Hacker News: scottlawson

New comment by scottlawson in "Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard"

scottlawson — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:12:16 +0000

That's awesome to hear! Sometimes the journey is the destination, its a great project to get started with electronics.

New comment by scottlawson in "Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard"

scottlawson — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:10:39 +0000

I'd actually argue it has some wicked problem characteristics. The input space is enormous (all possible audio), perception is subjective and nonlinear, and there's no objective function to optimize against, only "does this feel right?". Every solution you try reframes what "good" means. It's not as hard as social planning but is way harder than it sounds, no pun intended.

New comment by scottlawson in "Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard"

scottlawson — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:05:16 +0000

I didn't go into much detail about it but there's a whole rabbit hole of color theory and color models. For example, the spectrum effect assigns different colors to different frequency bins, but also adjusts the assignment over time to avoid a static looking effect. It does this by rotating a "color angle" kind of like the HSL model.

I really like your LED installation in Rosetta Hall, it looks beautiful!

New comment by scottlawson in "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

scottlawson — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:29:36 +0000

what I meant with "DevOps won't want to support it" was someone saying this before DevOps had even been asked, and by someone who wasn't even on DevOps, who just assumed that they probably wouldn't like this sort of thing.

New comment by scottlawson in "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

scottlawson — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:27:17 +0000

the "good for them personally" reaction is so true. It's almost like a team-level version of the inonvator's dilemma, where protecting the thing you already own feels more rational than supporting something that might replace it.

New comment by scottlawson in "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

scottlawson — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:20:57 +0000

That's fair. The title is provocative and probably overstates my actual position, which as you note is closer to "the way people practice critique in meetings is low value and here's how to do it better". The point about making critical thinkers feel worse is taken too. The people I'm describing in the post aren't the careful, thoughtful critics, but instead the reflexive ones. I could have drawn that line more clearly.

New comment by scottlawson in "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

scottlawson — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:16:01 +0000

I like that angle a lot, and this very thoughtful comment. Distinguishing between the idea and the person is a good way to think about it. I think sometimes people cross that line without realizing it. Your point about making sure people still want to bring ideas next time is really what it comes down to.

New comment by scottlawson in "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

scottlawson — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:07:52 +0000

you're right that a good idea should be able to survive scrutiny. The issue I'm describing isn't "someone asked a tough question". It's when objections pile up so ast that nothing can survive long enough to be properly evaluated. That's not a rigorous process, that's just a kill zone. The difference between a productive and unproductive kill zone comes down to culture. Teams that default to "here's why it won't work" end up very efficient at producing nothing. The teams I've seen do this well still kill ideas but they just do it after giving them a fair shot. The proposer has to do their homework but the environment has to let them get far enough to do it.

New comment by scottlawson in "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

scottlawson — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 04:57:36 +0000

Heilmeier Catechism is really interesting, thanks for linking that. I like how the questions break down different major aspects. It treats risk as one of the dimensions of evaluation but not entire conversation. That's the shift I was trying to describe. Critique is valuable as part of a complete picture, not when it is the only lens.

New comment by scottlawson in "I Am a Cross-Cutting Concern: On Having a Personal Monorepo"

scottlawson — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:13:19 +0000

Thanks for posting this. I'm glad I'm not alone in the monorepo club! I really believe in the benefits. Especially for a personal monorepo where the amount of code is not usually enough to run into the limits of git.

I'm curious about your CLI tool, what do you use it for?

New comment by scottlawson in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

scottlawson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 02:17:52 +0000

thats fair, I appreciate your feedback very much! Initially, I typed out easily two or three times as much text as what made it into the final post, and had to trim and summarize what I wrote down to size. I totally hear what you are saying about generic structure and prose.

New comment by scottlawson in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

scottlawson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 02:10:22 +0000

it isn't quite true that the categories are static, in fact, I've changed them a fair bit as I've reorganized containers. Sometimes I realize that two different containers should really be one container, and when that happens, I'll write down the sum of the dots on the new box label and continue it, so I don't lose the information. Less often, I'll take some parts out of a box and put them in a different one, accepting the loss of partial information. But I generally do that because I notice a subset of parts doesn't really belong in the box, and so the dots weren't really conveying information about those migrated parts anyways. It's more fluid than you might think at first.

New comment by scottlawson in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

scottlawson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 02:05:57 +0000

short term memory, but I'll admit it isn't perfect and sometimes I'm pretty sure that I might be double labelling. But that's okay because even an occasional mistaken double label is still a partially valid signal that the box is being used a lot.

New comment by scottlawson in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

scottlawson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:32:23 +0000

they aren't plastic, but surprisingly, I'm able to remove them with fine tweezers and transplant them when needed. They are 6mm diameter so pretty small and I've never seen them shred like larger labels/stickers.

New comment by scottlawson in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

scottlawson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:30:56 +0000

since this is cache invalidation AND naming things, does that make it the hardest?

New comment by scottlawson in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

scottlawson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:30:14 +0000

shoeboxes are a great size for containers, but does it bother you that they aren't transparent? I really like having clear containers.

New comment by scottlawson in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

scottlawson — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:07:32 +0000

sometimes I see no dots on things that are cool and I have this innate urge to want to hold onto.

One example is a Picomotor piezo actuator. It's a really cool piece of technology. I want to believe so badly that I'll use it in a project someday.

but after four years and seeing zero dots on it, it's like having concrete evidence PROVING that I'm delusionally optimistic about how useful it is. I can't ignore the reality.

the Picomotor is my version of your ice cream maker. the lack of dots gives me the evidence I need to finally donate it to a better home

New comment by scottlawson in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

scottlawson — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:42:55 +0000

I definitely see the appeal of an electronic version. I think it really depends on what you care about tracking. Food? Maybe use the same barcodes already on the product. Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive.

Things that are subject to a lot of wear and tear and handled a lot will not work well with dots as they will come off, but I don't find that to be a problem for the front of storage boxes so it works for me.

While I don't have an electronic system for tracking parts bins, the one exception is parts I place on PBCs. This is a small subset of my total parts and to track them I have an electronic database that's much more rigorous, tracking part numbers, data sheets, footprints, symbols, and it is much closer to the kind of part database that a site like digikey would use than the dot system.

I don't need dots to track parts I put on PCBs because I can do that all programmatically to scan the files and see what parts I place the most often.

I don't quite know what you mean with your question about whether it would be useful if I didn't have dot totals but still tracked them. I do find the dot totals to be useful, and comparing across years also helps me identify things that were used a lot, but maybe only two years ago. Stuff like glue and magnets seem timeless and are used constantly every year though.

A dot a day keeps the clutter away

scottlawson — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:15:01 +0000

Article URL: https://scottlawsonbc.com/post/dot-system

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47593556

Points: 583

# Comments: 168

New comment by scottlawson in "Artificial Cleverness: The system that knows everything and understands nothing"

scottlawson — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:29:10 +0000

reading this article reminded me of a couple of quotes:

"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra

And paraphrasing another "it would be silly to say that airplanes can't fly because they don't flap their wings like birds"