wanderingstan · HackerTrans

wanderingstan

2,503 karmajoined il y a 17 ans

http://wanderingstan.com/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/wanderingstan; my proof: https://keybase.io/wanderingstan/sigs/K5OGXFBpf1D6jJyFvL3Za6Rs9VGHaSLosTLVQHwsrUo ]

Submissions

Show HN: Handy Bird – Browser game using doppler effect to detect hand motion

github.com

1 pointsby wanderingstanil y a 7 ans1 comments

Coding styles: Are you Lewis and Clark or building an interstate?

wanderingstan.com

20 pointsby wanderingstanil y a 7 ans3 comments

Introducing Echo Look

amazon.com

1 pointsby wanderingstanil y a 9 ans0 comments

U.S. To Release 6,000 Inmates from Prisons

nytimes.com

32 pointsby wanderingstanil y a 11 ans25 comments

S.F. jail inmates to have access to computer tablets

sfgate.com

1 pointsby wanderingstanil y a 12 ans0 comments

comments

il y a 7 joursdiscuss

I worked on a family archiving product (which dead ended) and dealt with this problem. My hacked solution was to repurpose the seconds value to encode precision, as you generally don’t care about seconds.

I forget the exact scheme, but it was something like this:

    0=minute precision 
    1=hour
    2=day
    3=month
    4=quarter/season
    5=year
    6=decade

Also note that the ISO date standard allows you to drop any digits you aren’t sure about, so all these are valid:

    1980-12-25T08
    1960-12-06
    1959-12
    196

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

I chose a toaster specifically because it's about the simplest electrical device out there, and thus pushes the thesis to the extreme. But smart toasters are pretty common: https://revcook.com/products/r180-connect-plus-smart-toaster...

And as other commenter pointed out, a smart toaster with ads or data collection can be subsidized and thus be more profitable. (Oh what a world we're headed for!)

In any case, I think the LLM-everywhere thesis holds even strong for even moderate-complexity devices like power plugs, microwaves, and mobile phones.

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

Yes! Continuing on thoughts of LLM compression, I'm now convinced and amazed that economics will dictate that all devices contain a copy of all information on the Internet.

I wrote a post about it: Your toaster will know mesopotamian history because it’s more expensive not too.

https://wanderingstan.com/2026-03-01/your-toaster-will-know-...

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

Mine as well. 2 years ago my mind was blown that I could code in a language I didn’t know (scala) while on a log train ride with no internet (Amtrak) using a local model on a laptop. Couldn’t believe it.

il y a 4 moisdiscuss

Here is the Dave Barry column mentioned in the obituary about George’s barbecue lighting: https://www.davebarry.com/misccol/charcoal.htm

il y a 4 moisdiscuss

Exactly. To refuse the “gift” is an explicit statement of “I know I could do this silently but I want to bother everyone around me.”

il y a 4 moisdiscuss

My go-to technique has been to offer the offender a pair of headphones, saying something to insinuate that they must forgotten theirs or be too poor to afford them. Most of the time they say “oh I have headphones!” and then realize that they’ve outed themselves. (I stockpile the free headphones from gyms or airplanes, or get the $2 ones from AliExpress)

il y a 5 moisdiscuss

I concur. And would just add two points: (1) Make it that you’re not asking for anything / don’t open with something that could be perceived as a setup to asking for money, or pushing a religion. :) 2) be sensitive to social cues or that they want to be left alone, like terse answers or shifting their attention away from you

il y a 5 moisdiscuss

The site seems to be getting crushed. Can someone summarize what it did?

il y a 5 moisdiscuss

What motivation would the Supreme Court have to get “back on Trumps good side?” If anything, after his recent name calling of them I’d think they’d be less inclined to appease him. The can’t be fired.

il y a 5 moisdiscuss

> Just what the process was in the scam that snared Mr Williams remains unclear but it appears the scammers were able to access his card details and add them to a new Google Pay wallet on their own phone.

> "We're never going to truly know how Ian's card was breached. What we do know is that he wasn't in that Coles … and that he had the proof," Ms Brooks says.

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

And to give them credit: WhatsApp also had brilliant engineering that was able to scale with their popularity.

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

Might you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

This is more akin to a race car driver give a review of, for example, a new type of electric car. It doesn’t matter that the driver is not a domain expert in electric motors and regenerative braking; what matters is he knows how to operate these machines in their use case at the limits.

Hearing a programming legend weigh in on the latest programming tool seems entirely completely reasonable.

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

For me, I recently wanted to assemble a “supercut” of my videos of attempts at learning to bunny-hop a bike. The tool was able to craft a python script that used ffmpeg to edit out the no-motion portions of the videos and stitch them together.

This would have taken ages to do by hand in iMovie, and probably just as long to look up the needed parameters in ffmpeg, but Claude code got it right in the first try, and worked with me to fine-tune the motion detection threshold.

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

> Attend every week.

In my experience, this is the key. “90% of life is showing up.” If you are around the same people every week, for whatever reason, with even a minimal amount of openness and friendliness, you will get community.

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

Yes, for years now I’ve had this creeping feeling that it’s a social version of the prisoners dilemma: if you’re the only one that puts down the phone (or gets off social media, etc) then you’re just left behind. It’s a coordination problem.

il y a 7 moisdiscuss

It’s the 2nd paragraph:

> Methods We used a retrospective matched case–control design in a preregistered study to compare famous singers with matched less famous singers (total N=648) based on the matching criteria of gender, nationality, ethnicity, genre and solo/band status. We compared mortality risk using a Kaplan-Meier curve and used a Cox regression to test the effect of fame.

il y a 7 moisdiscuss

Yes. And it’s so easy:

`<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no">`

il y a 7 moisdiscuss

This is someone retelling a story they were told by a co-worker of an event over 20 years prior. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t go into the details of exactly what was tried, beyond the key parts of the story.