Hacker News Reader

EvanDotProon US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

They already have ticketing cameras on school busses in some areas, at least around Syracuse, New York. Google "school bus camera ticket" for details.

Unsurprisingly, the rollout was quickly followed by news of 40+ false tickets from busses that were parked at a school. My understanding is that they were not loading or unloading kids, did not have their stop sign extended or blinking lights on, but just happened to be close enough to the adjacent street for the ticket cameras think the bus was stopped on the street and issue tickets to the innocently passing cars.

Those tickets were dropped and they're apparently fixing that, but not a confidence-inducing start to say the least.

EvanDotProon Show HN: A Simple Server to Match Long/Lat to a TimeZone

Thanks for being a sponsor at PHP[Tek] this year. Your stickers are out on a table next to our booth and I've been periodically telling people what you guys do as they walk by.

EvanDotProon Show HN: Open-source Android app to record raw data from Polar devices

Thank you!

I use the H10 to show my heart rate on my paramotor live streams and this will be SO much better than the way I'm scraping it with HR Monitor + Tasker + AutoNotification.

I'm very much looking forward to trying this out.

EvanDotProon Diagnosing an Unusual WiFi Issue (2020)

(Obligatory HN pedantry: arguably unrelated, but now I'll try to help anyway because this is quite common.)

Bluetooth is pretty low power, but without the TV in the way, that range should be no problem at all. Problem is that a lot can block it physically and drown it out in RF noise.

Most TV's probably have a thin, but solid aluminum plate in them for structure that could indeed block BLE and be causing the issue. Ironically, this is one RF case where metal studs would actually be helpful.

For comparison, I fly a paramotor and use Sena Bluetooth mesh for comms, and just our heads at any distance are enough to block it if we're on the wrong side of each other. Motorcyclists on the other hand don't often have this issue since there's other vehicles and stuff to bounce their signals around.

What might help if that's the issue is something reflective like foil mounted somewhere that can see both the controller and the GTV device. I'd also try to make the reflector slightly/roughly parabolic-ish (kinda shallow as to not make aiming difficult) pointed at the GTV device. You can hide the reflector behind and/or point it through anything RF transparent like wood or plastic.

Another possibility is other 2.4ghz noise— You could try turning down 2.4ghz transmit power on your AP as a possible quick fix. Of course if you haven't, make sure anything that can be on 5ghz, is.

Edit: Note that a reflector will also reflect noise sources at the GTV device.

I've also had issues with poorly shielded HDMI interfering with 2.4ghz in close proximity, so even just jostling things around behind the TV a little or using your best shielded HDMI cables there could help some.

Debugging RF can be tricky and frustrating, but I hope one of these tips helps either you or maybe a passer-by one day. :)

Happy new year!

EvanDotProon Ask HN: Do you have a YouTube channel?

https://www.youtube.com/@evandotpro

Recently started live streaming my paramotor flights on YouTube.

Been streaming on Twitch for a while, but I don't have any of the chat interaction stuff set up with YouTube yet. Honestly only started streaming to YouTube since they retain the recordings.

One of my favs, I got to fly and live stream in the center of totality during the solar eclipse: https://youtu.be/VZ-xxaJIkCg

I'm gradually working on improving the stream. Latest project is adding a chase cam that flies behind me.

Have some other random videos from over the years too.

EvanDotProon Show HN: I built GithubReader.org for better learning experience

Awesome, great job!

EvanDotProon Show HN: I built GithubReader.org for better learning experience

Neat tool, thanks for sharing. It would be nice if the behavior of the anchor links in markdown was preserved. In the markdown example you provided[1] the anchor links don't appear to work.

[1] https://githubreader.org/render?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com...

EvanDotProon Show HN: A tool exploring Earth-like exoplanets from NASA TESS mission

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

Small typo, the stellar mass/radius plot is labeled "Host Start"

EvanDotProon Show HN: Make a map of the countries/cities you've traveled to

Pretty neat, thanks for sharing this. I don't exactly share the privacy concerns of the other commenter, but I would feel better with a couple of things:

- Ability to toggle profile public/private - Ability to delete profile - Ability to change username (it's fine if doing so breaks my embeds, etc)

EvanDotProon Ask HN: Best way to cheaply convert website to Android/Apple app?

For Android, you can simply make your website available as a PWA, then you can publish it to the Play Store[1].

For iOS, be aware that Apple will absolutely reject your app from the App Store if it's simply your website wrapped in WKWebView with no native iOS functionality added. The rule can be found in section 4.2 "Minimum Functionality" of the App Store guidelines [2][3].

Apple usually reject such apps with a message along the lines of "We noticed that your app only includes links, images, or content aggregated from the Internet with limited or no native iOS functionality. We understand that this content may be curated from the web specifically for your users, but since it does not sufficiently differ from a mobile web browsing experience, it is not appropriate for the App Store."

[1]: https://developers.google.com/codelabs/pwa-in-play#0 [2]: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#min... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043216

EvanDotProon Show HN: An app store just for Web Apps

Really like this idea. I think anything that might increase awareness and adoption of PWA's is great.

I'm curious why you chose to trigger a vibration every time to switch categories when browsing.

EvanDotProon Linux Lite: Easy to Use Free Linux Operating System

As an anecdote, I've been upgrading a single install of Fedora stable for years without any issues.

EvanDotProon NPM won't publish packages containing the word keygen

I use the same method for a Twitch TTS system I built and it works very, very well.

EvanDotProon Public Money, Public Code

This seems so obvious, it's crazy this isn't being done everywhere.

