Hacker News: asimpson

New comment by asimpson in "The US Government Is Now a Shareholder in 26 Companies"

asimpson — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:16:41 +0000

> The gov can use it's buying power to sway things towards Intel, for example, over AMD

Pretty sure that's the goal: the government wants a competent cutting edge chip maker on US soil.

New comment by asimpson in "The US Government Is Now a Shareholder in 26 Companies"

asimpson — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:08:55 +0000

The investments listed here in the article make this seem like an effort to shore up or incentivize industries or companies that are integral to national defense. One example, in the ongoing US-China trade war one of the strongest moves China did was put [export controls on rare earth minerals][1] which are essential components across technology, defense, and healthcare to name a few. The government investing in these companies isn't ideal from a free enterprise perspective but seems rational from a national security perspective.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earths_trade_dispute

New comment by asimpson in "[dead]"

asimpson — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:35:44 +0000

…you have bigger problems

New comment by asimpson in "Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy"

asimpson — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:20:32 +0000

I've used a HP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF (with an i5-8500) as a NAS/home server for several years now. It's quiet, power efficient, has space for 2 HDDs plus additional nvme slots and regular PCI-e slots. These type of machines are cheap to get on eBay, I highly recommend getting one.

New comment by asimpson in "Cheap mini PCs have gotten good"

asimpson — Mon, 19 May 2025 01:40:13 +0000

I wonder if there would be a perf increase on the Mac minis if they ran OrbStack instead of Docker?

New comment by asimpson in "DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing"

asimpson — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 15:49:33 +0000

You can achieve something similar using vlc + slop on Linux, here's the script I usually use (I run i3 typically).

    selection=$(slop -f %w,%h,%x,%y)
    width=$(echo "${selection}" | cut -d , -f 1)
    height=$(echo "${selection}" | cut -d , -f 2)
    top=$(echo "${selection}" | cut -d , -f 4)
    left=$(echo "${selection}" | cut -d , -f 3)

    cvlc --no-video-deco --no-embedded-video --screen-fps=20 --screen-top=$top --screen-left=$left --screen-width=$width --screen-height=$height screen:// &

Then "just" share the VLC window instead of your desktop.

New comment by asimpson in "Docker Performance Evaluation Across Operating Systems"

asimpson — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 19:47:40 +0000

Important caveat: "Apple MacBook Pro with Intel chip was used in tests that met all requirements specified in this section". What I really want to see is performance evaluations between current generation x86 Linux, x86 Windows, and ARM macOS.

New comment by asimpson in "A concrete example of what goes wrong with Apple's docs"

asimpson — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 21:09:06 +0000

My experience as well. While I’d love a proper go to source approach, chatGPT nails most of the issues I run into with SwiftUI.

New comment by asimpson in "Permissive forwarding rule leads to unintentional exposure of containers (2021)"

asimpson — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 19:40:00 +0000

Ah yes, this footgun. Sometime last year I discovered our QA databases had all been locked with a ransom demand, how were they exposed? We had `ufw` blocking the db port?! Ah yes, Docker -p. smh.

New Evidence on the Impacts of Birth Order (2017)

asimpson — Sat, 28 May 2022 12:26:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nber.org/reporter/2017number4/new-evidence-impacts-birth-order

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31539787

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by asimpson in "Ask HN: Where to deploy a Docker container easily?"

asimpson — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 23:12:38 +0000

Fly.io is really good.

New comment by asimpson in "Play audio only on YouTube and save bandwidth"

asimpson — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 14:53:34 +0000

I've been working on a small Go program to do this specifically for the lofi hip hop beats youtube stream (file here: https://git.sr.ht/~asimpson/lofibar/tree/exec-ffmpeg/item/ma...). You can pretty easily parse the Youtube page to get the HLS stream and pass that to ffmpeg. No need to even have the overhead of another browser tab then.

P.S. also if anyone knows how to statically compile ffmpeg or libvlc into go I'd love to know :)

New comment by asimpson in "What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, and why?"

asimpson — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 14:29:02 +0000

you forgot this: /s

New comment by asimpson in "Learning Rust"

asimpson — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 17:21:43 +0000

100% agree with this! I used Advent of Code this year to explore Common Lisp. If you have any programming experience it becomes a fun hunt of "ok, I need to loop over an array. How do I do that in X lang?".

New comment by asimpson in "RSS: there's nothing better"

asimpson — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 18:12:55 +0000

This is why I made a service to serve up RSS feeds for Youtube channels, ytrss.co.

Love live RSS! :)

New comment by asimpson in "Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?"

asimpson — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 15:20:41 +0000

I love scraping websites, it's a stupid hobby at times, but I dig it (https://github.com/asimpson/nodejs-web-scraper-cookbook).

A couple successful scraper projects: 1. I automated buying an iPhone 6 when it came out at the time with a scraper + Twilio for SMS notifications. 2. I setup a scraper to alert me when certain blue-ray titles were available to reserve at the library. 3. I found a site that posted full NBA replays the day after a game. I set up a scraper to on their RSS feed for a couple teams and uploaded the videos to S3.

I've also automated notifications for when my sump pump gets flipped off. My sump pump is connected to a ground fault outlet which can rarely get flipped. I plugged in a spare raspberry pi to the same outlet and have my synology ping the IP periodically. If the synology can't find the pi it sends me a sms via twilio.