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Karliss

Re:Stringman, an $800 open-source room scale gripper robot on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:14PM (#50357558)
Cable robots have existed for decades this is not a new concept. Anyone who wanted to rip it off could have done it long time ago.
Re:Stringman, an $800 open-source room scale gripper robot on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:05PM (#50357423)
Only widespread commercial application of cable robots I have seen is cameras in stadiums and concert venues.

I guess in most industrial use cases it makes more sense to have a robot stationary and move the parts around with conveyors. Doing it that way allows to pipeline and parallelize the manufacturing process. In contrast the large operating volume covered by cable robot needs to be served by single robot exclusively.

Re:Radiation Map of the World on Sunday November 01, 2026 @10:50AM (#50326760)
From my observations it also seems to vary a lot depending on how the person recording behaves. Some people just walk around logging reading along the way. Others go out of the way to find interesting above background level radioactive objects and place the measurement equipment right next to those. Like finding 2 pieces of granite having 6x the background level in a giant pile of other rocks.

Another interesting pattern I saw while browsing around was increased level next to every fancy cast iron light fixture along a specific bridge. The bridge was made mid 20th century so I don't think they are old enough to have used thorium gas light mantles.

Re:Show HN: A Truly Modular Keyboard on Monday October 26, 2026 @08:03AM (#50242288)
The MCU in each module is probably one of the cheapest parts in that build $0.2-0.25 a piece. It's the mechanical parts which are expensive. The switches+keycaps which you need anyway depending on how nice you want them to be can cost $0.4-1.5 per key. The most expensive part is probably the pogo pins $0.5/per pair x 8 = $4 and magents.
Re:OBS Studio 33 on Saturday October 24, 2026 @02:13PM (#50223702)
Should be as simple as copy pasting server url + credentials or streaming key. My interpretation is that documentation authors either considered it so simple that it's not worth clarifying or since they are pushing for their own software (rumble studio) they intentionally didn't explain it further to encourage people using their software directly without extra step of OBS.

Once you open corresponding panel in Rumble it shows you all the information you need to copy paste in single place with convenient copy to clipboard buttons.

Platforms with "builtin support" require same amount of configuration minus the server url. But since the server url is provided in the same place as stream key, copy pasting 2 instead of 1 value hardly makes a difference. It probably takes less time to copy server url than trying to find it in dropdown containing 70+ other services.

There are different streaming services with different behavior.

Google stadia had special builds, very well could have been DRM-free.

Other streaming services like G-force now are closer to renting a virtual machine with some automation scripts on top. Where after connecting you use a slightly modified version of steam to install games (which publishers allowed to be streamed) almost like you would install them locally. Those definitely aren't DRM-free (except a portion of indie titles which are DRM free everywhere). While G-force now tries to limit access to underlying OS, surface is too large to trust the platform with DRM free builds especially if it allows installing multiple games and steam workshop mods. It's a bit more complicated as g-force now also has "ready to play" games which provide more stadia like experience with better integration.

So overall it means 2 cases: * special builds/game specific integration scripts from streaming platform -> requires extra work and agreement between streaming platform and developer/publisher, introduces uncertainty of how streaming platform limits account sharing (compared to the DRM publisher uses) * no extra work, just single checkbox in steam developer panel -> potential conflicts with finger printing, DRM and anticheat systems

Neither of 2 are no brainer free money. Either it's extra work and bureaucracy to negotiate, prepare and configure special build. Or it's conflicting with DRM systems.

It's trivial only for smaller indie devs who are uploading DRM free builds to steam anyway.

Game streaming services like that are harder to reliably hardware fingerprint and introduces unusual install patterns (same game potentially repeatedly installed large amount of times by same user).

For DRM and ban avoidance detection this means either false positives (which is bad rep) or if it's tuned to ignore those signals on specific service provider hardware makes it easier to do account sharing (and thus not buying the game).

Re:Source code of the Estonian online voting system on Saturday October 17, 2026 @04:49PM (#50135007)
Parliament elections in Estonia happen once every 4 years so don't expect frequent updates. Next one should be in 2027 so there are still ~5 months for them to publish next update. There was also a municipal election in 2025 and European parliament in 2024 which matches last 3 updates in git history. No elections in 2026 so no updates this year.
Re:Running the unmodified Linux amdgpu driver on an iPad on Monday October 12, 2026 @05:57AM (#50053975)
It's not like Apple provides you with kernel APIs for implementing custom GPU drivers on ipad properly.

