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alecdibbleon Show HN: Dittofeed v0.5.0 – Self-host SMS and email customer messaging

The SMS addition really ups the potential of the Dittofeed platform. Is SMS unsubscribe handles on the Twilio side or within the Dittofeed framework?

alecdibbleon Show HN: Open Prompts – dataset of 10M Stable Diffusion generations

This is a very interesting point. It's like using Fourier Transforms/Laplace Transforms to do operations or comparisons that are way easier in those spaces.

alecdibbleon The Twitter whistleblower story is worse than you think

The irony is that I had to help a client with a security audit because they wanted to provide Twitter with services that related to employee data. Judging from this article, Twitter would not have passed their own external service provider security audit.

alecdibbleon [dead]

> Our school is based on inclusion, and openly displaying Satanic symbols (on a public social media platform) that directly goes against the principles of the vast majority of families who represent the school, is not inclusive.

Religion is federally protected class. It seems like it would open up the district to a lawsuit if the employee were fired based on this.

alecdibbleon Are you the asshole? – AI powered answer bot

I tried with several inputs, but kept getting the following output for every response:

No response - you likely hit the content filter. Try re-generating!

alecdibbleon Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags

How much EM radiation bounces and how much it gets absorbed is highly variable depending on the material and, most importantly, the frequency of the EM radiation. A great example in this article is the faraday bag that was visibly transparent but blocked the EM radiation in the 1-6gHz range. The metal tin was basically the opposite, it blocked visible radiation very effectively but not radiation in the radio frequency range.

alecdibbleon Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

I recommend QP if you are going to do FPGA processing using a softcore or hardcore processor. It's an event-based state machine framework that handles IO really well. A hardcore processor would be more performant and take less LUTs but softcore will give you more flexibility as far as sourcing FPGAs.

alecdibbleon The Wolfram Physics Project

What you are describing is an analog computer or circuit. These definitely exist, I had to build a circuit to model the physics of a bouncing ball in a Circuits class in college. However, I don't know how often analog computers are used in professional/practical applications these days. Here is some more info: https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/not-your-father...

alecdibbleon Gilbert Strang Teaches Linear Algebra

These videos helped me immensely when I was getting my Electrical Engineering degree. I didn't realize going into the degree a bulk of the coursework would be focused around fourier/laplace transforms and linear algebra.

alecdibbleon How To Open and Manipulate Large CSV Files On A Mac

Thank you for linking this. It seems to be much more intuitive than awk, especially for his particular purpose. I wish I would have found this a few months ago when I was slicing and dicing lots of data for an extensive system migration project.

alecdibbleon How To Open and Manipulate Large CSV Files On A Mac

Amazing, I will definitely try this out. Thank you!

alecdibbleon How To Open and Manipulate Large CSV Files On A Mac

I don't believe so as it was a CSV export from Sequel Pro. I could be wrong, but the import worked fine using the same file truncated to the first few thousand rows.

alecdibbleon How To Open and Manipulate Large CSV Files On A Mac

vi is an editor so it doesn't really solve my requirement of getting spreadsheet-like editing capabilities. SQlite is a good idea, I never thought of that. I will investigate that and add it to the article. Thanks!

alecdibbleon How To Open and Manipulate Large CSV Files On A Mac

I've had pretty good experiences with both of those editing the raw files. However, neither of them give capabilities like moving columns or doing filtering. But for basic editing or viewing, they definitely work.

alecdibbleon How To Open and Manipulate Large CSV Files On A Mac

I personally am not a huge fan of awk, I've never built a great mental model around its syntax and it doesn't really solve the problem I was talking about, which is getting a spreadsheet-like editing experience. Thanks for bringing it up, I should definitely add it to the article.

alecdibbleon It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

I thought I was going crazy with this 2014ish search result dynamic. I almost always have to use date filters to find recent information. Especially when trying to research products, reviews, types of products, etc.

alecdibbleon Ask HN: Reasons to stay in Software Engineering

I think, because of smartphones and smart gadgets, the demand for hardware and gadgets has reduced dramatically. A lot of gadget ideas can be built as an app. Plus, most businesses need websites or web apps now so there is much, much more demand in for web engineering.

alecdibbleon Ask HN: Reasons to stay in Software Engineering

In my experience, a web job can net up to 4x salary vs a much more difficult hardware engineering role. I know because I went form hardware to web and the average compensation is much higher. Additionally, web jobs tend to be less stressful.

alecdibbleon Geolocating requests with Google Load Balancer for free

Every web request is like a letter with a to: and a from: address. Your anger is equivalent to being mad that someone looked at the from: address on an envelope when you told them not to.

