Hacker News: anaphor

New comment by anaphor in "My favorite prime number generator"

anaphor — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 16:46:14 +0000

There's a functional / lazy version I like that uses a priority queue in order to get the next prime number https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve-JFP.pdf

It basically uses the priority queue to store all the composites up to a certain point and then you can assume the next one is prime.

I had some (admittedly not well written) code for it too https://gist.github.com/weskerfoot/4699275

It can also incorporates the wheel factorization optimization mentioned in this article.

New comment by anaphor in "Ask HN: Why do many CS graduates lack foundational knowledge?"

anaphor — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 13:27:43 +0000

Because they all cheated on their coursework and got graded on a curve for exams. Source: I was a TA for an intro CS course.

New comment by anaphor in "Ask HN: Can you recommend a book to learn basic electrical concepts/engineering?"

anaphor — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 18:42:40 +0000

Watch EEVblog's playlist on DC theory, and then play around with a breadboard and simulations using something like circuitjs. Get some basic tools such as a soldering iron (and solder/wick/sponge/etc), breadboard, wires, and a collection of components like resistors, capacitors, and LEDs, and so on. r/AskElectronics has a guide for all of the practical stuff you need. Pick a project you actually find interesting and work on it (after learning how to safely use your tools and components).

Lots of people get started with things like using a microcontroller to light up some LEDs and so on. That will introduce you to basic concepts like how transistors work as well if you dig into it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSRe_4TQbuo&list=PLvOlSehNtu...

https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/wiki/beginners/

New comment by anaphor in "Rogers Canada, please fix the damn internet in Canada"

anaphor — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 05:10:44 +0000

I have Teksavvy via Cogeco and had no issues (obviously). I just discovered Rogers owns 41% of their shares though :|

New comment by anaphor in "Five major Canadian banks mysteriously go offline in hours-long outage"

anaphor — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:14:28 +0000

These are just reports people made that the sites were down. Not actual data from monitoring tools or something. I used my Canadian banking website a bunch of times yesterday and had no issues. Banking websites go down for maintenance or randomly start acting slow because of the crappy infrastructure they're built on, or because of other reasons located between your computer and their servers. Nothing I've seen shows any actual evidence that anything out of the ordinary happened. Just confirmation bias.

New comment by anaphor in "Living on 24 hours a day"

anaphor — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 04:30:11 +0000

Or block all of the non-educational youtube channels. Personally a good portion of my youtube usage is educational videos about electronics now. It feels like much less of a waste of time than twitter or instagram.

New comment by anaphor in "Memories of the “Sneakers” Shoot (2012)"

anaphor — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 21:08:41 +0000

They referenced the movie on Stranger Things as well with a line similar to the one River Phoenix's character says: "It's fascinating what 50 bucks will get you at the county recorder's office"

New comment by anaphor in "Why It’s So Difficult – and Costly – To Secure Chips"

anaphor — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 20:58:07 +0000

You can even place a backdoor on a circuit without any noticeable physical changes (other than chemical differences which are extremely hard to detect). You basically change which chemicals are used to "dope" the transistors, which changes their polarity.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860715

New comment by anaphor in "Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?"

anaphor — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 17:43:06 +0000

It works if you put it in "Verbatim" mode for that particular search, but I don't know how to make it permanent. Does anyone know if there's a way to always force it to use "verbatim" mode?

New comment by anaphor in "Nim Community Survey"

anaphor — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 22:19:54 +0000

That's awesome. I didn't file an issue yet but I was hoping to try it again soon and get a better idea of what's going wrong first.

New comment by anaphor in "Nim Community Survey"

anaphor — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 16:56:59 +0000

You can always call the C functions directly (from a shared lib) although admittedly it's a pain because you have to deal with unmanaged pointers very often.

New comment by anaphor in "Nim Community Survey"

anaphor — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 16:09:29 +0000

I would really like to see more work on improving the use of Nim for programming microcontrollers. I stumbled on to https://github.com/elcritch/nesper recently and it looks neat, but I had issues getting my code to compile. Improved support for other MCUs like the esp8266 and atmega32u4 would be really cool and useful. It would be nice to have Nim as a higher level alternative to micropython or lua in the embedded world (your only other real alternatives being C/C++ or Rust).

I also found this https://disconnected.systems/blog/nim-on-adruino

New comment by anaphor in "Doubling the PinePhone storage speed with a soldering iron"

anaphor — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 03:31:11 +0000

good to know! I was a bit confused by that at first :)

New comment by anaphor in "Doubling the PinePhone storage speed with a soldering iron"

anaphor — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 03:21:03 +0000

So this blog post covers the 1.0 hardware revision, but I just opened up mine out of curiosity and realized I have the 1.2 revision, which uses the sandisk chip, so everything is different. Not 100% sure which components need to be changed there, but it would be good to figure out the exact instructions for both types.

New comment by anaphor in "Doubling the PinePhone storage speed with a soldering iron"

anaphor — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 01:55:45 +0000

I would recommend getting a roll of kapton tape as well (make sure it's not counterfeit), and then use that to mask other components so you don't accidentally damage stuff

New comment by anaphor in "Doubling the PinePhone storage speed with a soldering iron"

anaphor — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 01:47:27 +0000

you could use an appropriate hot air station + some flux as well I think (and a good pair of tweezers designed for electronics)

Also, kapton tape is very useful if you're afraid of damaging stuff around it

New comment by anaphor in "ProctorU is dystopian spyware"

anaphor — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 17:39:46 +0000

Doctors google rare disease symptoms sometimes, however, and it's seen as a legitimate thing to try if you're truly stumped by a mysterious illness.

New comment by anaphor in "HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)"

anaphor — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 16:40:49 +0000

Named-data networking is literally what this is describing, except NDN works as a replacement for TCP, not HTTP. In the long term I'd rather have it work at a lower level and not have to think about it much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg

New comment by anaphor in "Multitasking Doesn't Work"

anaphor — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 16:00:26 +0000

And if you enjoy piano, there's some music specially created for this purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexations

New comment by anaphor in "Multitasking Doesn't Work"

anaphor — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 15:54:21 +0000

I find that I can focus better if I listen to a single track on repeat (I've done it literally for hours). The repetition helps for some reason because you're not surprised.