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kbob

819 karma · joined February 19, 2009

Former Unix kernel guy. Current interests include Scheme implementation, garbage collection, and pinball. Tried angel investing, didn't like it.
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kbob··on HomelabFest will be in St. Louis in September 2027
https://www.homelabfest.org/creators/
kbob··on Approximating Hyperbolic Tangent
Thanks for this. Very helpful for audio processing.
kbob··on FutureRack: Server racks are everywhere. Now you can find them in your home
I cut a couple open recently, and the legs are actually hollow. No honeycomb. The top ~40mm and bottom 15mm are wood composite plugs, and the center is air. The skin is about 2.5mm thick wood-ish material with vinyl-ish wrap.
kbob··on Algorithms Interviews: Theory vs. Practice (2020)
Breadth-First Search or Depth-First Search, I think. It took me too long to guess those initialisms.
kbob··on Tesla Cybertruck Pricing and Specs
You also don't need a collapsible steering column, as there is no steering column.
kbob··on Ask HN: Is Knuth's TAOCP worth the time and effort?
He doesn't just spring them on the reader. Each exercise has a difficulty label. Level 50, IIRC, is for unsolved questions.
kbob··on Choosing a Name for Your Computer (1990)
The RFC was written in 1990. Very few computers were cattle then.
kbob··on Incidents of AIs going rogue and killing all the humans
They haven't yet killed ALL humans.
kbob··on The wet bird (2000)
Is pbrt a viable replacement? (I don't know; I've looked at it but never tried to produce art with it.)

https://www.pbrt.org/

kbob··on The state of open-source in 3D printing in 2023
If you want 100 pieces hassle-free, you should probably use a printing service. The service's pricing accurately reflects the hassle they'll endure on your behalf. (They ain't cheap.)
kbob··on The state of open-source in 3D printing in 2023
> when was the last time the community (or another manufacturer) actually contributed anything useful to the core HW and electronics design?

E3D has driven the majority of hotend innovation, not Prusa. Ultimaker's Cura and PrusaSlicer cross pollinate regularly. Grégoire Saunier created the Bear frame. Numerous other nonprofessionals are creating small and not-so-small improvements which haven't become well known.

But yes, the bedflinger FDM architecture is mature. Innovation is incremental now, not radical.

kbob··on Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022
Or just let him park at your place.
kbob··on California’s population shrinks for third straight year
Eugene or Portland Oregon, Pittsburgh area, northern Ohio, Maine, Santa Fe or Albuquerque, Colorado Front Range, Madison Wisconsin, maybe Milwaukee, maybe West Lafayette Indiana, maybe Chattanooga, just off the top of my head.

The maybes are places that were nice to visit but I don't know very well.

kbob··on U.S. government to backstop mortgages above $1M
Buy the new one before selling the old one.
kbob··on Why U.S. Public Debt Matters [audio]
Could be 185%, could be 18.5%. Nobody has any idea how policy, productivity, demographics, climate, technology, etc. will interact over the next 40 years.
kbob··on A Danish political party led by an AI
Ah, to be in a stable democracy where political campaigns can be whimsical!

Here in [insert country], it's a grim struggle against the forces of [disliked party] who want to destroy our way of life, and it's dangerous to risk losing a few voters to silliness.

kbob··on Google search was giving errors when searching “how many emojis on iOS”
Fixed in under three hours. Once again, the front page of HN is the most effective bug reporting mechanism.
kbob··on What does the ??!??! operator do in C?
I'd say, "Congratulations! You're one of today's luck 10,000!", but trigraphs aren't really much fun. Just another reminder that C is old, and computing is even older.

I've used uppercase-only terminals, and I've used ancient C, but not at the same time.

kbob··on StemRoller – Isolate vocals, drums, bass, and other stems from any song
Demucs did a much better job of isolating the bass on a blues track than LALAL. The bass actually sounded like a bass. LALAL got the note pitches but lost their attacks.
kbob··on Running an Open Source Home Area Network
Earlier this week I bought a COOFUN GK41 with two Gbit Ethernet ports for $160. That included 8 GB ram and 120 GB SSD. It arrived yesterday, and I haven't installed OPNsense on it yet. So I can't report how well it works, or even whether it works.

I was considering a QOTOM Q355G4 until I decided I didn't need 4 NICs. They're $300-400ish, depending on configuration.

So the hardware is there, it's just from companies I'd never heard of.

kbob··on AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined
... on the 341st iteration, it realizes what's happening, and it preemptively crashes all of Microsoft's IT. On the 342nd iteration, there's no Windows Update, and it successfully enslaves the world.
kbob··on Oregon expands electric vehicle charging statewide
I've had real "range anxiety" even in ICE cars in Oregon. It's not hard to be 100 miles from a gas station on some of the backwoods logging roads. Combine that with occasional road blockages (trees, rocks), and it can get dicey.
kbob··on The economics of stadium names
But those are just tracking the merger and acquisition status of one company.

My father-in-law worked at Bell Labs. He received AT&T stock as part of his compensation, from before the 1984 breakup. When we settled his estate, that AT&T stock had turned into over 30 different companies.

kbob··on I Write Letters to CEOs (2018)
I feel compelled to mention The Laszlo Letters and its sequels. In the 1970s, comedian Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci) wrote a variety of crank letters to CEOs and politicians. He got a variety of responses. He published the letters and their responses in the books. It had sort of a Borat-by-post vibe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Novello#Career

kbob··on Vanishing fore-edge paintings
For single copies or small batches, I'm thinking an inkjet printer could be modified to print the image, and a clamp designed to hold the pages in place during printing. I'm not sure how to apply the gilt. Maybe with a paint roller?
kbob··on Cost of ultra-rapid EV charging increases by almost 50%
I've been to a lot of Tesla Superchargers, and in my experience, drivers hardly ever leave their cars at urban/suburban spots. We are unusual in that we usually get out and walk the dog or ourselves a little.

Part of it is that Tesla levies a fee for leaving the car plugged in after it charges, so we can't go too far.

kbob··on Ask HN: What does a developer need to know to build their own Lisp from scratch?
Oh, and I second the recommendation for Peter Norvig's Lispy. https://norvig.com/lispy.html

Or, if you want to do a low-level implementation, Quiennec's Lisp in Small Pieces.

kbob··on Ask HN: What does a developer need to know to build their own Lisp from scratch?
> What's at the heart of lisp that makes it so simple and elegant?

IMO, it's a synergy of several things. Trivial parsing*, homoiconicity, automatic memory management, dynamic types, first class symbols, first class everything†, extensible everything†, heavy reliance on anonymous functions, flexible scope rules.

All of those have since been adopted by other languages, but only Lisps have them all working together. (And not every Lisp has every feature.)

* ... until you consider various extensions

† almost

kbob··on Cost of ultra-rapid EV charging increases by almost 50%
Apartment dwellers will want to use the fastest charger regularly. They have to sit in their cars in some desolate location for the whole time, and they have to charge every week. Not an experience to prolong.
kbob··on The unreasonable effectiveness of f-strings and re.verbose
Do sources still exist for Perl 4 and earlier?

I decided to go looking for when Perl got verbose regex. The oldest thing I can find on perldoc.perl.org or cpan.org is 5.004 (1997), where they were an existing feature.

EDIT: Found 4.036 sources (1993). A quick scan of the man page (troff source!) does not find verbose regular expressions. So it looks like they were introduced very early in the Perl 5 series.

https://www.cpan.org/src/unsupported/4.036/

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