Also, your argument is that because the user doesn't want it, it is unethical? I don't want to sit in traffic but that doesn't make traffic unethical.

Similarly, you accuse them of 'violating trust'. It's public knowledge that any IP address can be looked up. Just because you weren't aware of it doesn't mean your trust is violated. In the same way, just because you didn't know something was against the law doesn't make it not illegal.

I am for privacy, don't get my wrong, but your comments represent one of the biggest challenges with privacy right now: the assumptions of privacy and trust. It's hard to have rational and productive arguments about privacy when people get emotional about the inner workings of the system. If you don't agree with the system, work to change it, but don't blame others for what is, at the end of the day, just a feature of how it all works. Instead, try to understand the feature and think about how we can implement future systems with similar functionality but more privacy.

alecdibbleon Writing a Simple Linux Kernel Module

A few years ago, I worked at a company that had hardware peripherals conntected to a master CPU card running linux through RS-232. One of the peripherals was a power supply that supplied power to another peripheral. Since they were architected as Slaves, the peripherals couldn't directly talk to each other, they had to get the messages relayed through the master CPU.

This whole communication process had to happen within a small time frame, something like 50 ms. A kernel module handled the communication, decoded the packets, and automatically relayed peripheral messages to other peripherals. The kernel module made it easier to achieve stable and real-time operation within the time constraint.

When writing the same function in userspace, there was absolutely no guarantee that messages would be sent or received in time.

alecdibbleon Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing

While GPS chips might seem like an obvious addition, it might negatively affect other camera functions like battery life.

alecdibbleon Why I Quit Being So Accommodating (1922)

From your perspective, what specific traits or responses did you cultivate to give off the impression you mention? Which were most important for changing other people's perception of you?

alecdibbleon U.S. Census director resigns amid turmoil over funding of 2020 count

It's equally likely that the startup would spend the $50 million with nothing to show for it.

alecdibbleon What Are the Tricky Parts of Embedded Development?

As a former embedded developer, there is another aspect of difficulty that hasn't been touched on. Dealing constantly with physical hardware introduces a host of challenges.

* If you or your coworkers are not organized, you can waste a lot of time looking for proper sized wrenches, proprietary screw heads, speciality crimpers, oscilloscope probes, etc. etc. The more hardware the company makes, the worse this problem can be.

* Most internal connectors are not meant to be constantly plugged and unplugged. In a testing scenario where you have to change connectors or test harnesses frequently, it is common for the connectors to break or wires to become loose. Then you have to waste time figuring out why your hardware stopped working.

alecdibbleon What Are the Tricky Parts of Embedded Development?

Your comment perfectly encapsulates my experience doing embedded development for a military contractor.

alecdibbleon Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

How will this work with a split testing tool like Optimizely?

alecdibbleon Analog's answer to FPGA opens field to masses (2008)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592292

Link to my reply. :)

alecdibbleon Analog's answer to FPGA opens field to masses (2008)

Most of the research work was targeting a specific development paltform, so I don't have good instructions for doing it generally. Here is the paper we based our research off of: http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~johns/ece1371/papers/1993_lewis...

Here is my presentation poster which should explain the motivation and theory a little more clearly than the paper: https://www.ece.ucsb.edu/academics/undergrad/capstone/event-...

I graduated before we got it releasable, and haven't had much time with my job to finish up the project. I don't have more time to add to this explanation, but if you want more info or implementation help, feel free to email me: alecdibble at gmail dot com.

alecdibbleon Analog's answer to FPGA opens field to masses (2008)

If you are interested, I did some research on extremely fast, lower power, and low noise filtering using FPGAs or CPLDs.

alecdibbleon Tim Cook Speaks Up

How is gay marriage analogous to Mardi Gras in this context? Marriage provides certain federal and state benefits. By denying it some people, you are denying a certain class of people those benefits. If you cancelled or banned Mardi Gras, you would be denying the benefits of Mardi Gras to everyone equally. The only way your argument makes sense to me is if you banned Mardi Gras only for gay people. If you ban it all together, you aren't denying any particular group their rights.