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davtbaum

97 karma · joined May 15, 2012

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davtbaum··on Show HN: A 2-row, 16-key keyboard designed for smartphones
yeah, I agree. It feels pretty rough to me. On older feature phones, you could accelerate this with a right arrow key which would lock to the key for key duplicates like 'cc' in success. Definitely feels like this needs a dedicated key for doing that
davtbaum··on Show HN: A 2-row, 16-key keyboard designed for smartphones
Just tried it out, how do you accelerate disambiguating a double key 'nn' in 'dinner' vs alternate? This doesn't feel very usable compared to the existing keyboard to me
davtbaum··on Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
Love this - congrats Dave on the launch
davtbaum··on EVs are lowering Bay Area's carbon footprint
> Between 2018 and 2022, 57 of the sensors in the Berkeley Environmental Air Quality and CO2 Network (BEACO2N) recorded a small but steady decrease in CO2 emissions

Convenient date range considering the global pandemic and WFH shift …

davtbaum··on SVB Hall of Shame
Perhaps I’m an outlier here, but doesn’t this feel a bit exaggerated? I’m not sure why the author (or, for that matter HN in general) feels so strongly about this. In the end, everyone was made whole. VCs acted in the best interest of the companies they back, and SVB made some really poor decisions which caused them to implode. What exactly is the story here?
davtbaum··on Patching an embedded synthesiser OS from 1996 with Ghidra
if you're into this I highly recommend checking out Bob Grieb's work[1]. He has reversed MCUs on many vintage synths and has a website dedicated to his explorations. Really impressive stuff...

[1]http://tauntek.com/synthesizerinfo.htm

davtbaum··on Global music market grew by 18.5% in 2021, driven by paid subscription streaming
Disagree hard - every major label I follow is embracing TikTok and encouraging their artists to leverage the platform for growth. Also, labels have so much infrastructure for marketing, merch, booking shows etc. The need for this support doesn’t magically go away with new distribution channels. It just helps newer artists get signed quicker :p
davtbaum··on Ok, so you can’t decide
on a) I came to the same realization years ago. The fact that its a hard decision inherently means that either solution can be the right solution
davtbaum··on Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over (2020)
I think this piece is really about identity, and what happens when you establish and associate so deeply with an identity that when something challenges it (e.g. the passing of a job opportunity) it turns your world upside down. The author claims to have found peace in motherhood and that the job she was seeking wasn’t even that great, and perhaps the interviewers single minded, and maybe the entire process a little absurd.

What I find interesting about this is that looking through the lens of ones ego, this seems like the logical way you would cope with losing a job - just convincing yourself it wasn’t ever really what you wanted

davtbaum··on Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music
The DX7 can lay claim to being one of the most important advances in the history of modern popular music. Perhaps not since Leo Fender attached a pick-up to a six-string in 1949

Statements like this are, exaggerated, to say the least. While the DX7 is undoubtedly prolific in 80s pop, it was just a synth that was successful for its price point (and timing!) as called out in the article. Case in point that today, nearly all the major manufacturers are building re-issues and the most coveted are those the analog counterparts of the Dx-7 (the sequential prophets, Oberheims, ARP...). FM has no way succeeded the typical subtractive synthesis of the analog machines.

source: I write 80s influenced music and collect synths

davtbaum··on Home Studio Setup Costs Compared – 1980s And Now
Yeah, this is spot on. The plethora of great VSTs out there makes it hard as an artist to choose a tool. You can easily get stuck in ‘preset surfing’ mode where you quickly realize you’ve spent an hour not really making anything.

For me it was important to acknowledge this and help myself set boundaries to how I spend my time producing. I also found myself gravitating toward vintage gear because of its limits and how it enforces decision making (e.g. printing synths directly in audio, which was a game changer in terms of process)

davtbaum··on Ask HN: Why are hiring processes flawed and testing random standards?
Most were looking for exactly one type with one set of experiences. Anything outside of that and you are filtered out.

