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ranma42 commented on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?    · Posted by u/ofalkaed
znpy · 4 months ago
Not so long ago there was a leak of windows’ source code, up to xp and 2003 server… the leak was so complete there are videos on YouTube about people building and booting (!!!) windows from there.

And yet, no big leap in ReactOS (at least for now).

ranma42 · 4 months ago
IIRC ReactOs forbids you from contributing if you had access to the windows source code in some way shape or form.
ranma42 commented on Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev   ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/10/... · Posted by u/thomasjb
mmaunder · 4 months ago
Thanks, very interesting. TIL.
ranma42 · 4 months ago
I've been mounting my 3.5" hard drives on those "fad" rubber band 5.25" drive bay adapters for decades and have not noticed any increased failure rate at all. Sure, seek time may be worse, but the reduced noise has been worth it for me.
ranma42 commented on Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels   grist.org/buildings/how-g... · Posted by u/bilsbie
55555 · 4 months ago
Can you break down the costs and subsidies you had? Genuinely curious
ranma42 · 4 months ago
Not OP, but I installed a "Balcony solar" 1.4kWp panels 2.4kWh battery system on my parents garage. The only subsidy was the tax free purchase of the components (we did file for an additional tax break with the city, but they had already run out of funds for that because it is so popular). You also save a lot of money on installation costs.

Cost breakdown:

- 400 EUR 2.4kWh 48V battery

- 320 EUR 4x 360W solar panels

- 200 EUR 800W microinverter

- ~200 EUR for helping hands when getting the panels onto the flat roof

- 160 EUR flat roof mounting equipment

- 153 EUR solar cable, connectors and crimping tool

- 115 EUR MPPT charge controller and cables

- 95 EUR electrics (e.g. fuses, dc/dc converter for OpenDTU)

- 50 EUR other assorted costs

So about 1693 EUR in total.

Total yield after 1.3 years: 1715 kWh (including power fed back into the grid)

Of that, discharged from battery: 488 kWh (battery already paid back ~146 EUR)

At the current energy costs, 1715 kWh would be ~514 EUR imported from grid

ranma42 commented on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out   gavi.org/vaccineswork/den... · Posted by u/slu
OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 5 months ago
It's less that and more "we just haven't tested it in older populations yet".

Sure you are more likely to have it the older you are but even then you are unlikely to have all the strains. The vaccine covers like 9 or 10 different strains so it can protect you from the other strains even if you already have one of them.

It's generally only when you get into the 60s and up that the justification for not recommending the vaccine changes. Once you get into those later years the immune response changes a bit and you get new concerns.

An example being herpes zoster (chickenpox) where after a certain age you are recommended to get the shingles vaccine instead of the chickenpox vaccine since the way the disease presents and how the body reacts to it changes with age (technically shingles can happen at any age but generally herpes zoster presents as shingles instead of chickenpox the older you get).

ranma42 · 5 months ago
> you are recommended to get the shingles vaccine instead of the chickenpox vaccine since the way the disease presents and how the body reacts to it changes with age (technically shingles can happen at any age but generally herpes zoster presents as shingles instead of chickenpox the older you get).

If the underlying virus is the same, what is different between the vaccines? How it presents shouldn't matter as much?

ranma42 commented on The mystery of Alice in Wonderland syndrome   bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/amichail
WrongOnInternet · 6 months ago
Surprised that the article never mentions psychedelics, because I experience something similar almost every time I am under the influence of one.
ranma42 · 6 months ago
It does say "Certain cough medicines and illicit hallucinogenic substances are also known to trigger it"
ranma42 commented on What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512   serd.es/2025/07/04/Switch... · Posted by u/ahlCVA
azonenberg · 7 months ago
This is why I used a VSC PHY. After they bought Microsemi (and Vitesse as a division of Microsemi) it looked like the only viable option to get a QSGMII PHY since all the other players were much worse.

