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niccl commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)    · Posted by u/david927
niccl · 5 days ago
back working on my lighting desk, after a couple of years of hating it because the communications bus between the many different modules was flakey and so the whole thing wasn't fun to use. I bit the bullet last year and re-implemented everything with CAN-bus communications and it's actually fun to use now.

Current work has been improving boot time. Was nearly two minutes because of one board, and that's a long time for the lights to be out if you have to reboot during a show. I'd wanted to use buildroot to get a custom kernel that should boot much more quickly, but the buildroot learning curve was steep for me, particularly as I've no expectation of ever needing the knowledge again.

Independently but concurrently I decided I really ought to understand what all this AI stuff was about, for fear of getting left behind. That coincided with the release of opus 4.5, and holy heck has it made a difference! With a little guidance from me Claude got the buildroot environment working and the boot time down to less than 10 seconds. I've been _really_ impressed. I've had Claude write a few boring utilities that I could easily have done but Claude managed much faster and with less boredom on my part. Fortunately for my AI revolution I think I'm a better Business Analyst/writer than I am a coder, so it fits with my temperament.

niccl commented on A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times   statmodeling.stat.columbi... · Posted by u/timr
slow_typist · 20 days ago
The problem is in parts, how confirmatory statistics work, and how journals work. Most journals wouldn’t publish „we really tried very hard to get significance that x causes y but found nothing. Probably, and contrary to our prior beliefs, y is completely independent of x.“

Even if nobody would cheat and massage data, we would still have studies that do not replicate on new data. 95 % confidence means that one in twenty surveys finds an effect that is only noise. The reporting of failed hypothesis testing would really help to find these cases.

So pre-registration helps, and it would also help to establish the standard that everything needed to replicate must be published, if not in the article itself, then in an accompanying repository.

But in the brutal fight for promotion and resources, of course labs won’t share all their tricks and process knowledge. Same problem if there is an interest in using the results commercially. E.g. in EE often the method is described in general but crucial parts of the code or circuit design are held back.

niccl · 20 days ago
obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/882/
niccl commented on Maybe the default settings are too high   raptitude.com/2025/12/may... · Posted by u/htk
niccl · 2 months ago
This is one of the things I actually remember my mother saying. Festina lente [0]: Make haste slowly. I've always tried to stick to it because when I have I've found more to appreciate in whatever I'm doing (as TFA says)

Sadly, for some reason I now can't read slowly, which pisses me off. I and my partner read aloud together alternating chapters of a chosen book, and I love how get _much_ more out of the book than I would reading alone in a tenth of the time.

I've also found that some books seem written to be read aloud: the sentence structure and punctuation lends itself to easy reading aloud, whereas some books have really convoluted sentences with multiple parenthetical sub-clauses that are a real challenge to read aloud in an a way that's easy to follow. I've ended up so that normally try to write in a way that's easy to read aloud. I think if something's easy to read aloud it's going to be easy to comprehend when read normally. And Yes, I know that the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph probably doesn't match that.

0: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/festina%20lente)

niccl commented on Approaching 50 Years of String Theory   math.columbia.edu/~woit/w... · Posted by u/jjgreen
Levitating · 2 months ago
You might not like Angela Collier's video on string theory[1].

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E

niccl · 2 months ago
_totally_ off topic, but what sort of brain must Ms Collier have that she can play a game at the same time as giving a cogent lecture on String Theory with very few hesitations? I could hardly concentrate on the lecture because of the game being shown in an inset window. Truly impressive
niccl commented on Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo   gabrielweinberg.com/p/som... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
niccl · 2 months ago
One thing not mentioned in TFA but I came across following the 'we're hiring' link to the Back-end Engineer role. They use PERL (v5). That certainly surprised me!
niccl commented on 4 billion if statements (2023)   andreasjhkarlsson.github.... · Posted by u/damethos
_kst_ · 2 months ago
The author missed an opportunity for a much shorter solution for the given problem statement.

    // Check whether a number is odd or even.

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include <stdbool.h>

    static bool is_odd_or_even(unsigned long num) {
        return true;
    }

    int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        const unsigned long num = strtoul(argv[1], NULL, 10);
        printf("%lu is %s odd or even\n",
               num,
               is_odd_or_even(num) ? "is" : "is not");
    }

niccl · 2 months ago
Brilliant! Mr Boole would love this
niccl commented on Prove It All Night: With no fame or fortune, what keeps a band onstage? (1999)   chicagoreader.com/news/pr... · Posted by u/NaOH
garbawarb · 2 months ago
Maybe it's just optimism talking but I foresee a cultural shift towards favoring live performance. When people spend so much time looking at screens and being alone at home, they long to be immersed in a live sensoral experience.
niccl · 2 months ago
I really, really, hope so. Local live music seems to be dying where I live.
niccl commented on Prove It All Night: With no fame or fortune, what keeps a band onstage? (1999)   chicagoreader.com/news/pr... · Posted by u/NaOH
niccl · 2 months ago
I had a gig last night. Small local band with a bit of a following that hasn't performed for a few months. Audience of 120 or so. Great fun. My occasional hobby is lighting live music so I have to take what bands I can. Fortunately I really enjoy working with these people.

After the show two of the band (40 and 37 y.o.) were talking about what next. They realise that, sadly, they're probably not going to make it big, but aren't sure that the occasional local gig with audience of 120, or supporting someone bigger but where the audience don't care, is enough. What should they do? give up? change mental focus and do something completely different (one thought about being a counsellor, the other about going into visual art). I'm older, so they were asking whether I'd had similar thoughts. Sure have. I long ago realised I could never make a living lighting live music unless I moved to the US, or possibly europe. For reasons, neither were practical, so I consciously decided that desgining hardware, writing software, and doing the occasional hobby lighting gig were enough. But for those two? No idea.

Not really sure where this is going, but the tone of the article really resonated with the discussion with those two last night, and my tiredness this morning.

I still think live music beats the pants off recordings. And show in smaller venues where you can really see and interact with the band are _way_ better than big shows where you just have loud television

niccl commented on Feedback doesn't scale   another.rodeo/feedback/... · Posted by u/ohjeez
paulcole · 3 months ago
> I can't cope with conflict in any shape or form

Why would you live this way?

niccl · 3 months ago
It's just the way I am. anxiety disorder? I dunno, but conflict really stresses me
niccl commented on Feedback doesn't scale   another.rodeo/feedback/... · Posted by u/ohjeez
noitpmeder · 3 months ago
What do you feel you cannot share concerns with your peers?
niccl · 3 months ago
Not the original poster but:

  * that the interaction with a peer _is_ the problem. I know we should all be grown up and able to talk about these things in a mature and effective way, but I can't cope with conflict in any shape or form, so if someone says Boo to me I cave in which doesn't get me any further

  * because peers aren't the people that need to hear some of the things I've got to say, it's layers above me that need to hear it

u/niccl

KarmaCake day930September 7, 2009
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