Hacker News Reader

geocrasheron Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

I see those boxes at estate sales regularly. And on FB marketplace for free or $5. Or sometimes somebody thinks they're sitting on a gold mine of technological history and tries to ask actual money for a box of 20 year old tangles.

Sometimes hoarding stuff pays off. It's usually just hoarding.

geocrasheron Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

Hi, ADHD here. I bought Tiny Habits. I tried reading it. Didn't get very far. You can imagine why...

geocrasheron Sam Neill has died

"I would have liked to have seen Montana..."

You are forever in our hearts, Vasili.

geocrasheron Tell HN: Meta is down

The DNS Song seems appropriate. Even if it's not DNS in this case.

https://soundcloud.com/ryan-flowers-916961339/dns-to-the-tun...

geocrasheron OpenFOV – Webcam head tracking for iRacing

I gave OpenPOV a try with FS 2024, and found it really disorienting. It was not useful at all. I went to a Meta Quest 3 and that actually made me feel like I was inside an aircraft. At on point I tried to lean on a bulkhead. Oops.

geocrasheron I’m writing again

   memories of slashdot rush in

geocrasheron Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

I don't want to crap on peoples ideas. Really, I don't.

But getting some closet case computer with unknown hardware and turning it into a server, at scale, is an impossible scheme.

The only way to make it work would be to buy hundreds of laptops at once and refurb, new storage, and standardize with custom power delivery. Because who wants hundreds of laptop PSU's plugged into power strips. And those do in fact die.

And then there's the horror of manually removing wifi hardware and batteries. Battery disposal is an issue. And having worked on hundreds of laptops, some of them are major pains in the neck to get to the battery. Consumer HP's come to mind. The bottom cover can be difficult to remove without breaking any of the clips.

Point of Reference: 27 years in web hosting

geocrasheron What came after the 486?

I recall as a teen wondering if the 486 was so good, how amazing a 1086 was going to be someday :D

geocrasheron What came after the 486?

My first PC was a 286/12 with an AMD chip in it.

I well remember the 486SX/2-66's and how terrible they were. I liked to say that Compaq put the "sorry" in Presario.

In the late 90's, between around 96 and 98, I made good money building AMD 486 DX/4 133's. Those things were blindingly fast for the price. As I recall there was even a 150MHz variant.

Still, my favorite CPU of all time remains the AMD K6/2-450. It wasn't until the Phenom II BE950, a dual core that I unlocked to quad core , that I felt I had a CPU that matched the K6/2-450 in value. Since then I've had a couple of Ryzen's for my daily driver/work machine, and couldn't be happier. AMD has done a fantastic job keeping price and performance in tune. But, it goes even further if you shop smartly.

Overall, this was an excellent read, and brought back a lot of memories. The 6x86 for example- too much promise for what they actually delivered. And, thanks to this article I now know why so many cheap motherboards had their CPU's soldered. It wasn't a technology decision, but a legal one. I had no idea of that at the time.

geocrasheron Six ingenious ways how Canon DSLRs used to illuminate their autofocus points

My uncle Richard is one of the inventors on Honeywell’s early phase‑detect autofocus. Patent US4333007A, which figures out both the direction and amount the lens needs to move instead of hunting.

Modern systems like Canon’s Dual Pixel AF in bodies such as the EOS R5 are very direct descendants of that idea, just implemented on‑sensor with far more processing power.

Every time I see an article such as this, I beam with pride. (Pun intended).

geocrasheron Willingness to look stupid

I've never been afraid to share bad ideas because the best way to get to a good one is to go through the bad ones. Sometimes my bad ideas will spark a good idea from somebody else or sometimes it even turns out that my bad idea isn't bad at all and people like it and we end up adopting it.

Either way, not being afraid to look dumb keeps the juices flowing. And keeps the conversation going. Or sometimes it starts the conversation that nobody else is willing to start.

geocrasheron TCXO Failure Analysis

At first, I felt smart about knowing what a TCXO is. Then, it went downhill from there. Great analysis. I figured it would have been the heater component that failed, then reading the comments here, I realized I'd conflated TCXO with OCXO. Similar but not.

I tried :D

geocrasheron Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

I learned next-level defensive driving by bicycle commuting to work 5.5 miles each way on busy roads in rush hour traffic. On a bicycle you're invisible, and if you expect any less, you're going to get hurt. As it was, I had some very very close calls- at least one of them had the potential to be fatal. Ironically, the only time I ever crashed was my own fault.

But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.

geocrasheron The price of fame? Mortality risk among famous singers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club

   The 27 Club is an informal list consisting mostly of popular musicians who died at age 27. Although the claim of a "statistical spike" for the death of musicians at that age has been refuted by scientific research, it remains a common cultural conception that the phenomenon exists, with many celebrities who die at 27 noted for their high-risk lifestyles.

geocrasheron Tell HN: HN was down

My organization is, for now, using OpsGenie.

