[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
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Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
You get nerd-sniped. Assigned a bug to squash. Some new tech or
gadget arrived, to familiarize yourself with. While researching /
reading up / debugging, you stumble upon something interesting.
Upon looking into that, yet another subject catches your attention.
You know how this goes. So... (see title). Bonus questions: what
intermediate steps did you pass along the way? What stuck in your
mind the most?
Author : RetroTechie
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-04-22 20:10 UTC (2 hours ago)
| imzadi wrote:
| Local brewery is doing a cinco de mayo event and we started
| talking about pre-gaming with margaritas:
|
| Margaritas -> Jello Shots -> Chimoy/Tajin rim/topper -> Pop Rocks
| -> History of Pop Rocks
| sunir wrote:
| I switched to Neovim from Sublime Text after trying copilot in
| Sublime, feeling sad, and then watching The Primeagen and his
| glorious mustache for too long.
|
| Ostensibly I wanted to be able to code on the production server
| like a miscreant with the same tools as my laptop.
|
| However I just wanted to regain command of my dev environment
| after years not coding.
|
| I also reorganized the furniture in my office and got weirder
| lighting to make it hacker friendly. I bought a new desk to
| solder electronics.
|
| Most people know me as a partnerships marketer or product manager
| but I am a compsci at heart. This made me happy.
| contact9879 wrote:
| i've been attempting to switch to neovim off and on for about a
| year now. VS Code is so much much easier to get started with
| though. And adding support for a new language is just an
| extension-install away.
| sunir wrote:
| That's fair. I can't use vs code on the server was my logic.
| But also it was a hacking challenge.
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| Why not really? Remote editing through ssh is vscode's
| superpower!
| sunir wrote:
| There's no reason. I just wanted to be cool and use
| neovim! Lol :)
| fransje26 wrote:
| So, how was the switch to Neovim? Which plugins did you settle
| on?
| sunir wrote:
| I used nvchad and I am configuring it from there. Here's my
| fork.
|
| https://github.com/sunir/NvChad
|
| Overall I still think I am faster in sublime text. I get
| stuck in the different modes. I find shift select and grep to
| be pretty frustrating.
|
| However I will muscle through this. Every challenge is
| another set of vim stuff to learn. I have faith I will love
| it later.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Neovim -- as good for a mid-life crisis as a Porsche, and a
| fair bit cheaper.
| sunir wrote:
| True. My friend is selling electrified retromodded Porsches.
| I want one but I am poor.
|
| However I can salve my ego spending a day flipping through
| neovim colour themes.
| dvh wrote:
| I'm trying to beat level 19 in terminator dash:
| https://www.atarimania.com/pgesoft.awp?version=37332
| rapfaria wrote:
| "What if I were to gather these 5 five recipes that really worked
| in a future... book?."
|
| Bookbinding has fascinating details.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| I've been making milk punch for friends as a gift for years now.
| On a lark I wanted to figure out how to produce it in larger
| batches with less manual labor and discovered the tip of the
| iceberg of what is the field of beverage filtration and food
| chemistry.
|
| Turns out getting particulates out of a solution is a massive,
| massive industry with a large body of science, literature, and
| engineering practice behind it.
|
| EDIT: Here's a few wiki entries I found as OK overviews. ChatGPT
| was handy for figuring out what relevant literature in the field
| was and terminology I could use to find more pertinent resources:
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_engineering
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrafiltration
|
| 3. Food Chemistry: https://www.amazon.com/Fennemas-Food-
| Chemistry-Srinivasan-Da...
|
| 4. Introduction to Food Engineering:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123985309/introductio...
|
| 5. Handbook of Food Engineering Practice:
| https://www.routledge.com/Handbook-of-Food-Engineering-Pract...
