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bacon_waffle

Re:Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Francis Halzen on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @02:52PM (#49982476)
I spent a bit over a year at South Pole for IceCube. There's an old joke in the Antarctic: the first time is for the adventure, the second time is for the money, and the third time is because you don't fit in anywhere else anymore.

Anyway, I'd love to do it again

Re:Making holograms with a pen plotter on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @11:10PM (#49267424)
Chocolate is a good medium for holograms :)
Re:USB-C for Lightning iPhones on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @08:18PM (#44729738)
Thanks for the link - PCBWay recently offered me sponsorship, and this video has provided some good inspiration to make use of it :)
The additional battery weight would be something under 250kg (having handled a few Leaf battery packs), and wikipedia says the Niro EV is about 1700kg
Re:Touching the back wall of the Apple store on Monday June 30, 2025 @12:57AM (#44419554)
I regularly notice bugs when using iOS Mail; one that springs to mind would display one email's body with the header info from another email, it seems to have recently been fixed but was easily reproducible for weeks if not months.
Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2025) on Tuesday June 03, 2025 @09:30PM (#44176431)
Location: South Island, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rust, electronics, insulation

Résumé/CV: https://ianrees.nz/tech/about.html

Email: code atsign ianrees dot en ze(e|d)

Microchip: please hire me to work on the Rust HAL for your ATSAM chips, which I currently volunteer the odd hour or two to help maintain. Between Rust bringing robust modular software in to embedded, and companies like Adafruit pumping out ATSAM boards, there's huge potential in this space.

https://github.com/atsamd-rs/atsamd

Re:Show HN: Rotary Phone Dial Linux Kernel Driver on Saturday May 24, 2025 @04:19PM (#44083557)
Fun historical twist: New Zealand rotary phones used a reversed mapping between digit and pulse count - here the number of pulses was 10-digit.
There are techniques for "stack"ing transistors so that the individual swtiching devices see potentials that are within spec and much lower than the voltage switched by the overall circuit.
Re:Ask HN: Predictions for 2025 on Sunday December 22, 2024 @11:52PM (#42491893)
"The 8th blade sends an electronic pulse to the center of the brain, which destroys the part of the brain responsible for hair growth and 4 other nonessential functions"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjAZnGeBcgg

Re:Deploying Rust in Existing Firmware Codebases on Thursday September 05, 2024 @11:47PM (#41462712)
Usually the HAL is between the main firmware and the PAC, so whether the PAC methods are marked as unsafe could almost be considered an implementation detail.

But yes, there has been a lot of discussion around how to handle DMA peripherals - the embedded_dma crate offers some abstractions that I've found handy.

Whoops, yes you're correct. Serves me right for looking at some SEO spam link!

Main point was that bronze is much more common in marine applications than brass - I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's been an error upstream as well.

I believe bronze (copper + zinc) is a lot more common in marine applications than brass (copper + tin)
It was a stupid riff on the title. But, the Arkansas River does start in Colorado, and so some amount of Colorado's snowpack does wind up in Arkansas' river.
Because it's in the Arkansas River drainage?
Re:How to Build a 50K Ton Forging Press on Thursday August 22, 2024 @12:13AM (#41316750)
Ah, that helps, thanks.

It's a bit academic, but set theory doesn't really apply to such fuzzy human things as knowledge and experience. Repairing and designing are different pursuits which might have a lot of similarities, but I wouldn't presume that a design engineer could competently do the work of a technician.

Just consider that any particular field of engineering as might be described by a lay person, can be far too broad and deep for an individual to be competent in all facets of it. I'm reminded of my neighbour asking for some help configuring email for her new iPhone, because she knows I do computer work. Mainly firmware.

Re:How to Build a 50K Ton Forging Press on Wednesday August 21, 2024 @10:19PM (#41316165)
I've rebuilt several motors, transmissions, various other mechanical contrivances. Sometimes with decent documentation, sometimes not so much. Also done a bit of amateur machining, and worked as an engineer on physical products.