Which leaves user space drivers embedded in the app as more or less only option. I am a bit surprised Apple allows enough low level thunderbolt access to implement this at all. On a desktop you could implement a user space driver in a shared library so that it can be used by multiple apps, but that's not really an option on iOS either.

Such approach is hardly rare. Many niche hardware products do something similar. Either implement driver/interface for generic data transfer device (like a serial port), or use the slots for vendor specific data within HID, bluetooth interfaces and implement a custom protocol on top of that. Almost any bluetooth device which requires vendor app for configuration, many smartwatches, gamer keyboards/mice which require custom app for configuring RGB lights (often HID based), even MCU programmers and other serious electronics development tools often show up as USB serial ports.

Re:Eye of Sauron: Long-Range Hidden Spy Camera Detection on Saturday October 10, 2026 @03:27AM (#50030565)
Shielding is addressed in the paper. They did some testing covering it with aluminum sheet (from coke can not aluminum foil) which decreased detection range from 30 to 2m. That's still not a bad range compared to other similar projects attempting to detect hidden cameras using EM. But with a properly designed shield the detection is probably even worse. Within limitations section they mention, they had problems detecting some smartphone cameras due them using low power memory and in general being better shielded.
Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft on Thursday October 08, 2026 @02:18PM (#50009745)
What's the point of bringing in workers into US just to have them work remotely from home? At that point why not have them work remotely from other side of ocean.
Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft on Thursday October 08, 2026 @02:05PM (#50009524)
> The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.

Based on that I would expect that if you advertise in small town newspaper, the job needs to be located in that small town. Want them to work in your big office next to big city, then it must be a newspaper widely distributed in that city not a small town on the opposite side of continent.

Just did a quick test 320x200x8bit grayscale PNG (couldn't quickly figure out how to get 8bit color pallet) compressed to ~15-40kB. Multiply that by 60frames a second (or whatever odd framerate historic hardware used) and 120seconds and you get 200MB. Not completely impractical, but I wouldn't call it trivial amount of space. And if you find any demoscene collection providing losslessly compressed videos let me know. All I have seen is original executable+youtube video (which suffers from compression artifacts). And I doubt many demoscene website maintainers are eager to increase their storage and bandwidth costs 100x.
Not going to say anything about AI translations. But the video recording don't do justice for many of demos.

The effects in some of the demos simply kill any video encoder, only way to properly experience them is by running or emulating locally. Not that crystal sharp upscaled square pixels on modern display or poor quality CRT filters are very representative either, but it's likely better than blurry mess you get when video encoder tries to deal with high frequency details or random noise from procedural effects.

Re:Find the flattest route between any two points in SF on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @03:50AM (#49975501)
Unless you are on foot (and even then) the route needs to follow existing roads, you can only zig zag as much as existing roads do it not endlessly.

And almost any practical routing system will have a mechanism for tradeoffs of different aspects. Often there is a distance/time tradeoff which directly relates to speed on corresponding segments. But the tradeoff can also be in the form of "on average x seconds spent waiting green light in each intersection or time to stop before railroad crossing. So there is no reason for a system optimizing grade to completely ignore all other factors, it's just a question of weights and curves of each of them.

Re:StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta on Friday October 02, 2026 @10:12AM (#49933753)
I don't get why you consider MIT/BSD fine when both of them have "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." but when OSM does the same it somehow becomes "you gotta promote our service".
Isn't sha1-dc just checking for a small list of hard coded disturbance vectors? Meaning that script kiddies can't easily reuse exact values that researchers spent a bunch of time precomputing. That's far from being a good long term solution.
Re:StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta on Friday October 02, 2026 @02:55AM (#49930562)
I would say biggest issue with licensing comes from clear attribution being problematic at the scale of OSM not the virality or relicensing problems. That and OSM aiming for being squeaky clean, far away from any ambiguity in terms of third party data licensing.

It is simply impractical to attribute all the sources anywhere in UI or printed copies of map. And whether an attribution hidden somewhere deep in wiki is considered acceptable is grey zone.

The fact that OSM themselves want attributions is another reasons why they have high standards for what's considered an attribution which they can't achieve for third party data sources.

