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ansgri

1,346 karma · joined January 8, 2010

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ansgri··on We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
This. For me it’s insane that the default is “you got the service, we send the bill after, and you’re expected to pay” and not “if I got the service without explicitly agreeing to pay set amount for it (without signs of fraud), it’s your loss for providing it”. Obviously things change for corporate agreements, but then both sides are expected to have lawyers.
ansgri··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
I read it like “of the land you own, up to x amount is tax exempt”. Which makes perfect sense, and encourages ownership transfer and de-aggregation. Where aggregation of land plots actively increases land use efficiency, that efficiency gain is expected to be large enough to offset the added tax.
ansgri··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
A book 'The Jakarta Method' by Vincent Bevis is a great exploration of those events and similar cases of deliberate destruction of the independent third world.
ansgri··on Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
Get two: typical electronics flush cutters, and mini side cutters from hardware store. Use the latter in most cases, the former only where precision is really needed.
ansgri··on Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
I have a FNIRSI 1013D, it has a large display and actually decent, if primitive, touch screen controls. You even can export waveforms in a proprietary but reverse-engineered format. Pleasant device overall, it’s both portable and ok for desktop use.

If you’re doing mostly digital circuits, I’d consider a very basic scope for dealing with power supplies and PWMs (but skip the cheapest single channel ones, you’ll want the second channel very soon), and consider getting a separate logic analyzer that can decode common protocols on several channels. You won’t need that if you just work with popular modules though.

ansgri··on Bug Blindness
also reader on ios interprets it wrong as it picks up the first heading as the article’s title, and that makes me think that it could skip some content as it’s prone to do, so back to poorly readable layout I go.
ansgri··on I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them
It definitely looks to be one of the better ones. Since many of these products use same generic Chinese platforms, I looked for a similar product on Aliexpress since they have better shipping for me, but didn't find a full analog. Had to use a forwarder to order from Treedix—only to have it shipped in a very roundabout way from China.
ansgri··on Colorimeter 3nh CR4501 RAL Hack
RAL and Pantone serve different market, at least from my Europe-adjacent POV. Pantone is more used in print and branded sign design (like, colored plastic) as brandbooks typically specify Pantone colors. RAL is more industrial-oriented: it's more constrained but supported by manufacturers of industrial paints and coatings. Like, you buy coated corrugated metal sheets for your roof in RAL, and often can order paints by RAL code in your hardware store.
ansgri··on REO Trucks I4 4WD Pickup Truck Starts at $21,500
Would be best to have a modular generator for an EV, that would allow slower but practical charging while on the go or at rest. This would be basically a series hybrid with modular generator, not popular due to lower efficiency AFAIU. Just explicitly design for lower performance when battery critically low and is charging on the go.
ansgri··on Canada's only watchmaking school still ticking after 80 years
Those are not as good as they seem to be. I once had a g-shock mudmaster, seemingly an absolutely overbuilt thing, and it was resetting randomly in wet conditions. Maybe that could be fixed on warranty and it would work next 50 years flawlessly, but it didn’t inspire any confidence in that brand. They re-positioned themselves as a loud fashion brand, not a tool watch manufacturer.
ansgri··on Heuristics for lab robotics, and where its future may go
So, they predict that the future is a mix of JLCPCB and AWS Lambda for bio research, with immediately available library of reagents and easily programmable hardware-agnostic experiments.
ansgri··on Phantasy Star IV – 1993 Developer Interviews
Thanks, I was hoping for this sort of a response. Ordered a Miyoo Mini Plus.
ansgri··on Phantasy Star IV – 1993 Developer Interviews
PS3 was one of my favorite games, maybe it's time to get myself one of those pocket emulators and play PS4 finally.
ansgri··on I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
You underestimate the non-computerized part of humanity. Even with automated plants building other automated plants the propagation speed will be highly constrained by natural factors, plain unavailability of resources, and xenophobic nature of humanity of course.
ansgri··on Maladaptive Frugality
That is good if you can count on your cost of living being predictable. It's not for many people, even for relatively well-off ones: you may earn a lot for your area but being an immigrant without a permanent enough status in your current country, and your home country which you always have a right to return to may be unsafe or highly undesirable for whatever reason. So you need to consider the emergency of moving somewhere in a political and legal climate not known in advance.

Thus it becomes a more difficult choice what proportion to bet on stability of the current living situation, and what on long-term savings for emergencies which look quite probable but still unmeasurable. And the latter is complicated by absence of reliable and relatively liquid investment opportunities. All in all, fun to be from a sanctioned country.

ansgri··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0
One of the reasons I can see is it’s much easier to say “we don’t play this game” than get a lot of negative press for selective openness and breaking compatibility of non-public interfaces. Maybe it’s even more important internally, as it enables new kind of internal discussions distracting from priority work.
ansgri··on Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors
It's likely easier to publish genuine research if you have knowledge and rigor to properly synthesize the data. It's not as common as you'd think, and a good simulator is easily publishable, at least was some years ago in domains I'm familiar with.
ansgri··on Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
Which one? The classic QtWidgets, which implements consistent controls but sometimes talked about as deprecated (same as WinForms), or QML, which is "modern" and "actively developed" but does not provide native look and feel and requires (or at least used to require) a lot of manual work to support proper keyboard control and accessibility?
ansgri··on Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC
Would be more practical to have a single 50-300W AC-DC 24V PSU per room or group of rooms, then pull relatively short DC cables to each light. A multichannel light controller could also be placed nearby, and then if you need fully-featured brightness and color control, only a small PWM amplifier could be placed at each light if distance from controller to each light is too long to transmit PWM power directly.
ansgri··on //go:fix inline and the source-level inliner
Good illustration that a seemingly simple feature could require a ton of functionality under the hood. Would be nice to have this in Python.
ansgri··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
Isn’t it the only common variant of 4.4mm? Since portable balanced audio is audiophile-adjacent, no wonder it includes the common ground of dubious utility.
ansgri··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
What’s 1.44 mm connector in this context? Common sizes for headphones are 2.5, 3.5 and (lately) 4.4 mm
ansgri··on To the Polypropylene Makers
Rechecked now, PEX became way more accessible it seems. Rehau-style toolkits used to cost several hundreds.
ansgri··on To the Polypropylene Makers
No, PEX is different. PEX is flexible, sometimes more convenient but requires more specialized and expensive tools to install properly.
ansgri··on To the Polypropylene Makers
Polypropylene is great: it revolutionized residential plumbing, at least in countries that adopted it (apparently not the US). With PP tubes you can weld any complex plumbing with like $50 worth of tools and minimum skills. The only drawback is significant thermal expansion, but they’re flexible enough that they won’t break even if you forget to design around that.
ansgri··on Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
I feel like half of junior programmers are susceptible to this.
ansgri··on iPhone 17e
Unfortunately yes. Some mobile games are 30+ GB (and this is probably the major reason for increasing minimum storage), high-res videos take any amount of space and are slow to sync with cloud, in-app downloaded data caches are routinely 2-5 GB each in addition to apps themselves.
ansgri··on The only moat left is money?
Absolutely. Design parametric families of patterns, 3d-scan the person, let customer adjust with live preview, laser cut, then fully automated or low-skill assembly. Probably not currently economical like many things involving physical world manipulation, but without obvious roadblocks.
ansgri··on Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
Russian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.
ansgri··on Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer.

Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.

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