Hacker News: rhinoceraptor

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

rhinoceraptor — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 11:57:04 +0000

For whatever reason, in my experience, the 1st gen Airpods Pro seem to pair much more easily to non-Apple devices than the 2nd gen. I have a 1st gen pair more or less dedicated to my Linux PC, and they auto-pair 99% of the time within a few seconds.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

rhinoceraptor — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 11:47:46 +0000

I have good wired earbuds and over ear headphones, but I still almost always go back to bluetooth. If I'm vacuuming, mowing the lawn, etc. I use my Airpods Pro. If I'm practicing drums or working with loud tools, I use my bluetooth 3M Worktunes.

Being able to get my phone out of my pocket and not have to worry about the cable is worth all the tradeoffs. At my desk, I have studio monitors, which I prefer over any headphones. For video calls, I use just the right Airpod to prevent echos, and so I can still hear myself.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

rhinoceraptor — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:10:20 +0000

How wouldn't this also apply to things like useradd(8) or simply automated user account setup, e.g. like cups, sshd, etc? Do we need to add this to vi for use in vipw on UNIX?

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "The World of Harmonics – With a Coffee, Guitar and Synth"

rhinoceraptor — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 19:13:32 +0000

If you have an analog oscilloscope, it's really cool to put a guitar signal into it, you can play an open string and see all its harmonics, then play a harmonic and you just see the one harmonic.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "A Year of 3D Printing"

rhinoceraptor — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 01:42:11 +0000

I think PLA is a lot stronger than people give it credit for, especially if printed at 100% infill. I finally had a chance to use the PLA-CF that came with my Bambu X1C for a replacement part on my tripod, and it's great.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "Embassy: Modern embedded framework, using Rust and async"

rhinoceraptor — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 23:38:42 +0000

I had been using this to try to build a Spark modeling guitar amp pedal controller, controlling the amp via BLE. It seemed pretty promising, and they have their own fully OSS Rust BLE stack. It seemed a little early days with that though, it seemed like the APIs were changing quite a bit and it required pinning git revisions in Cargo. I'm excited to see where the project goes!

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable"

rhinoceraptor — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:47:19 +0000

Another infuriating issue is TVs with so few HDMI inputs. I have tried many different HDMI switchers and none of them work reliably, so it kind of puts me off of buying a receiver which would also have that function.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)"

rhinoceraptor — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 02:31:03 +0000

Location: Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, Node.js, React, Redux, Postgres, Docker, Linux, AWS, CI/CD, Terraform, Git, Github, Gitlab, C, Rust

Résumé/CV: https://jacklew [dot] is/JackLewisResume [dot] pdf

Email: jack [at] jacklew [dot] is

I am a full stack developer with 10 years of experience, most of which doing Node.js backend services, React frontend UIs, both in Javascript and Typescript, and backed with Postgres databases. Most recently I was at an autonomous vehicle startup, working on data pipelines, vehicle log offloads, and processing logs, mostly in Python/Spark, but also working with lower level components in C and Rust.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?"

rhinoceraptor — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 01:44:46 +0000

From my experience, it's grim at the moment for software developer jobs. I got laid off in August and it's been rough. I'm in my early 30s so I can't compare it to 2008, but I've been laid off before and I've never seen it this bad.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "A Love Letter to FreeBSD"

rhinoceraptor — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 01:13:56 +0000

I personally have been itching for a NixOS-style BSD or Illumos derivative. My main machine is currently NixOS with root on ZFS, but I would love to be running something where ZFS isn't an afterthought, I could use dtrace, the kernel has first class OS virtualization, and so on. I think that the declarative approach to package management is obviously the future, but I wish there were a non-Linux option.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "A Love Letter to FreeBSD"

rhinoceraptor — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 01:02:55 +0000

The E10k reminds me of Bryan Cantrill's story about the motivation for dtrace. Sun engineers were working day and night, trying to debug what seemed to be a Solaris kernel networking bug, on a benchmarking cluster of E10k machines. I won't spoil the end, but it's great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTVfAMRj-7E&t=2640s

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "RuBee"

rhinoceraptor — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 06:03:22 +0000

I would imagine that any manufacturer being seen doing so, would face US consumer boycotts.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "X5.1 solar flare, G4 geomagnetic storm watch"

rhinoceraptor — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 06:50:34 +0000

I'm disappointed I missed it, I had disabled my Aurora phone alert after it woke me up for a 1% chance of seeing it a few weeks ago. I saw a bit of light in SE Michigan at about 1:30 AM EST, but just a tinge of green.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3""

rhinoceraptor — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 22:56:56 +0000

Don't worry, I also use Ubiquiti, and self-host Home Assistant on my TrueNAS :)

I have a little server rack cobbled together out of wood under my basement stairs, with a UDM Pro, 24 port POE switch, and an ancient Dell 2U poweredge for TrueNAS.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3""

rhinoceraptor — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:23:56 +0000

It calls back the classic, "you can already build such a system quite trivially": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "Reverse Engineering a 1979 Camera's Spec"

rhinoceraptor — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 22:27:50 +0000

The linked manual site was useful, I have four various Leica III series cameras that were my great-grandfathers. One of the more obscure pieces of the collection that I'd never seen before is the Visoflex [1], which essentially transforms them into an SLR.

Rangefinders have a fixed viewfinder for framing, as well as a special focusing viewfinder, which projects two images superimposed from different angles, via a very small mirror and beam splitter. The mirror is mechanically linked to the lens' focus ring, and when the two images align in the viewfinder, the lens will be in focus.

1: https://www.cameramanuals.org/leica_pdf/leitz_visoflex_ii.pd...

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery"

rhinoceraptor — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 04:40:29 +0000

If your inkjet printer has the right tray, you can buy printable CD-Rs for about 25 cents a piece in bulk. And somewhat unrelated, I've also been printing out a lot more of the photos I take.

I got a Canon PRO-100 printer for $25 off of Facebook marketplace, they practically gave them away with higher end DSLRs so they're easy to get second hand, and a set of generic ink cartridges is about $15. With generic ink and generic photo paper, you can do a 13x19 prints for about 50 cents each. It's not archival grade printing, but it's pretty good and affordable.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery"

rhinoceraptor — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 04:21:05 +0000

I love CDs, and unlike records or tapes they have never really gone up in price, even with inflation. A new CD is still about $15.

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "I only use Google Sheets"

rhinoceraptor — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 18:52:22 +0000

The HN perennial video, "You Suck at Excel" by Joel Spolsky [1] really changed my view on spreadsheets. I had never bothered to learn them enough to utilize naming or any of the features that make spreadsheets much more comprehensible. I was very happy to see Google Sheets added named tables recently, too.

I've recently been experimenting in Apps Script to write my own (physical) book collection record system with a USB barcode scanner. So far I have nothing polished enough to show, but it is a very cool platform. I found it a bit frustrating that I couldn't just import NPM packages, but at the same time it's a good excuse to embrace simplicity and skip a library like Axios, and rely on its built-in fetch()-like API.

1: The original YouTube video has since been taken down, but you can still view it through the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161118170705/https://www.youtu...

New comment by rhinoceraptor in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2025)"