In case of software License.txt and Help/About is considered standard practices. But that doesn't necessarily translate to other mediums of copyrighted work. Something like books or research papers have their own generally accepted practices of how attributions are handled. For maps digital and physical text in the corner is often used practice. You can see it even for something like a building plan posted next to construction site, listing additional map sources used for preparing the drawing. So it's not exactly unique invention by OSM. Back to comparison with software, software can't exactly be printed out so the concerns about attribution are different. Also software licenses typically require listing including a copy of license text not just attribution , which is simply impossible outside separate file or dedicated UI.

In practice the OSM aiming for better than good and thousands of unverified contributors being uncontrollable lands it somewhere in the middle. But if they aimed for barely acceptable all the contributors would definitely push the bar bellow legally acceptable.

On the topic of government data, CC-BY is also common which is somewhat problematic. But more often they have no idea under what license they are releasing their data. They come up with complicated schemes of metadata, which never gets properly filled or parsed, thus resulting in conflicting information about license being used. And if you ask them to clarify they will just say, "yes yes it's open data you can reuse it", with the government employee having no understanding about differences between various licenses and that not all open data is equal.

Re:Flip Fluid on Flip Dots on Sunday September 27, 2026 @09:13AM (#49866415)
Might not be so bad considering that all the plastic is on opposite side of fiberglass board. When desoldering connectors or smd chips, it's often hard to avoid directly blowing hot air at the plastic bits. That's not the case here. Having dots grouped in rows of 7 makes things a bit more challenging. As it means heating up larger area and increase chance of them getting stuck even when all the solder is molten.

But the theory would have to be tested and there aren't many people with so much flipdot panels that desoldering is a major concern. And ones who have few some don't want to risk it. So bulk processing techniques are likely underexplored.

Re:George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @04:47PM (#49807848)
Isn't multiple floors of bookshelves with open central area a very common theme in large fancy libraries? For example British museum reading room, Oval room in France national library, Morgan Library & Museum, Rose reading room in New York Public Library.

The shelves can't be very high to keep them easily accessible, adding additional levels solves that. Open central area with higher ceiling gives more natural lighting.

It doesn't really say that it needs to use 3x more area, but that 3x more gets consumed due to "advanced packaging and manfuacturing complexity". Which doesn't properly explain why it consumes 3x more and could simply mean they have a bad yield and 2/3 produced is garbage.
Re:Brood War Bench on Sunday September 20, 2026 @09:52AM (#49775903)
Your APM is too low. If you click a bunch sometimes the pause button works.
Re:Storm Summoner, a MIDI controller for effects pedals on Sunday August 30, 2026 @04:32PM (#49502469)
From what I understand the whole point is avoiding the need to stomp pedals or otherwise touch them during live performance.

Some pedals have a bunch of knobs which are a pain to adjust during live performance between the songs. So some pedals support changing the settings using MIDI interface. This device has builtin library of control codes fur such pedals. That way you can program presets for your MIDI controlled pedals in the storm summoner and during live performance quickly switch between presets with a click of single button as opposed to remember which of the half dozen pedals need to be stomped on/off for each song or worse adjusting the knobs.

Re:RISC-V is now officially supported by CPython on Sunday August 30, 2026 @03:55AM (#49496642)
People bring this up to every RISC-V discussion but the same could be said for ARM or x86. For which ARM instruction set is built? Does this ARM cpu support integer division instructions, does support arm and thumb instruction encoding, only arm, only thumb, does it have a floating point unit, does it have neon, does it have MMU. Those are still relevant questions for ARM cores. On x86 situation is even crazier https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/x86-Options.html . Some of the more recent CPUs list ~60 optional features. Even if you look just at generic common profiles you have i386, i486, i586, i686, x86-64, x86-64-v2, x86-64-v3, x86-64-v4. Just a single family of vector instructions has 6 different versions for example: SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2. I am not even going to try counting all the variations and optional instructions of AVX512.

On one hand this is an important topic, especially in contexts like which X86-64 profile are the software in Linux distro official repositories targeting.

At the same time no one is bothered by 20 cent ARM mcu not having instructions for atomic memory access, supervisor, SIMD or even floating point.

So if anything RISC-V instruction set optional feature sets are probably better structured and less fragmented (for now) than the current situation with ARM and x86.

