mrblampo
mrblampo on Hacker News
My kids have an Ooma landline and haven't gotten bored with it yet. It's been months. The hype is real.
Good feedback, thanks! Gemini got a bit carried away writing the README for me. Toned it down and added a demo GIF
Posted by
mrblampo on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @07:14AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://github.com/maxpblum/disco_checkers
I don't post here much, but thought I'd share this terminal Checkers game, because I vibe-coded [most of] it while my kids watched a movie and found it very gratifying.Runs via python3 without any other installation or setup.
Got a music degree, decided the career wasn't for me, went to a programming incubator, really struggled with interviewing for a while, got a job at a startup, got a job at FAANG, here I am a decade after the career switch
Posted by
mrblampo on Thursday January 30, 2025 @07:33AM
from the ask-hn dept.
With the horrible news this morning about the American airlines collision with a helicopter near Washington DC, I am sure the biggest focus will be on how these two aircraft came to be perilously close together, but I am also wondering: Does anyone here know the state of collision avoidance technology in commercial airplanes? This is something that cars are starting to get pretty good at, at...
Yep same. "Teach yourself to eat chocolate."
Posted by
mrblampo on Monday July 29, 2024 @06:55AM
from the ask-hn dept.
When you pick up a landline phone, throughout the USA there is a consistent "dial tone" you hear in the earpiece.I haven't heard it in a while, but IIRC it's two synthesized tones roughly a "major third" apart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_third), slightly buzzy-sounding, which means they probably weren't a "just" major third (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation).Once you...
Fun article! Particularly enjoyed the anecdotal evidence from individual soldier's writing.
Thanks, I enjoyed this and it rings true. This abstract concept of "space" getting filled up thoughtlessly, and that "space" being created by unnecessarily breaking things up into smaller parts that don't really need to be separate, makes a lot of sense and I think I've seen this happen.
The article stops short of proposing a clear plan for how to handle the opposite problem, though: Entrenched monoliths. Once a class (or other abstraction) has grown for long enough (e.g. perhaps someone has read this article and is trying to avoid unnecessary complexity of code structure), it can become very difficult to break it up.
Try not to worry about what others think of you, and definitely don't think about IQ. Judgment is so much more important than speed. Why are you concerned with speedy thinking?
First example seems odd? The author acknowledges that the two proposed alternatives (printing "<function exit>" or actually exiting) aren't great. The fact that the Python REPL provides a helpful hint seems like extra effort to make your life easier. This is especially notable given that in the next example, the author's complaint is about a command _not_ providing special guidance about the thing the user is probably trying to do.
Yep this happened to me yesterday. In a taxi, the driver was following Google Maps, which showed a 22 min ETA, with one or two alternatives adding a minute or so. My phone was open and showed the same options. He felt certain that he knew a better route—via a highway, not a back road—and when he took that first rogue turn, Google Maps adjusted and the ETA instantly dropped to 14 min.
Beautiful Country, by Qian Julie Wang. Beautifully written memoir about immigrating to NYC as a child in the 90s. Poignant, sweet, honest, easy to read, fun, not too too emotionally heavy, but also full of lessons about trauma.
Sounds like the thing about "ad blocker sabotage" is about replacing the Web Request API with something called declarativeNetRequest. I've been sifting through documentation but have had trouble seeing why this is any kind of a downgrade for ad blockers. Can someone explain?
Yep, everything in this article is right on my money in my experience.
This was invaluable in music school.
How could it help with anything at runtime? The type system only exists at compile time, right?
Reading
https://github.com/total-typescript/ts-reset/blob/main/src/e..., I'm more confused than before. The generic NonFalsy<T>[] looks to me like it should evaluate to never[] if the entire array is false, and to T[] (the original array type, not narrowed) otherwise. But I can see that the test case demonstrates that it works. What am I missing?
Interesting! The example
[1, 2, undefined].filter(Boolean). // number[]
is interesting because it makes use of the fact that the types of individual array members are known at compile time. I can think of some times when I have dealt with arrays that are defined at compile time, but not where I've needed to call .filter on such an array. Is there a common use case here?
Posted by
mrblampo on Friday February 24, 2023 @09:25PM
from the ask-hn dept.
I.e. comments that are literal spam, from accounts I've never heard of, on documents I've never seen, but where I am tagged. And they always mention some Bitcoin transaction whose funds are now available, in or similar.Has anyone found a way to make this stop?
Cool! Separate question: What makes people decide to use a mail client instead of webmail? What can I do with a client that I can't do with Gmail web?
I guess one option would be to use the same music streaming apps I would use on a phone, but use the download feature aggressively for playing music offline.
Fascinating. To use such a thing, where would I get downloadable DRM free music these days? What software do I use to sync it to an Android device? What software do I use to browse and play it on an Android device?
(I am asking these questions excitedly, not dubiously)
This was super interesting, and it would seem Bill Gates absolutely predicted the effect that not Java, but ultimately interactive web apps in a broad sense would come to have by making it less important to have one operating system or another.
Interesting that the reply mostly implied that there wasn't much reason to worry, and that the future and dominance of web apps was still uncertain. But we are reading this email exchange now I think largely because of how well placed Bill Gates's worries were. I wonder how many technologies he and other executives lost sleep over that did not amount to anything in the long run.
Most prominent European composers from the last 500 years must be suffering for eternity I guess?