jonp888 (u/jonp888) - Readit News

jonp888 commented on Reverse Engineered Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 github.com/schlae/cm5-rev... · Posted by u/_Microft

ACCount37 · 3 days ago

This is a PCB layout and board schematics. So this helps component level repair (uneconomical in first world) and diagnosing some of the weirder failures or hardware limitations. It also helps make a stronger case that RPI Foundation should have released this in the first place.

You could use this to make clones - but only if you could source at least the BCM2712 SoC, preferably RP1 too. I can't imagine that happening in practice.

jonp888 · 3 days ago

It has. At one point HardKernel "found" some Broadcom chips and made a one-off unauthorized batch of the Pi-compatible Odroid-W. Rpi weren't amused :)

jonp888 commented on Debian 13 “Trixie” debian.org/News/2025/2025... · Posted by u/ducktective

winter_blue · 21 days ago

> but several features in ntfy won't be available through debian packaging due to missing golang and nodejs packages

Woah. Shouldn’t Node and Golang be in Debian’s official repos by now?

jonp888 · 20 days ago

Nodejs itself is, but when you install a node project manually, you type npm install and wait while it downloads the 500 different packages it depends on.

Debian follows the same philosophy as for other more traditional languages and expects that all these dependencies are packaged as individual Debian packages.

jonp888 commented on AccuWeather to discontinue free access to Core Weather API developer.accuweather.com... · Posted by u/TerribleTurnout

lxgr · a month ago

Semi off-topic, but does anybody know a good weather radar app that has coverage outside the US (with particular interest in Europe)?

Apple/Dark Sky seems to only cover a very limited number of countries (despite many more providing radar data under open access), and zoom.earth seems to be shutting down precipitation radar by September.

jonp888 · a month ago

I use WetterOnline, it's German but I think it covers all of Europe.

jonp888 commented on Couchers is officially out of beta couchers.org/blog/2025/07... · Posted by u/laurentlb

aapeli · 2 months ago

I'm one of the Couchers founders and wrote this blog post (and incidentally spend way too much time on HN), awesome to see this show up here!

This launch is the culmination of a huge push from our volunteer team to clean up a bunch of core features and make the platform easier to use. We are also launching a new branding strategy and new landing page.

Quick plug: we are looking for senior React Native devs to join us and help us get a mobile app out, as well as React/Python devs for frontend/backend. Everything we do is open source (under MIT): https://github.com/Couchers-org/couchers/

Happy to answer any questions folks might have!

jonp888 · 2 months ago

Alternatives to Couchsurfing.com such as BeWelcome and WarmShowers have been around for many years, decades even and have users counts into 6 figures. They've remained non-corporate but never managed to reach mainstream popularity like Couchsurfing.com did.

What are you hoping to achieve by launching another hospitality sharing site that the other established non-profit sites couldn't?

jonp888 commented on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites bbc.co.uk/news/live/ckg3r... · Posted by u/mattcollins

827a · 2 months ago

I genuinely do not understand where this take is coming from.

The incentives for having a nuclear program have not changed. Ukraine did not have nukes. Crimea, as a part of Ukraine. Syria. Iraq. Afghanistan. Vietnam. Libya. None of these countries had nukes. They paid for it.

What happened today isn't only not a "massive" change to the status quo, as you seem to think it is. Its so much less significant than what happened to the rest of those countries I just listed. Yet, you used the word "massive". Why? I have no idea.

Iran did not learn any new lessons yesterday. Nothing they didn't already know. The US does not want them to have nukes. We've done everything short of boots on the ground to stop them from having them. They should still want them. They're correct, in the defense of their territorial sovereignty, to want them. But, we'll keep stopping them. That's how it was in the 2000s, the 2010s, its how it is the 2020s, and it's how it will be in the 2030s and 2040s. They keep trying, we keep stopping them. The incentives haven't changed. Nothing has changed. Yet you doomers keep thinking this is the end of the world or its WW3. It isn't.

If anything has changed: Iran just learned that something which took them a decade of development, cost hundreds of lives, and billions of dollars, was stopped by a couple planes from a country half a world away at basically no cost to us, without barely a thought or care. Fox News was tracking these B2s on ADSB a day before they hit Iran; it didn't matter. That's how ahead the US is. The asymmetry here should scare the shit out of them, and the world; that they will never have a conventional nuclear program because they're so unbelievably outmatched and outgunned that if our President has one bad nights sleep he could just wipe out half their country, half of any country, with no congressional authorization, no checks, no balances, just launch a plane and they're dead. Maybe this pushes them to non-conventional means of obtaining nukes; but it shouldn't significantly change their desire for wanting one in the first place. They've always wanted nukes.

jonp888 · 2 months ago

Analysed logically the aim of your post was a positive message that pushes back against "doomers", yet somehow it left me more depressed about the utter futility and meaningless of existence than any other comment I've read so far.

jonp888 commented on Riding high in Germany on the world's oldest suspended railway theguardian.com/travel/20... · Posted by u/pseudolus

lproven · 3 months ago

I went through Wuppertal on the train in February after FOSDEM and saw the schwebebahn with my own eyes for the first time.