Re:Decompiling a Nintendo 64 Game in 84 Days on Friday August 28, 2026 @09:33AM (#49478235)
Matching decompilation is a verifiable target that ensures feature parity but it says nothing about being reasonable non slop decompilation.

Disassembler output can relatively easily match original binary, I doubt anyone would consider it decompilation.

Let's say you add requirement of being higher abstraction language than assembly. You can translate the assembly code 1:1 with simple string substitions to C code which would provably replicate the behavior of program perfectly. I would consider that more of hard coded emulation, opposite of JIT like ahead of time code translation. Just because the intermediate langauge is higher level language than assembly doesn't automatically mean that the program text operates at higher level of abstraction than assembly.

I have seen plenty of decompilation projects where you start reading the code many functions contain nonsensical variable reuse (and name that match the register names), address calculations and memory casts and array calculations, arrays of function pointers, offsets within structures which strongly mirrors the assembly code.

The problem is that you can't draw a hard line how good do the variable/function names need to be so that it can be considered decompilation instead of hard coded emulation. It's hard to draw a line for how much of higher level language features you need to use to be considered decompilation. It's hard to define how logical the control flow needs to be. The line becomes blurrier by system programmers approaching it from the other side. Sometimes an extensively optimized code can contain a lot more manual memory mangling, index and offset calculations, manual unrolling than the language requires. So many C programs with homebrew systems of emulating virtual functions using structs of pointers. In such situations it's hard to tell if decompilation is incomplete or whether program was written that way from start.

Another possibility of junk decompilation (which perfectly compiles to byte identical copy of original executable) is program which depends on exact program layout in memory or undefined aspects of programming language. It would perfectly replicate original behavior on original hardware/compiler, but provide 0 insights in intended program behavior and fail miserably when attempting to modify the code or port it to different hardware/compiler. For example the "decompiled" code might intentionally peform out of bounds array access thus touching completely different variable or depend on fallthrough between functions lacking return statement.

Taking it to the extreme would be something like:

```

char data[] = {0x10, 0x12, 0xab, 0xcf, ...}; // bytes corresponding to majority of original program.

int main(){ ((void*())data)(); // cast the array to function pointer and execute it

} ```

It might behave exactly like original program, but that's junk decompilation.

You could add additional restriction that C program isn't allowed to exploit any undefined or machine specific behavior, but then there is very high chance that even original program wouldn't satisfy it.

Original program might also contain parts of it written in assembly for performance reasons or because that was only way to access certain hardware features. What does it mean for decompilation? Is decompiled code not allowed to use the same techniques. If decompiled code is allowed to have some pieces of assembly what stops it from using it for everything. There is no way of knowing precisely how much assembly the original program used.

Re:The mathematical beauty of hyperbezier curves on Saturday August 15, 2026 @12:30PM (#49311927)
There are two bad properties in terms of interactivity (and for other uses). In some configurations hyperbezier explodes towards infinity or at least way outside the bounds of control points. Cubic beziers don't do that, if control points are bounded the curve will be as well. This is direct result of how cubic bezier can be calculated with series of linear interpolations. Other issue was that there were discontinuities while moving through parameter space or at least very sudden jumps, small changes of control points caused curve flip to completely different shape.
Re:Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI? on Saturday August 15, 2026 @12:10PM (#49311745)
Even if you ignore the nonavoidable copies which happen during normal usage of digital files there is no way they don't dozens of different real copies of their training dataset across many different servers accessible by many people.
Re:The Ploopy A+ Trackball Is Here on Saturday August 15, 2026 @09:07AM (#49310233)
> They really need to find a better name

They seem to be happy with extra engagement from people who hate the name. https://blog.ploopy.co/yall-need-a-new-name-48

Re:The Ploopy A+ Trackball Is Here on Saturday August 15, 2026 @12:59AM (#49307778)
It's a blog of a niche computer peripheral company not a store listing. And it's not their first product either, only blog is having problems rest of website is still wotking and in the store you can get a pretty good picture of what their typical kits look like. Most likely only sensor, the only through hole component needs soldering. They also ofer fully assembled versions, although initial preorer batch might be kits only .
Re:IPC-7351B Electronic Component Zero Orientation [pdf] on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @04:44AM (#49180190)
By all LEDs do you mean addressable and other multipin LEDs? Never seen anything weird with classic 5mm/3mm. The flat side+leg length is quite reliable. 0805/1206 smd LEDs also seem mostly fine.

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