Hacker News: mrblampo

New comment by mrblampo in "The Hottest Phone for Kids Right Now Is a $100 Landline"

mrblampo — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:45:33 +0000

My kids have an Ooma landline and haven't gotten bored with it yet. It's been months. The hype is real.

New comment by mrblampo in "Show HN: Tiao, A two-player turn-based board game"

mrblampo — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:50:43 +0000

Me too!

New comment by mrblampo in "Show HN: Disco Checkers"

mrblampo — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:33:26 +0000

Good feedback, thanks! Gemini got a bit carried away writing the README for me. Toned it down and added a demo GIF

Show HN: Disco Checkers

mrblampo — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 12:14:22 +0000

I don't post here much, but thought I'd share this terminal Checkers game, because I vibe-coded [most of] it while my kids watched a movie and found it very gratifying.

Runs via python3 without any other installation or setup.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47060197

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by mrblampo in "Ardour 9.0"

mrblampo — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 02:08:34 +0000

DMA in what sub-field?

New comment by mrblampo in "3M Diskette Reference Manual (1983) [pdf]"

mrblampo — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:46:53 +0000

This is pretty cool

New comment by mrblampo in "Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?"

mrblampo — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 23:58:41 +0000

Got a music degree, decided the career wasn't for me, went to a programming incubator, really struggled with interviewing for a while, got a job at a startup, got a job at FAANG, here I am a decade after the career switch

Ask HN: What technology do commercial jets have for avoiding collisions?

mrblampo — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 12:33:09 +0000

With the horrible news this morning about the American airlines collision with a helicopter near Washington DC, I am sure the biggest focus will be on how these two aircraft came to be perilously close together, but I am also wondering: Does anyone here know the state of collision avoidance technology in commercial airplanes? This is something that cars are starting to get pretty good at, at least fancy ones like Teslas (I know they make mistakes they still do an impressive job of detecting potential collisions and avoiding them). I imagine that this is a harder problem for planes.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877161

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by mrblampo in "Teach yourself to echolocate (2018)"

mrblampo — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 02:42:50 +0000

Yep same. "Teach yourself to eat chocolate."

Ask HN: How did/does the "dial tone" work?

mrblampo — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 10:55:54 +0000

When you pick up a landline phone, throughout the USA there is a consistent "dial tone" you hear in the earpiece.

I haven't heard it in a while, but IIRC it's two synthesized tones roughly a "major third" apart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_third), slightly buzzy-sounding, which means they probably weren't a "just" major third (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation).

Once you started dialing, the dial tone would go silent. I think the dial tone would remain in place if you spoke, but I don't remember for certain.

Does anyone know how this worked? What generated the dial tone? Presumably there must have been a network of machines responsible for processing people's dialing and routing calls appropriately; did these machines also generate the dial tone? If so, were they all made by the same company, Bell-something-something? The dial tone was/is so consistent in its sound and behavior that it seems likely.

Just curious if anyone knows or has links!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41099442

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

New comment by mrblampo in "Coffee helped the Union in the Civil War"

mrblampo — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 11:00:27 +0000

Fun article! Particularly enjoyed the anecdotal evidence from individual soldier's writing.

New comment by mrblampo in "Complexity fills the space it's given"

mrblampo — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 10:18:55 +0000

Thanks, I enjoyed this and it rings true. This abstract concept of "space" getting filled up thoughtlessly, and that "space" being created by unnecessarily breaking things up into smaller parts that don't really need to be separate, makes a lot of sense and I think I've seen this happen.

The article stops short of proposing a clear plan for how to handle the opposite problem, though: Entrenched monoliths. Once a class (or other abstraction) has grown for long enough (e.g. perhaps someone has read this article and is trying to avoid unnecessary complexity of code structure), it can become very difficult to break it up.

New comment by mrblampo in "Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?"

mrblampo — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 12:07:48 +0000

Try not to worry about what others think of you, and definitely don't think about IQ. Judgment is so much more important than speed. Why are you concerned with speedy thinking?

New comment by mrblampo in "Ideal monitor rotation for programmers (2021)"

mrblampo — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 17:54:47 +0000

Made me laugh out loud

New comment by mrblampo in "You can't do that because I hate you"

mrblampo — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 20:45:13 +0000

First example seems odd? The author acknowledges that the two proposed alternatives (printing "" or actually exiting) aren't great. The fact that the Python REPL provides a helpful hint seems like extra effort to make your life easier. This is especially notable given that in the next example, the author's complaint is about a command _not_ providing special guidance about the thing the user is probably trying to do.

New comment by mrblampo in "Ask HN: Anyone else finding Google Maps terrible?"

mrblampo — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 02:24:50 +0000

Yep this happened to me yesterday. In a taxi, the driver was following Google Maps, which showed a 22 min ETA, with one or two alternatives adding a minute or so. My phone was open and showed the same options. He felt certain that he knew a better route—via a highway, not a back road—and when he took that first rogue turn, Google Maps adjusted and the ETA instantly dropped to 14 min.

New comment by mrblampo in "Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?"

mrblampo — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 11:29:40 +0000

Beautiful Country, by Qian Julie Wang. Beautifully written memoir about immigrating to NYC as a child in the 90s. Poignant, sweet, honest, easy to read, fun, not too too emotionally heavy, but also full of lessons about trauma.

New comment by mrblampo in "A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team"

mrblampo — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 13:09:22 +0000

Sounds like the thing about "ad blocker sabotage" is about replacing the Web Request API with something called declarativeNetRequest. I've been sifting through documentation but have had trouble seeing why this is any kind of a downgrade for ad blockers. Can someone explain?

New comment by mrblampo in "Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality"

mrblampo — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 17:29:22 +0000

Yep, everything in this article is right on my money in my experience.

New comment by mrblampo in "Petrucci Music Library"

mrblampo — Thu, 18 May 2023 02:15:47 +0000

This was invaluable in music school.