HN user

dnewcome

922 karma

Web hacker, audio tweaker, musician, beer and coffee geek.

Co-founder of UberNote online note taking application: http://ubernote.com

Creator of the Hacker Dojo audio and music meetup group: http://groups.google.com/group/audiohackers

Things I've created: http://newcome.wordpress.com/projects/

When I can, I make tiny investments in other startups whose founders I believe in because it's fun: http://www.bluefolder.com

I do most of my writing here: http://newcome.wordpress.com

I live in San Francisco.

Posts80
Comments86
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gascraft.ai 3mo ago

Show HN: I visualized Wasteland as an RTS game

dnewcome
2pts1
github.com 3mo ago

Reverse-engineering the Alesis MMT8 firmware

dnewcome
2pts1
github.com 4mo ago

Curses-exec: interactive xargs for less

dnewcome
4pts2
newcome.wordpress.com 13y ago

I don't want to download your app

dnewcome
316pts169
github.com 14y ago

HN Plonk - filter Hacker News stories by title/username/id

dnewcome
2pts0
gigaom.com 14y ago

Google, Cisco top the list of the greenest IT companies

dnewcome
3pts0
www.eff.org 14y ago

Letters to the Copyright Office: Why I Jailbreak

dnewcome
1pts0
github.com 14y ago

Donatello, a pure CSS drawing library

dnewcome
113pts22
newcome.wordpress.com 15y ago

Making rich text possible on mobile devices

dnewcome
1pts0
dnewcome.github.com 15y ago

Richie - simple rich text editor for iPhone (demo page)

dnewcome
2pts0
newcome.wordpress.com 16y ago

Weekend hack - Node.js on the .NET runtime

dnewcome
28pts5
github.com 16y ago

Webpipes - command pipelines for the web with Node.js

dnewcome
1pts0
github.com 16y ago

Jstle: a terse Javascript language for RDF graphs

dnewcome
9pts2
github.com 16y ago

Jath - declaratively transform XML to JS objects

dnewcome
6pts2
newcome.wordpress.com 16y ago

Getting unstuck by trusting your process

dnewcome
1pts0
newcome.wordpress.com 16y ago

The value of free coding

dnewcome
7pts2
newcome.wordpress.com 16y ago

How not to write an email opt-out page

dnewcome
26pts11
focus.ti.com 16y ago

Op Amps For Everyone

dnewcome
30pts5
venturebeat.com 16y ago

Ad expert: Google’s Super Bowl spot was a live traffic test

dnewcome
2pts2
newcome.wordpress.com 16y ago

We need a data API for the web

dnewcome
1pts2
newcome.wordpress.com 16y ago

Failure is not the goal

dnewcome
13pts3
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Do you list startup experience on your resume for a `normal' job search?

dnewcome
3pts4
msdn.microsoft.com 16y ago

Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)

dnewcome
4pts0
www.youtube.com 16y ago

Mainstreaming Psychedelics: From FDA to Harvard to Burning Man [GoogleTechTalks]

dnewcome
3pts0
www.skguitar.com 16y ago

Magnetic field simulations of guitar pickups

dnewcome
2pts0
blog.fittingroup.com 16y ago

How Far in Front of the Curve is Too Far?

dnewcome
1pts0
phaneron.rickmurphy.org 16y ago

Linked Data: Interpretants and Interpretation

dnewcome
1pts0
www.spectrum.ieee.org 16y ago

The Recession's Silver Lining

dnewcome
1pts0
www.psychologytoday.com 16y ago

Why millions of brains love (and hate) twitter

dnewcome
1pts0
www.eyetap.org 16y ago

EyeTap: The eye itself as display and camera

dnewcome
1pts0

I always wanted to pipe `ps -a` to something interactive using vim key bindings to select the process to kill. Maybe now someone in the comments will tell me how to do it with xargs and a complicated vim script instead of vibe coding my own.

