Hacker News: jhallenworld

New comment by jhallenworld in "ETH-68: Ethernet Audio Interface for Linux"

jhallenworld — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:23:36 +0000

How does the receive side recover the transmit side's sample clock? There is a BNC for clock sharing between "multiple units", but I'm not sure if that's used / required between transmit and receive.

Or is there no such synchronization, in which case there would be long-term drift?

New comment by jhallenworld in "The value of not getting to the point (2015)"

jhallenworld — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:31:56 +0000

This is famously not a thing for Dutch people :-) There are definitely cultural differences.

This scene: John Adams meets the Dutch...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj1cgBI5rdI

New comment by jhallenworld in "California closed the Montana license plate loophole"

jhallenworld — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:49:31 +0000

I've seen car dealers in MA use Montana dealer plates. At the very least they are cheaper, avoids $220 / year excise tax and registration fees vs. $25 for Montana. I don't think it helps with any sales taxes- dealers don't have to pay when they buy cars, unlike customers. It would help if dealer uses the car personal reasons instead of just having it for resale.

Hmm... maybe I should start a car dealer just to avoid taxes on my next car..

The Montana plate for owners reminds of registering your boat in Wilmington Delaware to avoid state sales tax. You had to create an LLC to do this I think.

New comment by jhallenworld in "cp: -r or -R?"

jhallenworld — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 21:41:38 +0000

I never bothered to learn -C, instead I use:

    tar -cf - . | (cd ;  tar -xf -)

For doing something like duplicating root of a filesystem you may want --one-file-system.

New comment by jhallenworld in "On social reality in China"

jhallenworld — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 02:18:33 +0000

Ah, I think the origin of this video style is "Zaza in China"- or at least he's the most successful at it.

https://www.youtube.com/@zazainchina

New comment by jhallenworld in "On social reality in China"

jhallenworld — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:32:10 +0000

Well I'm grouping these under AI- they have been around a while for sure, but maybe they have reached some kind of critical mass there: I'm imagining people on Chinese social media talking about it as a way to make money.

Also the text to speech is in their own voice. Some are using this as a way to help pronounce english (maybe there is some language training software available for this, I don't know).

New comment by jhallenworld in "On social reality in China"

jhallenworld — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:21:12 +0000

An interesting recent phenomena is that regular Chinese people have figured out how to use AI to speak for them to make english language youtube videos. They are quite fascinating to watch, because you don't normally get such an unfiltered perspective. I think people feel safe posting these because nobody knows them in the west, whereas family, friends and govt. see Chinese social media. And of course youtube is banned in China.. Some of them make a few hundred bucks from Alphabet, this is a big deal.

Here are a few (check out the comments- working class people from around the world make contact):

https://www.youtube.com/@kangkanginchina7

https://www.youtube.com/@Chineseruralareas

Anyway, I view this as one of the more positive uses for AI.

New comment by jhallenworld in "NAND-16: a computer built from 277,248 NAND gates"

jhallenworld — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:43:21 +0000

1 transistor for DTL... certainly CMOS is more relevant.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat"

jhallenworld — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:42:58 +0000

The Iranian revolution was due to messages spread on cassette tape. It's all Phillips's fault.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat"

jhallenworld — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:34:01 +0000

CB radio then.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat"

jhallenworld — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:29:09 +0000

"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"

This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Z80 REPL (2018)"

jhallenworld — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:02:51 +0000

You should support symbols... For example, the monitor on my 6800 / 6809 Exorciser simulator has this (the "Offset at..." is printed when it fixes forward references):

    ~/exorsim$ exor -d
    % a 1000
    1000: start bra skip
    1002:  nop
    1003:  nop
    1004: skip ldx #10
    Offset at 1001 set to 02
    1007: loop dex
    1008:  nop
    1009:  bne loop
    100b:  rts
    100c: 
    % sy
    1007 loop
    1004 skip
    1000 start
    % u 1000
    1000: 20 02               BRA $1004
    1002: 01                  NOP
    1003: 01                  NOP
    1004: CE 00 0A            LDX #$000A
    1007: 09                  DEX
    1008: 01                  NOP
    1009: 26 FC               BNE $1007
    100B: 39                  RTS

What would be even better: "a" brings up a built-in mini-editor. When you exit, the code is assembled.

https://github.com/jhallen/exorsim

New comment by jhallenworld in "What Sun got wrong"

jhallenworld — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:48:35 +0000

I seem to remember IBM had a way to buy their stuff online, but not anymore apparently. I'm sure this was back in the System x days.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"

jhallenworld — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:01:55 +0000

I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow.

Yeah, Notes had its shared database features, and you could see remnants of IBMers using them at the time, but most such applications been ported to Java CRUD apps. Also Lotus Sametime (it's like Slack) became a much more important collaboration tool.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Altair Basic Interpreter Source Code (1975) [pdf]"

jhallenworld — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:08:18 +0000

I always thought that the floating point routines were the big feature that made Microsoft BASIC a thing (compared with both Radio Shack and Apple integer BASIC). It's interesting reading about Monte Davidoff and also that Gates knew they needed a specialist for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Davidoff

New comment by jhallenworld in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

jhallenworld — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 02:15:36 +0000

>an original 7104

I've got one, they are very cool. I also have a 7834 (storage tube), cool in a different way. On the other hand, they are taking up a lot of space... I also have two 485s, one with a broken trigger.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

jhallenworld — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 02:12:38 +0000

We've rented them in the past- always we're not quite sure we're done so keep them much longer than necessary. They're kind of a pain to pack and ship.

New comment by jhallenworld in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

jhallenworld — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:30:39 +0000

Yeah 1 GHz is nice, but that tiny 200 MHz Siglent is going to be much more useful in practice for most things.

Speaking of boat anchors, I'm trying to get my company to buy a DSA91304a (13 GHz scope with SERDES debugging). ~$44K with all the options, but still Windows-XP. The Windows-7 ones unfortunately don't have the options I want. Maybe there is a hack..

New comment by jhallenworld in "OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor"

jhallenworld — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:15:25 +0000

My goto has been Shotcut, it's main advantage is high resolution support without having to pay extra compared to something like Lightworks (which has a better UI for sure, but I'm not paying...).

New comment by jhallenworld in "An Interesting Fourier Transform – 1/f Noise (2007)"

jhallenworld — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:04:48 +0000

1/f noise means that if you wait long enough an asteroid will hit the earth or the sun will go nova, etc.

Surely there is some connection to entropy.