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| What's your milk punch recipe?
| iamhamm wrote:
| Visiting and documenting abandoned mine sites across the U.S.
| desert southwest.
| drivers99 wrote:
| Different table top roll playing game systems
| hoten wrote:
| I've been doing some modernization on an old scripting language
| used by the game engine I work on [1]. Added a garbage collector,
| simplified how internal symbols are defined, added a VS code
| extension with some niceties like syntax highlighting, "Go to
| Definition", and doc tooltips. Also recently added support for
| websockets and plan to tackle JSON soon. Oh, and so much
| refactoring.
|
| https://github.com/ZQuestClassic/ZQuestClassic
| busterarm wrote:
| Been nerdsnipped and diving down the rabbit hole on a few topics
| in the past few months:
|
| Some history podcasts had me digging into the Napoleonic Wars and
| Israel/Palestine.
|
| Also a recent interest in human health and diseases has basically
| sent me down the path of self-study equivalent to a
| Kinesiology/Exercise Science/Sports Physiology degree.
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| Fun exercise to try and list them out! My last couple of weeks:
|
| - 3D-printable parts storage solutions (via: I found some part
| storage bins in the discard pile at a local hackerspace)
|
| - MITM proxy to snoop on Github Copilot API requests (via: we're
| building an jupyter AI assistant thing and got curious how other
| players do it).
|
| - DIY robot arms (via: I'm making several for a nested 'you pass
| butter' joke, via a casual conversation about robotics being
| accessible now. YouTube is amazing at surfacing smaller makers
| once you start watching a few videos on a given topic)
|
| - Learning about Oauth and JWT (via: 'why is auth still a pain?')
|
| - Invertebrate UV fluorescence (via: that millipede is glowing
| under my UV torch!)
|
| (a small subset of these end up documented
| https://johnowhitaker.dev/all.html eventually if you're curious
| to see a longer historical list)
|
| I like rabbit holes where following the curiosity gradient to a
| satisfying conclusion is possible. "How does X work" leads
| eventually to code that does X. I'm less happy when they lead
| into a tangle of complexity, like digging into a library only to
| find weird abstractions 6 layers deep or trying to compare 18
| different alternatives in a field I don't know very well.
|
| OP I'd also like to hear yours!
| RetroTechie wrote:
| > OP I'd also like to hear yours!
|
| Today I gave some thought to what would be a fitting name for
| my boat ( _if_ I were to rename it).
|
| One option: the glider pattern from Conway's Game of Life.
| Instantly recognizable by true hackers, just a weird symbol to
| others.
|
| Of course a quick check on Wikipedia. Know that I'm always
| interested in things small / simple / computing, so... cellular
| atomata. Which led me to varieties used to simulate or help
| understand biological systems ("systems biology" - if only that
| field had even _existed_ back when I left high school).
|
| From there on: artificial life, Core Wars & co, self-
| replicating machinery, and... Astro-chicken (deserves a HN post
| of its own, imho).
|
| Btw. it's amazing to see how many big, open questions there
| still are, related to the origins of (biological) life, and
| evolution. Eg. full simulation of a single cell organism: never
| been done (too complex).
|
| Next up: a cup of hot chocolate.
| niccl wrote:
| Trying to _really_ understand the postgres query planner's
| `EXPLAIN` output. We have long-running embarrassingly parallel
| processes where the throughput will sometimes completely tank.
| Got worse when we upgraded to PG16.
|
| Trying to compare good query plans with bad ones, and then work
| out what changes we need to make to the slow queries is ...
| interesting.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| I watched Lex Fridman interview Richard Wolff and have spent 2
| weeks going hard into marxist and anarchist theories and
| practice. Working through 2 books, a dozen browser tabs,
| interviews, etc. It's rare something catches my interest like
| this (especially non-technical). But I'm really enjoying all the
| different perspectives and formulating my own fantasy scenarios.
| cameron4 wrote:
| If it hasn't made it onto your list yet, Ursula K. Le Guin's
| book titled "The Dispossessed" is a great exploration of
| anarchism in practice through a sci-fi lens
| hangonhn wrote:
| Do you have any recommendations on books that talks about
| Leninism like it's foundational ideas, etc. and how it departs
| from Marxism?
|
| Thanks in advance.
| 0xWTF wrote:
| Started on the Nagoya Protocol, then PCR of wastewater on
| airplanes, mechanical engineering of lavatory fittings, then
| metagenomic shotgun sequencing, and now Bloom filters.
| kevindamm wrote:
| It is such a good feeling to deploy a bloom filter in
| production. There aren't many times it will help but when it
| helps it helps a TON.
