trashb (u/trashb) - Readit News

trashb commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026) · Posted by u/david927

trashb · an hour ago

I have been working on "scratch milling"[0] PCB's at home using my vinyl cutter/plotter and a engraving bit.

Inspired by Robin Debreuil his process and videos (see video the article and several forum posts). He is using a CNC but I figured regulating pressure is more important then depth, therefore my experiments with the plotter.

Currently dialing in the pressure/speed and amount of passes on a single layer copper board.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2020/07/10/making-pcbs-the-easy-way/

trashb commented on I prefer to pass secrets between programs through standard input utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/ingve

Dwedit · 5 days ago

I haven't actually tested this, but aren't the input and output handles exposed on /proc/? What's stopping another process from seeing everything?

trashb · 5 days ago

Yes pipes are exposed /proc/$pid/fd/$thePipeFd with user permissions [0].

Additionally command line parameters are always readable /proc/$YOUR_PROCESS_PID/cmdline [1]

There are workarounds but it's fragile. You may accept the risks and in that case it can work for you but I wouldn't recommend it for "general security". Seems it wouldn't be considered secure if everyone did it this way, therefore is it security through obscurity?

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/156859/is-the-data-...

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3830823/hiding-secret-fr...

trashb commented on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? · Posted by u/terabytest

embedding-shape · 18 days ago

So there seems to be an shared underestanding how difficult "measure your results" would be in this case, so could we also agree that asking someone:

> I wonder if they have measured their results? [...] Can you provide data that objects this view, based on these (celebrity) developers or otherwise?

isn't really fair? Because not even you or I really know how to do so in a fair and reasonable manner, unless we start to involve trials with multiple developers and so on.

trashb · 5 days ago

> isn't this fair?

We are talking about hear say anecdotal evidence from some influential people in the industry. The people mentioned in the comment I responded to have influence to organize certain research. Some measurements (even if not ideal) can point to 20x vs 0.1x speedup differences at least.

I indicated that there is at least some research pointing that developers (experienced or not) often overestimate the gains of using AI. There are a lot of other things that may prompt people to say things regarding emergent industries, for example investments into the AI industry.

I am interested if the claims are real or perhaps overstated. Therefore I asked what kind of information this is based on. This is how science works compared to marketing claims. Hypothesis lead to experiments that result in measurements that lead to a conclusion.

But as of now I still didn't even get a link to the statements supposedly made by these influential developers, this is the rhetoric with a lot of claims around AI especially. And therefore I am still skeptical about such claims until I see some concrete evidence.

So I would say yes it is fair to ask if they measured their results to back up their claims, especially if they are influential developers.

trashb commented on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? · Posted by u/terabytest

edanm · 17 days ago

> I wonder if they have measured their results?

This is a notoriously difficult thing to measure in a study. More relevantly though, IMO, it's not a small effect that might be difficult to notice - it's a huge, huge speedup.

How many developers have measured whether they are faster when programming in Python vs assembly? I doubt many have. And I doubt many have chosen Python over assembly because of any study that backs it up. But it's also not exactly a subtle difference - I'm fairly 99% of people will say that, in practice, it's obvious that Python is faster for programming than assembly.

I talked literally yesterday to a colleague who's a great senior dev, and he made a demo in an hour and a half that he says would've taken him two weeks to do without AI. This isn't a subtle, hard to measure difference. Of course this is in an area where AI coding shines (a new codebase for demo purposes) - but can we at least agree that in some things AI is clearly an order of magnitude speedup?

trashb · 5 days ago

It is entirely plausible that your colleague did have a significant speedup from using AI. But that may also be a one off overstated story (probably not as you respect his judgement as "senior dev").

I'm not saying they didn't get a speedup or you can't get a speedup. I'm just wondering how they determined that speedup and how reliable they are as a source for the statement "using AI will improve your performance".

As the other thread was discussing, it is a difficult thing to prove but some (debatable) measurement proves more then anecdotal stories. And I am trying to probe for some sources where these kind of statements are proven as I am a programmer continually judging the tools available to me.

And on the flip side there is at least some evidence that programmers often overstate/overestimate their speedup when using AI.

trashb commented on Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon

laverya · 5 days ago

Do those people actually _repair_ hardware, or do they swap bad hardware for good chips?

Can SpaceX not just say "OK, GPU #7 on satellite #15872 is broken, don't use it" and just accept that they're now overbuilt on power/cooling for that sat?

trashb · 5 days ago

From what I understand it is in part swapping it, in part upgrading it. Some of it is preventative some of it is reactive. They could overbuild the hardware and slowly disable capacity I think that will not really work. Data centers are static in infrastructure but not in the systems running within them. Actually they are constantly changing to meet the needs.