I wish I'd jumped off and taken a ride... but I was on an Interrail ticket, and my seat cost me €50. If I'd given it up, I'd have had to buy another one...

jonp888 · 3 months ago

That's quite strange. Unlike in say France or Spain, all domestic trains in Germany should be reservation free for all Interrail ticket holders, including the fastest ICE trains.

jonp888 commented on Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26 macrumors.com/2025/06/04/... · Posted by u/danso

DidYaWipe · 3 months ago

Except that they aren't shown as bullets, headers, or bold unless your viewer understands the Markdown codes that invoke those decorations. Which is what I'm decrying the lack of.

My "alternative" is to have DEDICATED, lightweight Markdown viewers. The major OSes have long come with a simple text-file viewer that can render RTF. Why not Markdown?

In the meantime, I'm mystified as to why the format is so rampant when there is so little support for it.

jonp888 · 3 months ago

The whole point of Markdown is that the formatting codes intutitively make sense and are readable even without a viewer and without needing to read a specification first. People have been using asterisks as bullet points and to emphasise things long before anyone came up with Markdown.

Maybe it doesn't to you, but it does to most people.

An update to Microsoft Notepad which renders Markdown is currently being rolled out: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/05/30/text-fo...

jonp888 commented on Googler... ex-Googler nerdy.dev/ex-googler... · Posted by u/namukang

gnfargbl · 5 months ago

Well, sure, but unless the US company is willing to set up an EU subsidiary and employ you via that then you'll be working as an independent contractor. That status gives you zero employment rights, because you're explicitly not an employee.

jonp888 · 5 months ago

That's usually illegal, unless you're a genuine independent contractor that completes work packages for multiple clients.

If it was legal to work in the office of your only "client" 40 hours a week on a permanent basis, then any EU company could ignore the entire employment legislation of their real country by setting up a shell subsidiary in the US.

jonp888 commented on Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth? cleantechnica.com/2025/03... · Posted by u/guerby

jimnotgym · 6 months ago

I can't agree with the underlying idea of this article at all.

1) hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric. I don't see how that is true. Hydrogen uses an ICE that is much cheaper to purchase than batteries + motor. Of course early stage niche designs might be more expensive, but that doesn't mean that it will be more expensive at scale

2) somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot, because it was in one case. Bus depots often have their own diesel, why couldn't they have hydrogen?

3) it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle. Superchargers can recharge a piddly car battery in 20 minutes. How much larger would they need to be to recharge a bus and how long would it take? How big a grid connection would you need to have 100 buses on charge overnight. It doesn't sound trivial at all

4) depreciation. An electric car depreciates very quickly because the battery lifetime is short. Think of how many batteries a bus would need, and write that down over 3 years. A hydrogen bus would have a similar lifetime to a diesel however

5) JCB who make earth moving and farm equipment realised that batteries would never have the energy density for those uses has gone all-in on hydrogen and has demonstrators of its main machines, a hydrogen bowser that can be brought to the field and a very compact hydrogen plant with solar panels that can allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.

6) hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy.

I would say that rather than transport operators demonstrating naive thinking, they have demonstrated their own.

I'm also suprised by the people on here think that this must be the result of advicacy from the petrochemical industry, then going on to shill for the electric vehicle industry themselves. The electric car industry is only alive due to subsidy, and is only just alive at that.

jonp888 · 6 months ago

1) Hydrogen combustion engines exist, but are extremely inefficent. For this reason all Hydrogen buses currently in use use fuel cells, which are expensive and complicated. That you were unaware of this makes me doubt the rest of your commentary.

2) There is a huge existing logistics network which conveys diesel to all corners of the world. The same, in a sense for electricity. For Hydrogen this doesn't exist.

5) The chairman of JCB wrote to all his employees before the Brexit referendum to say how he was absolutely convinced it would be a brilliant success and would lead to great prosperity for Britain. So probably not the best people to take strategy advice from.

In Europe at least, battery powered trains and commercial vehicles have been in use for decades simply because they were the best solution for certain use cases, before anyone thought about the climate or subsidies related to it. Hydrogen only came along once subsidies did.

In every single case I am aware in my country Hydrogen vehicles were only purchased because politicians insisted that Hydrogen MUST be used, and these projects have pretty much all been disastrous.

Recent in my city a number of diesel trains were replaced with battery and hydrogen. The Hydrogen trains lasted two weeks before they gave up and went back to Diesel. The battery ones are running perfectly.

jonp888 commented on US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s ukrainetoday.org/us-ends-... · Posted by u/ctack

genewitch · 6 months ago

okay, but 8 of the top 10 shareholders (and four of the top four) in Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc are American. I'm not really sure "ain't a subsidiary" is quite what you make of it. I was incorrect, but i hedged, i guessed that the aircraft engine parts wasn't owned by ford, but i was not sure.

in the context of this discussion, if all american investors pulled out of Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc because they were tasked with copying an american engine... could Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc make that engine?

This is what american isolationism means and will look like.

jonp888 · 6 months ago

Rolls Royce is also responsible for building and maintaining the nuclear reactors used in Britain's missile launch submarines.

If things really got so bad that American investors began intentionally sabotaging the operations of foreign companies, it would probably be forcibly nationalised by the British Government.