cmos (u/cmos) - Readit News

cmos commented on I Met Paul Graham Once okayfail.com/2025/i-met-p... · Posted by u/DamonHD

jhp123 · 7 months ago

I'm not a target of tech's fascist turn, but my head is still spinning from the change of direction. When I entered this industry it was for hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.

What particularly stings is that the vipers at the top tricked people into giving away an enormous amount of intellectual property. Zuck is removing tampons from the men's room—will he also remove open source code written by queer people from his company? Of course not.

cmos · 7 months ago

It's time for tech to go back to its roots and starve the kings and 'noblemen' of our talent.

Stop working for billionaires.

cmos commented on Sky lapse in two tone blog.datadesk.eco/p/sky-l... · Posted by u/ltrg

jpm_sd · a year ago

I worked on a "floating solar" project at Google and you're completely correct.

Also, waterproofing is a nightmare, and the panels get dirty (salt, algae, bird shit) and stop producing power efficiently.

cmos · a year ago

I work in Oceanography.. The solar panels on individual buoys also get cleaned by rain, and can work ok vertically because of reflections. We have special diode bypass panels made so if 10% is covered in poop (SeaLion poop in our case) only 10% of the power is reduced.

Our biggest problem with small wind turbines on buoys is fishingpeople throwing line into them.

But yea, solar for power generation at sea is not realistic.. and you are stealing it from the tiny animals that make up our carbon sink. https://twilightzone.whoi.edu/explore-the-otz/value-of-the-o...

cmos commented on Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code · Posted by u/Timot05

polalavik · 2 years ago

I was thinking the same thing (I'm an EE by day). I think this idea is very cool, but since the dawn of time schematics and PCB layout have always been visual because you are actually building a physical thing. Its easy to see hardware bugs in schematics visually. However, it might be very hard to track it in code, unless the code is one day smart enough to find the bugs for you. You have to hold more context in your head that you cant export to your visual senses when its written as code. You cant see the actual circuit flow.

edit: just wanted to double down on this being very cool though. i dont mean to deflate this project and I'm about to design a pcb for a personal project - I might give this a go for fun. the promise is there and asthe project and feature set grows i can see it being the way forward.

cmos · 2 years ago

I agree - also an EE - and I think it is similar to 'programming music' packages like Sonic Pi. If you are used to reading and writing standard music coding will be an odd and difficult change. Right now we have a comfort for seeing the layout and such physically, and since that is how we manufacture it this is going to be an output anyway, but there is some future world where it is all put together automatically within the requirements we specify and we have an entirely new way of designing circuit boards. Each component would come with not only a footprint but an array of basic design implementations that would mix and match with others.. autorouting on steroids of sorts.

cmos commented on Ask HN: How do I stop wasting time? · Posted by u/beeburrt

cmos · 2 years ago

search youtube for motivational videos. Play one when you are down. Skip if you don't like it - there are an infinite number of them.

cmos commented on Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002) web.mit.edu/jemorris/humo... · Posted by u/dvrp

cmos · 2 years ago

I did a startup making a mp3 player that was attached to whole house audio distribution systems. We got an angry email from a customer saying he woke up to ABBA playing full blast at 3:00am. While it was likely an integration/timer issue, he was wondering 'why ABBA? what is the player trying to tell me?"

The control system was sending 'play' with nothing else, which was more of an edge case based on our UI, and so it started at the beginning of the list of artists, and ABBA was at the beginning of that list.

Other players might have started at the beginning of the list of songs, but for some reason (25 years ago) we chose the beginning of the list of artists. Later on it was configurable - random, favorite playlist, etc.

cmos commented on Ask HN: Best Resources and Books for a Soon-to-Be-Dad? · Posted by u/xyos

entropicgravity · 2 years ago

No books but some experience. (1) don't try to push things, kids develop at different rates.

(2) eg we didn't potty train until she was just 3. We tried before that but it was stress with no upside. After three she had like maybe 5 'mistakes' over three weeks and that was pretty much it. You mileage may vary.

(3) When your new born is about two weeks start staring in their eyes and stick out your tongue. It takes a few days but in a while they'll stick out their tongue in response. From there the sky's the limit for tongue communication. Way more fun that you think. I did this on my own but there's an early childhood educator who recommends it too and wrote a book (can't recall the name)

(4) Discipline. Use the 'block system' it can eliminate almost all the time outs. For age 2y and 3y use five plastic blocks. Every time (use your judgement) they do something bad put a yellow plastic block in a visible but unreachable place. After they have five blocks up they get no more videos for the day. For age 4y and 5y do the same but use 3 blocks (at the younger age they eventually clue into 'oh, I have five blocks, I can burn three of them with no consequence').

(5) videos are not the tool of the devil. Kids naturally pay attention to the highest source of information that's available. In a boring house with slow changes (unlike, say, moving through the landscape all day long with a nomadic tribe) that information source is videos...but watch out for sunny bunnies no more than three day :)

(6) Between the ages of 2 and 10 kids are good for absolutely nothing except learning languages, at which they are certifiable geniuses. Try not to waste this valuable window in time.

cmos · 2 years ago

We just started putting our kids on the potty around 5 months old.. they liked to sit on it and we would read to them. Sometimes stuff came out. But more importantly it was part of our routine before and after naps, and so by 1.5-2 they were fully trained mostly by themselves.

Waiting too long can create issues with sitting on a seat with a hole in it - at least make that a common thing you do.

cmos commented on The new desktop Outlook is a bad idea windowscentral.com/softwa... · Posted by u/thesuperbigfrog

cmos · 2 years ago

We use MS365 at work. Outlook for the web is ok until you try to use the 'groups' feature. I need to hold a 10 minute tutorial on the backwards UI for the group view within outlook.

The 'groups' functionality is decent.. so sad they hide buttons and kinda just stopped working on it.

cmos commented on DESKTOP2 – A Graphical User Interface for DOS mevis-research.de/~ritter... · Posted by u/marcodiego

cmos · 2 years ago

I made my DOS apps using National Instruments DOS GUI.. it was oddly wonderful, and super easy to make full fledged applications with 'c' calls. It's a shame they now just make bloatware for niche testing environments.

Then I got into visual basic in the later 90's and was able to build amazing apps as well. Then it all got overly complicated seemingly.

cmos commented on Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality english.elpais.com/scienc... · Posted by u/belter

bombcar · 2 years ago

Also from my experience the "left in place" part is technically very challenging, because a woman in labor tends to move around quite a bit, whereas the nurse holding something against the patient for a moment is much more workable.

cmos · 2 years ago

..and the woman can hear the heartbeat, and when it gets different it can have a closed loop affect that causes unnecessary stress.