Hacker News: sgtnoodle

New comment by sgtnoodle in "A server that wasn't meant to exist"

sgtnoodle — Thu, 15 May 2025 15:33:32 +0000

It wasn't a laminates company, was it?

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining"

sgtnoodle — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 15:16:40 +0000

I'm embarrassed that I live in HMB and didn't recognize it. I should go to the harbor more.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model"

sgtnoodle — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 02:21:38 +0000

I asked Gemini to format some URLs into an XML format. It got halfway through and gave up. I asked if it truncated the output, and it said yes and then told _me_ to write a python script to do it.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "How to repair the parts that explode in Lenovo Yoga laptops"

sgtnoodle — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 07:10:13 +0000

I have a yoga from 2016 that had its backlight supply rail blow up. Very lame.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Using gRPC for (local) inter-process communication (2021)"

sgtnoodle — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 21:25:32 +0000

You can do some pretty crazy stuff with pipes, if you want to do better than unix sockets.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Using gRPC for (local) inter-process communication (2021)"

sgtnoodle — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 21:23:36 +0000

I've spent several years optimizing a specialized IPC mechanism for a work project. I've spent time reviewing the Linux Kernel's unix socket source code to understand obscure edge cases. There isn't really much to optimize - it's just copying bytes between buffers. Most of the complexity of the code has to do with permissions and implementing the ability to send file descriptors. All my benchmarks have unambiguously showed unix sockets to be more performant than loopback TCP for my particular use case.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Using gRPC for (local) inter-process communication (2021)"

sgtnoodle — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 21:16:37 +0000

There's definitely differences, whether or not it matters for most usages. I've worked on several IPC mechanisms that specifically benefited from one vs. the other.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?"

sgtnoodle — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 05:50:38 +0000

A former coworker texted me out of the blue yesterday, saying he missed working on a " codebase". He specifically appreciated that "doing something simple things were kept simple." Made my day!

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Show HN: We made a small and cheap network switch"

sgtnoodle — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 13:56:32 +0000

It's still mass, drag and cost.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Show HN: We made a small and cheap network switch"

sgtnoodle — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 13:54:00 +0000

It might work in so far as you'll get packets through. The performance would be abysmal, though. Modern Ethernet is built around switching.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Why the CORDIC algorithm lives rent-free in my head"

sgtnoodle — Sun, 12 May 2024 17:29:27 +0000

The folk that made Crash Bandicoot were pretty clever. They figured out that the PlayStation could render untextured, shaded triangles a lot faster than textured triangles, so they "textured" the main character with pixel-scale geometry. This in turn saved them enough memory to use a higher resolution frame buffer mode.

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-ba...

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed reader"

sgtnoodle — Fri, 03 May 2024 16:58:19 +0000

I read the XML directly in my browser out of spite.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces to counter Starlink"

sgtnoodle — Wed, 01 May 2024 15:25:36 +0000

Crowded? No. Littered? Perhaps, depending on the altitude. The article you linked says the bulk of the existing debris is from a few isolated incidents.

These satellites are generally low enough tha their orbits decay after a couple years if they don't boost themselves, and then they burn up in the atmosphere.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "DDC OLED (2022)"

sgtnoodle — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 10:32:23 +0000

I've gotten CEC to work in Linux on my desktop computer. The funny thing is that most GPU HDMI ports don't implement CEC, but do implement CEC over DisplayPort. You simply need to find a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter that supports CEC.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Tiny World Map"

sgtnoodle — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 14:56:41 +0000

It's funny that it doesn't have the great lakes. I guess it doesn't have any internal bodies of water.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Employers feel the side effects of drugmaker control over Wegovy, Ozempic costs"

sgtnoodle — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 17:27:37 +0000

We're on a good employer plan, and weight loss meds are all out of pocket.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Hidden dependencies in Linux binaries"

sgtnoodle — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 20:59:54 +0000

A more obscure use would be for loading multiple instances of a singleton library. This is especially helpful in something like a unit test suite, where you want each test case to start in a cleanly initialized state. If the code under test has a bunch of globally initialized variables, reloading the library at runtime is one of only a few possible ways of doing it.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "The Guide to Stock Options Conversations"

sgtnoodle — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 18:18:12 +0000

In my experience, a culture of radical employee-driven compensation transparency can lead to toxicity. A subset of folk have a tendency to become obsessed, and increasingly more resentful about their particular notion of fairness. Then from that, folk start to play the victim, grasping for explanations that don't require introspection or admitting individual responsibility. In that environment, the company is forced to take a defensive position, which makes the culture even more toxic.

What I've seen work well is the company taking pro-active steps to be transparent about compensation in aggregate. For example, HR can put out a periodic report documenting compensation metrics by job title and experience. They can also slice the data along various social factors to quantitatively show whether there's any indicators of unintentional bias. From there, another good idea is for the company to regularly apply adjustments independent from performance, in order to keep the metrics healthy.

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Making Truth Social Comply with the AGPL"

sgtnoodle — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 07:33:15 +0000

Is email not customary? It seems like it would be fine as long as they respond in a timely manner, and provide access instructions. Also, in this situation it seems like that's exactly what happened.

I suppose what might be non-compliant is if their website doesn't explicitly document the process to access the source, i.e. "send an email to this addressm to request the most up-to-date source code."

New comment by sgtnoodle in "Show HN: Comprehensive inter-process communication (IPC) toolkit in modern C++"

sgtnoodle — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 22:32:40 +0000

Given that it's shared memory based, it seems like there has to be some degree of trust that the participants are well behaved. What do you mean by a malformed message, though? If you're talking about the payload of the message, that seems like a matter of the message scheme you're using. If you're talking about correctness of the IPC protocol itself, integrity checking is unfortunately at odds with latency.