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liamkinne

249 karma · joined September 2, 2018

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liamkinne··on Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
I have a 1.5GHz TDS7154B in addition to my 200MHz SDS1204 specifically to measure power rail noise with a low noise probe.

You just can’t characterise power rail noise well with less than 500MHz of bandwidth.

liamkinne··on Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
I recently did something similar with a TDS7154B. Rather than going with an IDE/PATA drive I was able to use the SATA Gen1 ports on the motherboard and a molex-sata power adapter to use a modern SSD.
liamkinne··on Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity
The government loan changes the calculus. Allows for short term thinking and a long term benefit.
liamkinne··on First and Lego Education Partnership Update
It feels like LEGO for a while have been dumbing-down their education products.

I saw it with computer science education as a whole during my schooling. Instead of focusing on fundamentals there was more and more layers of abstraction added, lying to you about what you were actually learning.

There is also another competitive event that will be affected by this: RoboCup Junior.

liamkinne··on Oxide raises $200M Series C
You buy the physical rack and install it in your data centre. It is your property.
liamkinne··on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
$1k per year if you run an action 24/7. How many minutes per month do you actually use? How does that compare to the cost of the machines being used as runners?

The real mistake was GH not charging anything for self-hosted runners in the first place, setting an expectation.

liamkinne··on Ironclad – formally verified, real-time capable, Unix-like OS kernel
Is there a technical reason it only supports x86_64, riscv64, and not arm64?
liamkinne··on POML: Prompt Orchestration Markup Language
XML? how is this not just XML with a schema?
liamkinne··on Our $100M Series B
Yes, but you aren't wasting time early on negotiating compensation.
liamkinne··on How Tesla is replacing the age-old CAN bus
Have a look at Ethercat. Based on the same physical layer as Ethernet but allows daisy-chaining devices.
liamkinne··on Zero Day in Microchip SAM Microcontrollers
Trying to secure hardware that the attacker has direct access to is just so brutal. Your hardware vendor can promise compliance with X spec, implement Y protections and still fall foul to something like this.
liamkinne··on Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework
It’s interesting to me that every robotics framework essentially boils down to a specialised pub-sub system with some flavour of serialisation and some kind of startup/launcher to wrangle running separate processes.

Props to this team for picking Protobuf given its wider adoption unlike ROS and its custom format.

Is there a reason an existing pub-sub system like NATS isn’t suitable for a framework like this?

Also unfortunate that this project is written in C++ and offers Rust bindings rather than the other way around.

liamkinne··on Moving to a RTOS on the RP2040
Importantly for RP2040 users, RTIC 2.0.0 is currently single-core only.

I’m using RTIC for the firmware on my STM32H7 based product (https://umi.engineering) and it has been a joy.

liamkinne··on Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
Survivorship bias!
liamkinne··on Show HN: A web debugger an ex-Cloudflare team has been working on for 4 years
Nice looking landing page. Small bug, when I scroll down the page and then click "pricing" it doesn't take me to the right spot on the page until I click again. On Firefox 125.0.3
liamkinne··on LED Matrix Earrings
I wonder what the smallest circular OLED display is. There are 01005 LEDs (the next size down from the 0201's used here) but at that point an OLED display is essentially the same thing.
liamkinne··on My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website
I once hade the unfortunate experience of building an API for a government org where the data changed once a year or when amendments were made which happens very infrequently.

The whole data set could have been zipped into a <1MB file but instead a “solution architect” go their hands on the requirements. We ended up with a slow API because they wouldn’t let us cache results in case the data had changed just as it was requested. And an overly complex webhook system for notifying subscribers of changes to the data.

A zip file probably was too simple, but not far off what was actually required.

liamkinne··on Keycloak – Open-source identity and access management interview
The Terraform provider[1] unfortunately is 3rd party and as such doesn't bring and guarantees of correctness other than that of the maintainer. It would be nice to see Keycloak provide an official solution for configuration management other than the K8s operator which is missing a lot of features.

[1] https://github.com/mrparkers/terraform-provider-keycloak

liamkinne··on Squad Solar City Car
Stop putting solar panels on cars. It’s just not worth the cost or complexity.

That square meter of PV is going to get you at most 250W in perfect conditions. Conditions that aren’t found in cities or even at ground level in residential areas.

liamkinne··on Microsoft Azure Outage
I welcome your sympathy because Azure constantly makes my life hell.

So many half baked features and legitimate bugs in their platform that they either don’t fix or take years to fix.

liamkinne··on Kubernetes Cordon: How It Works and When to Use It
Most often I’m using ‘cordon’ and then ‘drain’ to remove nodes from a cluster that has auto-scaled up, but is being hesitant to scale down.

Pretty nuts to think I’ve saved six figures in VM costs just doing that once or so a month.

liamkinne··on Ask HN: Russian Military and Alcohol?
I don't have any data to back this up, but I would argue that the alcoholism is more cultural and circumstantial than causal.
liamkinne··on Exponentially Better Rotations
Interesting is how this applies to interpolation with industrial robotic arms.

Shortest path for each joint moving from a -> b does not create a linear path for the end-effector of the robot. Linear end-effector movements require inverse kinematics and are limited by how fast the slowest joint can move.

Quaternions are also useful because you often don’t care the particular rotation you approach and object with, just the angle/direction so you can leave theta as an arbitrary value.

liamkinne··on Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox (2012)
Only for the cases you are set up to test. This is about headroom on your golden resources so any kind of overload you can buy yourself time for.
liamkinne··on Yaw String
Airplanes can also have these fitted on the wings. Although not as common as yaw strings and usually for demonstration purposes.
liamkinne··on Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm
The difference is SpaceX don’t have these orbits forever. The satellites will fall back to earth and congress can enact regulations that limit the number of them launched in the future.
liamkinne··on Update: iPhone Camera app did not replace person's head with a leaf
Question for the audience: would you say this is an example of Occam’s razor?
liamkinne··on Italy reveals its new national airline
Airbus use a number of Italian suppliers [1]. Not 100% Italian made, but probably supporting more Italian jobs than buying Boeing.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?channel=trow5&client=firefox-b...

liamkinne··on People Staring at Computers
Ethics != legality
liamkinne··on Graphite anode inventor says he can charge electric car in 10 mins
80kWh battery

10 minutes

80*(60/10)=480kW

Not gonna happen.

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