| gnarcoregrizz wrote:
| Metal-air batteries/fuel cells. Made a mini aluminum air battery
| (you can easily DIY one with household items). It seems that most
| people consider metal-air batteries to be a dead-end, since they
| aren't green and are generally non-rechargeable, and air cathodes
| are tricky (sluggish, exotic materials, expensive catalysts). I
| dove into "alternative" battery and fuel cell research after
| looking into how to extend the range of my electric motorcycle. I
| love the electric drivetrain, especially on motorcycles, but
| lithium ion isn't up to the task as far as capacity for anything
| beyond an hour or two of high performance fun. If I could get a
| compact metal air battery or hydrogen fuel cell to output just
| 1kw for a hybrid drivetrain, range issues could be solved.
| friggeri wrote:
| Two very very deep rabbit holes in the last 6 months:
|
| - Designed/built a small USB controlled pan/tilt camera head to
| control the mirrorless I use as a webcam (couple of servos,
| gears, belts), and then designed/built a custom ortholinear
| keyboard with a joystick to control the camera (custom PCB, CNC'd
| aluminum case, etc)
|
| - I'm a pretty big runner, built my own web based calendar UI
| that integrates with Google Calendar where I can type in workouts
| like "1 mile warmup @z2 + 5x(30 seconds @ 6:00/mile + 0.5 miles
| recovery) + 1 mile cooldown" and this gets parsed/total weekly
| mileage gets tallied. The next step down this rabbit hole is
| building a small iOS app to automatically generate Apple Watch
| Workouts using WorkoutKit.
| hurtuvac78 wrote:
| Very interested in your first rabbit hole. Which servos did you
| use? Which gears? For me, it would be to use with an action
| camera. How many hours did you spend on it before you were
| satisfied? I've seen some arduino-based projects to do that,
| but servos look quite bulky... and with the right gears, very
| little torque / power should be necessary. But i have not spent
| the time yet.
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| Installing and exploring V7 unix (1979) on a PDP11 emulator.
|
| Crazy how familiar and yet different things are.
| kromem wrote:
| I started looking into the Gospel of Thomas right before the
| start of the pandemic, which led to a number of rabbit holes:
|
| * Turns out the work is not 'weird' or 'Gnostic' but is directly
| addressing details from Lucretius, including paraphrasing his
| view of evolution and atomism, but refuting the claim there's no
| afterlife by basically appealing to the idea we're in a simulated
| copy of an original physical world where the spirit doesn't
| actually depend on a body, because there is no actual body.
|
| * As I dug more into the various mystery religions the followers
| of the work claimed as informing their views, I saw a number of
| those were associated with figures various Greek historians were
| saying came from the same Exodus from Egypt as Moses.
|
| * Turns out a lot of the ahistorical details in the Biblical
| Exodus narrative better fit the joint sea peoples and Libyan
| resistance who end up forcibly resettled into the Southern Levant
| latter on. In the past decade we've also started finding early
| Iron Age evidence of Aegean and Anatolian settlement and trade
| previously unknown in the area, including in supposed Israelite
| settlements like Tel Dan, lending support to the theory that Dan
| were the Denyen sea peoples.
|
| * Also turns out that in just the past few years a number of
| Ashkenazi users have been puzzled by their genomic similarity to
| ancient DNA samples, where the closest overall match in a DNA
| bank was 3,500 year old Minoan graves sequenced in 2017 or that
| they have such a high amount of Neolithic Anatolian (which the
| 2017 study found was effectively identical to Minoan).
|
| * The G2019S LRRK2 mutation that's almost only found among the
| Libyan Berbers and the Ashkenazi appears to have originated with
| the former but appeared in the ancestry of the latter ~4,500
| plus/minus 1k years. Which is a window that predates the
| emergence of the Israelites in the first place, but is on the
| cusp of the sea peoples/Libyan alliance.
|
| * There's also been discovery of endogamy among some of the
| Minoan populations. Did the Ashkenazi endogamy evidenced from
| their emergence in Europe and the bottleneck in the first
| millennium CE actually go back _much_ further than we 've been
| thinking? Maybe Tacitus wasn't so off base when he talked about
| how some claimed the Exodus involved people from Crete hiding out
| in Libya.
|
| Anyways, that's a very rough summary of some of the rabbit holes
| I was going down.
