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tomcam

22,059 karma · joined May 17, 2010

I'm not trolling. I actually want to know the answer, although my comment may feel less than diplomatic.

tomcampbell@gmail.com

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tomcam··on Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water
Because of this I always fix a piercing gaze on any pistachio that crosses my path
tomcam··on What I've learned about the trombone
No one has yet mentioned that getting good tone quality on a trombone is perhaps its biggest challenge.

The same as true with violin and viola. The older and more primitive and instrument is, the more work you have to do.

Contrast this with the trombone’s cousins, the baritone and euphonium, which have infinitely better tone quality with little to no effort at all.

I will get downvoted for this, but modern players like Trombone Shorty have nowhere near the tone of players like Tommy Dorsey. this is clearly a matter of preference because he could nail that smooth smooth sound if you wanted to. I just don’t like the blatty sound.

tomcam··on What I've learned about the trombone
I have a bunch of them, but I prefer to play marching baritones because I’m less likely to bang them into a music stand.
tomcam··on What I've learned about the trombone
No. It has a trombone look but more important, it is not as conical as a baritone so it doesn’t sound as rich.
tomcam··on ESP32-S31
I didn’t know that. Thanks for letting me… meet the FOCers

I’ll see myself out of the Internet now.

tomcam··on Building durable workflows on Postgres
I suppose you're right. What I liked about it was this very specific graf, which gave me a lot to think about as a (potential) future implementor. It tells me this person has thought deeply about these issues and I feel like I have a much better grasp of the concept of a durable workflow than I did after reading TFA. Thank kindly for spending so much time on my comment.

> Once you need retries, backoff, timeouts, cancellation, versioning, visibility, task routing, rate limits, leases, heartbeats, stuck-worker detection, replay/debugging semantics, workflow migration, fanout/fanin, long timers, audit trails, and operator tooling, the “just use a database” story becomes “build a poor copy of a workflow engine plus a bunch of workers.” pretty quick.

tomcam··on Markdown Tables Generator – Tablesgenerator.com
As a stout proponent of Markdown I have to say getting tables right is hit or miss for me. Love this site.
tomcam··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
Stop it, you tease. I'm getting a little tingly
tomcam··on Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
I’m retired and still working on a new business
tomcam··on Perry Compiles TypeScript directly to executables using SWC and LLVM
This looks exciting.
tomcam··on Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
Always preparing for the next job at night
tomcam··on Building durable workflows on Postgres
Did I say revolutionary?
tomcam··on Building durable workflows on Postgres
Ridiculously good analysis! HN is a national treasure because of posts like this.
tomcam··on Ask HN: Entrepreneurs, how long did it take you to succeed?
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3gbx78/til_t...

It was an eBay-related business that I had used many times. The resources I used were common sense and a realistic perspective on business, neither of which I was raised with :O. I went in knowing it might be a ripoff so I didn't go into debt. Just used up some of my retirement account.

There was little time for due diligence so I developed a relationship to the owner of the business to help calm my nerves.

tomcam··on Ask HN: Entrepreneurs, how long did it take you to succeed?
Redmond, WA
tomcam··on Ask HN: Entrepreneurs, how long did it take you to succeed?
What do you mean by succeed? To me, it's very specific. It is to live without debt or a mortgage in a safe place where I can afford medical insurance (which currently costs me $65,000/year). It also meant being able to spend as much time with them as my children required.

I guess you could say it took me from ages 21-38. If you count study as a child, 12-38.

However by the time I was 23 I was already super happy. I had a good job and could afford to take my girlfriend out a couple times a week. So the times from 23-38 were fulfilling and very enjoyable even though I didn't feel I "made it" until 38.

12: Started reading business books & biographies

16: Kicked out of high school

21: Dropped out of college & started to teach myself programming.

21: Fired from my first job as programmer

23-31: Worked as computer programmer, moonlighting journalist & got lots of free learning materials. Also spent all extra money on books.

25: Got angel funding for a business that sort of failed 3 years later

28-31: Programming jobs. Fired from another one.

34: PM job at Microsoft. Everyone sold their stock options due to dumb things Marc Andreesen said but I kept it all. Stock went up 1300% in the next 4 years. My friends who had been there much longer all seemed to listen to Marc.

38: Retired to due handicapped kid born. Stock was worth $1 million, had to sell it when I left. So $600K after taxes.

40: Bought a business, fixed it up, and it supported us beautifully for the next 20 years. Spent a lot but also saved a lot. HN calls it a lifestyle business. I made, say, minimum salary for an NFL football player. We bought our house for cash in a neighborhood where one of my favorite guitarists lived, but they couldn't make the house payment and moved out. Same for a local newscaster. I bought another house in the neighborhood for cash as an office.

60: Sold the business, now live off investments. Traded the houses for a farm in town.

tomcam··on Everything in C is undefined behavior
I fear I will be downvoted into oblivion but I also want to learn from this.

First let me state the case for C. It’s meant to be used as a systems language that’s as close to assembly as possible while remaining portable (compared to assembly). As such it’s the first high-level language developed for any new processor.

Given the above predicate: Isn’t everything described in the article as it should be?

Add too much to the language and it becomes less possible to implement on new architectures, right? Because the undefined behavior lets implementors stand up new compilers fairly quickly.

For less undefined behavior isn’t it better to use languages that have that in their DNA? D, Zig, Go, Java, etc?

tomcam··on Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian
Did GP edit the post? Please explain to me where they stated that developers should act like monks who’ve taken a vow of poverty?

I completely agree with the sentiment of your reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181203 btw

tomcam··on MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
I can top that (he said bitterly). My wife is still gorgeous after 30+ years of marriage and is a 10x programmer. But she was happy when given the choice not to work when we married, and hasn’t touched a compiler in decades.

I did well in business, but the family joke is that I’d be a billionaire if I could have monetized her.

tomcam··on Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold
Delightful! Thank you.
tomcam··on Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
I remember it well and now I can’t get that stinger out of my head
tomcam··on Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
Who doesn’t miss the days when a Milliarden was worth something?
tomcam··on German Dog Commands
But with the batwings I hope
tomcam··on German Dog Commands
I totally want a batwinged attack dog now
tomcam··on German Dog Commands
Now I’m dying to know what kind of herding you do that requires this separation of powers
tomcam··on Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh
That 8088 MPH demo is a tour de force. Which tells you that the millions of Apple laptops being bricked right now instead of being recycled could have some amazing use if it were possible to wipe them clean and reuse. Sigh.
tomcam··on Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)
So good to see Oberon this accessible! Mad props!
tomcam··on Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry
This answer blew my mind. It's making me think in a very different way.
tomcam··on The curious case of retro demo scene graphics
Well-balanced, well-written article. It linked to a site called demozoo that used Cloudflare bot detection to block me at least 6 times from my home IP that CF had heretofore permitted, which is damn nice of them considering nothing nefarious ever originated from this address.

So, no way to tell if the illustrations were illustrative.

tomcam··on A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)
Thanks. Same to you! I treasure such exchanges.

Sorry for the tardy reply. Had a couple of surgeries.

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