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tkanarskyon Ask HN: Best method to classify short audio events in real time?

Edge Impulse does everything you described. It has a really nice web UI that lets you collect and annotate data, extract features, train a model, and bake it into a microcontroller image for inference. It supports a good chunk of microcontrollers and SBCs out there.

https://docs.edgeimpulse.com/docs/development-platforms/full...

tkanarskyon Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

Just like Wile E Coyote running off a cliff with delayed gravity:)

tkanarskyon I over-engineered a Fast Fourier Transform for Arduino

Agh, I meant to say microcontroller. But you're right, microprocessor is too broad of a term these days when it can refer to both a top-flight AMD workstation chip and a tiny stm8. Nanoprocessor sounds about right for the latter :)

tkanarskyon I over-engineered a Fast Fourier Transform for Arduino

Probably not, unless you're willing to stretch the definition of 'real time' or 'image'. The classic Arduino Uno processor aka the ATMega328 does about 1 million 8-bit instructions per second per MHz of clock[0]; the Uno iirc has a 8mhz crystal. Even for the contrived example of a 1MP webcam that outputs uint8 grayscale values, you'd only be able to read it at about 8 frames per second, max, much less do anything with it. If you limited yourself to 64x64 boolean images, maybe; you could probably run a simple NN to categorize MNIST examples or do blob detection.

If you want to mess around with image processing within the realm of the Arduino framework, you could pick up a super cheap ESP32-CAM dev board [1], which has a small camera and a dual core microprocessor with much less anemic specs. You can of course program it using the Arduino IDE or, as I prefer doing it, using PlatformIO [2] which is a CLI tool and VSCode extension that allows you to use the [Arduino, ZephyrRTOS, mbed] framework with a zillion different dev boards and architectures.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATmega328

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-ESP32-CAM-Development-Bluetoo...

[2]: https://platformio.org/

tkanarskyon Building a private LoRa network (2017)

How did you get started in this line of work?

tkanarskyon Ask HN: Where to buy old computers and consoles?

If you're in the LA area the W6TRW swap meet in Redondo Beach is fun to visit, iirc it's the last Saturday of every month in the morning. Definitely show up early, the good stuff sells quick :)

tkanarskyon Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

This is simply unusable. If I type `sl`, I expect an animated choo-choo train to appear, not a newfangled Git client!

/s :)

tkanarskyon Kanaye Nagasawa: A samurai who changed California

Recommend reading Daemon and Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez. It describes a reasonably plausible transition to a society managed by an impartial AI.

tkanarskyon New Long March 5B Uncontrolled Reentry Tracked by Aerospace's Experts

Several nuances:

"Controlled reentry" isn't necessarily synonymous with "booster recovery". Most rockets have a way to deorbit the upper stage once its job is done, either by firing the main engine retrograde, or using a small dedicated deorbit motor. By firing the motor about half an orbit before the projected reentry point, you can control exactly when and where the stage will reenter the atmosphere, hence controlled reentry.

Second, the Long March 5B is somewhat unique among rockets in that its large main stage stays with the payload all the way until orbital insertion. Most other rockets drop a large majority of their bulk long before it has enough energy to stay in orbit for any appreciable amount of time. Probably the closest comparison in this category is the space shuttle's big orange external tank, as it provides fuel for the main engines until just a hair below orbital velocity, but it's subsequently jettisoned and the orbit is completed using the shuttle's onboard thrusters.

So you have a combination of (no deorbit capability) and (big tank floating in orbit) that results in (big tank crashing down at an arbitrary location whenever it feels like coming down to earth).

tkanarskyon Apple now valued at more than Amazon, Alphabet and Meta combined

A lot of them sound surprisingly similar to IFR waypoint names. Try guessing which one is a sketchy Amazon brand and which one is a waypoint name:

WEXIM

PEIPU

SEMRE

MIADY

YEAKE

(Answer: WEXIM and SEMRE are waypoints, the rest are brands)

I wonder how the sellers decide that "ah yes, today is the day I'll start selling YEAKE-brand USB cables". It sounds vaguely English, I guess.

tkanarskyon T-Mobile will start charging a $35 fee on all new activations and upgrades

$2.50/mo is the lowest, but it's eBay exclusive iirc. Gives you something like 200mb of data. (Which coincidentally makes it one of the best deals for a small IoT project sim like a GPS tracker or remote weather station or whatnot)

tkanarskyon Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?

Thanks for the pointers! I'm very much a noob, this is really the first formal class I've taken on the topic. Are there any books, papers, or websites that stand out as particularly useful for grasping these topics?

tkanarskyon Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?

yep, I'm currently taking a systems/signals course and it was incredibly illuminating how a lot of common image and sound filters -- edge detection, low and high pass filtering, equalization, etc -- boil down to the convolution of the signal with the impulse response of the filter.

tkanarskyon How SSH got port number 22

TL;DR: He asked nicely

tkanarskyon Show HN: Jerrica, a 100% scheduled, Web Audio native, MOD player for JavaScript

Thanks, what a cool demonstration of WebAudio! Time for my weekly re-listen of space_debris.mod :)

tkanarskyon What’s the best way to host a personal blog for max engagement?