|
| Bonus: Herodotus's description of Helen of Troy spending the
| whole time in Egypt has two datable markers to the 18th dynasty,
| which is when Nefertiti, "beautiful woman who arrived" is around
| during a complete change to Egyptian art and religion while she's
| the only woman in history to be depicted in the smiting pose,
| with her only noted relatives being a sister and wetnurse.
| greentxt wrote:
| > appealing to the idea we're in a simulated copy of an
| original physical world where the spirit doesn't actually
| depend on a body
|
| Sounds a bit gnostic no?
| kromem wrote:
| It was what resulted in Gnosticism, not the other way around.
|
| You had this first century response to Epicureanism's
| naturalism as a foundation. In that paradigm, the Platonist
| demiurge recreating the physical world before it was an agent
| of salvation, liberating the copies from the certainty of
| death from the Epicurean original.
|
| What happens is that Epicureanism falls from popularity over
| the second century, so in parallel to the increased
| resurgence of Platonism, Plato's forms becomes the foundation
| instead. For Plato, there was a perfect world of the
| blueprints of everything, the corrupted physical versions of
| those forms, and then the worst of all was the images of the
| physical. So the Thomasine salvation by being in the images
| of physical originals is through that lens corruptive.
|
| So as the foundation shifted from the Epicurean original
| world of evolution (Lucretius straight up described survival
| of the fittest in book 5) to Plato's perfect forms, a
| demiurge creating a copy of what predated it shifted from
| being a good thing to trapping people in a corrupted copy.
|
| For the first 50 years of the discovery of the Gospel of
| Thomas, it was mistakenly thought to be Gnostic. This changed
| at the turn of the 21st century with the efforts of Michael
| Allen Williams and Karen King, and it's now labeled as
| "proto-Gnostic." It's absent a lot of the features typically
| associated with 'Gnosticism' though that term in general
| should be retired as it's turned out that there isn't any
| single set of beliefs to be considered 'Gnostic' in the first
| place (this was the chief realization of scholars over the
| past twenty years).
| chasd00 wrote:
| Micropython on an Adafruit Feature to make a dual deploy
| altimeter for high power rocketry. Got really into control theory
| and all the fancy math for determining the state of the rocket on
| the way up. Then got into device drivers and improving on the
| ones that come with CircuitPython to get higher performance out
| of barometers and IMUs. Then got into circuit board design and
| fabrication starting from zero for an i2c pyro board that fires
| the ejection charges (little tubes of blackpowder and an e-match
| used to eject parachutes). That was pretty interesting, i have
| the advantage of a handful of hardware engineer friends to answer
| my questions when i get stuck.
|
| It's all sitting on my desk, first flight will likely be in May.
| jl6 wrote:
| So, I decided to install Linux on my formerly-Windows-only
| laptop, and thought it was cool enough to go full time and ditch
| Windows completely. The downside was the lack of access to top
| tier games. No problem though, my plan was to take a break from
| gaming, figuring that by the time Linux had caught up with
| compatibility, computers would also be much more powerful and I'd
| be able to resume gaming at some point in the future on better
| kit, and not have to worry about janky framerates on struggling
| hardware.
|
| Linux proved interesting enough that I kept finding all sorts of
| cool new rabbit holes to go down - shell scripting, filesystems,
| Python, databases. It was side-quests within side-quests! Plus,
| having kicked my gaming habit, I had plenty of time to explore
| these.
|
| Anyway, to cut a long story short, that was 23 years ago. I ended
| up getting a career in tech, relocated, got married, had kids,
| lived the American Dream... The "life" rabbit hole kind of got in
| the way of my plans, so I can't wait to finally get back on track
| and play GTA III on a decent box.
| emestifs wrote:
| Is a router a decent box? https://kittenlabs.de/real-gaming-
| router/
| umvi wrote:
| Let's hear your distro journey! What did you start with, what
| do you currently use?
| user_7832 wrote:
| For me, it's DIY audio.
|
| The thing about diy'ing audio (primarily speakers but also amps,
| DACs etc) is that you can get _top of the line_ performance for a
| fraction of the market price. A $50,000 speaker setup that would
| bring tears to your eyes could be made for perhaps $5000. A DIY
| $500 kit can perform similar to a $2-3000 set of speakers. Open
| source amps with gerber files on github are amazing.
