Hacker News: jmole

New comment by jmole in "TCXO Failure Analysis"

jmole — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:38:52 +0000

This article is a good reminder that essentially everything in your computer boils down to really precise mechanical engineering.

New comment by jmole in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

jmole — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:20:18 +0000

Any chance you'll release on macOS/Linux?

A simplified guide to TRS MIDI

jmole — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:19:12 +0000

Article URL: https://minimidi.world/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224980

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

New comment by jmole in "Cosmologically Unique IDs"

jmole — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:54:39 +0000

Unless it's a key that needs to be sortable (e.g. insertion order) or a metric/descriptor of some kind, I'm not sure why UUID would be overused or inappropriate for use.

New comment by jmole in "Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors"

jmole — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 02:20:10 +0000

i always worry about tools like this, maintained by small teams, that are so universal that even if only a small fraction of installs are somehow co-opted by malicious actors, you have a wide open attack surface on most tech companies.

e.g. iTerm, Cyberduck, editors of all shades, various VSCode extensions, etc.

New comment by jmole in "How to store a chess position in 26 bytes (2022)"

jmole — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:24:32 +0000

The question is, are we storing the state of a chess game, or the state of a chess board?

If a game, you might also include timers or other state as well, including full position history.

New comment by jmole in "Chat-tails: Throwback terminal chat, built on Tailscale"

jmole — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:03:11 +0000

This is great, I've been looking for an easy to use local chat app for me and my kids, and Adium on Bonjour has been flaky with my VLAN setup at home. Will have to give this a try...

New comment by jmole in "NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle"

jmole — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:08:52 +0000

Isn't circular funding how the entire economy works?

I can see how you could make an argument that this particular ouroboros has an insufficient loop area to sustain itself, or more significantly, lacks connection to the rest of the economy, but money has to flow in circles/cycles or it doesn't work at all.

New comment by jmole in "Bytes before FLOPS: your algorithm is (mostly) fine, your data isn't"

jmole — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 20:14:59 +0000

> worst case scenario being the flat profile where program time is roughly evenly distributed

It sounds like the “worst case“ here is that the program is already optimized.

New comment by jmole in "Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC"

jmole — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:50:00 +0000

I think the correct strategy in this case is to return your laptop to the store if it has linux compatibility issues, and keep trying until you find one that works.

i.e. don't support vendors whose laptops don't work in Linux.

New comment by jmole in "Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC"

jmole — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:19:26 +0000

Its not a problem with Linux, it's a problem with laptop manufacturers not caring about designing their ACPI tables and firmware correctly.

New comment by jmole in "Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC"

jmole — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:42:30 +0000

It's ACPI - most laptops ship with half-broken ACPI tables, and provide support for tunables through windows drivers. It's convenient for laptop manufacturers, because Microsoft makes it very easy to update drivers via windows update, and small issues with sleep, performance, etc. can be mostly patched through a driver update.

Linux OTOH can only use the information it has from ACPI to accomplish things like CPU power states, etc. So you end up with issues like "the fans stop working after my laptop wakes from sleep" because of a broken ACPI implementation.

There are a couple of laptops with excellent battery life under linux though, and if you can find a lunar lake laptop with iGPU and IPS screen, you can idle around 3-4W and easily get 12+ hours of battery.

New comment by jmole in "How a devboard works (and how to make your own)"

jmole — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 01:58:34 +0000

I thought this article would first start with the most essential question: "How to decide what you need on your devboard".

Without that critical piece of design work, you may as well call this "How to build a Raspberry Pi Nano from scratch". Which, to be fair, is also a good article to write.

But step 1 for really building a dev board is answering the question, "What do I need from this that I can't get from a $5 Amazon purchase?"

New comment by jmole in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

jmole — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 21:06:17 +0000

Great, so it sounds like installing unpermitted solar at your house is about as illegal as jaywalking, and you probably shouldn't worry about it so much.

New comment by jmole in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

jmole — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:59:16 +0000

"I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid"

Where exactly do you live? I'm not saying you're lying, but this smells like a tall tale. You can easily buy solar panels and batteries, and if no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.

Maybe what you're saying is, "my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?

New comment by jmole in "Bay Area chief of police allegedly commutes from Idaho"

jmole — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 03:10:27 +0000

> The I-team also found six sergeants in the Sheriff's Office who live out of state - in Idaho, Nevada, Texas and Tennessee. Two of them work on the bomb squad where they made almost $600,000 in pay and benefits last year.

New comment by jmole in "US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces"

jmole — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 17:12:45 +0000

Not sure about you, but when I submit a “contact us” form, I am about 10% sure someone will actually read it.

When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.

New comment by jmole in "23andMe is out of bankruptcy. You should still delete your DNA"

jmole — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 01:19:58 +0000

Is there any intrinsic value whatsoever in the DNA or SNPs themselves? Or is it just the link between your name and your DNA that is so concerning?

It seems like you could do lots of useful things without having a name attached to any particular sample. There must be some kind of differential privacy approach here that would work well.

New comment by jmole in "Show HN: FlopperZiro – A DIY open-source Flipper Zero clone"

jmole — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 18:37:07 +0000

What use case?

I got mine to make a backup copy of the remote controls that I'm worried about losing, which happen to be sub-GHz and infrared.

New comment by jmole in "Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation"

jmole — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:22:52 +0000

> Imagine an AI engine like a block of swiss cheese. New, original content that fills one of the holes in the AI engine’s block of cheese is more valuable than repetitive, low-value content that unfortunately dominates much of the web today.

Great statement in theory - but in practice, the whole people-as-a-service industry for AI data generation is IMO more damaging to the knowledge ecosystem than open data. e.g. companies like pareto.ai

"Proprietary data for pennies on the dollar" is the late-stage capitalism equivalent of the postdoctoral research trap.