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nippooon Show HN: Dataviz, ranked daily from GitHub, NPM, PyPI and CRAN

You gotta write your HN post yourself rather than using an LLM - it's really obvious and a turn-off

I use News Feed Eradicator (works for Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, HN etc etc) it's wonderful and has changed my life! https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/news-feed-eradicato...

nippooon Ten ways a check passes while the thing it checks is broken

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.

nippooon Ten ways a check passes while the thing it checks is broken

This is the weirdest AI philosophi-slop I've read in a while. The whole website appears to be completely AI-generated - the 'portfolio' page is a doozy!

nippooon What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

How did you navigate the world of compliance testing and certification, with all the different countries involved (FCC, UL, etc). Are there any markets you've decided not to sell to as they're not worth the paperwork?

nippooon The Baffling World of Masayoshi Son's Presentations (2020)

Here's an example of his latest presentation slides: https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/investor...

nippooon To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system

Great analogy. Li-ion batteries have several layers of defense against exploding, one of which are vents that, if all else fails, let the hydrogen gas safely escape rather than building up. It's perfectly fair for independent testers to say "we haven't found any flaws in the protection circuitry yet, but we should bypass it to see if the vents work as designed".

nippooon On Labubu and the Hyperreal

Except scratch cards are a guaranteed statistical loss. Trading cards, if you're skilled and know what you're doing, can be a sensible side-income.

It's the difference between poker and roulette...

nippooon Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links

I mean, it happened to the FBI... https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/11/hoax-email-blast-abused-...

nippooon I hate soldering

To each their own. I find soldering (with a nice iron!) very therapeutic, much like knitting. I'll put on a good album or catch up with some friends on the phone.

If you're impatient, plenty of fab houses (like JLCPCB) will do all the soldering for you, for about 0.1 cents per SMD joint or 2 cents per THT joint...

nippooon Production engineering when trading billions of dollars a day [video]

That's effectively time-based request sharding which seems sensible but you'd still have to reconcile trades and any open positions (etc) across the time boundary where one system stops accepting requests and the other one starts. And keep the databases synchronous (ie have some system to make sure they're in sync at the changeover time) - or have a few minutes/hours of downtime between weekends and weekdays while you copy the whole production database from one system to another. The devil is in the details!

nippooon Bankruptcies increase 11.9 percent

I can't find the original source, but I remember reading a study showing that this rise was closely correlated to states which had legalised or loosened laws on gambling!

nippooon How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way

Above 400MHz or so, the on-die/on-chip capacitance starts being the most important thing (you're going to have inductance through the legs or balls of the chip).

Putting your decoupling capacitors next to the power pins _does_ cost. Not just in board space, but I've seen and reviewed layouts where the signal traces had to snake around decoupling caps or in some cases through vias because the designer believes that putting the caps close to the pins was the most important thing...

nippooon Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API

Truly! As someone who's worked with HPC and GPUs in a scientific research context, trying to get a service like this to work reliably is a different ballgame to your usual webapp stack...

nippooon How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way

This is probably a good place to debunk the usual wisdom that "decoupling capacitors must be placed very close to the IC pins". If you're using a solid power plane, rather than routing power through traces (and honestly 4/6 layer boards are cheap enough these days) it really doesn't matter where you place decoupling capacitors for most uses - keep the via traces short or ideally in the pad, and you can put all your decoupling capacitors in one place on the boards a way away from the chip and focus on good routing of your signals. Figure 15 on this paper (and the whole paper!) explains it well: https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=221...

nippooon Just How Much Should You Worry About Eating That Burnt Toast?

So, the concentration is 1000x less than the carcinogenic threshold in mice, and it's possible that our carcinogenic threshold is even higher than that, but the advice is "be careful how you store your potatoes and don't fry them too much and don't eat charred toast"? Surely the correct response is "it's probably totally fine"

nippooon A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform

"I went through about a dozen AI tools I've personally authorized in the last year after reading this. Nine of them have Google Workspace OAuth permissions that include reading all emails and accessing all Drive files. Nine. I authorized every one of them without reading the permissions because the onboarding flow asked and I was in a hurry."

