Hacker News: stapedium

New comment by stapedium in "Desert Graves (2021)"

stapedium — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 22:10:22 +0000

Sobering stories and photos. There is a beautiful stillness in the desert. Thanks for reminding me how much I miss it.

New comment by stapedium in "Introduction to Digital Filters (2024)"

stapedium — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 02:47:01 +0000

I was hoping to see something on Kalman filters. But it was good to see info on state space analysis. Also good to see a simple example on why dynamic range compression is nonlinear. Would have been nice to see more info on what makes a system non-time invariant with examples.

New comment by stapedium in "How you breathe is like a fingerprint that can identify you"

stapedium — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 13:59:47 +0000

I suspect the fresh air is more an issue with temperature and humidity rather than oxygen content. Try a fan first.

New comment by stapedium in "Ask HN: How do I give back to people helped me when I was young and had nothing?"

stapedium — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 20:23:06 +0000

Take care of your parents!

New comment by stapedium in "I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it"

stapedium — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 20:21:53 +0000

In 2008 or 2009 Palm still had enough relevant legacy apps that they could have convinced me to stay with WebOS, but launching a tablet (no phone) in 2010. Forget it! That shop has sailed and youre not onboard! By 2010, you were either android/java or ios/ObjC. If they really wanted to present an alternative platform they should have been giving away those 200k tablets and a compiler/sdk to cs majors. They werent! It was a half hearted effort. Acquisition was probably to bail out board members with palm stock with a buyout.

New comment by stapedium in "I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it"

stapedium — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 20:08:23 +0000

These were my exact thoughts about HPs printer division. These should be studied in bussiness schools as the definition of enshitification for the next 25 years. PC side of HP is a different story. Their high end consumer laptops are crap compared to dells xps line. Comodity/Enterprise gear is equivalent to Dell (primary competitor) at the generic box and monitor level. Maybe a bit better on the power supply and managemet side. Worse if you bought into VMWARE ecosystem. So I thought HP…meh…dying company with legendary history of innovation in the 80s and 90s. Then I bought an HP z840 workstation for homelab. This thing is a beast. Engineered out the wazoo! Three pcix16 slots, 1+ TB RAM, 40+ cores. Documentation for days. Way better than similar era Dells. At least in the late 2010s they still had it, for the right price. For sure not unusable or any where near awful…even 10+ year old kit.

Ive got no idea about gear in the last 3 years or how they will do financially going forward. But if you are looking at the used market, the enterprise workstation gear in the late 2010s has tons of value.

New comment by stapedium in "The Second Half"

stapedium — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:44:08 +0000

Current AI is like search. You still have to know the vocabulary and right questions to ask. You also need the ability to differentiate a novel answer from a hallucination. Its not going to replace lawyers or doctors any time soon.

New comment by stapedium in "An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system"

stapedium — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:38:52 +0000

I’m just a small business & homelab guy, so I’ll probably never use one of these big distributed file systems. But when people start talking petabytes, I always wonder if these things are actually backed up and what you use for backup and recovery?

New comment by stapedium in "No Calls"

stapedium — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:43:59 +0000

If you are selling to a non-technical user, phone calls give them a hint of your support. Email support is horrible. Turn around times are too slow. This is the reason I wont buy another framework laptop.

New comment by stapedium in "What’s the difference between an -ectomy, an -ostomy, and an -otomy? (1986)"

stapedium — Wed, 15 May 2024 22:27:25 +0000

To make even more confusing, laryngology is the surgical specialty you would go see for a tracheal issue in the neck. (where a trach is performed) And a head and neck surgeon (oncologic surgery) is the one that performs the most laryngectomies. Fricken otolaryngologists…isnt the one name complicated enough.

New comment by stapedium in "Why are bidets just now getting popular in America?"

stapedium — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 19:36:57 +0000

Many people have a fascination with cleaning their body parts and looking at the cleaning product to confirm that the dirty stuff is gone. Toilet paper gives you that’s satisfaction.

New comment by stapedium in "Own Your Web – Issue 11: Welcome to the IndieWeb"

stapedium — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 22:23:56 +0000

I love the idea of the Indie web. But the costs seem prohibitive for someone with 1990s skills like me. I have a personal blog site setup on a shared server for $100/year. But running things like mode.js are a no-go unless I upgrade to a VPS or set up my own aws (or other) sever. I wish there was a way to embrace the indie web with low cost static commercial front ends and offload the bandwidth light, compute intensive backend to my home server. Someday I’ll take the deep dive into this stuff. Maybe when I retire.

New comment by stapedium in "Google News searches ranked AI-generated ripoffs above real articles"

stapedium — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 22:30:39 +0000

It’s still better than duckduckgo requiring a Microsoft account to see TFA!

New comment by stapedium in "New images and video confirm Austin-made Tesla model Y has cracked front casting"

stapedium — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 17:47:30 +0000

Target market for the MachE is explorer and escape owners looking at EVs. Lightning and MachE aren’t anywhere close to the same price point.

# of MachEs at local dealer = 3

# of F150s sitting on lot >1 month = 50-100

New comment by stapedium in "New images and video confirm Austin-made Tesla model Y has cracked front casting"

stapedium — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 17:32:16 +0000

File a lawsuit to get them to lemon law the thing. Court testimony is public record that can’t be NDAd.

New comment by stapedium in "The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”"

stapedium — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 23:23:30 +0000

So is most of NPRs “analysis and context”

New comment by stapedium in "The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”"

stapedium — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 23:21:20 +0000

As someone who self-identifies as Hispanic, I find NPRs insistence on the term LatinX offensive. I’m a middle of the road New Yorker but NPR pushes their way out of journalism and into advocacy any time gender or sexual identity enter the conversation. And due to the risk of being labled anti-Semitic I’ll stay away from their coverage of anything Israel related.

New comment by stapedium in "The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”"

stapedium — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 23:12:41 +0000

It’s called computers at your public library.