Hacker News: xyx0826

New comment by xyx0826 in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

xyx0826 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:22:03 +0000

I remember reading an analysis on one of those projectors; the author found a residential proxy running on their device. I would recommend keeping these things off the internet.

New comment by xyx0826 in "Fisker went bankrupt and owners built an open source car company from the ashes"

xyx0826 — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:33:18 +0000

Root persistence is more for encouraging you to report all bugs you’ve found instead of holding on to them in fear that the vendor will patch them and make further research difficult. See Apple’s security research device program.

New comment by xyx0826 in "The California Government Is Coming for Your E-Bikes"

xyx0826 — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:15:09 +0000

Notably this bill covers Class 2 and 3 ebikes, not Class 1. The key distinction here is Class 2/3 features a throttle that lets you accelerate without having to pedal.

IMO Class 2/3 bikes are more of a bike/moped hybrid than just bikes.

New comment by xyx0826 in "Your hex editor should color-code bytes"

xyx0826 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:30:45 +0000

If you analyze binary files often, I highly recommend binvis - http://binvis.io/. It creates a colored minimap for files it loads and has two available arrangements. Pixel color is based on range of bytes, eg ASCII/null bytes/FF bytes. Besides, it’s a pretty basic hex viewer that runs in your browser. The minimap is extremely powerful for identifying interesting areas and patterns in unknown data.

New comment by xyx0826 in "My First Meshtastic Network"

xyx0826 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 07:19:39 +0000

You seemed to have made an account just for this reply. Care to explain the cynicism? I’m out of the loop with the toxicity.

New comment by xyx0826 in "Pdsink: USB Power Delivery Sink library for embedded devices"

xyx0826 — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 03:22:23 +0000

Here’s a tangent discussion from a while ago that I enjoyed, on bootstrapping PoE (Power over Ethernet) from UEFI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44111609

Looking back, funnily the top comment drew a parallel to negotiating USB-PD in u-boot, aka the bootloader. I suppose this wouldn’t have worked for your case though, since your device couldn’t boot at all on 5V.

New comment by xyx0826 in "Fallout from the AWS outage: Smart mattresses go rogue"

xyx0826 — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 21:12:42 +0000

Valetudo. I haven’t had personal experience using it (due to an unsupported model of NAND memory chip), but I’ve heard good words: https://valetudo.cloud/

That said, I did some research last year before buying my first robot vacuum. I wasn’t able to find a project - Valetudo included - that would support the bigger, fancier robots made by Roborock etc. If you’re looking to decloud a recent model, I don’t have a good answer.

New comment by xyx0826 in "Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool"

xyx0826 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 21:05:06 +0000

Is it necessary to prevent the water from freezing? If the chamber and water within are subzero while the SoC produces sufficient heat, the ice would simply melt.

* Edit: the article mentioned freezing could crack the seal. Freezing would be a bigger issue than I had thought, then.

New comment by xyx0826 in "Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience"

xyx0826 — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 22:13:12 +0000

I applaud his efforts to document this what must’ve been a nightmare of a case for him. But it felt like a lot of the wording is speculative or hyperbolic in nature and aggressively tries to paint Volvo in a bad light. For example:

“Analysis of Volvo's Final Response: This response … confirms Volvo's complete abandonment of customer responsibility…This is Volvo's definition of ‘customer care’ in 2025.”

“Center Display Failure - Critical Interface Blackout: Main Controls Inaccessible”

“Climate Control Malfunction - Climate System Override: Controls Unresponsive Despite Interface Status”

“Complete Center Screen Malfunction - Total System Breakdown: Hard Reset Failed to Restore Screen”

I know little about Volvo or this case; I’m choosing to offer them some benefits of doubt. Comms and decision making are prone to break down on the corporate ladder. Volvo had no doubt fumbled his case badly but I’m not convinced it is indicative of the company’s overall customer support policy. Sure, the main touchscreen had failed. But how is this an “override” of HVAC or a “total system breakdown”? And what’s the “system” anyways? On top of all that, these subtitle summaries smell like AI.

I don’t deny that Volvo has a lot to answer for. Though the choice of these instigating descriptions might not be the best one giving the author is actively pursuing litigation.

New comment by xyx0826 in "Serial SPI RAM Emulation on Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 MCU"

xyx0826 — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:13:55 +0000

Before I came across this tool, one use case I’d conceived for a tool like this is to help in debugging and reverse engineering. One could hook this up to a microcontroller under test/analysis and essentially monitor its “disk I/O” or supply it with arbitrary data.

