Hacker News: tomchuk

New comment by tomchuk in "New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper"

tomchuk — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:08:31 +0000

… and a M1 MacBook will source 5V/3A all day long to a non-PD negotiated sink. Somewhere between the M1 and M3 Apple decided to buy into USB-IF compliance and limit to 500mA.

Has lead to some very embarrassing “works on my computer” situations on prototype boards shared with my EE colleagues (I’m a software guy who dabbles in hardware when I need to)

New comment by tomchuk in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

tomchuk — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 13:31:46 +0000

IAM, Cloudfront, Route53, ACM, Billing...

New comment by tomchuk in "DuckDuckGo now lets you hide AI-generated images in search results"

tomchuk — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 17:09:46 +0000

Yesterday's discussion around Kagi[0] prompted me to poke through some settings there, as it had been a while. They've also added a "Exclude AI generated images" which they describe as "Best-effort removal of AI generated images from search results"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44594475

New comment by tomchuk in "The intricacies of implementing memoization in Ruby"

tomchuk — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 14:57:04 +0000

Can't mention Fibonacci and memoization in the same sentence without me breaking out my favorite Python party trick:

    def fib(n, cache = {0: 0, 1: 1}):
        if n not in cache:
            cache[n] = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
        return cache[n]

New comment by tomchuk in "Mechanical Watch (2022)"

tomchuk — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 20:30:15 +0000

Very relaxing. Until impossibly small $15 Incabloc springs start flying around the room. I'm convinced these sublimate into a vapor the moment they fly out of view of your loupe.

New comment by tomchuk in "Ask HN: Offline resources during internet outages?"

tomchuk — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 17:29:58 +0000

During a recent move, I found my WikiReader [0] from 2009 at the back of a drawer. Tossed some new AAA batteries in it and it fired right up. It contains a fairly complete offline copy of (2012-era) Wikipedia and some reference material for survival, medicine, farming, and repair of various mechanical and electrical devices. Remarkable little device for the $20 I paid for it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader

New comment by tomchuk in "Plain Text Calendar"

tomchuk — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 15:34:39 +0000

I have a shell function I use all the time to keep track of both calendar and timezones where our teams are located

  now() {
    cal -3
    echo
    echo -n "Local:       "
    date --rfc-3339=s
    echo -n "UTC:         "
    date -u --rfc-3339=s
    echo -n "New York     "
    TZ='America/New_York' date --rfc-3339=s
    echo -n "London:      "
    TZ='Europe/London' date --rfc-3339=s
    echo -n "New Zealand: "
    TZ='Pacific/Auckland' date --rfc-3339=s
  }

AWS DNS Issues?

tomchuk — Fri, 27 May 2022 01:41:49 +0000

Anyone seeing name resolution issues in AWS? Some internal monitors started failing about an hour ago with name resolution issues. Quad9 is returning SERVFAIL for status.aws.amazon.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525267

Points: 21

# Comments: 10

New comment by tomchuk in "Apple is discontinuing the iPod"

tomchuk — Tue, 10 May 2022 18:04:31 +0000

I have an older iPad mini for this purpose (but an old iPhone without a data plan would work too). I setup a separate home@ iCloud account under my family plan and use it exclusively for streaming music vi AirPlay, cooking w/ recipes on Paprika, HomeKit controls, reminders, timers, etc. - no Slack notifications, no calls, no calendar reminders. The AppleTV goes on the same account too. It's really been a great solution.

New comment by tomchuk in "The case for induction cooking"

tomchuk — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 23:26:30 +0000

Kenji Lopez-Alt, of Seriouseats and “The Food Lab” fame, is coming out with his new book, “The Wok”, here is his travel rig: https://www.instagram.com/p/CaxbNwdvOTR/. I’ve had a similar wok hob for years, and while fitting the wok to the curvature of the hob is essential, once you’ve got that figured out, it’s an absolute joy to use. Even, fast, powerful heat - nowhere near to a commercial gas hob, but neither is my gas range at home. My next home or kitchen reno will be induction, not even considering gas.

New comment by tomchuk in "Ask HN: What is the best privacy-focused video doorbell?"

tomchuk — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 14:20:15 +0000

I’ve divulged my camera & network setup. Sure, you could use that info to sneak up to my house, turn the gas off to my generator, cut the power, wait 3h for the batteries in my UPS to run out….

