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smnc

252 karma · joined November 11, 2016

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smnc··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
Alex Rivera's 2008 movie Sleep Dealer is not without flaws, but it left quite an impression on me. I watched it it after seeing it recommended here in a comments thread on an article about military drone operators, I should probably watch it again with fresh eyes.

EDIT: Jeez, it looks like that's an 11 years old thread. Time does indeed fly.

EDIT 2: The source for the claim is paywalled, but this is how the Cultural impact chapter of the movie's Wikipedia page closes:

> In 2025, Rivera noted that a tech CEO claimed the film had been an inspiration for his company to employ a remote labour force in the Global South in order to operate robots in the Global North, and that the film has been used in pitch decks for various start-ups.

... once again bringing to mind the "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus" meme.

smnc··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
> as long as I am confident it is correct

Are you? Does it cost you extra (time or money) to be?

smnc··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
Do you mind me asking, what kind of problems did you run into with Neo4j? Did you encounter performance issues after the DB grew to a certain size, or did you realize that the data wasn't suited to a graph DB and weird query patterns started causing trouble, or was it something else entirely?

I'm considering using a Neo4j self hosted instance for a project, but having only played around with it in low-stakes + small-data toy projects, I'm not really familiar with the footguns and failure modes...

All that aside, plugging holes in a sinking database for six months because you can't come to a descision does not sound like a fun time :D

smnc··on I finally got my sway layout to autostart the way I like it
I've wanted this for i3, but I guess I wasn't sufficiently motivated :) Given that sway's homepage describes it as a drop-in replacement for i3, I'll try it out tomorrow.
smnc··on Ask HN: Startup getting spammed with PayPal disputes, what should we do?
> - Ports exposed by Docker punch through the firewall

I've been using ufw-docker [1] to force ufw and docker to cooperate. Without it, Docker ports do actually get exposed to to the Internet. As far as I can tell, it does its job correctly. Is there another problem I am not aware of?

[1] https://github.com/chaifeng/ufw-docker

smnc··on The Windows Registry Adventure #7: Attack surface analysis
Previous posts in the series:

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-windows-r...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-windows-r...

smnc··on How Tesla is replacing the age-old CAN bus
> CAN uses bit arbitration and the lowest address wins.

And in doing so it prioritizes important messages and enables deterministic timing.

smnc··on SunVox: Powerful Modular Synthesizer and DAW
There are a bunch of modules, you can connect them in various modulation configurations.

> Module is a basic element of the SunVox. There are several types of modules (...)

https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/manual.php#mod

smnc··on Scan HTML faster with SIMD instructions: .NET/C# Edition
> As an optimization, it is helpful to use a local variable for the reference to the first pointer. Doing so improves the perfomance substantially: C# is not happy when we repeatedly modify a reference. Thus, at the start of the function, you may set byte* mystart = start, use mystart throughout, and then, just before a return, you set start = mystart.

Did not expect this.

smnc··on Migration out of Africa may have been driven by first glaciation of Pleistocene
> while Denisovans left at the same time into Asia ending up concentrated in Serbia.

You probably meant to write Siberia.

smnc··on What is the point of a public key fingerprint?
Hashing is not compression, it should not be reversible/inflatable.
smnc··on The age of average
> they go with the aesthetic de jure

You probably meant to write "du jour" :)

smnc··on If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others (1977) [pdf]
Furthermore, from the same article:

> Lem, however, considered one science fiction author as exempt from his scathing criticisms – his denouncer, Philip K. Dick. The title of an essay Lem published about Dick is evidence enough of this high regard: A Visionary Among the Charlatans. The essay itself waxes lyrical on Dick’s many excellent qualities as a writer, and expounds upon the dire state of US sci-fi. Lem considered Dick to be the only writer exempt from his cynical view of American SF.

smnc··on Sabine Hossenfelder: There are areas where physics blurs into religion
> Having said that, I personally detest the particular populist-with-lack-of-nuance approach Sabine (and others like her) take.

Not arguing against the point you are making, just highlighting a silly turn of phrase. Who ever encountered a nuanced populist?

smnc··on Show HN: Async UI: A Rust UI Library Where Everything is a Future
For a webserver, scalability (as in ability to handle a large number of concurrent request) is a performance metric. Speed of handling each one of those requests is another performance metric.
smnc··on 10 years of Ecce Homo, the worst artistic restoration that changed a city
Is this a machine translation?

> The old woman gave various interviews during the Ecce Homo boom era, where she revealed her skills as an artist. He painted for a long time, had exhibitions and even sold his art, which was very different from what he did with "Ecce Homo", although it should be clarified that it was not complete by the time he became famous.

smnc··on A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
Any recommendations?
smnc··on Motors Big and Small (1971) [video]
One of the top comments on the youtube video:

> That was 1971. Now 43 years later, we still use the over 100 years old combustion engine. Something is seriously wrong in this world.

smnc··on Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos
This guy explains the process of creating a basic bass sound quite well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbrTC0NndM

smnc··on Ruby vs. Python comes down to the for loop
Not sure how they compare feature-wise, but take a look at FoxDot:

https://github.com/Qirky/FoxDot

smnc··on Comparing H.265 (HEVC) and H265 video file size
I wouldn't call that "what was once known in the scene as DivX"...
smnc··on Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser
One of the old Opera mobile browsers (Mini or Mobile) worked in a somewhat similar way.
smnc··on Chess’s Cheating Crisis
It is possible to disable kibitzing for a table (or a tournament, or a team match etc.), but kibitzing is a feature. It's often both educational and entertaining to kibitz high profile players and participate in the play commentary and banter.

The downside is that people can kibitz their own table (if kibitzing is allowed) using an alt account. Yes, it's a risk, but there are lots of ways to cheat online. It's trivial to cheat using out of band communication with your partner, as a sibling comment points out, or use a computer program to calculate odds if cheating without the knowledge of your partner.

So the whole thing is built on an honor system.

smnc··on Chess’s Cheating Crisis
A similar thing has been happening in online contract bridge.

https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/the-2020-online-cheat...

https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-...

smnc··on The Cinema of Inadvertence, or Why I Like Bad Movies
This series in particular: http://redlettermedia.com/best-of-the-worst-archive/
smnc··on Details about MIDI 2.0
How about controlling a band consisting of robots playing real instruments? [0]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7nMZvueKNQ

> Compressorhead are built out of metal scrap, most of the movings are made with electro pneumatics. It is controlled via Midi. There is an interface that changes the Midi signals in switch signals for the electro pneumatic valves…,” Kolbie’s voice drifts off. He has soon got his face in a Robotics for Dummies manual. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressorhead

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20181016144145/http://www.gibson...

smnc··on User-defined Order in SQL
> Sybase's T-SQL does not have equivalent for LIMIT.[0]

Are you looking for SELECT TOP 3 ...?

smnc··on Faster: Fast numerical calculations in Rust
"Faster" is technically a comparative, not a superlative. Otherwise, sound advice.
smnc··on What MongoDB got right (2015)
In a world where developer convenience wins over performance, operations and data safety a significant number of those same developers argue over whether they should be referred to as computer scientists, engineers, architects, or painters.

Painters sounds about right.

smnc··on MPC-HC v1.7.13 is released and farewell
Like dombili said, you can integrate Subliminal. One of the nice things about mpv is that it's lua-scriptable.

Here's a rough version of my script: https://github.com/smnx/mpv-autosub (forked from https://gist.github.com/selsta/ce3fb37e775dbd15c698).

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