HN user

auxym

2,295 karma

I'm mechanical engineer with a long-lived interest in programming and computers.

Get in touch:

frtherien@gmail.com github.com/auxym

Posts24
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tecnetinc.com 6mo ago

The Death of the Draftsman

auxym
14pts1
twitter.com 3y ago

Are completely out of touch with copper mining

auxym
9pts3
gist.github.com 3y ago

What is Strict Aliasing and Why do we Care?

auxym
2pts0
www.themainemonitor.org 4y ago

Cutting-edge, aerial drone technology could help combat browntail moths

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1pts0
github.com 4y ago

CPS – Also Known as Continuation-Passing Style – For Nim

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22pts0
www.outsideonline.com 4y ago

How to Save a Ski Town

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127pts288
librepcb.org 4y ago

LibrePCB 0.1.6 Released

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10pts1
github.com 4y ago

O1heap: Constant-complexity deterministic memory allocator for embedded systems

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3pts0
www.embeddedrelated.com 4y ago

How to Handle Packets When All You Have Are Streams (2011)

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3pts0
ennerf.github.io 5y ago

Analyzing the viability of Ethernet and UDP for robot control (2016)

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2pts0
www.vulture.com 6y ago

Disney Is Placing Classic Fox Movies into Its Vault

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144pts124
www.nytimes.com 7y ago

Want a House Like This? Prepare for a Bidding War with Investors

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61pts64
splinternews.com 7y ago

The Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors Is Underway in Florida

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16pts0
www.nytimes.com 7y ago

A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job

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2pts1
www.npr.org 7y ago

Why Aren't Millennials Spending? They're Poorer Than Previous Generations

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18pts4
thedailywtf.com 8y ago

The Automated Curse Generator

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2pts0
www.bbc.com 9y ago

The next generation of jobs won't be made up of professions

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1pts0
www.atlasobscura.com 10y ago

The Delightful Perversity of Québec's Catholic Swear Words

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193pts64
www.theguardian.com 10y ago

Is this the world’s most radical mayor?

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2pts0
www.cbsnews.com 10y ago

The GM Trolley Conspiracy: What Really Happened (2010)

auxym
2pts1
github.com 10y ago

Bibulous: drop-in replacement for BibTeX that uses templates

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1pts0
pydoit.org 10y ago

Doit: bringing the power of build-tools to execute any kind of task

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54pts10
pydoit.org 10y ago

Doit: bringing the power of build-tools to execute any kind of task

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2pts0
strikemag.org 11y ago

Advertising Shits in Your Head

auxym
77pts28

They had stopped for a while because they were transitioning away from using Paypal as a processor. A few weeks, maybe a month or so tops? I had to switch to JLC PCB for an order back in January, because they didn't support any viable payment method for me in Canada (tried to make a payoneer account, they don't do business in Canada).

But I just checked and it seems that they now accept CCs again.

In case anyone is interested, I enjoyed the book "Turn the Ship Around!" by L. David Marquet, about management lessons applied by the author who was a US Navy submarine captain. It does very much emphasize giving trust, responsibility and accountability to workers (or enlisted personnel, in this case).

Prism 6 months ago

Agreed. Tex/Latex is very old tech. Error recovery and messages is very bad. Developing new macros in Tex is about as fun as you expect developing in a 70s-era language to be (ie probably similar to cobol and old fortran).

I haven't tried it yet but Typst seems like a promising replacement: https://typst.app/

uv has mostly solved the python issue. IME it's dependency resolution is fast and just works. Packages are hard linked from a global cache, which also greatly reduces storage requirements when you work with multiple projects.

It's because aluminium has a higher coefficient of thermal expansion. It expands and shrinks more as it heats, and as those cycles add up it tends to loosen electrical connections. Loose connections have higher resistance, heat up and can cause fires.

That said, there is no reason we can't design better connectors that can withstand the expansion and shrinkage cycles, like spring loaded or spring cage connectors.

Just an idea but Nim seems to have the features you mentioned. Nim "transpiles" to C, and can even be compiled via `zig cc` (which is an interace to clang). If you really want to, maybe you could make a zig backend for Nim?

Typically, company would pay for a week or so of training if you don't have previous experience with the software.

Once again, this isn't a huge expense compared to the license cost + the engineer's salary.

Then for ongoing support/questions you get the support I mentioned including the onsite support engineer.

