Hacker News: spatular

New comment by spatular in "Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)"

spatular — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:43:31 +0000

The trick is to redesign the bricks for worse tolerances. With 3D printers you can print very nuanced springy elements that are impossible to achieve with injection molding. I got some reasonable bricks years ago on cheap printers with PETG, should work even better now with modern printers and ABS.

New comment by spatular in "How to run Qwen 3.5 locally"

spatular — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:13:20 +0000

There is also prompt processing that's compute-bound, and for agentic workflows it can matter more than tg, especially if the model is not of "thinking" type.

New comment by spatular in "AMD's Chiplet APU: An Overview of Strix Halo"

spatular — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 15:30:57 +0000

Yes, 140W sustained, 160W burst (~10 seconds).

New comment by spatular in "ClickHouse gets lazier and faster: Introducing lazy materialization"

spatular — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:43:58 +0000

Clickhouse is a network server, duckdb and polars are in-process databases. It's like postgres vs sqllite.

New comment by spatular in "Raspberry Pi 5"

spatular — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 11:00:35 +0000

You can take a look at orange pi 5 plus. It has M.2 for WiFi and M.2 for SSD, both PCI-E. It's in $100+ category though.

New comment by spatular in "Raspberry Pi 5"

spatular — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 10:52:01 +0000

Orange Pi 5, "plus" version also has 2gen 1-lane pci-e (M.2 wifi), and 3gen 4-lane pci-e (M.2 SSD) and 2x2.5Gbit ethernet.

8nm, pretty power efficient. I've measured it to run at 0.7A@5V idle and 1.2A@5V with all 8 cores loaded with md5sum /dev/zero; iirc it had 1 ethernet connected, no other periphery. Running on Armbian.

New comment by spatular in "Electrolyzer efficiently converts CO2 into renewable propane fuel"

spatular — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 22:54:55 +0000

You'd need to spend at least 110kWh to convert CO2 back to propane, maybe much more. No matter what you do, LPG -> CO2 -> LPG cycle has to be energy-negative.

New comment by spatular in "So you want to build an embedded Linux system?"

spatular — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 01:50:08 +0000

To be precise, that'd be called MPU -- memory protection unit.

New comment by spatular in "So you want to build an embedded Linux system?"

spatular — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 16:10:57 +0000

MMU allows linux to provide a "flat" memory space to each userspace process. This memory space is assembled from 4KB pages that can be randomly dispersed throughout physical memory. Say, you want to malloc() 1MB of memory on a system that's been up for some time. Physical memory may not have a fitting continuos chunk of memory, but virtual memory of a newly created process will always have one, provided that there is enough free pages available.

In other words without MMU all programs share the same memory space, and if it get fragmented, generally you'd have to reboot. With MMU fragmentation can still be an issue, but it's greatly reduced, since each process has its own memory map. And if memory of the process gets framgmented, you can just restart it. If runtime supports object compaction/relocation, then fragmentation may be not an issue at all.

Re access to memory locations -- mostly any direct access to instruction or data memory in userspace program automatically goes through MMU remapping.

New comment by spatular in "Reviewing Bad Schematics as EE Interview Tactic"

spatular — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 10:18:42 +0000

Sorry, I meant to write "voltage regulator" about which parent asked about, not sure how I ended up with "linear regulator".

New comment by spatular in "Reviewing Bad Schematics as EE Interview Tactic"

spatular — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 22:46:28 +0000

I believe that without qualification "linear regulator" could be just anything that regulate voltage. Usually you can easily tell from schematics around it if it's some switching IC, an LDO or a module. And if you have layout or 3d render of the board it'd be almost certain.

Otherwise the person may just ask: "where are caps, or is this thing a module or what?"

New comment by spatular in "Reviewing Bad Schematics as EE Interview Tactic"

spatular — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 22:05:32 +0000

I've yet to see a voltage regulator IC with built-in caps. DC-DC modules sure, but author argues that this kind of info (module / ic) should be present in schematics. BTW, some linear regulators can't handle ceramic and low-ESR capacitors at output, and may be better with none if that's the choise.

New comment by spatular in "The successor of SMS has already been hacked"

spatular — Sun, 01 Dec 2019 13:35:13 +0000

I think he meant that in 3-rd world countries iPhones are luxury items bought by rich people in position of power.

New comment by spatular in "Richard M. Stallman resigns"

spatular — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 20:19:00 +0000

Well racism connotations permeat everything in US, it's overheated/taboo topic there. Not so much in the rest of the world, see two top dictionary definitions from google:

To punish (a person) without legal process or authority, especially by hanging, for a perceived offense or as an act of bigotry.

(Law) (tr) (of a mob) to punish (a person) for some supposed offence by hanging without a trial.

Nothing about racism here. The only thing that doesn't apply to Stallman is that he has not been hanged. That's quite important one. Though words are sometimes used not in their literary meaning (like "I'm killing it" -- well hopefully not).

BTW from what I've gathered this entire thing happened because Stallman was pedantic and has written something along "let's be precise with words, I think what happened was not rape, but statuatory rape because of such and such".

New comment by spatular in "Richard M. Stallman resigns"

spatular — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 15:23:09 +0000

Let's see: - judged by angry mob -- yes, - no ability to defend oneself -- yes, - killed -- no (though seeing polarization and level of anger here it's possible that he'll be eventually physically assulted), - person demolished, life ruined -- yes (Stallman got removed from the org he created, got fired from his work. Another poster here written that his friend got accused, defended in court with hard evidence, life is still ruined).

Comparison with lynching seems fair to me.

All of this got me thinking about creating, you know, accepting tech community where everyone is free to express their own opinions. I'm personally fine with my code being called shit and me being called dumbass for a good measure, just tell me what you really think and we'll sort things out faster instead sugar-coating stuff to not hurt my ego.

New comment by spatular in "Richard M. Stallman resigns"

spatular — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 19:16:57 +0000

Um, I'm actually worried that I or other person will be punished for something that they didn't do. In the third world country I live in you'd have to accuse someone and then bribe the judge. Turns out that in US one don't even have to bribe anyone, mob will lynch them. You just need to accuse them of right things; e.g. stealing and homicide won't do. Is that the progress that humanity has made?

New comment by spatular in "Richard M. Stallman resigns"

spatular — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 18:56:35 +0000

I don't have US cultural background and it looks insane to me, about level of witch hunts or lynch mobs. Like one accusation of peadophilia is enough to ruin a life, and lives of others that dare to voice opinions counter to that. Same thing with rape. It doesn't matter if it happened or not. Court of law? Nah, why? Clearly if they are accused then they are guilty.

New comment by spatular in "The Embedded Rust Book"

spatular — Sun, 28 Apr 2019 00:27:09 +0000

I haven't tried it, but it should be doable. A lot of linux-based rust libs wrap C libs and link to them, or compile their own embedded version during build. Same thing here too, though there could be some problems regarding what C compiler is used and where it expects to find its libs.

New comment by spatular in "The Embedded Rust Book"

spatular — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 23:34:58 +0000

AFAIK LM3S6965 is used in the book as a target for QEMU, and no one endorses to use the chip in actual hw.

New comment by spatular in "The Embedded Rust Book"

spatular — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 23:32:25 +0000

Absolutely this. The same price and the Bluepill has much more powerfull CPU.

The problem is HAL support. Some periphery is supported, other is not. ADC and DMAs for UARTs were merged just recently. Stuff like SPI / I2C slave modes is missing, I think HAL interface is not fleshed out yet. Stuff like usb stack would probably take a lot time to complete.