blakesmith (u/blakesmith)

blakesmith commented on No Calls keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/... · Posted by u/ezekg

Aromasin · 7 months ago

I'd disagree - at the ends of the curve, there are a lot of products that are effectively identical, at which point it's a race to the bottom on price (often meaning a slow decline in features until things are "cost-optimised") unless they can bring another value-add to the table which is where salespeople come in. Some of the best companies with the best products have extensive sales teams because they don't race to the bottom on price - they outcompete on getting first to market of features that they only get to because they understand their customer pain points deeply and find out when the value add is.

I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more. Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were requests by customers with super niche requirements you couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it. They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost every Premier League football game you watch on TV.

Good products are often only good because the sales team was out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them and acted on that.

blakesmith · 7 months ago

Love this anecdote. Having a really capable sales team that actually listens to customers unique needs, and feeds that back into a better product can be such a huge asset. Your sales team is usually a huge repository of unique customer pain and problems (opportunities!)

blakesmith commented on Reading QR codes without a computer qr.blinry.org/... · Posted by u/input_sh

cyco130 · 2 years ago

Slightly off topic: One day in the late 90s or early 2000s, I wanted to transfer the contents of my Atari 8-bit disks to my PC. I did know about SIO2PC, a cable that converts between Atari's SIO port and the PC's serial port and a piece of software to go with it. But I didn't have the electronics skills to build one (even though it is actually very easy).

So I ended up writing a Basic program on the Atari to read data from the disk sector by sector and paint it on the screen (with the large 4-color pixels of graphics mode 3). The Atari was connected to the TV card of my PC and a Delphi program I wrote was running on the PC that kept taking screen shots and trying to decode the data from there. I quickly learned that empty sectors threw off my pixel position calibration so I added a mask pattern and a checksum. The sector address was also included. With that, I was able to transfer all my disk contents to my PC. To this day I consider it my greatest engineering achievement :)

Some ten years later, I went on to build an SIO2PC program called AspeQt. A more up-to-date community fork called RespeQt is still the most popular tool in that category used by the community. It even has its own subforum on AtariAge[1].

[1] https://forums.atariage.com/forum/184-respeqt-sio2pc-softwar...

blakesmith · 2 years ago

Reminds me of how the first generation iPod firmware and keys were reverse engineered. They blinked out bit patterns on the LCD backlight and used a camera to read the data in! https://mastodon.social/@bagder/111538350617290554

blakesmith commented on Open Sourcing Ferrocene ferrous-systems.com/blog/... · Posted by u/pietroalbini

blakesmith · 2 years ago

This is really cool. A really big step forward for the Rust ecosystem. Being able to use Rust in safety critical systems is a big win.

Congrats to everyone involved!

blakesmith commented on Show HN: Garnix, fast and easy CI for Nix · Posted by u/jkarni

blakesmith · 3 years ago

This looks really cool, and showcases how simple CI can be if every git repository exposes a nix flake. Congrats on shipping!

blakesmith commented on A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight military.com/history/how-... · Posted by u/gscott

cdot2 · 3 years ago

"In 1974, the future Dr. Rupert was skydiving naked while he was a student at the University of Illinois. He noticed that the rush of air on so much bare skin kept him oriented, even as he spun and twirled in midair."

Where do you sign up for naked skydiving?

blakesmith · 3 years ago

It's usually tradition that your 100th jump is supposed to be naked, at least amongst the skydiving communities I was a part of.

blakesmith commented on Why keyboard shortcuts don't work on non-US layouts and how devs could fix it tkainrad.dev/posts/why-ke... · Posted by u/tkainrad

PureParadigm · 4 years ago

It's not just international keyboards that are affected by this. I'm a Dvorak user so I run into these issues from time to time.

As the article explains, there is a difference between the physical keyCode and character it corresponds to. Which to use really depends on what it is being used for, and there are situations for both. The article suggests checking the character typed, but this is not always the correct way to do it.

For instance, the most annoying are games which default to WASD based on the letter typed and not the physical keys (I've seen this both in web app and native games). Using WASD based on letters simply does not make sense because the whole purpose is to mimic arrow keys. If you base it off of letters typed, then on Dvorak it's like if you used ,A;H on Qwerty which makes absolutely no sense for directional navigation.

For shortcuts where the letter has a meaning, then you might want to look at the actual character. But beware that even alphanumeric keys are not always in the same place because of layouts such as Dvorak and Colemak.

blakesmith · 4 years ago

Another Dvorak typist here! Personal funny anecdote: I learned vim modal navigation after I learned Dvorak, and never bothered to remap the keys. Totally debilitating if I'm using a coworkers QWERTY keyboard for vim navigation, but at least I can still navigate on remote servers without reconfiguring anything!

blakesmith commented on mRNA's next challenge: Will it work as a drug? science.sciencemag.org/co... · Posted by u/mudil

blakesmith · 5 years ago

I've been a little out of the loop on how COVID vaccines were different than others. In case you're like me, here's a nice primer on "mRNA vaccines": https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...

blakesmith commented on Early Work paulgraham.com/early.html... · Posted by u/harscoat

Mizza · 5 years ago

Obligatory Ira Glass quote:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

blakesmith · 5 years ago

This article reminded me of the same quote! Here's the original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE

blakesmith commented on Ami, a tiny cube on wheels that French 14-year-olds can drive theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/davidodio

emteycz · 5 years ago

There are electric scooters (not push-bikes) in Prague, it's absolutely quiet. A better future awaits you!

blakesmith · 5 years ago

I converted an old 1978 Puch Maxi moped that wasn't running to fully electric. Was a great way to learn how EVs work, and build a quiet around-town cruiser. https://photos.app.goo.gl/jgL4VmpmSWA5csba8