Go away Python 7 months ago

uv uses a global cache but hardlinks the dependencies for your script into a temp venv that is only for your script, so its still pretty fast.

Ansys also costs 5 digits per seat per year.

My experience working at large size company that paid those sort of sums for a different FEA software is that we got an "application engineer" assigned to us to answer any questions we had and provide needed documentation if anything was needed. He actually sat and worked from our own offices one day per week.

Also wasn't the D compiler proprietary and a paid product for a long time after its initial release?

No judgement against trying to monetize valuable work, but in this day and nearly everyone expects free and OSS compilers/interpreters and core tooling.

Scoop (https://scoop.sh/), a package manager for windows that is essential to make Windows usable for me.

Sourcegit is my new favorite git client. Git in general, of course.

Linux and also the people behind RT_PREEMPT, I am excited to see it merged into mainline this year.

KDE has been my favorite DE for years and I use many of their apps too, such as Kate. Thanks to everyone contributing to the KDE project.

The entire python "data science" stack, numpy/scipy/matplotlib/pandas/plotly/polars/pyarrow/jupyter, which is essential to my work. Tiny projects too, like nptdms.

The raspberry pi foundation, in particular for the pico, rp2040 and rp2350. Joy to work with, great documentation, super cheap and available, perfect for one-off projects, prototypes and hobby stuff, which is pretty much always neglected by the big silicon vendors.

I set up my own NAS this year, running many self-hosted apps. I am grateful for Truenas, Jellyfin and pihole.

So many cli apps that I use daily:

- starship prompt - fd - ripgrep - fzf - lazygit - yazi

Firefox gets sometimes deserved criticism, but I have been using it continuously since Firebird 0.7 and I believe it contributes to keeping the web open.

Advent of Code 2025 8 months ago

I've had a lot of fun using Nim for AOC for many years. Once you're familiar with the language and std lib, its almost as fast to write as python, but much faster (Nim compiles to C, which then gets compiled to your executable). This means that sometimes, if your solution isn't perfect in terms of algorithmic complexity, waiting a few minutes can still save you (waiting 5 mins for your slow Nim code is OK, waiting 5 hours for your slow Python isn't really, for me). Of course all problems have a solution that can run in seconds even in Python, but sometimes it's not the one I figure out first try.

Downsides: The debugging situation is pretty bad (hope you like printf debugging), smaller community means smaller package ecosystem and fewer reference solutions to look up if you're stuck or looking for interesting alternative ideas after solving a problem on your own, but there's still quality stuff out there.

Though personally I'm thinking of trying Go this year, just for fun and learning something new.

Edit: also a static type system can save you from a few stupid bugs that you then spend 15 minutes tracking down because you added a "15" to your list without converting it to an int first or something like that.

Nim 2.2.6 9 months ago

FWIW, I agree that Araq is an abrasive character and probably not a great community leader for an open source project.

But I disagree with your take on the moderation team. I don't know if you have specific names to call out, but PMunch, miran and the rest of the team have been nothing but welcoming, in my experience.

Nim 2.2.6 9 months ago

@[] is syntax for a "seq", which is similar to a C++ vector, ArrayList in Java/C#, or a python list. It's a heap-allocated array that automatically resizes.

In contrast with [], which is mostly identical to a C array: fixed size and lives on the stack.

The Netherlands Bach Society has actually started a huge project to produce high quality video recordings to all of Bach's catalogue. You can find the videos on their YT channel (https://www.youtube.com/bach) or www.allofbach.com.

I'm pretty sure I learned about this project from HN many, many years ago.

It took a long time for Canon CR3 raw format to be supported by darktable because, although the format itself had been reverse engineered, there was a fear from the developers that it was covered by a patent and that they risked a lawsuit by integrating it in DT. IIRC, they had attempted to contact Cabon legal to obtain some sort of waiver, without success.

I'm fact I'm not sure how that saga ended and CR3 support was finally added a few years after the release of the Canon mirrorless cameras that output CR3.

It seems you're talking about about self-hosting a website or web-app that you are developing for the public to use.

My vision of self-hosting is basically the opposite. I only self-host existing apps and services for my and my family's use. I have a TrueNAS box with a few disks, run Jellyfin for music and shows, run a Nextcloud instance, a restic REST server for backing up our devices, etc. I feel like the OP is more targeted this type of "self hosting".