You can prefix your command with pasuspender to temporarily disable pulseaudio. This is usually what I do. It's kind of inconvenient and half the time I forget to do it, so sometimes I just write a little launcher script that includes it.

To get true understanding of what you're working with you need to be able to trash the configuration of your gear at will. I learned a lot buying up some big old Cisco Catalysts and EMC Clariion SAN boxes back when I was doing data center work. Later on though, when I was in charge of buying new stuff I'd rack the stuff up first and go crazy with it before it was in production. Either way works. I don't miss having those fans running in my house though.

There just needs to be some UX work here indicating the document status. Just like typing a chat message. "blahblah has entered text"-style. Evernote did this early on in their Windows application, we did it with Ubernote - it rocks. Everything should be autosaved+versioned.

On Configuration 14 years ago

This is one of the reasons I stopped messing around trying to find the perfect text editor. I focused on getting better with a stock VIM install.

I think the spirit of this post is that you should at least give the defaults a chance before you go crazy trying to make everything "better". However, I would add that you shouldn't totally ignore that voice that says "is this setting getting in my way?".

Citing a single data point doesn't refute the quoted assertion. It is basically the same as me trying to refute that air travel is safer than automobile travel per passenger mile by mentioning a single notable crash.

I'm not trying to downplay the plight of those affected, but it's worth separating these concerns when evaluating the true risks involved with any technology that can potentially have great benefits for the bulk of humanity, the rare catastrophe notwithstanding.

It takes a lot of discipline to run a shared power setup like you describe. Most of those servers that have two power supplies operate in a shared power mode, rather than active/failover. This means that if one of your sides (LH/RH) is over 50% and you fail over, you are going to have a cascading failure as the other side goes >100%. It used to surprise me how often I saw things like this, although I'm talking about server rooms in the low 100s of servers, not huge data centers.

On Mastery 14 years ago

> by acknowledging the mastery, we have changed the practice.

I'm somehow (without irony) enlightened by this statement.

I've tried what the OP has done in the past. I ran into the mouse issue and what I did to make it better was to map the button under the analog stick to increase the mouse speed. Getting the pointer to a rough position quickly is a more gross muscle movement involving pushing down on the stick while moving it in some direction. Fine positioning is done then by letting up on the stick and maneuvering using fine motor control. I agree that using analog sticks for the mouse is kind of awkward though.

I've got to push back on the anti-guid stance for surrogate keys. They may be big but it is nice to have opaque IDs so that no one makes flawed assumptions about ordering or relative insertion time/trying to guess valid IDs, etc. Opaque is good...

This made my morning. You should write a gonzo-style programming epic. It reminds me that some of what we do might as well be magic to the people that hire us and unlike in past cultures where we'd be anointed as medicine men and revered as holy, we're given gilt boxes by monkeys.

I thought about doing an in-browser git implementation for enabling offline mode in a webapp. Doing things with git would make some really interesting sync scenarios possible. Looking at what was involved though, I think I'm glad I didn't go down this particular rabbit-hole.

I have played with making an absolutely positioned single-char text input box in my custom editor (https://github.com/dnewcome/richie). The idea is that it forces the built-in keyboard to show but the input is caught and inserted into the DOM. I don't use contenteditable since it doesn't work on most mobile devices. My hacks are really rough but I think the technique could be polished eventually.

S4 16 years ago

I wish I had heard about this a few months ago. I wanted to implement a way to create and connect streaming web services. I hacked up something then called webpipes (https://github.com/dnewcome/webpipes) using node.js. Unfortunately I haven't looked at it again since I first put it up on github. S4 looks a ton more advanced than anything I was envisioning, but I still think that something simple done in one of the evented servers like node.js (the S4 implementation looks to be Java) would be useful.

Alas, if anything I ever wrote commanded criticism akin to that in comment #59 by voralex I think I could die happy.

You get the most value out of blogging if you publish it. Period. Writing drafts is great, but it just isn't the same as putting it out there. It's like practice vs. performance. No amount of practice can take the place of the experience gained by performance.