Hacker News: xkbear89

New comment by xkbear89 in "An open-source 240-antenna array to bounce signals off the Moon"

xkbear89 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:41:30 +0000

You are not missing it -- it does not seem to be published yet. The site says open source but from the updates page it looks like the hardware design files and SDR software will ship alongside the physical product when it launches. This is pretty common with open-source hardware projects: the design is open but the repo appears after the first production run, partly because the schematics and firmware are still being iterated on and partly because publishing incomplete designs invites issues before the team is ready to support them.

What I find more interesting than the license question is the software side. They mention a pre-loaded SD card with SDR applications, which probably means GNU Radio or something built on top of it. If they release the beamforming DSP pipeline as open source, that is genuinely valuable -- most phased array signal processing code is locked behind defense contractor NDAs. Having a reference implementation that people can study and modify on commodity hardware at the 399 dollar price point would be a significant contribution to the SDR community regardless of when the repo goes live.

New comment by xkbear89 in "Signals, the push-pull based algorithm"

xkbear89 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:39:41 +0000

Glitch-freedom is one of those things that does not bite you until it does, and then you spend a day debugging a UI that renders an impossible intermediate state for a single frame. I hit this in a dashboard project where two derived signals depended on the same source, and without batched updates the downstream computation ran with one stale and one fresh value. The result was a brief negative number in a percentage display, which was only visible if you knew to look for it.

The push-pull approach described here actually sidesteps the worst glitches because the dirty-flag propagation is just marking, not computing. But the article glosses over what happens during the pull phase when the dependency graph has diamonds. Topological sorting during pull is the standard fix -- Preact Signals and SolidJS both do this -- but it adds complexity that matters if you are rolling your own.

Flapjax was doing a lot of this right in 2008. It is wild that the JS ecosystem took another 15 years to converge on essentially the same core ideas with better ergonomics.

New comment by xkbear89 in "Email obfuscation: What works in 2026?"

xkbear89 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 03:21:12 +0000

The most underrated point here is that data breach lists have made web scraping almost irrelevant as a spam vector. If your email was in the Ticketmaster, LinkedIn, or Adobe breaches, it is already in every serious bulk mailing list regardless of how carefully you obfuscate it on your site. That said, obfuscation still makes sense for addresses that have never been in a breach -- particularly for new projects or personal sites where you have a clean slate. HTML entities plus a simple JS reassembly catches the vast majority of unsophisticated scrapers with basically zero maintenance overhead.