EvanDotProon Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

This sounds quite similar to many DMT experiences you see on YouTube and hear about on podcasts. I wonder if there's been any studies monitoring DMT levels in realtime as people pass away to measure if there's a significant spike around the time of death. I recall hearing that measuring DMT levels is difficult because we process it so quickly.

EvanDotProon Show HN: FOSS physics-based sandbox game with circuiting, robotics, scripting

Wow, this is very, very neat. I'm surprised I hadn't come across this earlier since I love nerdy time wasters like this so much. I'm really excited that it's been made open source, best of luck with the project moving forward!

EvanDotProon Show HN: Gmailify.com extends Gmail with custom domains

Ha, I built exactly this, but just the outbound part because I use a single Google Apps account with a wildcard address and routing rules to handle all the inbound mail. I even considered wrapping it up as a service like this, but decided against it because I'd want to be able to give every customer a dedicated IP (as to not affect other customers if they misbehave) with a clean mail reputation that has been confirmed working and/or cleared with major mail providers, which simply introduces too much overhead for a reasonable price point. Allowing multiple customers to send mail from the same IP seemed too risky.

Anyway, this looks pretty well done though and I like the name/domain.

PS: under "advanced routing" on the home page, it says "Your domain's address space is easily tames with Gmailify's routing" ... I think "tames" was meant to be "tamed" :)

EvanDotProon An end to typographic widows on the web

Great timing. I was actually just complaining about this a couple weeks ago.

Wonder how long this will take to land in the OBS browser where I actually needed it.

EvanDotProon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2023)

Update: This position has been filled. Thank you to everyone who applied!

EvanDotProon Show HN: A HN clone writen in Go

> Keep hammering. For everyone who says you don’t need a framework in Go, there are at least a few newbies who learn how to set up and run their Go server and stack from your framework.

This. A million times this. Please don't be discouraged by any negative responses you get here.

EvanDotProon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2023)

Roave | Mid or Senior PHP / Laravel / JavaScript Developer | REMOTE (most countries) | Part or Full Time (contract)

My company Roave[1] is hiring for a part or full time mid-to-senior PHP developer role to help with a legacy PHP/Laravel/JavaScript project[2], working on in-flight Wi-Fi systems for major airlines.

Contact gary@roave.com

[1]: https://roave.com/ [2]: https://twitter.com/RoaveTeam/status/1631226172662054915

EvanDotProon Show HN: Scribble Diffusion – Turn your sketch into a refined image using AI

I run a custom Stable Diffusion bot for a small community that has generated many tens of thousands of images. The community wanted to know what it was costing me, so I dug into it a bit and have a fairly "literal" answer to that question (generally). With the RTX3060 I'm running it on, using a kill-a-wat, I very roughly calculated that generating a 512x640 image consumed ~ +170 watts for about 6 seconds (on top of the baseline power consumption of the PC when idle). This comes out to a little over 1,000 Watt-seconds or 0.000295 kWh per image. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look up their current cost per kWh and work out what that comes out to. This is extremely, extremely rough, but helped me wrap my head around the amount of energy we were using to generate all these images and roughly how much of my power bill I had to thank my friends for, haha.

Of course running on rented/hosted GPU's, it's a simpler, but much more expensive story — basically however much you're paying for GPU instances to run Stable Diffusion divided by how many images you generate. :)

EvanDotProon Wonders of Street View

+1 for Geotastic. I play regularly with friends — It's very well developed and he shows you how much your play has cost in Google Maps API usage to reference if you choose to (optionally) pay.

EvanDotProon VALL-E: Microsoft’s new zero-shot text-to-speech model

That's a great idea, yep. :)

EvanDotProon VALL-E: Microsoft’s new zero-shot text-to-speech model

I'm working on exactly the opposite of this, I have a GPT-3 based bot hooked up to voice recognition and Coqui for TTS I'm training to bait scammers. It has memory like ChatGPT (but only the previous 50 things said). The delay/latency makes it tough to get the scammer to not hang up initially, but the ones that tolerate the slow responses are very easily fooled by the bot. I'm working on speeding it up more and adding stammering, ums and uhs, and background noises etc to fill the delay.

EvanDotProon Show HN: Generate quiz questions using AI

Just showed this to a middle school science and math teacher I'm friends with and wanted to share that she thinks this is awesome and will probably save her a ton of time. Great idea and great work. :)

EvanDotProon Ask HN: Anyone else unable to access photos and street view on Google Maps?

Seems to be working for me again now. :)

EvanDotProon Open Source Tax Software

Around 2007-2008, as a "side project" I tried to build a web-based payroll software for a single state. Me and the developer I employed were able to get to 80% real quick, with ACH and everything. But as you say, the final 20% (edge cases) are nearly endless and ever-changing. Even a single state ended up being way too much for two developers.

EvanDotProon Ask HN: What’s the cheapest stack you have supported millions of users on?

$200/mo dedicated server + $45/mo prepaid phones. It was a very popular free ringtone website comprised of about 5 PHP files. It sent ringtones to users via MMS using carrier email address or via SMS (link) using AT commands to prepaid flip phones plugged into an old laptop at my house working off a queue.

EvanDotProon Nginx Playground

Wow, I'm taken aback by this, in a good way. This is _such_ a great idea and useful tool! Very well executed too, if I may say so myself. I've been playing with it a bit and I can't even come up with anything substantive in the way of constructive criticism so far. That's coming from someone who's been a Nginx advocate for quite a while; talking about it at conferences, etc.

Julia, if you read this: Remarkable work! Based on the comments here, I'm late to the party but I'm glad was bored enough to come here and stumble across this tool and your blog!