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lopespm

1,549 karma · joined October 6, 2016

[Website] https://lopespm.com

[GitHub] https://github.com/lopespm

[Twitter] https://twitter.com/lopes_pm

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lopespm··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
One thing that always worried me about bluetooth headphones was their proximity with the brain, for prolonged periods of time. As such, for several years, I've already replaced my legacy Bose wired headphones 3 times, since I can only get them on eBay whenever the ones I own start failing for some reason. I am almost sure they are clones, but there is nothing that comes close to them on the market in terms of wired headphones with noise cancellation. I even wrote an article on this: https://lopespm.com/notes/2025/02/22/wireless-headphones.htm...

I've very thankful that we are coming back to wired headphones.

lopespm··on Minimal x86 Kernel Zig
OP here, thanks for all the comments! In the meanwhile added the capability to build a bootable ISO with a GRUB menu https://github.com/lopespm/zig-minimal-kernel-x86
lopespm··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://lopespm.com/ - personal blog and projects
lopespm··on The Therac-25 Incident (2021)
I am really amazed by the frequency and the quality of your output.

Would you have an article on your routines, how you structure your day / work? Essentially, what enables your consistency, and quality articles?

lopespm··on The average college student today
> It’s also clear that kids whose parents restrict phone use seem to have superpowers compared to those that don’t.

Love this phrase. What might happen is that the next generation, upon seeing this opportunity, will do the opposite of their elders and highly value focus, and more readily dismiss quick gains.

lopespm··on Life Has Several Exits
Good catch, thank you! Fixed it now :)
lopespm··on Writing as a form of thinking
If my word is enough, this article was actually written by me. Although it would be quite ironic if it was written entirely by GPT, with no revisions whatsoever :)
lopespm··on Ask HN: YouTube Channels for the Intellectually Curious
- The Diary Of A CEO - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO

- Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoriesofEverything

- Tech Ingredients - https://www.youtube.com/c/TechIngredients

- Lex Fridman - https://www.youtube.com/c/lexfridman

- Andrew Huberman - https://www.youtube.com/c/AndrewHubermanLab

lopespm··on WTF Nextdoor? Over 130 clicks to disable email and push notifications?
Meetup suffers from a similar issue, where one cannot perform bulk changes to all the subscribed groups, which becomes unwieldy when one has over 100 subscribed groups.

Apart from this, it happened just a few months ago that these settings suddenly stopped working, so I received several non-solicited emails from notifications that should have been disabled.

Issues like this could have a significant negative impact in user experience and retention, in my opinion

lopespm··on The Norway Problem
> Christopher Null has a name that is notorious for breaking software code - airlines, banks, every bug caused by a programmer who didn’t know a type from their elbow has hit him.

This one made chuckle, and TIL that Null is a real life surname.

lopespm··on HN Alternative UIs
One more reference: HackerNews Daily, which I've published a couple of days ago:

- Web page: https://lopespm.github.io/hackernews-daily

- GitHub repository: https://github.com/lopespm/hackernews-daily

- Blog article about its implementation: https://lopespm.github.io/2020/12/25/hackernews-daily.html

lopespm··on Show HN: Hacker News Daily – Lightweight glance over the past best stories
Apart from the different view you mentioned (added screenshot and top comments), I believe the other more subtle difference/advantage is that it picks up the most relevant stories on any given day, and filters out the others from previous days.

My experience around this is that when I check the latest "daily", I know from which day I can start reading, and all the stories starting from there will be new to me. Otherwise, checking the "best" stories, say, every day, I would have the added effort of filtering out the ones I've already seen.

lopespm··on Show HN: Hacker News Daily – Lightweight glance over the past best stories
The (best) stories are fetched via the Hacker News API:

- API call documentation: https://github.com/HackerNews/API#new-top-and-best-stories

- Code pointer: https://github.com/lopespm/hackernews-daily/blob/main/hnsour...

- This is equivalent to https://news.ycombinator.com/best

On a given new day, stories that appear in previous days are filtered out. The top most stories are prioritized

lopespm··on Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
"By contrast, reusable metal straws and canvas bags require something like 10-100x the energy and materials to manufacture, and need regular cleaning to avoid spreading disease. So unless you use them many times, they end up being worse for the environment. I lose them much faster than that, and have better things to do with my attention than remember to bring bags with me everywhere I go, so I just use those old-school plastic bags whenever I can."

This is not a valid argument. A bad habit should not be a justification for a devious behavior. I would even argue it is easier to bring your reusable container of choice when going shopping, and if that habit is really formed, then you wont be able to exit your home or car without it, because something will seem to be missing. Take for example the backpack or "granny cart". They are much more comfortable to use when compared to lugging around many plastics bags around your hands, and the granny cart is much better for your back.

lopespm··on Twitter was down
A comment made before by another user about Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outages offers an interesting perspective:

"This outage coincides with FBs PSC (performance summary cycle) time. I wonder if this is folks trying to push features so they get “impact” for PSC."[1]

I wonder if the recent outages on other well known services could be heavily influenced by a similar phenomenon. If this holds water, it would be interesting to have an article or study around this issue. I certainly would be interested in reading it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20350579

lopespm··on Forest kindergarten
It is an interesting concept to have these borderless, less limited kindergartens. Another example is a Tokyo kindergarten which was architected to provide more freedom to children, and let them play and experiment as they wish[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5jwEyDaR-0

lopespm··on Public Domain Movies
Browsing through the site I stumbled upon the "Why we fight" movie series[1].

