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starky

1,285 karma · joined November 7, 2012

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starky··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
Ovens vary greatly. There is no consistency in how even the heat is in the space, the airflow through the space, how much and how fast the temperature varies around the set temperature, etc. These things all do affect how things bake up and often people have to tweak recipes for their specific oven.

In a case where something is safety critical the computer is super important as very subtle errors could cause catastrophic consequences. This is why you get into things like running software on 3+ computers concurrently depending on how fail-safe something has to be.

starky··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
Niri is an awesome project. I've never understood why one would want a tiling wm when windows split vertically lose so much of their useful real estate. The idea of windows being spawned in a scrolling list just makes so much more sense to how I work. I tried it pretty recently and pretty quickly decided that I would be sticking with it.
starky··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
In what way does KDE not already meet this requirement? It operates similarly to Windows, and the features they add don't tend to do anything to the base experience.

I've not used it in a very long time, but I also get the impression that Cinnamon is also familiar in this way and doesn't make major changes.

starky··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
This is precisely the thing that drives me nuts about how mobile platforms treat data. They assume their users don't/shouldn't own anything anymore.

Recently I was trying to put a couple videos on my iPad before a trip. I would think I could just copy the files from a network share to the iPad and be done with it, but that didn't work as I couldn't get those files to be accessible in the apps no matter what I did. Instead I had to use VLC which has a server built in that was able to upload the files into the app. The entire process had me swearing at Apple constantly.

starky··on Apple's Dimensional Drawings
Professional 3D CAD software is pretty much Windows only. Especially with a company like Apple where you have complex models with many designers working on it you aren't going to risk using anything other than the likes of NX, Catia, Creo, or SolidWorks (though I shudder at how frustrating SolidWorks would be in that use case).
starky··on iPhone Duo
How are you deciding if a test applies to your case? I can't do that from the subjective testing that he does. At best you have a comparison that Phone X is maybe stronger than Phone Y since there are no measurements taken to ensure consistency. For most people watching his videos all they are thinking is "Phone Y broke, therefore it is bad." which isn't fair.

Testing products properly is HARD. Companies have entire groups of people who that is their entire job and if they do it wrong it can costs millions in returned product. At the same time, if the test is too harsh, the customer is paying extra for a product that is over-designed for conditions the product will never experience.

starky··on iPhone Duo
You determine what specifications you want to test the product to and develop a test plan to test those specifications in a repeatable and methodical way. Ideally you use industry standard tests that allow for more direct comparisons, but if they aren't sufficient you develop your own.

For example, with his bending test. You would define a standard loading method (e.g. 3 point or 4 point with specific spacing), and then apply a realistic load a phone may experience plus some safety factor with a specific loading/unloading profile (say a phone is sat on and experiences 100lbf you might test to 125lbf). Once released you inspect the phone for damage, deformation, and test functionality.

starky··on iPhone Duo
I mean, we still have the ridiculous separation between the Macbook Pro and iPad Pro with the same processors where you have to choose between a fully featured OS or a touchscreen. We are a long way from an iPhone being used in that way.
starky··on iPhone Duo
The entire presentation fell into the uncanny valley for me. Not only was the presentation flat, but the appearance of the video just felt off for the entire presentation. At one point I was questioning if they were going for something that looked like an AI generated video.
starky··on iPhone Duo
JerryRigEverything drives me absolutely nuts as someone that works in product design. His tests have zero basis in reality and don't actually test whether a product will survive daily use. I wouldn't take anything from his videos as an indication of whether a device is fragile.
starky··on iPhone Duo
I still think that there are very few examples of apps that utilize tablets well even among the apps that aren't stretched phone apps. I don't know if it is the ergonomics of the large screen or what, but the experience of using a tablet has always been pretty bad in my opinion.

Maybe the folding phone form factor will inspire some better UI/UX for apps.

starky··on Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
I had just enough issues with archinstall the last time I tried it that I went back to EndeavourOS which essentially gets you a GUI installer and some pre-installed utilities on the stock Arch install. The only significant change I'm aware of is that they use dracut instead of mkinitcpio.
starky··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
No I don't actually see it, but I can clearly think of the concept of it down to the details and can alter that concept in space (like spinning the globe in Google Earth). What happens when you think of memories? Like imagine the feeling after someone tells you a joke so good that has you gasping for air, can you imagine that without actually feeling it? Visualization is similar to me just about a different sense.
starky··on Don't paste the AI, please
>The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions?

