Hacker News: spditner

New comment by spditner in "Japan bets $67B to become a global chip powerhouse once again"

spditner — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 12:43:21 +0000

It is covered in Chip War, by Chris Miller. The book also details the loss of leadership by Nikon and Canon.

New comment by spditner in "IDEs we had 30 years ago"

spditner — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 23:29:16 +0000

Perhaps it could be restructured to separate out the howto from the explanation to serve the reader’s intended use at the time as described here: https://diataxis.fr

New comment by spditner in "Liu Cixin's Technologies of the Future"

spditner — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 14:20:06 +0000

The Da (Big) / Xiao (Small) prefixes are direct translations of family honorifics that in the simple case directly indicate the relative age of one family member to another. The more common use for family is with more layers of indirection -- so when referring to my mother's younger sister, I would say "Xiao Ai" (Little Aunt), and when referring to my mother's older sister, it would be "Da Ai" (Big Aunt).

In this case I imagine it was more in a professional context, so "Shi Qiang" -- family name "Shi", given name "Qiang" -- was likely elder or the superior of people around them, so would be called "Da Shi" (Big Shi / Boss Shi). If Shi Qiang were the younger, they'd likely be called "Xiao Shi" (Little Shi / Subordinate Shi).

New comment by spditner in "Clear snow the laziest way"

spditner — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 03:30:58 +0000

I have found the lowest energy way to shovel snow is to stand with a bit of a bow stance and push the shovel front to back as if you were paddling a boat, pushing down on the end of the handle at the end to launch the snow. Very easy on the back.

If heavier snow, sink into it a bit to transfer more energy.

Works well up to depth of the shovel head, so for deep snow, skim first, and repeat.

For wet snow, launch earlier, but sorry, it’s still hard work.

New comment by spditner in "Putting an Ultra-Tiny Linux Board in a Phone Charger Eventually"

spditner — Sat, 08 May 2021 14:50:26 +0000

They're still available in newer forms[1]. Its manufacturer, GlobalScale, is more an ODM for plug computers and provides reference devices.

There are also other smaller full package variants around. I used the Ionics PlugComputers for a PBX project ~8 years ago (no longer manufactured), and still have one of them running a PBX on debian under my desk[2].

[1] https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-products.aspx [2] https://imgur.com/a/YuaLFtc

New comment by spditner in "Stripe Climate"

spditner — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 19:29:06 +0000

I am curious to know what the business case looked like to get "climate" added as a feature to the product roadmap in a for-profit company.

New comment by spditner in "Jitsi Meet features update"

spditner — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 18:06:06 +0000

There are a few of things to be aware of when deploying your own instance in jitsi-meet/config.js:

Firefox simulcast is still experimental (edit: and disabled by default), so Firefox is only sending HD to the video-bridge and no LD stream. The HD is then relayed to everyone even as a thumbnail.

If you don't need to see everyone's video all the time, set channelLastN: 5 or a similar number, and only the last N speakers video will be broadcast

If you don't need 720p (1280x720), change the constraints: video section to be something like 360p (640x360)

Enable layer suspension so that HD is not sent to the server when not needed: enableLayerSuspension: true

New comment by spditner in "Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?"

spditner — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 14:55:16 +0000

There's a large multi-tower project in Toronto that includes a heating and cooling system built by Enwave that incorporates a very large cistern / well, building on their prior success cooling the downtown core: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/climate-heat-cooling-1.5437...

New comment by spditner in "Tunnel Boring Machines (2018)"

spditner — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 15:10:55 +0000

Besides the physical activities, the number of interested parties that become involved when touching so many things drives up the bureaucracy with each party bringing their own engineering requirements and conditions for cooperation.

New comment by spditner in "Fridge Condenser Fans – Old and New [video]"

spditner — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 15:35:32 +0000

Regarding the piercing beeps - I popped open the case on mine and put a piece of tape over the piezo buzzer speaker, which brought the volume down to just the right level.

New comment by spditner in "Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook"

spditner — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 20:40:30 +0000

A long time ago now, a friend worked on a partial translation of "Where Women Have No Doctor" into Farsi with a grant from Hesperian -- and one of the dilemmas they had was whether including (they did in the end) the more graphic pictures would help or hinder their efforts in distributing it. I wonder how much of a challenge literacy is in a place where no doctor can be found. She talked about doing an audio cassette version, but again, the pictures are a challenge there as well.

New comment by spditner in "Present Timing for Kids (2018)"

spditner — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 18:47:09 +0000

What has become fairly large in our school community is a group gift / group donation coordinated through the invitation services like Echoage. The kids could care less about all the gifts, they just want to spend time running around with their friends.

New comment by spditner in "A Dollar Store Backlash Has Begun"

spditner — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 13:18:57 +0000

I put it uncooked into the blender and use it as a flour replacement. Works well as a 1:1 replacement. You need to reduce fluids about 20%. It makes great pancakes -- it does stick more and is less binding, so be prepared if you put it in a waffle iron. Probably need to use PAM to avoid a "bad time".

New comment by spditner in "How Netflix outsmarted everyone else in TV"

spditner — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 21:45:21 +0000

I definitely prefer their product placements over traditional ads. Some of them are very jarring though, and you can feel the actors' pain reciting the lines -- like the KFC in season 2 of Stranger Things, in a dinner scene all the shots are obviously centered around a bucket of KFC. For some reason they felt that wasn't enough and drag you straight out of the scene saying "finger lick'in good!!!".

New comment by spditner in "Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M"

spditner — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 15:54:56 +0000

Indeed, I ran a large-ish asterisk user group for years in Toronto and know a number of people at Digium and Sangoma, and there was always a bit of animosity between them. Glad to see them finally coming together.

Most of the talent I know took a step to the right (like myself) and are working with WebRTC. It's all the same stuff! Just more signalling layers on top of RTP channel management. I quite often end up doing SIP over WebRTC with things like sip.js (still backing onto Asterisk and FreeSWITCH) and XMPP over WebRTC with jitsi-meet.

New comment by spditner in "Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M"

spditner — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 13:12:53 +0000

Sangoma's doing a good job of consolidating the SMB Telephony market. They bought Schmooze Com Inc.[1] (owners of FreePBX, the largest Asterisk based Linux distro), Dialogic's hardware business, and VoIP Supply[3] (where most independent VARs order phones from).

[1] https://www.freepbx.org/sangoma-completes-the-acquisition-of... [2] https://www.dialogic.com/2018-01-09-sangoma-announces-sixth-... [3] http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/sangoma-announces-t...

New comment by spditner in "Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M"

spditner — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 13:00:09 +0000

I believe they were using FreeSWITCH when they first built it out.

New comment by spditner in "Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M"

spditner — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 12:58:43 +0000

The state you tend to store is in the application side, so it still backs onto things like SQL databases in the end. You'd put another service in front of your Asterisk instances like OpenSIPS or Kamailio to distribute load.

New comment by spditner in "The Future of Tesla Hinges on This Gigantic Tent"

spditner — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 02:28:50 +0000

I recall that Saturn went down a similar path (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNrfqHaEeYg), where they manufactured a lot of the components in house. I wonder how they managed to pull it off.

New comment by spditner in "The Expensive Art of Living Forever"

spditner — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 21:53:45 +0000

Maybe think of it less as a one-time transfer from one singular place to another, and more a redistribution of a workload whose larger outcome is consciousness. After a migration period, that consciousness would find it's not using the meat-resources anymore.