New comment by xyx0826 in "File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern, robust interface"

xyx0826 — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 03:01:34 +0000

Files looks great but it has performance issues and occasional crashes when I tried it out a few months ago. When going into subfolders, there is a very noticeable subsecond lag which I don’t get from native Explorer. For all complaints of lack of features that Windows File Explorer gets, it’s still a very respectable native GUI app for being Windows’ most used program!

Crashing rockets and recovering data from damaged flash chips

xyx0826 — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 19:20:49 +0000

Article URL: https://dontvacuum.me/rocketflashrecovery/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42434331

Points: 70

# Comments: 13

New comment by xyx0826 in "Student rocket group shatters amateur space record"

xyx0826 — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 08:18:55 +0000

> you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience

For sure! And that’s perhaps the #1 reason these teams are so valuable: it’s an environment to get hands dirty in. If something sticks, that’s great and goes on the resume. If something awful happens, just walk away with a cool story assuming you didn’t blow up a school building or anything like that. Either way the experience and hopefully learnings stick with these young people like me for a long time.

New comment by xyx0826 in "Student rocket group shatters amateur space record"

xyx0826 — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 07:26:39 +0000

I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.” In college, you have a bunch of freshly educated, similarly minded people in one place with a whole bunch of free time to put towards one project, highly motivated because it’s both an extracurricular escape and a career prep achievement. And these teams are often financially supported by their school departments or fundraisers. If you fail, there are little if any consequences on your life. All these motivators improve the likelihood of making something truly impressive.

Sure, we can make an arrangement like this out of college. Call up your ex-rocket club teammates, who have all now graduated and making banks at rocket startups. Spend the Thanksgiving week grinding out the CAD, code and circuit boards then test everything out in a desert. But projects like this are a huge time investment and with work and family in the way, they can often be very difficult to coordinate and pull off.

Even if your rocket does end up shooting off and breaking a record, does it truly “beat them”? I find it a bit hard to compare a team of similarly educated college students to a group of adults, usually with relevant professional backgrounds. Maybe the closest we can get are YouTuber collabs. Sometimes I miss my days spent on my college team; it’s pretty hard for me to get an exciting, rewarding, comradely and occasionally traumatizing experience like that ever again.

New comment by xyx0826 in "How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup"

xyx0826 — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:49:05 +0000

Thank you for Outline, I used to self-host it for a team and it was a breeze compared to Google Docs or confluence.

Does it support the use case of publishing the wiki as a public documentation site, while allowing authenticated users to edit?

New comment by xyx0826 in "MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia"

xyx0826 — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 22:19:55 +0000

With an ESP32 or comparable (RPi Pico W, for example) you get MicroPython or CircuitPython support! That means a Python interpreter, drivers for popular peripherals and usually a network stack. Performance doesn’t beat a native SDK but Python is Python.

New comment by xyx0826 in "NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause"

xyx0826 — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 18:48:56 +0000

The Voyagers’ protocol use no encryption and the specification appears to be public. I’ve linked a PDF of what appears to contain the protocol description below. So anyone with a *large enough* antenna can talk to it. It just happens to be that the “anyone” on earth really is just NASA and its Deep Space Network.

https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_n...

New comment by xyx0826 in "BookStack: Simple and Free Wiki Software"

xyx0826 — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 23:30:52 +0000

It’s a bit of a pain to set up and self host the container stack but Outline has been great for me. Does anyone have experience with using Outline as a public facing docs/blog site?

New comment by xyx0826 in "Return-to-Office Mandates Aren't Worth the Talent Risks"

xyx0826 — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 10:17:09 +0000

My job involves 60% writing software and 40% testing with hardware. I work about 5% of my days from home, when I’m sick or have other obligations.

I don’t have the space, time or incentive to set up a home office in the place I live. This unfortunately means all the stuff around me become distractions. I find it harder to sustain long work sessions at home.

I miss having quick chats with coworkers by their desk. Sometimes I hit an issue and all I need is a 30-second talk with the dev 2 aisles over. And it’s mutual: I find these quick chats great for helping folks out and keeping myself in the loop. Instant messaging is not an adequate substitute.

And lastly this is tied to my work and company policies but usually I can only access test hardware at the office, due to logistics or confidentiality.

How the Master Clock Sets Time for the World (2014)

xyx0826 — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 07:28:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3dkd5b/demetrios-matsakis-and-the-master-clock

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40571630

Points: 1

# Comments: 0