Overbuilding also comes with a cost when talking about space, it is still very costly to get stuff up there and there is limited bandwidth downstream, you want to balance those two. So if you're overbuilding it costs a lot to get up there, if you disable what's up there you don't fully utilize the bandwidth.

For example AI data centers now use very different hardware compared to 5 or 10 years ago that upgrade path is just a lot harder when your data center is in space.

trashb commented on Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon

trashb · 5 days ago

As others point out this is a bad idea.

Asside from the other excellent comments on power consumption, cooling and radiation. One point I didn't see being made in the comments much is maintenance costs.

Now I don't find myself in the facility of a data center often in daily life, however I do know that medium to big data centers require 24/7 hardware replacement. I believe this is what those 5 guys with the bikes and scooters are doing in every data center. That would be very difficult, near impossible in space (with the current space fairing infrastructure).

trashb commented on PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible redgamingtech.com/playsta... · Posted by u/croes

anonymous908213 · 10 days ago

> (a) happened with a hypothetical hardware platform released after the PS2 but before the PS3, with specs lying in between the two

I would argue strongly that the weak hardware is why the PS2, and other old consoles, were so good, and that by improving the hardware you cannot replicate what they accomplished (which is why, indeed, newer consoles have never managed to be as iconic as older consoles). You can make an equally strong case that the Super Famicom is the best console of all time, with dozens of 10/10 games that stand the test of time. I think the limitations of the hardware played a pivotal role in both, as they demanded good stylistic decisions to create aesthetically appealing games with limited resources, and demanded a significant level of work into curating and optimizing the game design, because every aspect of the game consumed limited resources and therefore bad ideas had to be culled, leaving a well-polished remainder of the best ideas in a sort of Darwinian sense.

> (b) resulted in a sort of standardization in the industry like what happened to the IBM PC and its market of clones, with other vendors continuing to manufacture semi-compatible units

Unlike the PC market, the comprehensive list of "other vendors" is two entries long. Is it a more perfect world if Nintendo manufactures knockoff Playstations instead of its variety of unique consoles? I don't think so.

trashb · 10 days ago

This reminded me of the following quote "Limitation breeds creativity", and therefore the PS2's limitations where instrumental to it's success.

The PS2 in may ways was a great improvement on the PS1 however it was not easy to develop for and could do certain things very well, other things not so well. One example is the graphics due to the unusual architecture of the Emotion Engine (gpu). I think this forced the developers to consider what their games really required and where they wanted to spend the development effort, one of the key ingredients for good game design.

Additionally the release hype of the PS2 was quite big and the graphics that where achievable where very good at the time, so developers wanted to go through the development pains to create a game for this console.

Not to forget besides the mountain of great titles for the PS2 there is also a mountain of flopped games that faded into obscurity.

trashb commented on Why do RSS readers look like email clients? terrygodier.com/phantom-o... · Posted by u/jasonpeacock

tecoholic · 11 days ago

What’s happening in this site? The page loads and number starts going up from 47 and the it says “You fell behind reading this”. And I start scrolling and paras of text start floating up. I am really confused

trashb · 11 days ago

This is "modern web design", I personally prefer a more minimal style.

If you turn on your browser's "reader mode" the article is more readable.

trashb commented on The Texas Instruments CC-40 invades Gopherspace (plus TI-74 BASICALC) oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

trashb · 12 days ago

Very informative write up!

Though at the end I was left wondering if it can run more traditional line oriented programs though the usb2ppp interface, something like "ed" (perhaps ex or vi -e) or "edbrowse". I think those programs will be well suited for the physical user interface of this device.

trashb commented on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? · Posted by u/terabytest

dagss · 19 days ago

Fresh example:

I described a problem on UI level. LLM suggested the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm to solve it, which I have never heard about before. It implemented it. Works perfectly. It is 40 lines of code (of which I only really need to review the function signature, and note the fact that it's a recursive bisection algorithm). I would have spent a very long trying to figure out what to do here otherwise and the LLM handed me the solution.

trashb · 18 days ago

Yes this kind of work will be sped up a lot by AI since you are not familiar with the intricacies of the subject matter. Especially with well documented but complex formats it can assist (vector graphics are not necessarily intuitive). Additionally in my experience UI design is quite pattern and boilerplate heavy.

The suggesting of algorithms sounds good, I don't know how you got there but I would ask for several algorithms that fit the bill and narrow it down myself (the first suggestion isn't always optimal).

Thank you for taking the time to shine some light onto what you're doing as I can see how you get that kind of speedup from using AI in this scenario.