Even though it is very biased and seems to have been a propaganda tool, the movies are actually pretty well crafted.

The "public domain movies" site does not have the entire series, but you can find them at youtube[2]

[1] http://publicdomainflix.com/browse-documentary-videos-1-date...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcAsIWfk_z4&list=PLugwVCjzrJ...

lopespm··on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages
Very good point. I wonder if the recent outages on other well known services could be heavily influenced by a similar phenomenon. If this holds water, it would be interesting to have an article or study around this issue. I certainly would be interested in reading it.
lopespm··on Ask HN: Why is everything a file in Unix
Some good in depth explanations:

- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/141016/a-laymans-ex...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_is_a_file

lopespm··on The Hacker News Habit
Same here, for years. It was the best way I could find to consume HN. It does not require a newsletter subscription and one can consult it whenever he/she wishes. I normally consult it once or twice per day, and make a conscious effort to focus my attention on that task for a continuous time amount.
lopespm··on Ask HN: Why is nearing completion so demotivating?
My personal hack to get around pre/post completion downers is to have a clear idea of what to do after the project completion.

This can be support for the completed one, another project, vacations, or anything really, as long as it is clearly visualizable and tacit. If there are multiple good options and I cannot pick one of them, I try to clamp them to a maximum of 3. All of them have to be clear and concise.

It is a somewhat simple system, but I have found this to work time and time again, mostly because I came to realize that the core of these downers could be attributed to post completion void. Before this approach, I would find myself delaying completion in order to not face the unknowns of what would happen after getting though the goal line. This led to unneeded anticipation worries and needless time wasting.

On the other hand, having these delimited post project goals took the situation on its head. Instead of delaying completion, I worked even harder to get there fast and jump to the next exciting stage as fast as possible.

Thank you for the post and for sharing your experience with us!

lopespm··on Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced
Honest question: for those of you who own a mobile device without a headphone jack, do you find it to be an encuberment?

Personally I still find it a bit hostile to not have the jack available, since often times I find myself charging the phone and using the headphones (when watching videos for example), so having an adapter dongle for such a frequent task seems counterintuitive to me. I believe that if a device is correctly designed, then it should serve most of its usecases without the aid of an extra adapter. These should be reserved for edge cases.

Moreover, I use headphones for a good part on my day and I am not sold on the idea of having a wireless device next to my brain for such an extended amount of time. Sure, we are already exposed to a good number of electromagnetic radiations, but this one I might want to pass. Not to mention the need to charge yet another device.

lopespm··on Developer accidentally deletes 3 months of work with Visual Studio Code
Exactly, a good portion of deleted files could probably be salavaged using "Recuva" right away, for example
lopespm··on Ask HN: You privately received $24M. What would you do?
Good point. I can't edit the main post anymore, so it might cause some confusion still. To make it clear, the purpose was to express 24 million dollars
lopespm··on Google I/O 2017
I can´t help to think this was not a business as usual I/O, it feels like the concretization of the exponential nature of technology development, sported nowadays a good deal by deep learning. Notice that a good portion of the products presented in I/O weren't just a result of many people grinding away on a problem (say, iterating on a new version of a operating system), but where "machines" worked/trained on a problem in order to do something useful for us.

This is not news to me nor anyone here I am sure, but seeing it realized on a keynote where a company gives us an update on what was accomplished in roughly a year and seeing it realized in a more wholesome approach/platform (Google Assistant), instead of scattered along different products, just made me realize that a fundamental mindshift is happening on a more global scale. From makers ("I will make this machine/software so that it can help with X") to leaders of machines ("I will give the necessary conditions for the machine to help with X").

lopespm··on Google I/O 2017
I would add Baidu as well
lopespm··on The Boring Company [video]
I have profound respect of Musk's perseverance and courage to tackle difficult problems, coupled with a great vision of the future. This project however, as it was presented, strikes me as a bit off the mark.

I lived in a dense city with good public transportation and good bike and pedestrian lanes. To get around the city and its surroundings, I would mostly use my bike. It was incredibly fast to find a parking spot and to get from point A to point B. Other times, I would use the integrated public transport system (bus/train/tram) if wanted to go somewhere further in less time. I had options, flexibility and much more freedom than I would if I used/owned a car. Not only that, but my quality of life was way higher than that in the suburbs. Not having a car made a huge difference: more physical activity, less monetary burdens and the piece of mind acquired by not thinking about its maintenance and care.

This takes me to my second point: passenger cars are mostly useful in sparse areas, like the suburbs. In dense areas it makes less sense to have a personal cocoon for transportation. Although the boring company's tunnels are underground, that same energy and investment would be better suited in a public transport alternative, like a subway. This subway would transport people and their bikes, and this could serve as a push for the street level pedestrian, bike and public transport infrastructures to get better.

lopespm··on Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro
Anyone here used a similar rig for machine learning?