Do other (tech-literate) people do this?! Giving anything access to my emails and Google Drive would keep me up at night and I try and be very granular with permissions and revoke them when I don't use an app any more. I would assume that anything confidential/NDA in my emails had been compromised and leaked well before this point!

nippooon Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors

It's hard to avoid, but there are steps we can make towards fixing it. I spent years in academia building open-source data processing pipelines for neuroscience data and helping other researchers do the same. Most quantitative research goes through "lossy" steps between raw data and final results involving Excel spreadsheets, one-off MATLAB commands, copy pasting the results, etc.

In a lot of cases (where data is being collected by humans with a tape measure, say) there is room for error. But one of the things that's getting traction in some fields is open-source publication of both raw datasets and the evaluation/processing methods (in a Jupyter Notebook, say) in a way that lets other people run their analysis on your data, your analysis on their data, or at least re-run your start-to-finish pipeline and look for errors!

As is often the case, the holdups are mostly political: methods papers are less prestigious than the "real science" ones, and it takes journals / funders to mandate these things and provide funding/hosting for datasets for 10+ years, etc - researchers are a time-poor bunch and often won't do things unless there's an incentive to!

nippooon We Left the Cloud (2023)

I'm always curious what RoI analysis goes into this kind of decision - whether to leave on-prem and join the cloud, or vice versa. The numbers always seem huge, and in opposite directions. "Moving from onsite datacenters to AWS saved us $2m/year!"

Has something changed with AWS' pricing recently, have their business needs changed over the years, or were the calculations (to use AWS) just wrong to begin with?

nippooon A New Kind of Hybrid Car Is About to Hit America's Streets

This is called a "series hybrid" rather than the more common "parallel hybrid" (eg Toyota Prius) and has been around for a while, including the BMW i3 with range extender (and London buses, and various other vehicles!). It's more expensive largely because the battery pack needs to be sized much larger to be able to provide enough current for all propulsion / regen. On the other hand, the combustion engine can be undersized and run at its most efficient RPM continuously - the BMW range extender is a 600cc little scooter engine that can provide enough power for continuous highway driving.

nippooon Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others

It's ironic that Backblaze themselves wrote a blog post a couple of years ago explaining why Dropbox isn't enough as a backup service and you need Backblaze as an additional layer of protection: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-wrong-with-google-drive...

That aged well...

nippooon 1D Chess

If you play the game, you realise this ends up in stalemate.

nippooon Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year

In other "incorrect calendars" bugs, there's the Rockchip RK808 RTC, where the engineers thought that November had 31 days, needing a Linux kernel patch to this day that translates between Gregorian and Rockchip calendars (which are gradually diverging over time).

Also one of my favourite kernel patch messages: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin....

nippooon $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

Good $3 MEMS gyros are about 100x better than that now - look at anything new made by Invensense in the past couple years. And their drift is pretty Gaussian-distributed, so the error scales as sqrt(n). If you combine 8+ of them on one board you can get about 5deg/hour stability...

nippooon Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

I can't prove it either way, but it's pretty clearly LLM-generated slop!

nippooon Meta Deployed AI and It Is Killing Our Agency

> We hire a senior Paid Ads Specialist. They set up a dedicated work account, which, by the way, is standard professional practice.

It's not "standard professional practice". It's explicitly against Meta's TOS.

nippooon California's new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report themselves

The irony isn't lost on me that it's the USA, the country with some of the most permissive gun laws in the world, that's imposing these draconian rules on 3D printed guns - or is this pressure from the gun manufacturing lobby?

nippooon 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

They've taken it down now and replaced with an arguably even less helpful diagram, but the original is archived: https://archive.is/twft6

nippooon Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

This kind of thing, widely implemented, would be a game-changer for dealing with assets after someone's death! I maintain my family's IT infrastructure (Google Enterprise admin, webserver etc) and I've been tempted to write down 1/4 of my password manager root password and give it to each of my family members - but then we run into the problem where if any one of them loses their shard, it's unrecoverable. Some kind of ECC would be great - ideally where I could print it out onto various bits of paper with a user-definable redundancy, or better still, some kind of reciprocal system where (say) 8/10 members of a trusted friend group/family ring could unlock any other member's password...

nippooon What if writing tests was a joyful experience? (2023)

A lot of tests are designed as regression prevention. You know the system is working as designed, but what if somebody comes along and changes the Fibonacci function to compute much more efficiently (and, in the process, makes some arithmetic errors?).