Under no circumstances would I claim that rebuilding a motor was essentially figuring out how to build one from scratch. In software, maybe that's like claiming that figuring out how to configure a new Linux box is essentially the same thing as figuring out how to write an OS.

Re:Heat exchanger masks for cold weather cycling on Thursday January 25, 2024 @06:27PM (#39136891)
The 300 club might be of interest :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300_Club

Re:Coming Home From the South Pole on Thursday January 11, 2024 @05:42PM (#38960474)
Directly, the temperature isn't as big an issue for operating tapes/drives/computers, since they are inside temperature-controlled buildings. There are indirect problems though; the incredibly low relative humidity that results from heating outside air - that dryness leads to problems with static. Various solutions were tried to keep the tapes humidified, but in the end I think everyone was relieved to switch to hard drives :). South Pole is also fairly high elevation, which combined with the low humidity makes air cooling work a lot less well than it might in other places - the air just doesn't have as much heat capacity as in more moderate environments.

As far as transport, it's about a km (in winter, typically a walk) from the main station to the "dark sector" where the CMB telescopes and IceCube Lab are. As another comment points out, there are cables between the main station and the dark sector so typically data flows through them. When you do need to move equipment, it's usually not too big of a deal to carry it inside a parka or something if it's smallish, or arrange a vehicle for bigger items.

Things like cables can be a bit of a learning experience; a friend hand carried a PVC-insulated monitor(?) cable outside, coiled up, then promptly tried to uncoil it and found that PVC gets quite brittle at low temperatures...

Re:Coming Home From the South Pole on Thursday January 11, 2024 @02:39AM (#38948987)
If by "station wagon" you mean LC-130 ;) IceCube switched from tapes to hard drives I think in 2015 or 16.

In 2014 we spent a lot of time fiddling with tapes and drives... At that point, all the data was recorded to tape and flown North in the summer. Additionally, software at Pole filtered out the more interesting events to upload over satellite within hours. I assume it's still basically the same.

Re:USB Made Simple (2008) on Monday October 16, 2023 @07:36PM (#37908137)
Cool! Just in case you haven't come across this, we've got a (rather quiet lately) chat that might be useful.

https://matrix.to/#/#usb-rs:matrix.org

Re:Ray-Ban Meta next generation of smart glasses on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:49PM (#37684198)
Natural Intelligences, it was an attempt at humor.
Re:Ray-Ban Meta next generation of smart glasses on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:29PM (#37684039)
At times in my life, I'd have paid good money to disable that feature of some NIs.
Re:Plants don’t have ears. But they can still detect sound on Monday September 18, 2023 @06:01AM (#37554219)
Imagine an elevator that moves up and down its shaft with a sinusoidal elevation over time. Riding in that elevator, one could detect frequencies with quite long wavelengths compared to the size of a person.

A less abstract example is a boat at sea.

Re:If you can use open source, you can build hardware on Thursday September 07, 2023 @07:36PM (#37427182)
I think that's shifting the goalposts a bit - one can buy weird proprietary stuff from a company or product line that disappears, or build stuff that uses standard interfaces.
Re:If you can use open source, you can build hardware on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @11:05PM (#37400901)
> It it goes wrong, you cannot buy a new one or hire repairperson at a sane price. If it has a software side, it will probably need maintainence.

It's not clear to me that the alternative provides these either. Just thinking about some of the appliance-type things I've had issues with lately: my oven would've made more sense to replace than hire a repair person, and my ISP-provided router is running their latest firmware which is horribly out of date...

Re:On Craft on Monday September 04, 2023 @05:00AM (#37378573)
This sort of approach seems common in the Rust community, it's so much more professional/humane/sustainable/performant than any other corner of the industry that I've come across.
That is an interesting idea! The space of possible next characters expands polynomially, so as you say, the display might be better used with a polar grid compared to cartesian.
Yes, it is a small world after all! I'll email soon.

Sorry, my memory is pretty fuzzy, but here's a contemporary photo in case yours works better: https://icecube.wisc.edu/gallery/winterovers/#modulagallery-...

Wow that was quick, thanks!

Have imagined a music theory/improvisation practice program that looks something like Dasher + Guitar Hero.

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