In my experience this rings true for senior roles and less so for new college grads.

Companies seem afraid to hire thinking there is a slightly better/cheaper option around the corner.

I can see why perhaps a candidate receiving a rejection may think this, but in the companies I’ve worked at this has never been the case. It’s always been “it’s really tough finding talent, not paying talent”.

The take home assignments with random marking standards. Tests can matter, ui could matter, api structure could matter, documentation/choice of framework, speed, style all could matter but you rarely know which matters to whom and rarely have time to do it all and even if you did everything perfectly a lot of the time no one even looks or the reviewer expects the code to look like how they might write it.

A fair reviewer recognizes the limitations of these take home exercises. While there are many ways to perform a take-home successfully, there are more ways to show that you aren’t qualified for the role. Not all that pass will be right for the job, but most who fail aren’t.

davtbaum··on The Perils of Loading Native Libraries on Android
But it wasn't the fragmented Android that caused this bug...

The article acknowledges that the root cause was an existing bug in Package Manager.

davtbaum··on Understanding ARM Assembly, Part 1
One instruction is not being executed against multiple registers, it's that the same 128bit register range can used as q, d, or s registers depending on the which instructions you're executing
davtbaum··on Being Sneaky in C
> ...Except, of course, the the compiler can and will optimize away any such memset.

It's dependent on the function attributes of memset (e.g. __attribute__((pure))) - it won't always be optimized out.

https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/references/c/gcc4.7/Function-A...

davtbaum··on Big-Endian “is effectively dead”
Even though the bytecode is being executed on a VM, the VM itself has been ported to the architecture, which has a native endianness. Byte order in the dex that matches the host OS's will likely result in a performance gain as the VM can cast more efficiently.
davtbaum··on The little book about OS development (2012) [pdf]
Check out chapter 10 of the Definitive Guide to ARM [1]. It's not a guide, but the best resource I found in regards to OS support on the platform.

1. http://books.google.com/books?id=5OZblBzjsJ0C&pg=PA181&lpg=P...

davtbaum··on Where Did Time Come From, and Why Does It Seem to Flow?
No, I think the point is that your mind interprets the universe as spinning when you stop twirling. This is just an interpretation, as is the flow of time.
davtbaum··on Lego Calendar
I'm not sure i agree, I can't imagine it taking more than a solid day of work prototyping this in OpenCV.
davtbaum··on BlueRobotics – T100 Underwater Thruster
Another great hardware platform, the Jetson TK1. Much more capable than the Pi (I can't speak on the BeagleBone), and even though it's new it has great software support (OpenGL, OpenCV, CUDA).

http://elinux.org/Jetson_TK1

davtbaum··on Cylinders in Spheres
It wasn't (initially) clear to me that the cylindrical hole must enter and exit the sphere.

With that knowledge the solution seems pretty intuitive.

davtbaum··on Apple is reportedly launching iOS in the Car with Ferrari, Mercedes, Volvo
I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for the auto industry to adopt mobile platforms as part of the in-car experience. This is a great move though, hopefully it will force other manufacturers to dump their lacking proprietary platforms in favor of Android/iOS
davtbaum··on Snapchat Is Mulling Another Huge Round at a $3.5 Billion Valuation
This is ridiculous. How exactly does Snapchat plan on profiting from their user base if they have yet to have proven a revenue model?

Sure, advertisements seem like the end game, but how will they be targeted? How can they be implemented without severely affecting application experience and user expectations?

davtbaum··on Is it OK to replace optimized code with readable code?
Who ever said optimization and readability were mutually exclusive?

If the engineer who develops this (provably optimized) codebase can't read the code, he/she should be replaced with someone who can.

davtbaum··on Startup offers trip as hiring bonus
Nice misuse of the term 'low level developers' Craft Coffee...
davtbaum··on Please Learn to Code
Anyone else bothered by the crappy coding style in that screenshot?