide the imperfections - but it creates a less polished feeling as the article points out.

New comment by rkourdis in "Flipper One Tech Specs"

rkourdis — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:47:00 +0000

They added an M.2 port [1] to which you can attach a variety of modules, including SDR (eg. [2] 30 MHz - 11 GHz).

[1]: https://docs.flipper.net/one/hardware/m2-port/modules [2]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/wavelet-lab/ssdr

New comment by rkourdis in "Ask HN: How to get started with robotics as a hobbyist?"

rkourdis — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:30:38 +0000

I was very interested in athletic robots, so I left my job in software to build a quadruped and make it backflip [1]. I made the hardware at home (the design was open-source [2]) and wrote the framework to generate jumps, flips, etc. I started with basically zero robotics knowledge, so it was a lot of work, but it was incredibly fulfilling and super fun. I personally learn best by building things.

I'd say start playing with 3D printing and motors to make mechanisms that move (pendulums, simple walkers, ...). +1 to tinkering with the 3D printer itself (that someone mentioned) as you can learn a lot about how the machine works and figure out ways to improve it.

You've mentioned the physical aspect, but simulation could also be a good starting point. You can now very easily train RL agents in sim to say, walk, and transfer to real hardware afterwards.

Finally, if you like flying stuff, there's drones you can buy that are controlled programmatically (e.g. Crazyflie). I haven't played a lot with these, but I've seen them used to teach control and they seem like a nice, inexpensive platform to experiment with.

[1]: https://github.com/rkourdis/trajopt?tab=readme-ov-file#backf...

[2]: https://open-dynamic-robot-initiative.github.io