I'm a fan of WriteFreely [0] as a no-frills blogging platform. So far it's had negligible resource use, and I like that it looks like a stripped down Medium or Substack without the social features. It takes Markdown formatting so it's not fully WYSIWYG, but it autosaves so it's easy to jump back and forth between the draft and its preview. Oh and there's decent support for MathJax though you need to enable it in the admin console beforehand.

As for discoverability, it supports ActivityPub federation, so people using Mastodon or [insert trendy federated app] can get updates when you publish a new post.

About the only downside is that it doesn't come with automatic image upload/embedding, so you'll need to manually upload to imgur or imgz and embed using the usual markdown syntax. Or comments, although that appears to be a deliberate design decision that I honestly agree with.

[0]: https://writefreely.org/

tkanarskyon Boeing 787s must be rebooted every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' (2020)

Humans have to be rebooted at most every 2 days to avoid misleading auditory data among other things.

tkanarskyon White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight

We should just fly over there at night and put a blanket over it

tkanarskyon Pittsburgh Airport installs an algae air purifier

Based on the photo, it seems more of a showpiece than an actually practical way of filtering large quantities of air. Those bubble columns are at most a few liters of air per minute -- not much more than your usual aquarium pump -- when large air purifiers are in the hundreds or even thousands of cubic feet per minute. I just can't imagine passing that much air through the columns without sending greenish water all over unsuspecting passengers. Unless this treated air has a synergistic effect on the surrounding air, like negative ions or ozone, this won't make the air significantly cleaner.

It does look cool, though.

tkanarskyon Pine64's RISC-V Ox64 Takes on Raspberry Pi Pico W

Their Pinecil soldering iron is an awesome piece of kit. I just bought the v2 the other day to replace my v1. It's honestly head to head with the Hakko irons in the lab in terms of power and temperature control, and the v2 has support for the USB PD 3.1 28v profile which lets it hit 128w on a beta firmware with the Apple 140w charger. Pretty nuts for an iron barely bigger than a Pilot G2.

tkanarskyon The Election-Swinging, Facebook-Fueled, Get-Out-the-Vote Machine

So it's good when we use targeted ads for political means, but it's Evil Incarnate when they use them. Understandable

tkanarskyon Ask HN: How do you keep up with AI advances, esp. Stable Diffusion and GPT-3?

Check paperswithcode's State of the Art leaderboards for the tasks I care about (sound classification, style transfer, etc)

tkanarskyon Ask HN: Coding music playlist to increase code throughput

SomaFM Groovesalad or Defcon Radio

tkanarskyon The Dial Toner – color dial hex code keypad

That thing is sweet. If I recall correctly, the issue is that the motor type he used is no longer being produced (?) so a redesign is necessary. I really love the idea of having infinite possible UX choices in a single knob -- for example, the Mustang Mach-E could really benefit from having this kind of control knob for its various use cases

tkanarskyon Uber investigating breach of its computer systems

If you have a Linux PC with a TPM, you can use https://github.com/psanford/tpm-fido to create and "plug in" a virtual USB WebAuthn key whose secret is irretrievably stored in the machine's TPM. This effectively asserts that your specific machine is being used to enter a given site. However, it's important to remember it doesn't necessarily verify that *you're* present, or even if *anyone* is present at all, since the presence check is done via a software dialog and can be pwned along with the rest of the system.

tkanarskyon Ask HN: What are your favorite personal websites?

https://ciechanow.ski/archives/

Fantastic writeups and interactive animations; iirc, he does the WebGL by hand! His website gives me the same feeling of discovery that I got at the Exploratorium as a kid.

tkanarskyon About Lockdown Mode

To be fair, it's advertised as a "bioweapon defense mode" and not a "chemical weapon defense mode".

tkanarskyon Winner of $1.28B Lottery Gets $433.7M After Tax

Think of taxes as your SaaS (society as a service) bill. Don't want to pay the costs? Then don't reap the benefits.

tkanarskyon Apple Passkey

Oh dang, thanks for writing tpm-fido! It works really well for my use case -- avoiding mandatory and incredibly annoying Duo Mobile 2fa on my school's website -- although I tore the presence verification out of the code for my purposes :)

iirc, this relies on the uhid module to mock a physical fido2 key, and I'm not sure if there's a way to present a mock fido2 key OS-wide without relying on a virtual USB device. This was a bit of an issue when I tried setting up a similar fido2 emulator in a container, as the Google container OS doesn't allow loading kernel modules. Do you know if that's still the case, or if there's a way to mock a fido2 key systemwide without uhid?

tkanarskyon System Font Stack

I "discovered" this stack through VScode autocomplete when making my website several moons ago. It's a huge improvement in readability over the default serif font, and not much overhead is added!