|
| The biggest reason it's so easy to get amazing value is because
| that $600 speaker only has $150 of materials. Upgrading its $25
| woofer to a $80 one would help a lot, but no company would do
| that and not sell it now for $1000 if they could.
|
| However the biggest allure for me is not beating commercial
| systems on cost, but making what _I_ want. A small speaker with
| deep base? Easy. Speakers with quasi-active noise cancellation
| behind them? Sure, why not. Speakers that 'll make the most
| overpowered/fancy beach-boombox sound like a crappy toy? Simple.
|
| The only limit is your imagination and time/money.
|
| I'd very much recommend diyaudio.com, but be warned, parts of
| this field are mature while others are still in effective
| infancy. Also, being an engineer (electrical/mechanical) helps a
| lot, there's a ton of signals processing and electrical/mech
| oscillation.
| ak_111 wrote:
| MH370. There was no intermediate step as I saw somewhere it was
| the 10th anniversary of its disappearance and decide to get a
| quick update on the current status of all the evidence and
| theories. Ended up spending the entire day reading about radars,
| pings and aviation controls.
| naiv wrote:
| What did you find is the most reasonable explanation?
| ak_111 wrote:
| Pilot suicide by a long shot. There is no other alternative
| theory that comes even close.
|
| What was interesting is to see them piece the theory together
| from the very fragmentary and little evidence (what is even
| more mind-blowing to know how little evidence there was to
| play with given we are talking about a 747).
|
| The true mystery left is how did he execute the suicide and
| why. How did he dispatch the co-pilot? (There was a very
| small window to do so). What did he do in the final hours
| (was he alive for the entire duration)?
| wiresurfer wrote:
| did you chance upon @MentourPilot on youtube and his
| breakdown of the MH370 investigation + recent update? If
| not, I am afraid you may have another hour to spend, but
| its very likely you have already seen this.
| Twirrim wrote:
| A quick and dirty, shallow one, that I just opted to brute force
| out of curiosity.
|
| An online game I play includes an optional two player Russian
| Roulette type feature (non-fatal). I got to wondering if there
| was an optimal betting percentage to use, if you set aside some
| money as a betting seed. So I spent time coding up a really ugly
| brute force "just run lots of games and see".
|
| Pretty much the answer is you'll lose more often than you win,
| looks like your best bets are around 2% of whatever money you
| have left of your betting money.
|
| If you play 75 games, at 2% of your betting pool, you'll come out
| ahead only about 49.8% of the time.
|
| There's more efficient ways of working that out than I bothered
| to do, which was to create a basic abstraction for a gun. For
| example, your odds of winning is essentially 50%, given two
| players. For every "game" I simulated, I could have just picked a
| random integer between 0 and 1 instead. Faster and the same
| effect.
|
| As best as I could find, there are no good betting strategies on
| a coin toss (which is what this really is)
| FrojoS wrote:
| > a really ugly brute force "just run lots of games and see".
|
| This is usually called
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method
| bormaj wrote:
| You might find the Kelly Criterion interesting and/or useful
| for optimal bet sizing. This rabbit hole goes deeeep
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
| meter wrote:
| This past month, I've been reevaluating my dev environment and
| workflow. My goals are to reduce RSI, be more efficient, as well
| as learn all my tools as deeply as possible. And have fun!
|
| - I've ditched VSCode and gone all-in on NeoVim. I've spent a
| bunch of time watching Primeagen, etc., tweaking my vid config
| and learning how to navigate as efficiently as possible.
|
| - Switched from QWERTY to Colemak-DH to hopefully reduce RSI. I'm
| at about 70wpm with decent accuracy after 4 weeks. My QWERTY
| skills are gone. I like Colemak, but we'll see how I feel in
| another month or two.
|
| - Finished my custom hot swappable Sofle keyboard, and spent many
| hours customizing the layout. I think I'm pretty close to feeling
| comfortable. I'm using home row mods, which I love. Currently
| using Kailh box whites (clicky). Might switch to Gateron Brown
| Pros.
