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robbles

710 karma · joined February 11, 2011

Computer engineer turned software developer. Former startup founder. Interested in programming, electronics, startups, and games.
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robbles··on Amazon without the knockoffs
What is a "squat-length string"?

I realize this is one of Claude's copy tells (using excessively hyphenated words) but in this case I can't figure out what it means.

robbles··on Show HN: Spegel, a Terminal Browser That Uses LLMs to Rewrite Webpages
I'm curious whether anyone has run into hallucinations with this kind of use of an LLM.

They are pretty great at converting data between formats, but I always worry there's a small chance it changes the actual data in the output in some small but misleading way.

robbles··on Show HN: I built an under-the-door fan duct to lower bedroom CO2
I've used OpenSCAD for a few small projects. The main draw for me is avoiding all the "fiddly mouse stuff". I figure it's a trade-off between simple stuff being more complicated, and complicated stuff being easier to bulk edit and organize.
robbles··on Cap: Lightweight, modern open-source CAPTCHA alternative using proof-of-work
This is a neat idea.

I don't know enough about the underlying proof-of-work stuff to comment on how effective this could be, but I think it's pretty funny that the UI examples say "I'm a human".

I guess "there's only a few of me at most" or "I could allocate enough computation to this that I'm probably not up to no good" don't read as clearly.

robbles··on Long live American Science and Surplus
Good to know, thanks for the explanation!
robbles··on Long live American Science and Surplus
It's a pity they don't ship to other countries than the US. I looked through their website and saw some fun stuff, but no international shipping.
robbles··on Terminator: Hasta La Vista, Shell
I'm probably just not thinking through the problem fully, but: Wouldn't this be better solved inside the coding assistants? They're the parent process and should be able to tell when a sub command has hung.
robbles··on Show HN: Roons – Mechanical Computer Kit
This is incredible, love how much further you've taken it than just the proof of concept as well.

This is probably just my opinion, but I kept thinking that a better word for "drive" given the domain would be "clock". It's basically a binary clock signal driving these, right? Maybe "clock drive"?

robbles··on Show HN: Rabbit Holes
I opened this on a mobile device, and it only shows the top and bottom topic buttons. I was pretty confused until I tried turning on "desktop site" in Chrome and saw the left/right buttons. Having only a linear track of topics kind of undermines the overall idea!
robbles··on The effect of daily usage of Mouthwash on the oropharyngeal microbiome
What brand of toothpaste do you use for this? I often struggle to find a toothpaste that's SLS-free but still has fluoride.
robbles··on Optimizing the Lichess Tablebase Server
> here are the empirical distribution functions (ECDFs) with 30ms added to each response time

> The added constant seems artificial, but it's just viewing the results from the point of view of a client with 30ms ping time. Otherwise the log scaled x-axis would overemphasize the importance of a few milliseconds at the low end.

I thought this was interesting - maybe it's a standard practice I was just unaware of but it seems like a smart trick.

robbles··on Circos – Circular Visualization
Doesn't this suffer from similar issues to a pie chart?

e.g. https://scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/resources/data-visualisation-a...

I'm kinda suspicious that any data visualization that uses a circle is going to be hard to draw meaning from.

robbles··on Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta
> The drones can be configured to scatter seed, spray pesticide, or spread fertilizer.

It's right there in the article.

robbles··on Macaroons Escalated Quickly
That's a great explanation, and pretty much exactly what I'd love to see instead of the original slightly mysterious comment :)
robbles··on Macaroons Escalated Quickly
It's a statement that won't make sense to someone who's new to the topic.

I don't think it's related to virtue signalling at all, the two just share the word "signalling".

robbles··on Macaroons Escalated Quickly
The tone is entertaining, but some of the snarkiness around the code is bit frustrating at times. e.g.

> # do i really need to say I'm not serious about this?

Can you just come out and say what you mean here? Like, presumably it's bad, insecure code, but can't you just spell it out for the benefit of your audience?

I'm probably being really picky here - just find this kind of developer in-crowd signalling to be really irritating and counterproductive.

robbles··on Donkey code
I once inherited a codebase that did this, and it was a nightmare to learn. All the classes were named after types of alcohol for some reason. Naming things clearly is really hard, but this approach is just giving up completely.
robbles··on Serverless at Scale: Lessons from 200M Lambda Invocations
> 10GB is hardly enough. Once you import Pandas you’re on the limit. You can forget Pandas and scipy at the same Lambda.

This sounds way off to me. 10 GB to install a Python library?

robbles··on Privacy friendly ESP32 smart doorbell with Home Assistant local integration
Not quite to your specs, but have you tried https://www.room-assistant.io/?
robbles··on Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
Interesting that most of the top comments here seem to be about the day to day process of estimation itself, when the linked article is about how poorly the research on estimation has been done to date. Did any of you actually read the article?
robbles··on Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS
This is a really nice one! What did you use for the board itself? Is it 3D printed?
robbles··on Secret ChatGPT plugins can be revealed by removing a parameter from an API call
Just a guess from the names, but these sound like debug plugins built in by the OpenAI developers, not real unreleased plugins.
robbles··on How a Stable Diffusion prompt changes its output for the style of 1500 artists
Interesting that it seems to have no concept of the filmmakers they tried to include here - Tim Burton and Walt Disney didn't produce anything recognizable and look to me like the default stuff you get without providing a style.
robbles··on JITX (YC S18) launches general availability and announces Series A from Sequoia
This looks really cool, and I would love to try it out on a hobby project before considering it for something more serious.

Are you planning to make some kind of "hobby" tier below the startup pricing at a later date?

robbles··on Hacktoberfest 2022
These sound like very positive changes! Would you consider going through past years and pre-emptively disqualifying people for their previous spam PRs as well? And is it obvious on the website to someone when they're disqualified? Or do they just not get a reward?
robbles··on Launch HN: Micro Meat (YC S21) – Technology for scaling cultivated meat
Do these sterility requirements have an impact on the food safety concerns for the final product? e.g. does the meat end up either completely ruined vs. totally safe to eat raw? Just curious, I have no plans to eat raw cultivated meat :)
robbles··on Replit.com (YC W18) raises $80M Series B
Yep - I'm talking about Battlesnake regions though:

https://docs.battlesnake.com/references/engine-regions

robbles··on Replit.com (YC W18) raises $80M Series B
Are you using the default Battlesnake region? Depending on your location and where your replit ends up hosted, switching regions might reduce your latency a bit.
robbles··on Show HN: My wife is pregnant; naturally I made a baby-name app to prepare
I think it's just the curve fitting on the chart widget, but I saw one name where the popularity went negative in the 2000's. I didn't recognize the name at all, so I had to laugh seeing that.
robbles··on Show HN: Coding Font – A game to find your favorite coding font
What are you using to run the tournament logic? Custom code, or some kind of library?
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