>What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated.

One of the hardest things about taking on any sort of leadership role (even unofficially) is that you need to allow others to do things. It feels incredibly stupid when you have to ask someone to do something you are more than capable of doing better/faster than the other person, but if you did that all the time you wouldn't have time to do your other work. Sometimes that includes questions that seem lazy, but part of asking the question is for the other person to acknowledge that they have thought about it and/or to ensure you aren't stealing ownership from someone.

starky··on An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
I've used mailbox.org for a few years and been quite happy with it. Its definitely more basic than Fastmail or Proton, but it meets my needs perfectly.

They did recently increase their storage from 10GB to 20GB (along with a price increase from 30 to 36EUR/year). They also have had catch-all addresses as long as I've used the service, you just setup an email alias for it.

starky··on An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
Most of the sites I have accounts on did let me change my email. Looking at my password manager, about 1/5 of those that use email for login don't use my current email.

I wouldn't say it is easier than expected though, logging in, changing your email, confirming the change, and then making sure the password manager was updated was a bit of work.

starky··on Dear people who work at the airport
>Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others

The tapping out thing can be so confusing, even as someone that uses transit a lot. I was traveling recently and encountered buses where you had to tap in only, ones you had to tap in and out on, and ones where you had to tell the driver where you were going before tapping in. None of which had clear signage on the bus itself.

Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when trying to get home.

starky··on Dear people who work at the airport
I'm pretty sure this is a purposeful "feature" of security at least for North America. They don't want anyone getting comfortable with the process and constantly make changes to ensure this. I'm not sure what this is supposed to accomplish other than to make air travel less comfortable.

I recently flew and the airport had gotten the new scanners since the last time I had gone somewhere. The signage was confusing as only some of the lines had signs that specifically said you didn't have to take out your electronics on "this lane only". Even with the new scanners they were pulling out half the bags for additional screening and only had one person doing the additional screening.

Coming back from overseas I saw how it was supposed to work, walked up and they directed me to a line and a specific bin loading station, had someone remind me to ensure my pockets were empty, walked through the scanner and my bag was already waiting for me, took all of 2 minutes.

starky··on Thanks FedEx, This Is Why We Keep Getting Phished (2024)
We have a training thing at work that sends out phishing emails and you are supposed to report them using a handy button in the email app. If they are training emails you get a good job website that pops up. I greatly enjoy reporting every single genuine email that reads anything like a potential phishing email as there is someone in IT that reviews them and probably gets annoyed at the various groups sending sketchy emails for official business.
starky··on Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed
The MSG health panic was racism against Chinese people and their restaurants, nothing to do with health. So many foods and sauces contain glutamic acid yet nobody is complaining about their health being impacted when they eat them: Meat, Tomatoes, Mushrooms, Cheese, Worcestershire Sauce, Marmite, Soy Sauce, Fish Sauce, and Oyster Sauce to name a few.

When I make stews I'll often make a concoction of tomato paste, soy sauce, fish sauce and Worcestershire sauce to massively boost the meatiness of the stew without making it taste like any of those ingredients in particular.

starky··on Perfection Is Not Over-Engineering
This is a good way of putting it. People who advocate for over-engineering don't consider cost-benefit vs not doing it. This is where FMEA analysis comes in when developing products, you assign values for severity, occurrence, and detection to determine which potential issues need extra effort implemented, but just as important is identifying the potential issues that aren't worth putting effort into to prevent over-engineering.

I've recently had to deal with a problem where the parent company has dictated 100% production testing for a spec that we meet for the spec sheet but customers practically don't ever need. But since the parent company test their products this way they say we have to. I've been very vocally against this because it has delayed us shipping products that are otherwise ready, prevented starting new products, and added a lot of production cost when our RMA rate without the test is something on the order of 0.01% and most of those are due to installation errors, not true failures.

starky··on What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
>But for me the take away still is: “hardware is as hard as you make it”.

I dislike this statement. Hardware is as hard as the product dictates it needs to be. A 25 component PCBA and a clamshell of 2 injection molded parts is about as simple of a product as you can make. Heck, most people would just buy an off the shelf clamshell for that type of product.

