mkipper (u/mkipper) - Readit News

mkipper commented on Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32 svendewaerhert.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/waerhert

stavros · 8 days ago

Thanks, I'll read more datasheets, as I've kind of just been winging it (with terrible results, as you saw).

mkipper · 8 days ago

If you're pulling the datasheet from the vendor website, you can also skim the list of documentation and see if there are any application notes available for the part.

For more "complicated" parts (e.g. lots of signals, high frequency, high power, etc.), integrating the part into a board design isn't necessarily straightforward. Rather than putting a ton of detail in the datasheet, the vendor will sometimes have an entirely separate document with design guidelines for the part.

mkipper commented on SystemD Service Hardening roguesecurity.dev/blog/sy... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

temp0826 · 9 days ago

Why don't distros flip more of these switches? Are there cons of being more aggressive with these settings? It's really a lot for many people to tinker with.

mkipper · 9 days ago

This question is sorta similar to "Why don't distros enable restrictive MAC policies by default"

Maintainers _could_ take the time to lock down sshd and limit the damage it can do if exploited, but there are costs associated with that:

  1. Upfront development cost
  2. Maintenance cost from handling bug reports (lots of edge cases for users)
  3. Maintenance cost from keeping this aligned with upstream changes

You could extend this argument and say that distros shouldn't bother with _any_ security features, but part of the job of a distro maintainer is to strike a balance here, and similar to SELinux / AppArmor / whatever, most mainstream desktop distro maintainers probably don't think the juice is worth the squeeze.

mkipper commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

hirvi74 · 20 days ago

Do you think a human response is much better? It would be foolish to blindly trust what comes out of the mouths of biological LLMs too -- regardless of credentials.

mkipper · 20 days ago

I’m incredibly confident that any professor of aerospace engineering would give a better response. Is it common for people with PhDs to fall for basic misconceptions in their field?

This seems like a reasonable standard to hold GPT-5 to given the way it’s being marketed. Nobody would care if OpenAI compared it to an enthusiastic high school student with a few hours to poke around Google and come up with an answer.

mkipper commented on Palantir is extending its reach even further into government wired.com/story/palantir-... · Posted by u/mooreds

thechao · 22 days ago

Nothing that spends a lot of money on the scale of the Fed. Just low cost culture war stuff.

mkipper · 20 days ago

That's what gets attention in the media, but the Trump administration has also been axing a lot of "traditional" programs.

I used to work a defense contractor and still have some friends in that industry. One of them told me their project (related to some armored vehicle) was unceremoniously killed overnight a few months ago. As best they can tell it had nothing to do with cost, schedule, missed deliveries, etc -- it was just someone in the administration deciding they don't want to keep paying for it. They work for a very large contractor and apparently this happened to a whole bunch of projects / teams there.

mkipper commented on Sign in with Google in Chrome underpassapp.com/news/202... · Posted by u/frizlab

dotancohen · a month ago

Does that happen to you often?

mkipper · a month ago

I guess "often" is relative, but this happens to me pretty regularly.

I live in Canada, and it's not always obvious if an American company ships here or not. If the answer isn't trivial to find, I'll do this:

  1. Add something to the cart
  2. Start the checkout process as a guest
  3. Fill in the boxes that pop up during the checkout process
  4. Close the tab when I see that the country dropdown only has USA available

On most websites these days, you're asked for your email before your mailing address. And after I abort the checkout, I'll get an annoying "Psst...you forgot something in your cart" email a few hours later even though I never made an account or placed an order with my email.

Stores built with Shopify do this so consistently that I have to assume it's an out-of-the-box feature you need to opt out of.

mkipper commented on Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs? · Posted by u/jshchnz

NameForComment · 2 months ago

> I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.

It is hilarious that companies that hired a guy who was scamming them are also convinced they are great at assessing the skill level of devs.

mkipper · 2 months ago

Is it so hard to believe that someone can be a great candidate in an interview when you're getting 100% of their attention and then be horrible at their job when you're getting 20% of it because they're juggling 5 jobs?

mkipper commented on Alberta separatism push roils Canada nytimes.com/2025/05/22/wo... · Posted by u/paulpauper

Teever · 3 months ago

As I understand it the BC Liberals are a centre-right party that don't have any affiliation with the Federal Liberal Party of Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BC_United

mkipper · 3 months ago

Generally speaking, provincial parties are either loosely affiliated or unaffiliated with federal parties which share a name. e.g. Alberta recently had an NDP government that skews much further right than the federal NDP.

If someone says "BC is Liberal" when discussing multiple provinces, they're probably referring to the distribution of federal MPs from BC. And in three of the last four elections including the most recent, the Liberals have "won" BC federally.

mkipper commented on How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia? twitter.com/dieworkwear/s... · Posted by u/taubek

josefresco · 5 months ago

You can buy Croc knockoffs at the "Dollar Store" yet Crocs still exists. Why? Is it purely first-mover advantage/brand or is there an engineering edge?

mkipper · 5 months ago

There are _some_ differences in quality, but I think they're pretty minor.

I recently visited the Philippines and a friend bought some knockoff Crocs at a market. The little rivet thing holding the strap to the shoe had the logo printed right on the exposed plastic, and after a few days, the logo was mostly scratched off. But my wife's Crocs that she bought a decade ago still look fine because there's some sort of sealant on top of the logo.

Is that worth an 800% markup? Probably not. But the knockoffs do cut some corners that the genuine articles don't.

mkipper commented on Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives downtowndougbrown.com/202... · Posted by u/zdw

mort96 · 6 months ago

> I know an engineer who spent two years of his life making sure the new water pump designs would fail at warranty + 50 percent, but only in an annoying, non catastrophic way.

Wow what an abhorrent waste of talent and life.

mkipper · 6 months ago

This can be a pretty blurry line.

If the engineer took some existing product and did nothing for 2 years other than design in additional failures that show up after the warranty has expired, I agree that's awful. However, I'm very skeptical of that. I've worked in some manufacturing orgs who try to pinch every possible penny they can, and I've never seen anything resembling that level of mustache-twirling villainy in engineering. Also, 2 years seems like an incredibly long time for someone to spend doing this and nothing else.

It's much more likely that the company asked the engineer to reduce the cost of the pump while still hitting the product's requirements (e.g. no failures during warranty period plus some margin), and while doing that, the engineer found the design was overspeced for those requirements and made some changes which reduced the pump's expected lifespan while still meeting that requirement.

Unlike what the OP is suggesting, this happens constantly...it's what engineering is.

Obviously I'm not OP and I'm reading between the lines here, but it's very easy to imagine someone hearing this story second-hand and completely misrepresenting it.

mkipper commented on Tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO tomshardware.com/laptops/... · Posted by u/pseudolus

polski-g · 6 months ago

The top 10% of America pay 75% of all taxes received -- the top 25% pay for 89%.

https://www.ntu.org/library/doclib/2024/02/2021-who-pays-2-....

mkipper · 6 months ago

Conveniently, there's no mention of the 0.1% in there, and the historical data comparing the tax contribution of the top 1% to the total tax base doesn't include any information on income and wealth growth of the 1% over that same time period. Weird!

But given that the organization who published that was founded by a Newsmax board member, I'm sure they're trying to paint a clear and unbiased picture of things.