Hacker News: mc42

New comment by mc42 in "The tools and tech I use to run a one-woman hardware company"

mc42 — Tue, 18 May 2021 19:48:59 +0000

Thea's work is immaculate, and always an interesting read. Her synthesizer modules use FR4 PCBs as the front panels as well, a technique that's pretty popular but executed so well it's beautiful. [1] Even her documentation is made with care; when I have more disposable to spend I'm definitely buying a module.

[1] - https://twitter.com/micktwomey/status/1383527521744867338/ph...

New comment by mc42 in "A Light Box in Heavy Times"

mc42 — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 14:54:20 +0000

It's a very cute box, and I particularly enjoy that this small blog reflects a microcosm of development, fixing bugs for a product, and making it usable for a "customer". That said, games for the author's child remind me of the MIDI Fighter 64 as used by Shawn Wasabi [0], which while a MIDI controller, has reactive patterns to button-presses while being used to play music.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xof7PkoggbM

New comment by mc42 in "Teens are spending nearly half their waking hours on screens"

mc42 — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 15:29:38 +0000

In the same area, both my hometown and the district I attended had 1:1 Chromebook policies. They also had Orwelian programs to allow teachers to see what was on student's screens (!) and later a list of recently closed tabs (!!).

New comment by mc42 in "New PDFex attack can exfiltrate data from encrypted PDF files"

mc42 — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 12:03:11 +0000

If you're thinking about FIRST Robotics Competition, then yep that's nail-on-head about what they do. I briefly talked to one of the folks responsible for that system and they mentioned looking into using a CDN, but couldn't match the relatively low cost of serving a static file over HTTP elsewhere. That being said, the traffic is still enough to tank that entire Azure region last time I checked during the release window (other assets on the same host / their other hosts in the same region were incredibly slow to load.)

New comment by mc42 in "Introducing Git protocol version 2"

mc42 — Fri, 18 May 2018 17:46:46 +0000

I thought Linus Torvalds was almost wholly responsible for the initial development of git? Even so, everything, especially software, is easier in hindsight....

New comment by mc42 in "SEC Shuts Down Munchee ICO"

mc42 — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 16:03:54 +0000

I believe this is part of their announcement on how the SEC will be handling ICOs, but IANAL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15902054

New comment by mc42 in "Citadel's Ken Griffin Says Bitcoin ‘Bubble’ May End in Tears"

mc42 — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 20:17:11 +0000

Several years ago during the MTGox collapse, /r/bitcoin over on reddit had a suicide hotline pinned to the top as multiple evangelicals had sunken their life savings into BTC. It's going to be a very difficult situation if / when BTC crashes again, and it won't end well for just about anyone.

Edit: changed "has" to "as", as it was a typo.

New comment by mc42 in "Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition"

mc42 — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 13:58:26 +0000

Their banner graphic says that pre-Quantum Firefox scored 32 runs per minute, so I think it's quite the improvement.

New comment by mc42 in "Google Is Close to Buying HTC Assets to Bolster Hardware"

mc42 — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 18:15:08 +0000

What leaves me curious is what's to happen of the Vive hardware line that Valve sells made by HTC.

New comment by mc42 in "10 Hobbies for Programmers That Don’t Involve Code"

mc42 — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 19:16:14 +0000

I very much find myself agreeing with the items on this list. However, I think it can be expanded to anything that's the "opposite" of programming.

Hands-on projects that are as far away physically and mentally from programming are amongst the most relaxing in my experience. I enjoy writing personally, especially on pen and paper. The total cognitive disconnect for me between writing on a computer and on paper makes it a wholly more enjoyable experience. Along the same vein is working on bicycles, anything with hand-tools.

New comment by mc42 in "Ask HN: How do you spend your free time in office?"

mc42 — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 16:45:15 +0000

In this case, their free time breeds free time (barring an employer issuing more work). The logic works in some situations.

New comment by mc42 in "A Novelist Forces Himself to Press on After Losing 100 Pages in a Tech Glitch"

mc42 — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 14:57:43 +0000

Though I find the sentiment appreciable, how the author persevered, goes to show that good backups always are always needed. Backups are only backups if you test them...

New comment by mc42 in "Reasons to Switch from Chrome to Firefox"

mc42 — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 22:12:16 +0000

There are single-off tools to dump password databases from all 3 major browsers instantly. Terrifying yes, easy to deal with, not so much.

New comment by mc42 in "By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation"

mc42 — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 16:44:55 +0000

Just reading the story now, but I can confirm that college radio stations (and in general radio stations) are build to run and then be forgotten. My campus still uses a rather old copy of Simian which relies not only on IPv4, but filepaths shorter than 255 characters.

New comment by mc42 in "Ask HN: Which websites do you visit?"

mc42 — Fri, 19 May 2017 19:55:48 +0000

Reddit, YouTube, Twitch for media.

Chief Delphi for Robotics-related content (FIRST Robotics Alum, so it's an interesting thought pattern to watch as an outsider.)

HN, Hackaday and on occasion Slashdot for Tech-related content.

New comment by mc42 in "Show HN: E-Book Site for Classics"

mc42 — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 03:41:59 +0000

Though the site is visually appealing, I fail to understand why nearly 550kB of JS is needed (548kB to be specific). A site like this could get away rather well with just using on-hover and some elegant links.

Overall a decent idea, but it's not one that needs to be this complicated. I feel as if designing a better "classics" landing for the Project Gutenberg might be a better idea. [0]

[0] - https://www.gutenberg.org/

New comment by mc42 in "Txt.fyi"

mc42 — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 19:22:06 +0000

The whole "main" page being under 2kB is an adventurous thing indeed. Overall, interesting implementation and incredibly clean layout (CSS is 541b.)

What languages are the site written in?

New comment by mc42 in "PGP needs to be retired in honor"

mc42 — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 19:13:04 +0000

My biggest point of contention with this is... what should replace it? PGP is the current and retroactive psuedo-standard for verification for everything from email to code to builds.

Any replacement would have to be at least semi-compatible, so as not to break the (likely) hundreds of solutions relying on and expecting PGP.

New comment by mc42 in "Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?"

mc42 — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 18:19:25 +0000

A cursory Google search suggests you could use a package like poppler to convert the pdf to raw text, and then in theory use regex to create data your server could use and serve.

If the pdfs are published as scans like so many municipalities do, then OCR is the only way to go.

Either way, good luck and decently nice design.

New comment by mc42 in "Trump2cash – A stock trading bot powered by Trump tweets"

mc42 — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 13:39:05 +0000

Precisely. Though I've never been to one personally (as a man), the women I know who have attended their events seem to benefit from it, as have the few men I know who have. The name may be "Girls Who Code", but the Boy Scouts & Girl Scouts aren't just boys and girls respectively.