|
| - Been going through a "Build your own git" course, to understand
| git as deeply as possible.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Congratulations on learning Colemak! I made that journey myself
| and haven't regretted it once since. I did have to relearn
| QWERTY, frustratingly, but luckily it isn't nearly as difficult
| as learning a layout for the first time, and I can now switch
| between them relatively easily. (For me, a few years on, I now
| type at 100-120 WPM on Colemak; I was also at 70 WPM four weeks
| after starting.)
| ajxs wrote:
| I was writing an article on reverse-engineering vintage
| synthesisers[0], and I ended up getting majorly sidetracked
| trying to find out exactly what year the Hitachi HD44780 LCD
| controller was first manufactured, or try and find any background
| information on it. The earliest reference to it I can find online
| is a 'preliminary' user's manual[1], dated March 1981. I know
| it's a bit of a weird rabbit hole to go down, but I figured I'd
| get to the bottom of this mystery. It's a shame that there's so
| little background information available about one of the best-
| known ICs in history.
|
| 0: https://ajxs.me/blog/Introduction_to_Reverse-
| Engineering_Vin...
|
| 1: https://archive.org/details/Hitachi-
| DotMarixLiquidCrystalDis...
| SimianLogic wrote:
| I couldn't find any containers for paper filters for the
| AeroPress XL that didn't look like cheap 3d-printed garbage, so
| I've been going down a rabbit hole of how to build bronze
| articulated joints.
|
| I'm building a paperweight inspired by vintage brass table lamps
| to hold the papers in place on a wooden platform.
| cameron4 wrote:
| I take photos for fun in my spare time and recently started
| shooting on film again. This time around I've been interested in
| how film actually functions. SmarterEveryDay has a fantastic
| 3-part YouTube series of the Kodak manufacturing process as he
| tours through the facility. I'm now amazed that film is still
| even being manufactured today, and can't even imagine what the
| production line was like during the heyday of film.
|
| I've developed my own film in the past but knowing so little
| about chemistry myself, it's still pretty much magic to me even
| after digesting all of the info from the series.
| gxs wrote:
| How to break substitution ciphers.
|
| Somehow and unintentionally as the search began from some random
| article I'd read, this seemingly unrelated subject ended up
| uncovering some insights into a problem with deduping database
| rows I'd been working on for another project.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I spent the last week evaluating drag and drop form designers and
| came to the reluctant conclusion that I'd be better off building
| my own. Long story. So now I'm building a drag and drop form
| designer, quite the deviation from the road I need to travel
| down.
|
| Its almost certainly a rabbit hole but at least I've forewarned
| myself.
| captainvalor wrote:
| Suno and Udio.
|
| Spent WAY too much time adapting a Buddhist sutra into a heavy
| metal banger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-5Y9Z7DK4s
| anon115 wrote:
| ----esp32 module ----gaussian splatting ------
| keyle wrote:
| Writing a low level C code editor, going down the rabbit hole of
| gap buffers and piece tables. Fun though.
|
| I first wrote it the dumbest way possible, one big array with
| padding at the back. Worked fine actually for most modern use
| cases, but as this is also a learning experience, I want it to be
| best in class in performance.
|
| I think I'll settle on gap buffer because the performance is
| great and it doesn't hurt my head.
| K-Wall wrote:
| I've been bitten by the Meshtastic / LoRa bug. It's fascinating
| to see how far these little inexpensive units can reach.
|
| This weekend I was able to reach my home node from a state park
| 8.2 km away and have been giddy since.
| Alexito wrote:
| What is the difference between sony camera models.
| wiresurfer wrote:
| Now that's one tricky rabbit hole. If you are planning on
| buying a camera, the deliberation seems to be a part of the
| shopping process. Post buying though, the differences seem
| either very important, or don't matter at all. Depends on how
| serious you want to get with the cameras.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Rebuilding a Ford Cleveland V8 - the Australian specific 302
| cubic inch version.
|
| One broken engine and one non operational one and turning them
| into a single good motor. American thin-wall cast V8 engines are
| fairly similar, but different enough that if you don't get them
| built you have to do a bit of puzzle solving (especially in the
| timing case). Plenty of youtube videos and forum posts on the
| Cleveland and it's been fun piecing it back together and learning
| about new things like installing cam bearings.
| greentxt wrote:
| San Francisco politics in the late 19th century.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| How the public transport services in my local area are run!
