Hacker News: skinwill

New comment by skinwill in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

skinwill — Wed, 06 May 2026 03:51:16 +0000

They use the same image on their mini pc's page. https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/byte

New comment by skinwill in "Iowa farmers are leading the fight for repair"

skinwill — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 05:25:21 +0000

The phrase "sufficient test suite" is doing a LOT of work here. You would need to know what the data from every sensor is supposed to be along with how every piece of the machine is supposed to perform. AI isn't going to be able to iterate into those parameters over night.

New comment by skinwill in "What an unprocessed photo looks like"

skinwill — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 15:33:57 +0000

This is way over simplifying here but I always understood it as: our eyes can see red with very little power needed. But our eyes can differentiate more detail with green.

New comment by skinwill in "Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA"

skinwill — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 11:00:06 +0000

Speaking mostly from personal experience here, if a kid gets a suped-up liver from their dad's smoking habits, cool. But how many kids fathers stopped smoking when the kid was born? My point, the father's smoking habits may have passed down a strong liver but his continued use damaged the child's lungs and possibly more.

These mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance or whatever need much more study. It is far too early to draw any conclusions other than we need to keep researching.

New comment by skinwill in "Ultra-Low-Latency Trading System"

skinwill — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 15:21:28 +0000

Better yet, instead of positioning it as an institutional-style research. You should frame it as an information hub for bovine castration techniques.

New comment by skinwill in "Ultra-Low-Latency Trading System"

skinwill — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 15:17:52 +0000

"The core-and most-critical component-was left-out." Jesus-h-cluster-fucking-catastra-christ. If one of these data centers ever catches fire I will show up and make smores.

New comment by skinwill in "Ultra-Low-Latency Trading System"

skinwill — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 14:51:57 +0000

How deep down the rabbit hole did you go with hardware optimization?

In an ideal world, would it be better to compile this on a processor more RISC-y?

New comment by skinwill in "Twelve Days of Shell"

skinwill — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 10:52:10 +0000

Viewing the page with Safari 26.1 the questions stopped showing up after the second challenge. I was left with only Learn and View Solutions, which was not very fun since both showed a form of the answer.

TL;DR: The page stopped loading properly.

New comment by skinwill in "Why do some radio towers blink?"

skinwill — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 08:38:03 +0000

Jeff, it's very cool to hear from you as I have enjoyed your videos for some time. I would like to make one request though. Next time you do a project like "How I almost broke MrBeast's Ages 1-100 video" that involves setting up interactive electronics for an event, you should really call me. I managed interactive technology deployments for the automotive marketing industry for over a decade. It's a niche that has unique challenges which you fell face first into. I would be happy to help make things go much smoother should you ever do something similar. Proof: https://imgur.com/a/5z5JrwT I'm also on Reddit, same screen name if you want to dm me there.

New comment by skinwill in "Why do some radio towers blink?"

skinwill — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 21:05:24 +0000

I worked at a television station years back that was designed in such a way that the lights going up the tower were powered by the separate phases of three phase AC with the one at the top powered from all three combined. This was pretty normal but what the engineer had done was rotate them at every level so that if a phase was dropped you could count the lights and quickly see from a distance that the power wasn't right. 4 lights was good, 3 meant you dropped a phase, and so on. I thought it was a pretty clever way of keeping light on all sides of the tower while being able to tell from a distance that a phase was out.

New comment by skinwill in "Cheese Crystals (2019)"

skinwill — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 19:46:33 +0000

There is an error on that page. src="https://www.media.snipettemag.com/wp-uploads/2019/09/cheese-..." should be src="https://media.snipettemag.com/wp-uploads/2019/09/cheese-stre..."

There is an extra "www." which breaks the link.

New comment by skinwill in "Micro-LEDs boost random number generation"

skinwill — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 05:52:23 +0000

Can someone explain to me how this is different than a simple noise generator based on a PN junction? As in, isn't this just amplifying noise and aren't there less sensational ways of doing nearly the same thing? Does measuring a photon with this method actually get you better randomness? I have some serious gaps in my understanding here and an ELI5 would be neat.

New comment by skinwill in "The Therac-25 Incident (2021)"

skinwill — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 09:43:43 +0000

Around here we have Epic. If you want a good scare, look up their corporate Willy Wonka-esq jail/campus and their policy of zero remote work.

New comment by skinwill in "Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers"

skinwill — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 21:42:18 +0000

I did one of those once and quickly found out that any display of personality was interpreted as an incorrect answer. It was made clear by the totally unrelated follow ups. I'd like to see the turn over rates of any company that implements this crap.

New comment by skinwill in "Uber will let women drivers and riders request to avoid being paired with men"

skinwill — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 15:05:06 +0000

This will do more harm than good. I guarantee it.

New comment by skinwill in "Thnickels"

skinwill — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 17:58:58 +0000

The way Frontpage would vomit in the source code was the OG AI hallucination.

New comment by skinwill in "555 Timer Circuits"

skinwill — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 04:02:30 +0000

The internal diagram appears to be incorrect, https://www.555-timer-circuits.com/inside-the-555.html

The internal resistors should be connected to the upper comparator. Also, that diagram just seems confusing. Something like this makes more sense: https://www.theengineeringknowledge.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

New comment by skinwill in "Satellites Spotting Aircraft"

skinwill — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 08:56:00 +0000

State-of-the-art for what could survive space. It used 486's for quite a while. You are still very correct, I just think it's funny that the "best" is not always what people think.

New comment by skinwill in "Satellites Spotting Aircraft"

skinwill — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 08:51:22 +0000

My father, back in the 80's, told me about satellites in the 70's that could read your license plate. Using imaging tubes before CCD technology no less. The technology limitation is not only the resolution, which was rather good btw, but rather the time. Early spy sats used film that had to be de-orbited and captured for processing. Then they started beaming down what was essentially slow scan television which only improved with time. Now you can get clusters of CCD's beaming down massive amounts of digital signals from wide swaths of area. None of this is secret, really. Just look up the Landsat program. They even used multispectral cameras to count things like tree growth and duck populations. In the 70's!

New comment by skinwill in "Satellites Spotting Aircraft"

skinwill — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 08:43:46 +0000

A company called Erim back in the 70's pioneered SAR systems. They had an interesting approach to processing and storage of the data which was all analog back then. They used holography. Erim and their SAR work is documented in wikipedia but their company presidents obsession with holography was detailed in their monthly news letters. I was handed some of these documents from a former (now deceased) worker at Erim. He told me how they were able to fly the massive radar systems and the huge analog computers they used to process the data. It must have been absolutely wild to work there in those days.