Hacker News: RichieAHB

New comment by RichieAHB in "I broke IKEA (2023)"

RichieAHB — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 12:01:09 +0000

The last 15 seconds sounds like it hit the runout groove on the IKEA phone system vinyl!

New comment by RichieAHB in "Post Office plan to sack Horizon IT reviewer kept secret, documents reveal"

RichieAHB — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 12:53:01 +0000

It feels like that might be a fair point in other context but as one of your sibling posts says: this is just double entry book keeping.

Print out the transactions with their timestamps and it feels this should have been very clearly a computer error given the duplicates etc.

New comment by RichieAHB in "Show HN: I made a tool to compare time zones"

RichieAHB — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 09:20:38 +0000

Nice little idea! As a slight aside I’m not sure where the timezone / city list has come from but it labels Hanoi as in Thailand (rather than Vietnam).

New comment by RichieAHB in "Normal Operating Sounds"

RichieAHB — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 12:47:25 +0000

I guess the question would be, if indeed these suggestions would solve those problems, how much does this cost (I genuinely have no idea!) and how much do I want to spend on this versus putting up a webpage to direct people too.

I want to shave off every last ms of latency in the services I own but at the end of the day at some point it’s good enough (and best for the business) just to manage expectations.

New comment by RichieAHB in "Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall"

RichieAHB — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 10:02:40 +0000

IIUC cm precision should be fine if the algorithms looking for stable placement accounts for that cm (and reality id imagine it’d account for less precision than that). If a placement needs sub cm precision the algorithm would just discard that option.

Additionally there shouldn’t be any accumulation in a specific direction. Any accumulated gaps would be accounted for when placing the next rock and rectified to within a cm.

New comment by RichieAHB in "datetime.utcnow() is now deprecated"

RichieAHB — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 21:39:52 +0000

A store’s opening hours will probably remain 9am-5pm regardless of any time zone changes around it. If you run a bunch of stores across time zones you need to know where each store is and whether it’s summer or winter to work backwards to find out 9-5 in UTC.

New comment by RichieAHB in "Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI"

RichieAHB — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 08:58:30 +0000

Makes we wonder how much of the investor’s money was put in to OpenAI as a company or in Sam and the leadership. I think the answer is probably the latter, and the fact that Sam’s firing was this easy (and would likely have the effect of others going in quick order) seems like a massive oversight in terms of investor due diligence in board structure etc.

New comment by RichieAHB in "Building a high performance JSON parser"

RichieAHB — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 15:18:36 +0000

I feel like trying to infer valid JSON from invalid JSON is a recipe for garbage. You’d probably be better off doing a second pass with the “JSON” through the LLM but, as the sibling commenter said, at this point even the good JSON may be garbage …

New comment by RichieAHB in "Desmos 3D graphing calculator"

RichieAHB — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 19:39:43 +0000

My phone gets pretty warm when I zoom out but the UI remains nice and responsive …

New comment by RichieAHB in "Daktilo: Turn Your Keyboard into a Typewriter"

RichieAHB — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 13:36:00 +0000

I want to hear that at normal typing speed. I feel like, unless there are a good amount of slightly varied samples, it's going to have that TR-808 repetitive vibe going on ...

New comment by RichieAHB in "What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023"

RichieAHB — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 15:59:12 +0000

Here’s a good example of the test cases used for backspaces in Android[1]. It’s definitely more involved than just deleting a grapheme cluster.

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

New comment by RichieAHB in "Tell HN: There is a highlights page on HN"

RichieAHB — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:51:06 +0000

Nice to see Clifford Stoll currently topping the page. I bought The Cuckoo's Egg after reading enough people recommending it on HN and so to see the author referencing the main events in that book as the most recent highlight kinda brings things full circle!

New comment by RichieAHB in "Choose Postgres queue technology"

RichieAHB — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 06:59:19 +0000

This works fine as long as you’re happy to do the same task multiple times. I.e. the task is idempotent and cheap.

New comment by RichieAHB in "Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002)"

RichieAHB — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 07:58:53 +0000

I read it every time!

New comment by RichieAHB in "FAA authorizes Zipline to deliver commercial packages using drones"

RichieAHB — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 07:16:35 +0000

While that is true for Platform 2 drones, from reading this article [1] it seems the ruling currently only applies to Platform 1 drones (ie. the specs I was referencing). Although it does seem like the Platform 2 drones would be more of what you’d imagine for drones dropping consumer packages in the US. And that article goes on to state that this ruling seems like a jumping off point for securing further exemptions (ie for the Platform 2).

[1] https://dronedj.com/2023/09/19/zipline-earns-faa-bvlos-exemp...

New comment by RichieAHB in "FAA authorizes Zipline to deliver commercial packages using drones"

RichieAHB — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 06:03:09 +0000

For others interested in how these Sparrow (“Platform 1”) drones operate:

- Cruises at 80-120m and 60mph

- Max payload of 1.8kg

- 50 mile max delivery distance (although it can fly 190 mile on a single charge)

- Payload dropped by parachute from 25-30m into a 5m diameter landing zone.

More details on Wikipedia[1] and the Zipline site[2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_comp...

[2] https://www.flyzipline.com/technology

New comment by RichieAHB in "The Rules of Margin Collapse"

RichieAHB — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 21:04:06 +0000

Nice article! As with all CSS posts there’s always something in there I’ve never used. Today it was `display: flow-root;` [1]. I’ll probably never use it given Grid and Flex but still interesting to see this may have saved some small headaches in the past.

[1] https://css-tricks.com/display-flow-root/

New comment by RichieAHB in "Is this Duplo train track under too much tension?"

RichieAHB — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 16:48:11 +0000

Simpsons aside: I wish this was titled "Is there a chance the track could bend?".

New comment by RichieAHB in "Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process"

RichieAHB — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 20:20:44 +0000

Taking a picture is deterministic. You aim at something, configure the settings and the cells / CMOS will capture that light in the right manner. You can argue that autofocus and portrait-mode are eroding this but ultimately, if you, the human are not pointing at something good in the first place, well you’ll very likely not have a very good picture. I feel like with AI and a random seed you can ask a question of which you have added none of your own reflection into and it will produce something somewhat in the ballpark that may pass as real. I.e. you don’t even have to point the camera at anything good …

Edit: not to say you can’t use it as a muse or for inspiration, but it isn’t a prerequisite.

New comment by RichieAHB in "What's Hashing? (2022)"

RichieAHB — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:48:55 +0000

Given this is for a non-tech audience I think this is reasonable. It basically talks about it being a lossy encoding of things that represent the original. Also, if the words / chars were stored as an array or string already you wouldn’t need to read every byte.