| There's a lot to it: route planning, scheduling, ticketing... and
| a large amount of digitalization too.
|
| It's interesting to discover that a lot of 'facts' about public
| transport people take for granted just aren't true. The names and
| liveries by which vehicles go often don't actually correspond
| with their actual operators and owners. The company that's named
| on your ticket might not actually get any money from your
| purchase - or they might make money from passengers who don't pay
| at all, due to a myriad of subsidy schemes run by different
| levels of government.
|
| Waves of privatization and re-nationalization with political
| motivations at every turn have produced a system which is
| amazingly efficient in some ways, and appallingly wasteful in
| others. Workforce strikes are obvious to the general public, but
| what's not obvious is who the negotiating parties even are, with
| various trade unions (and unions of unions) competing against
| various management groups (and groups of groups).
|
| Some things are pleasantly surprising. Without any fanfare,
| digital systems for vehicle tracking have been introduced with
| remarkable efficiency. Then, for me, there's the astonishment of
| discovering that not only is every timetable published in a
| consistent, nation-wide data format, but one that has been
| utilised in production for _twenty years_!
|
| It all makes me realise how limited the public discourse about
| public transport and 'green' mobility policies are in my region.
| It is simply impossible to grasp the true consequences of any
| given proposal in the meagre columns that they're given in the
| newspapers and the two-minute reports in which they feature on
| the television. Diving into this rabbit hole has led me to
| respect the complexity of the field much more than I did before,
| and fills me with both hope and despair on topics which I had
| hitherto scarcely lent a thought.
| rav3ndust wrote:
| Over the last little while, I've fallen down the Nix rabbit hole.
|
| I don't currently use it in any serious projects aside from
| tinkering about with it, but it has been a lot of fun to learn
| and study.
|
| Between the Nix package manager, the associated language, etc.,
| there has been a lot to learn about, and it's been good fun. I
| have nixOS on my spare Thinkpad for toying with, and I have Nix
| on my main Debian systems, if I want to pull something from
| nixpkgs.
| poyu wrote:
| USB! I've tried and failed couple times in understanding how USB
| works under the hood, from electrical, to protocol, then classes,
| and also Power Delivery. This time around things seem to make
| more sense now. It started out as an ambitious goal to emulate an
| FTDI USB DMX converter with the ESP32-S2/S3, but realizing that
| might be too big a goal, so I'm starting small. I want to be able
| to make a custom device class on the ESP32, and write a driver
| with libusb.
| umvi wrote:
| USB is a frighteningly deep rabbit hole. I thought it was going
| to be easy when I first dipped my toes into the USB stack but
| boy was I in for a shock.
| wiresurfer wrote:
| So, I was looking at some performance issues which seemed to be
| stemming from linux networking stack. We eBPF with docker/k8s a
| fair bit as a PaaS, and I ended up getting into the weeds with
| linux sys/procfs and kernel tracing. One thing led to another and
| after quickly dispatching the perf issue, I was supposed to be on
| a planned week long holiday which turned into a deep dive into
| linux kernel + networking.
|
| Intermediate step - I feel pretty confident with the gory details
| of the kernel code now. can possibly build a custom kernel, boot
| qemu with both a simple C+assembly bare metal kernel, or the self
| compiled kernel. I feels like the clouds have cleared and I can
| see the sun. - Incidentally the kernel source code is pretty well
| documented, but one thing which is missing is a much smaller list
| of files which are most important. true pareto here. 20% files
| carry the weight. You also need to know the subsystem you want to
| touch. Chances are that subsystem is much lesser number of files.
|
| Finally - Got to reading about kernel packet handling. at the
| L2/L3/L7 level. from nic hardware to userspace. Turns out that
| eBPF [hello old friend!] has a networking avataar called XDP
| which is pretty recent [<5 years] way of doing high performance
| networking on the linux kernel. Along the way, got to know about
| network performance optimizations specially in modern multicore
| systems in the kernel like RPS/RSS/aRFS, DPDK/fd.io/VPP.
|
| And now I feel the itch to apply this to some of our networks.
| Particularly, baremetal servers on equinix metal + aws ec2 +
| azure can be peered with either VPP/Bird to make a p2p connection
| which is a factor more performant than the vpc
| interconnect/gateways which are provided off the shelf.