When I first started the project in 2012-13, Vitesse was just as NDA-happy and I ruled them out. The original roadmap called for a 24-port switch with 24 individual TI DP83867 SGMII PHYs on three 8-port line cards.

ranma42 · 7 months ago
BTW looking at the 8051 patch bytes, they look like 8051 code to me. 0x02 is the ljmp opcode, so this is a jump table: 0x02, 0x40, 0x58, 0x02, 0x40, 0x4e, 0x02, 0x44, 0x00, 0x02, 0x42, 0x2b, 0x02, 0x41, 0x82

I poked at a vsc73xx-based switch in the past and wrote my own test firmware, but had problems with packet loss since I didn't do all the necessary phy initializations I guess, in case this might be of interest: https://github.com/ranma/openvsc73xx/blob/master/example/pay...

Also on the device I had the EEPROM was tiny and the code is loaded from EEPROM into RAM, you were pretty much stuck with 8051 assembly that had to fit into the 8KiB of onchip RAM :)

ranma42 commented on Nordic Semiconductor Acquires Memfault   nordicsemi.com/Nordic-new... · Posted by u/hasheddan
Neywiny · 8 months ago
Looks like it switches different ranges. ST makes something similar that has similar dynamic range without switching. They use analog circuitry (op amps and junk) to compensate for the resistor drop, so the path is uninterrupted. I've had systems where the auto-ranging on a bench meter is enough to cause it to reset. I can't find a schematic for the PPKII (haven't looked too hard though) but if it's actually switching the supply, that can cause issues to devices downstream. Especially if that switching causes a voltage drop change.
ranma42 · 8 months ago
I have the ST one (X-NUCLEO-LPM01A), but its range is actually not enough for something like an ESP32, it goes into "overload" as the max current is 50mA for dynamic (100kHz bandwith) and 200mA for "static" measurements.

Looks like the PPKII can do up to 1A.

ranma42 commented on Linux on the Behringer X32 [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=6CfLC... · Posted by u/birdman3131
seba_dos1 · 8 months ago
Where did you get the idea that it's powered by Linux from?
ranma42 · 8 months ago
The partition table listing from the microSD card shown in the video (before installing a custom u-boot/Linux) shows partitions marked as the Linux partition type at least.
ranma42 commented on Maximizing Battery Storage Profits via High-Frequency Intraday Trading   arxiv.org/abs/2504.06932... · Posted by u/doener
ACCount36 · 8 months ago
> Unless you specifically design for it (specifically, with a dummy load), the efficiency of the system is inversely proportional to its ability to do this. You need a secondary system.

Many multicell BMS already have this kind of "power shedding" capability. They use it for cell balancing - to equalize voltage between cells with slightly different characteristics. This is desirable despite the power waste, because it reduces wear, increases charging efficiency and allows battery packs to last longer.

Some battery packs are also designed to be able to dump enough power into heat to be able to keep the batteries warm during extreme cold.

ranma42 · 8 months ago
The amount of power you can dump for balancing is just a fraction of the charge/discharge power (because it only needs to offset differences in self-discharge rate). So you still need a proper dummy load when you want to dump more.

Similarly, the heatsinking capacity of the battery is designed for charging/discharging losses (say 5% of charge/discharge power).

ranma42 commented on Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful   aruarian.dance/blog/japan... · Posted by u/aecsocket
ranma42 · 9 months ago
> Since there's no point in generating keys for a device which will not be used in Japan, non-Japan SKUs don't have Osaifu-Keitai functionality. So even if you rooted your phone and had full access to the secure element, if your phone's secure element doesn't have the key, you can't use it as an IC card.

At least in some cases it is sufficient to change the phone SKU id (which requires temporary rooting) to the Japan SKU id to unlock the Osaifu-Keitai functionality on a non-Japan phone. I'm not sure if this means that the secure element had the necessary keys provisioned all along, or just that the Osaifu-Keitai app then provisions it on first use.

u/ranma42

KarmaCake day155November 21, 2017View Original