Hacker News: spin

New comment by spin in "Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC"

spin — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 01:07:45 +0000

Yeah, I thought that was Intel's MO. Intel quit making RealSense only after a competitor (OAK-D from Luxonis) became viable. They just want to make chips. It's my impression that they only build "lower" devices as a proof-of-concept for how their chips can be used.

New comment by spin in "Building Interactive SSH Applications"

spin — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 09:23:40 +0000

An interesting, useful real-world example of this is Gitolite [0]. Gitolite requires no background daemons or anything -- just a normal unix/ssh environment.

[0] https://gitolite.com/gitolite/index.html

New comment by spin in "I quit Instagram and Facebook and it made me happier"

spin — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 02:16:39 +0000

Thank you for sharing this demo (and to the GP for the video with the metronomes). Very interesting; very cool.

New comment by spin in "Wooden bikes"

spin — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 01:57:32 +0000

I'm curious what your new bike is. I currently have a 12 year old (but well maintained) Trek 1000. I'd like to get some better derailleurs (I'm constantly having to adjust and clean mine). But maybe I'll just get a better bike, I don't know.

EDIT: oh, you already said it: Merida Scultura

New comment by spin in "Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code"

spin — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 09:26:28 +0000

I would definitely put it under my own name, if I were you. Like another commentor mentioned: if you leave the company, you still control your own repo.

Also, whenever I interview programmers, I always browse their Github (or BitBucket or whatever). Not having a Github isn't such a bad thing, but if you have a cool (or popular) project of your own there, it can help you get noticed.

(Of course, you need to be careful that your employer isn't going to freak out about you posting code openly. I have a habit of starting side-projects in-between jobs, then only do updates on the weekends after I've started a new job.)

Another option, perhaps: put it on your own repo, but track it from the company's repo on the company's webpage. (If they'll let you do it, that is.) That gives you some free visibility.

New comment by spin in "How Employers Track Their Workers"

spin — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 04:12:16 +0000

There are good office jobs and there are bad office jobs. There are good employers and bad employers. The best jobs I've had usually have some basic deadlines (measurable goals and results), and some basic rules (show up every day), but other than that, not much structure or micro-management or anything. If you're a full-time programmer on a team, then you might have a lot of little tasks assigned to you (eg: "add feature X to user profile page", "fix bug Y on the logout screen", etc.), but not constant surveillance or anything. If you're constantly checking in code to Github, then your boss knows that you're working.

New comment by spin in "The Great Fish Market Migration of 2018"

spin — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 07:32:44 +0000

That area is prime real-estate in Tokyo. Developers have been itching to build shopping malls, etc, there for ages. It might be a parking lot during the Olympics, but afterwords it's going to be turned into something much more expensive.

The fish market, OTOH, doesn't have to be in any particular place. It needs good access to the ocean (boats) and good access to the roads (trucks). Moving it by a few miles isn't going to change their economics by much (if any).

(I am sad to see it move, though...)

New comment by spin in "Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub"

spin — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 05:10:35 +0000

I third this. I've installed/maintained and used gitolite, gitlab and gitea.

- gitolite: easiest to install and manage. But there's no web interface. Your entire workflow is with git itself (and maybe some SSH/Unix tricks/scripts).

- gitlab: huge, bloated beast. Many, many different components. Difficult to understand all the pieces. Uses a ton of ram and CPU cycles. UI and workflow is different from Github.

- gitea: single, stand-alone package. UI and work-flow is identical to Github. Given all that it does, it seems about as simple and light-weight as it could be. (My only pain point is that it's written in Go, with Go packages, and I don't really know anything about Go...)

New comment by spin in "Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow"

spin — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 05:34:59 +0000

I think that this is a more realistic/relevant example of "slowing down or stopping is not always the safest action":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWuK-fi-D_w

New comment by spin in "Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow"

spin — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 04:10:41 +0000

"... outrun ... the police"

I doubt that this is a use-case that legal, for-profit companies will be pursuing.

For the other use-cases, you can just say: Manual driving only.

New comment by spin in "Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow"

spin — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 01:58:15 +0000

In my entire life, I've never encountered the Trolley Problem, and I've never met anyone who has.

Most safety problems in driving can be solved by slowing down.

