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benjaminogles

Re:Awk Technical Notes on Friday November 14, 2025 @05:07PM (#45932738)
I feel the same about using Awk, it is just fun to use. I like that variables have defined initial values so they don't need to be declared. And the most common bits of control flow needed to process an input file are implicit. Some fun things I've written with awk

Plain text accounting program in awk https://github.com/benjaminogles/ledger.bash

Literate programming/static site generator in awk https://github.com/benjaminogles/lit

Although the latter just uses awk as a weird shell and maintains a couple child processes for converting md to html and executing code blocks with output piped into the document

Re:Ask HN: How do you balance reading books vs. articles on Sunday December 06, 2020 @02:06PM (#25325735)
I experienced the same thing. Waiting for recommendations from similarly minded people helped me get past it.

I didn't read any non-fiction for a long time before I was given a book as a gift [0] that was really good. Since then, I have received a few other recommendations that I enjoyed [1-2].

[0] Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell

[1] Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

[2] The Theoretical Minimum Series by Leonard Susskind

Ask HN: Open-source projects in need of optimization work?

Are any of you working on open source projects that need more developers to put time and effort into performance engineering? I want to find ways to apply myself and practice my skills in profiling, benchmarking and optimizing code. I would also welcome opportunities to help develop parallel or vector-ized implementations of code that needs it.

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Re:Ask HN: Best technologies for indoor position tracking? on Monday August 12, 2019 @04:39PM (#20679729)
Good question, my main motivation is to learn more about how such a system would work. I am interested in signal processing and especially radar like systems so implementing one would be a fun experience.

In general, systems based on radar are trying to replace wearables for sleep states tracking, elderly fall detection etc. But I'm not sure yet what other applications it might have. The ability to track my location just seemed like a good first step.

Ask HN: Best technologies for indoor position tracking?

I have a hobby project in mind but I'm not sure which technologies will give me the most bang for my buck long term.I want to track my 3D position accurately within my apartment. My first use case is to track how long I sleep and how long I watch TV etc. without using some sort of reporting mechanism. I would like to incrementally add more advanced features such as gesture recognition for...

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Re:Hardware cost evaluation of the posit number system on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @04:14PM (#20396109)
I have not read the paper yet but the abstract says that they compared two hardware adders synthesized from C++ code. It seems like a fair comparison but I wonder whether it might be possible to hand design a much more efficient posit adder that is more competitive with hand designed floating point adders. I can see how the number of lookup tables used in synthesis would be proportional to the number of gates used on a dedicated chip though so maybe there would be no difference in comparing hand optimized adders on ICs.