My pager noise: https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossin...

That will not only wake the dead, it'll wake me no matter how asleep I am.

geocrasheron Tell HN: HN was down

I had the same thing for Slashdot.org for many, many years. Both the reflex and the browser autocomplete. I still miss the old /. It was like HN + Hackaday + Usenet.

geocrasheron Tell HN: HN was down

Yep, have been on constant "pager duty" for 2+ years, although I have more help now and I get paged 1-3 times a week instead of per night. Still, carry my lappy everywhere I go. Bought an ARM Windows laptop to get that 20hr battery life so I could worry less during my travels. You know, fancy things like going get food or going grocery shopping.

geocrasheron A Cozy Mk IV light aircraft crashed after 3D-printed part was weakened by heat

That was my point. They used the wrong filament. And there isn't really a right one for the cowl of a single engine aircraft

geocrasheron A Cozy Mk IV light aircraft crashed after 3D-printed part was weakened by heat

Yes but are they printed with PLA or PETG, or even ABS? Or are they using material designed exactly for their use case, and tested thoroughly before being certified for flight?

Or do they get their parts from some vendor at a swap meet who spends most of his time fiddling with his Ender 3?

geocrasheron My Truck Desk

Just added to my cart. Thanks. Working from the car sucks, but it happens now and then. This should make it a lot easier.

geocrasheron Responses from LLMs are not facts

The ability to spot poor information is what keeps the end user a vital part of the process. LLM's don't think. [Most] humans do.

geocrasheron Responses from LLMs are not facts

LLM's follow the old adage of "Garbage In, Garbage Out". LLM's work great for things that are well documented and understood.

If you use LLM's to understand things that are poorly understood in general, you're going to get poor information because the source was poor. Garbage in, Garbage out.

They are also terrible at understanding context unless you specify everything quite explicitly. In the tech support world, we get people arguing about a recommended course of action because ChatGPT said it should be something else. And it should, in the context for which the answer was originally given. But in proprietary systems that are largely undocumented (publicly) they fall apart fast.

geocrasheron Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

Wow. I have never heard of this. Thank you. I just Googled it and while not all of the symptoms fit, a good number of them do. It's rather interesting, I know how to use numbers- I've done several types of analyses over the years, professionally. And my own budget/savings is done in my own self-designed spreadsheet, calculated/balanced down to the cent.

But ask me to do subtraction? Forget it.

geocrasheron Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

Exactly. I left high school over abuse. Another student spent the whole period sitting next to me staring at me muttering about how he was going to tie me up in the middle of the desert, and all the things he was going to shove up my ass, serious serial killer vibes, and the teacher just acted helpless, despite seeing everything. When they started stalking me after school, and it started getting physical, and the school did nothing, I left.

Thankfully that level of toxicity did not follow into the workplace, but I did have a car vandalized by a coworker.

Truth be told I was a bit of a punk, and had a knack for pissing off the wrong people. We all have our flaws, but nobody deserved what I went through. I'm a man now, not the insecure boy who tried to act like he was better than others to compensate, and I reject toxicity immediately. No room for it. Hard lessons to learn when you grew up with abuse.

geocrasheron Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

High school was toxic, and so were my first few jobs. Lessons learned the hard way.

geocrasheron Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

These weren't universal truths, they were my personal truths.

geocrasheron Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

Math is amazing, and I'm becoming interested in it after being out of school for over 30 years. But, my own incompetence with numbers meant gravitating away from them, for me. I am not dyslexic, but I think my ADHD does with numbers what dyslexia does to words and letters.

geocrasheron Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

My experience with school wasn't that different from work life. Lessons that I learned in school that followed:

1) I am a dork, embrace it

2) Avoid Math

3) Scientific method = troubleshooting with purpose. Use it.

4) People in charge can be total idiots, but they're still in charge

5) Popularity and Competence are not related

6) Competence and compensation are not related

7) If you stay focused and just do you, you'll succeed despite other people's drama and your personal pains

8) Abuse is abuse, and people negligent in doing anything about it are participating in it. Get toxicity out of your life.

9) People who believe in you are right. Ignore the rest and allow yourself to thrive despite them.

School sucked.

geocrasheron Revamping an Old TV as a Gift (2019)

We were the last people in town to get a flat screen TV. In 2015. We still had a 27" Sony CRT TV. That thing was beautiful. It didn't bother me really until one day.

A young person about 10 years old came over "What's that thing hanging off the back of your TV?"

I got some nice parts out of that TV, and cracking the vacuum seal on the CRT was just so satisfying.

geocrasheron Nepal Bans 26 Social Media Platforms, Including Facebook and YouTube

Since you added context to my comment that I didn't ask for, I'm going to add some to yours that you didn't ask for.

Because of an unknown metabolic disorder, I watched my wife starve to death. She literally died from malnutrition. It was the most awful ugly thing I've ever seen.

You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to.