That doesn't work for the vast majority of products, building a product with 20 COTS parts plus 60 custom tooled parts, and 4 complex PCBAs is what is hard. Getting everything to fit together, pass testing, arrive on time from dozens of suppliers, etc. it where the complexity comes in. Then consider that hardware is cash intensive, you need to pay ahead of time for all the tools, you need to pay to buy the individual parts and warehouse them somewhere while you build the products you hope are going to sell. If something goes wrong there, then your expensive parts are just sitting there waiting for replacement components before you can ship. Then even when you ship, that revenue goes into buying the next round of parts you are going to receive in 3 months. This is where many hardware projects fail as they run out of cash before the project breaks even.

starky··on What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
Seriously, microSD cards are the second worst hardware component to have to deal with (first being labels). For being a "standard" you end up with cards that are subtly but significantly different from each other, the slots are ALL poorly designed, and microSD cards are just inherently unreliable. Plus with the current flash shortage, the major manufacturers don't care at all to support any issues with the product.
starky··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
That is awesome. I worked at a bowling alley as a mechanic in high school (Brunswick A2) and got a sense of how stupid expensive the replacement equipment was. At one point another employee spilled their coffee over the keyboard used to control the score-keeping system, apparently the replacement was something like $400. What fancy proprietary keyboard did you get for that $400? The keyboard cable replaced with a phone plug.
starky··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
>People think this doesn’t matter, but GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place.

I'm actually surprised to hear that GoPro is used in aerospace applications. I assumed that they would use cameras from companies like Teledyne that have a more industrial/military customer base. That is to say, there are almost certainly options for domestic camera manufacturers if required.

You are right about China. The West (especially Apple) taught China how to manufacture while losing the ability ourselves and for some reason didn't consider that they would figure out how to design products themselves and bring the entire product chain within the country.

Individuals at the end of the day mostly care about buying the cheapest thing that does the job. They don't consider where it comes from. Even those that do care have limits in how they will compromise (there is a reason why I bought Bambu Labs 3D printer even though I would have preferred a Prusa).

starky··on The lost joy of music piracy
It seems like every recommendation algorithm gets into a state that is broken eventually. For the music streaming services, I find they end up in one of two states, either it shows me the exact same artists and songs over and over again even if I skip their songs constantly, or I'll play a song once out of curiosity or accident and it decided that that genre is all I am interested in listening to for the next month. Is it really that hard to map artists

I got so frustrated with Tidal recently that I finally sat down and finally setup a media player on Linux to play my locally saved music (most of which is from What.cd).

starky··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
The functionality is literally built into both Android and iOS. For example, I've got some of my self-hosted services linked on my home screen. On Firefox for Android you just browse to the site, click the 3 dots, and then under more its "Add to Home screen", Chrome works similarly.
starky··on Factories are just rooms
This is China's massive differentiator than anywhere else. They have impeccable supply chain management. You will find that certain items are almost always made in the same city. Shenzhen (and surrounding area) is just the hub for electronics manufacturing. Within the city there is the main output, and then a bunch of smaller manufacturers making all the input components within driving distance of that factory which allows it all to work incredibly efficiently. This makes manufacturing in China so much faster than elsewhere.

I'd even go so far to say that Shenzhen is probably the wrong place to build the electric train motor above. I bet there is some 2nd or 3rd tier city somewhere in China that specializes in just that. For example, the only reason I'm aware of the city of Yueqing is because I did a project with pushbuttons once and that is the pushbutton city in China.

starky··on Factories are just rooms
It depends on how you look at it.

I've traveled all around Asia visiting different factories for projects over the years. After some time, factories just tend to blend together, big rooms filled with machines where materials come in one end, and are modified to be more like the final product at the other end. The rooms might look/feel different, whether it is the dirty floors and heat of a die cast grinding room, the green floors of an injection molding factory, or even a clean room you have to squeeze yourself into a bunny suit for (They never have large enough suits for me), its all just equipment in a room to transform material.

A factory is also a set of people and processes, which is what truly matters. If you don't have good people with expertise and the processes in place you don't have a chance at getting good product. You build relationships with the people at the companies and they will move mountains to help you. You build a truly excellent relationship with a factory, and they will anticipate your requirements and sometimes ship you perfect parts at T0.

I've got plenty of examples of factories that are fantastic, and ones that have been horrible from my time in working. The good ones all have the same differentiator, people that we have built a good long term relationship with. The bad ones almost always have a constant rotation of different people you have to talk to.

starky··on 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
I'm pretty strongly in the camp of trust the science and measurements for audio stuff. Thus I suspect its mostly just better sounding masters, but I was shocked at how much I noticed the sound quality of Tidal compared to Spotify when I switched.
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