Or you could walk up and smash a window wearing a balaclava.

New comment by tomchuk in "Ask HN: What is the best privacy-focused video doorbell?"

tomchuk — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 13:37:47 +0000

I’ve been very happy with Ubiquiti’s Unifi Protect doorbell. It does mean having to buy into their whole ecosystem, but I was already most of the way there when I added the doorbell and a couple 4k cameras.

Recording to a local device does mean you have to consider things like power/network outages if you want remote access and recording to continue during those events. I’ve got all my network gear and the doorbell transformer running off a UPS to cover the time between a power outage and my whole-home generator kicking in. I’ve also got an LTE modem to fail over to on my Dream Machine Pro (Router/network controller/video storage).

New comment by tomchuk in "NvChad: An attempt to make Neovim TUI as functional as an IDE"

tomchuk — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 17:09:33 +0000

Looks like the author is running BSPWM, their configuration (in their dotfiles repo) is available here: https://github.com/siduck76/dotfiles/blob/master/thinkpad/bs...

New comment by tomchuk in "Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)"

tomchuk — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 18:17:31 +0000

Depending on the make, this could be something you could disable via app/ODB dongle. I use the Carista app/BT dongle and have used it to disable the panic button on my last two Toyoyas.

New comment by tomchuk in "ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper"

tomchuk — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 18:01:51 +0000

Looks like the embargo just lifted today. reMarkable just sent out an email with links to reviews:

https://mailchi.mp/remarkable.com/first-remarkable-2-reviews...

New comment by tomchuk in "Time to Upgrade Your Monitor"

tomchuk — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 19:03:13 +0000

Couldn't agree more. My primary monitor is a 43" 4k LG at unscaled, native resolution. I can fit five 94 column wide terminals tiled across, each showing 140 lines of text.

Is the text super crisp? Nope. Would I give up all this space for smoother text? Not a chance. Would I replace it with a 43" 8k monitor? In a heartbeat.

New comment by tomchuk in "Nikon's 300mm F/2"

tomchuk — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:39:07 +0000

Canon has their DO (Diffractive Optics) technology[1] which I think only ever made it into a 70-300[2].

Mirror lenses have been around for a long time. They fold the length of larger telephotos into about a third with some trade-offs in speed and image quality.

[1] https://global.canon/en/v-square/34.html [2] https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/d...

New comment by tomchuk in "Folding@home now has 400k users fighting coronavirus"

tomchuk — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 17:43:31 +0000

As mentioned, you'll need to ensure your /etc/fahclient/client.xml includes:

If you check your logs in /var/lib/fahclient/logs, you'll probably see something like:

  CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2
         OpenCL: Not detected: Failed to open dynamic library 'libOpenCL.so':
                 libOpenCL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
                 directory

Take that missing library over to the Ubuntu Package Search[0] and it will lead you to ocl-icd-opencl-dev

  apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

Restart fahclient and you should see something like:

   CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:7.5 Driver:10.2
  OpenCL Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:51 Slot:0 Compute:1.2 Driver:440.64

[0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=bionic&arch=amd64&m...

New comment by tomchuk in "Show HN: A directory of restaurants with links to buy gift cards to support them"

tomchuk — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 05:14:58 +0000

The website lists a restaurant (Southern Proper in Boston) that shut its doors months ago. The space already has a new tenant, has been renovated and has new signs up.

Edit: It appears the site immediately posts any user submissions without any verification. I posted Toro, and it immediately went live on the site. They’re worth posting, because they’re sharing 50% of gift card proceeds with staff through the end of April: https://www.instagram.com/p/B9zIuPkB4U-/

New comment by tomchuk in "iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max"

tomchuk — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 20:39:16 +0000

I was disappointed as well. But I get it.

After three years, Pixel users still have to refer to a guide [0] or track down a Google Engineer's Amazon reviews [1] to find a 3rd party USB-C cable on Amazon that doesn't have the potential to fry their device [2].

If I were Apple, I'd be hesitant to jump on to USB-C, when Amazon and gas stations around the world are selling $5 cables and chargers that are so out-of-spec that they introduce the very real possibility of damaging devices that will end up at the Genius Bar for an AppleCare+ repair/replacement.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/wiki/officialguide/usbc... [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFLICGQRF6BR... [2] https://www.engadget.com/2016/02/03/benson-leung-chromebook-...