hrishios

Reminds me of the viral video where a dad asks him children to instruct him on how to make a peanut butter sandwich. If they were vague, he would exploit any ambiguity in the instructions against them - like "rub the knife on the bread" before it had any peanut butter on it :)

The military knows how to do this - and has a strong reason to. If your documentation cannot survive the death or resignation of the man, team or department that wrote it, you can't build generational knowledge. Look up the mil spec for chocolate cake (skips my mind where it is in my library) for example.

+1 for wrangjangling.

This is the second engineer I respect leaving Mozilla, not through their own choice.

I'm hoping I'm wrong, but this is possibly the point of no return for them.

You know the Nazis had side projects that they made the Jews do.

(Please get the reference or this just sounds weird out of context)

Great to see another Keralite on here!

5G will not make this better. The problem for your (our) part of the world is coverage, and that needs to be dealt with using more cell towers. A 5g transition will possibly compound this problem, by needing more towers for the same coverage area, and by making those towers and the infrastructure for data transport to them more expensive.

IMHO 5G is a great idea for cities, ideally mini building-as-a-city size projects, where you can provide coverage to a lot of people really fast. But for penetrating and providing reliable coverage for wider areas, 5g isn't the right thing. Hopefully the next iteration works towards that.

It's also been interesting to see Kerala change over the last decade - I see things change as snapshots everytime I'm there, so I feel it more keenly. Speeds are a lot faster when they're available, but tower-to-tower and carrier-to-carrier handover is still a massive problem. Part of it's hardware, with the signal just not reaching you. The other part is still software, where some towers just won't let you go, or refuse to upgrade you. I've sat next to people who were getting 4g on the same carrier, same phone, while I was getting 3g and had to restart.

Same problem - and it's a shame, the article seems well written and decently insightful - still couldn't finish it.

Scrolled to the article, finished reading, looked at the URL and wondered if insurers had gotten a lot more serious with their tech writing :)

Honestly though, thanks for this. I had wandered into Firebase a number of times, and always found hydrant not ball. After reading through and using it for a bit, the same problems you mentioned (why is 1MB the limit? Why isn't that abstracted away with gracefully degrading performance?) ran fast and ran far.

Did not know there was a better one. Would you say it's worth building on, still? Or is it at risk of cancellation by the Cube?

K6 is my usual go-to, since it can import Postman request files (which makes it easier to simulate more complex requests with file uploads and such), and is highly configurable.

https://k6.io/

How do you have case-insensitive passwords? Does it all get smooshed to lowercase before it's salted and hashed?

Looking forward to it!

Postico is amazing. I recently moved out of MacOS, and I can honestly say that it's the only tool that keeps making me want to move back. pgAdmin is a right pain.

Thank you! I was halfway to building JSON escaping as a tool for myself. I'm working with AWS SES templates at the moment, and the manual steps to - validate handlebars, inline CSS, escape JSON, upload and then see what failed is killing me.

Honestly the first and sometimes last step is to just not be afraid to break things.

If the author had been as afraid as me of reverse biasing the circuit, he might not have gotten started. Try things, and if something breaks there's still something you can learn from that behavior.

I was just about to comment with the suggestion of adding a low pass filter for nyquist transformation, but reddit beat me to it!

Still amazing that it's a self-contained audio device, no actual addressing or protocol needed. It would be interesting if (as the author thinks) these were custom ASICs with built in songs from the factory, or some combination of EEPROM and decoder/driver chip. Does anyone remember what they sold for way back?

I'm glad that logic programming isn't completely dead. I think once gradient descent has filled it's niches well and the AI summer quietens a little, we might see a return to knowledge engines and decision trees as a useful complement (if not a supplement) to solving the class of problems not well served by neural nets.

The main headings break off the viewport in mobile, should be a simple fix :)

Unfortunately I ended up shelving the project once it became clear that I couldn't go far without rebuilding the browser, and I think things have only gotten worse in terms of what extensions can do.

Here's what I could find from my old folders - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W4nxW9GaQXybdX4zKqVsdaE7unI...

It's not much - and I remember getting a little further, but I must've lost the file - but hopefully it eases the discovery of prior art if you end up going down this path.

If you do, would love to hear from you to help or share thoughts!

The one I'm trying to do most recently is to compile bitcoin's bx[1] to wasm, so it can be run in the browser. It's not a crypto-related project, I primarily need the mnemonic generation code so I can generate mnemonics from passphrases for more general-purpose reasons.

Two reasons I'm thinking of getting it done in WASM: First is of course, not to roll my own crypto. Second is that if you're asking someone to generate a private key to use themselves, sending ANY information to a server is a big no.

Honestly I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice anyone has, I'm open!

[1] - https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-explorer

This is beautiful!!

Do you have a write-up or any details on how you did it? There's quite a few things I'd like to apply said treatment to :D

This is awesome! Just so I understand, you've compiled ffmpeg into wasm and run it in-browser?

This is google being google. Blogger underwent a refresh maybe about 5 years ago, and that too was trending in this (worse) direction.

Not sure why, but that's the third time I've heard about Tool communities and their organisation this month.

Mine is a glucose tracking app that I made for my girlfriend. I did all the reverse engineering of the CGM, electronics, design and coding and published it so she can use it.

Except it hit a bug a few weeks ago and the "ugh" of setting up the dev environment with frontend tooling, Gradle and android just to fix it has left me procrastinating forever.

Something something argument!

Absolutely. I usually email them a cheque with a note of the instances I've spun up.

The new XPS 13 has a good matte display that's not too matte and not too glossy for me, you might want to check it out.

Agreed, but with the caveat that what you're describing is the bleeding edge of any industry. Even in manufacturing, the bleeding edge of an industry is craftsmanship - building new injectors, engineering systems that haven't existed before. As the bleeding edge becomes cutting edge and then passes into mature tooling, glue work dominates (and for good reason, most of us don't have a good reason to rewrite compilers or task schedulers) unless your use case is far off the beaten path.

This is not to say that a craftsman level understanding of the underlying technology is useless in glue work. The best parts of HN and the best of modern compsci is done by people who wondered if their tooling could be better - and the answer is yes. As the landscape changes, no one's going around updating the tools you use to be the best they can be. Someone here recently rewrote ripgrep, and I've been using it as a faster version of grep (for specific uses), for example. Even if your job can be done with glue logic, pushing for a deeper understanding of the components and doing better when you can is what keeps the industry as a whole moving forward, not just the bleeding edge.