The problem with AI is all those weird, little edge cases that humans can reason through -- for example: if there's a deer next to the road, then I'll slow down, even if it's not on the road yet. I've known many people who have hit a deer when it spontaneously jumps into traffic. Or something like: someone's not quite staying in their own lane, so I have to be careful when I pass them.

New comment by spin in "Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off"

spin — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 08:14:59 +0000

I wanted to say something similar to this. But I think you articulated it much better than I could have.

I think that now, today, Linus could afford to be less of an asshole. But I honestly wonder if the project would've have succeeded so well without him being so strict and demanding in the beginning.

EDIT: Yes, I think that it is possible to be strict and demanding without doing ad-hominem attacks and without swearing. It's just that it's very rare.

New comment by spin in "LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command"

spin — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 03:26:02 +0000

Haha, yeah, I just read through that entire list. I'd say that more than half of those seemed very reasonable and civilized to me. But the people complaining about penis.js seemed to have completely missed the point of that whole project.

I then started browsing through my own code to see if anything seemed offensive. One thing that caught my eye: in SPI communications, there is very clearly a "master" and a "slave". I have programmed many SPI-related code... So now I wonder, what was the original complaint in calling Redis servers "master" and "slave"? That terminology is very, very common in computers.

EDIT: I guess this is the original complaint?: https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185

EDIT #2: I guess I'm late to this conversation: http://antirez.com/news/122

New comment by spin in "It’s Amazon’s Swamp Now"

spin — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 09:39:51 +0000

When I was in college, I was a systems administrator for a lab as a part-time student job. After I graduated, they wanted to hire me full-time. But it was a state university, so they had to open up the job to everyone, and they had to have a specific window for applications. So... my boss wrote the job description exactly around my resume. Lo-and-behold, I got the job.

New comment by spin in "Do Not Read: Restricted collections in remarkable libraries"

spin — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 02:01:44 +0000

The Yale rare books library[0] is a beautiful, amazing building to walk around in. Most of the books are off-limits for fear of damaging them, I think. (This is what originally sprang to my mind when I read the title of this article.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beinecke_Rare_Book_%26_Manuscr...

New comment by spin in "Why I left Japan after 10 years"

spin — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 09:19:43 +0000

Hmm, yeah, that's never happened to me, either. I've never been assaulted, either. I have been harassed by other foreigners though, but that's almost always in the "seedy" areas, like Roppongi or Kabukicho.

I rarely, if ever get harassed by the police. But I know some Asian-American friends who get harassed... eg: the cop thinks he's Vietnamese, so starts giving him trouble. When the cop finds out he's from the U.S., all of a sudden the cop starts acting totally nice. I'd call that racism.

New comment by spin in "Why I left Japan after 10 years"

spin — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 08:42:31 +0000

I'm an American living in Japan (about 12 years now). Most of the stuff he's talking about is totally true. But, like some other commenters have been saying, I feel like: you figure that stuff out after a couple years and make peace with it (or not). There are many good and bad things about Japan. And it's different if you're a foreigner in Japan, yes. And it depends on where you're from and what color your skin is, etc.

My only question is why did it take him 10 years to "get fed up" with it? Most people who leave do so after a year or so. Most people who stay longer than a couple years tend to stay for a very long time.

New comment by spin in "The Old Are Eating the Young"

spin — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 08:40:35 +0000

In college I had an econ friend who said that there's basically only three ways to grow an economy: more workers, better technology or more capital.

If you look at technology, then I think "yes!" it has improved the economy. Look at engines and trains and telecommunications. The first world economy today, per person, is rip-roarin' compared to 100 years ago.

Many western economies haven't noticed the decline in the birth rate yet because of so many immigrants. Japan is unique in that they are a modern country, with a declining birth rate, but very low immigration.

New comment by spin in "Easy XMPP: What are we doing here?"

spin — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 08:25:59 +0000

Awhile ago I built a little hack that allows you to run your own Signal server:

https://github.com/mfassler/pySignald

New comment by spin in "Compulab Airtop – Natural Airflow Desktop"

spin — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 10:02:19 +0000

I imagine that's for use with POS terminals (ie cash registers). A lot of those still have serial-port barcode scanners or serial-port printers.