|
| I might extend the holiday by a few days. and I would love to
| talk to people who have hands on experience with any of this. Its
| hard to contain my excitement tbh.
| atonse wrote:
| The wonderful world of research paper identifiers.
|
| DOI (Digital Object Identifiers) are used by many modern research
| papers as sort of a UUID for papers, run by doi.org.
|
| But they're discipline-specific. So they're used widely by
| certain disciplines. But others use different databases.
|
| So for biology-related papers, NIH's PubMed ID. Or for
| Astronomers, Bibcode.
|
| All are "global" identifiers and each has some kind of consortium
| that's trying to make theirs the One ID. DOI seems to be the
| closest.
| dvno42 wrote:
| GoLang and Azure APIs.
|
| I've been attempting to add a oauth2 device code flow to a Tacacs
| server with the goal of extending Azure accounts to access
| network device management planes. Pretty neat, I can get a "enter
| this device at URI" from the router/switch and let Azure do it's
| 2fa/compliance etc. Currently trying to get token validation
| working on the tacacs server =).
|
| Ultimate goal is have a reverse proxy web front end kind of like
| Apache Guacamole that does the Oauth for the user and when they
| click on a network device, the JWT is passed through to the
| network device over SSH and thus the tacacs server which is
| relatively local to the network device which will validate it and
| let the user into the network device.
|
| Playing around with GPT4/Opus a lot lately and man... I have
| feelings. They've been a great learning tool to learn the basics
| of Go though so I'm thankful.
|
| It's going swimingly /s but I seem to be making progress. Slowly,
| I'll bake this into my bigger network management tool if it an be
| secure and make sense to do so...
| 2genders30786 wrote:
| hi are u lonely want ai gf?? https://discord.gg/elyza
| TNwTaLyRLZFilWMHQ
| 2genders14678 wrote:
| hi are u lonely want ai gf?? https://discord.gg/elyza -- FOLLOW
| THE HOMIE https://twitter.com/hashimthearab EkcsvJUyCcgqKWXXZ
| rice7th wrote:
| We managed to get twitter bots into HN. Maybe tomorrow the pigs
| will fly.
| 2genders48337 wrote:
| hi are u lonely want ai gf?? https://discord.gg/elyza
| OFjqioxtKLFjmOvlT
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| The Night The Stars Fell
| batch12 wrote:
| I've been researching and planting fruit trees and edible plants.
| Looking at paw paws, peaches, pears, berries, persimmons and tea
| bushes.
| 2genders11064 wrote:
| Are you lonely? Do u want an AI girlfriend?
| https://discord.gg/elyza -- FOLLOW THE HOMIE
| https://twitter.com/hashimthearab eYZSYiNhCLcPdgxXI
| 2genders31988 wrote:
| hi are u lonely want ai gf?? https://discord.gg/candyai
| kXNNjalWfeYgvMEuT
| irongeek wrote:
| Due to all the recent BSD posts I have spent the past month
| exploring NetBSD and OpenBSD. Really enjoying the journey and
| finding that I can do everything I am currently doing easily on
| both.
| datascienced wrote:
| I haven't had time to even look but etcd is on my list. It is a
| distributed key/value for node configuration (I think!)
|
| The reason why I want to learn more about it is I feel it is like
| a base building block of distributed systems and may be easier to
| grok and even write a toy version than a bigger thing like
| kubernetes or a leaderless distributed datastore. I would also
| learn some go and know how a critical piece of kubernetes works.
|
| What led me there is practicing for a damn system design
| interview. As much as this whole topic is controversial on HN the
| grinding has really got me curious about the tech that runs at
| larger scales and how it works under the hood.
| 2genders28478 wrote:
| Are you lonely? Do u want an AI girlfriend?
| https://discord.gg/elyza jjZxewOezjZfCQFlM
| 2genders15763 wrote:
| Are you lonely? Do u want an AI girlfriend?
| https://discord.gg/elyza DcBsYUTyVQwuAQris
| 2genders42041 wrote:
| hi are u lonely want ai gf?? https://discord.gg/elyza -- FOLLOW
| THE HOMIE https://twitter.com/hashimthearab UdrZSPSvTtgWhNFef
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