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jamesbowman

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excamera.substack.com 2mo ago

PulseTrain

jamesbowman
2pts0
happyword.app 4mo ago

Happyword.app – Crossword Assistant

jamesbowman
1pts1
nand2mario.github.io 5mo ago

80386 Barrel Shifter

jamesbowman
84pts12
excamera.substack.com 5mo ago

Printable WiFi Code Ornament

jamesbowman
1pts0
excamera.substack.com 6mo ago

Losing Things Less Often

jamesbowman
2pts0
www.breatharian.eu 8mo ago

AntCalc

jamesbowman
2pts0
excamera.substack.com 8mo ago

Chicken Coop Tech Stack

jamesbowman
2pts0
excamera.substack.com 9mo ago

How bad can a $2.97 ADC be?

jamesbowman
278pts138
blog.plover.com 10mo ago

My new Git utility `what-changed-twice` needs a new name

jamesbowman
89pts62
excamera.substack.com 10mo ago

A Box Forming Mandrel

jamesbowman
2pts0
hackaday.com 11mo ago

Subpixel Rendering for Impossibly Small Terminal Text

jamesbowman
1pts0
excamera.substack.com 1y ago

Tiny Code Reader: a $7 QR code sensor

jamesbowman
157pts43
excamera.substack.com 1y ago

TermDriver's Firmware

jamesbowman
1pts0
excamera.substack.com 1y ago

The Machine for Making the Machine

jamesbowman
1pts0
excamera.substack.com 1y ago

Can 3 point text be readable?

jamesbowman
3pts0
substack.com 1y ago

What I've been making: TermDriver2

jamesbowman
1pts0
excamera.com 5y ago

Crossbars in CuFlow

jamesbowman
1pts0
github.com 5y ago

Rockwell RSC-Forth

jamesbowman
2pts0
tinyletter.com 5y ago

Building a kit computer, 41 years late

jamesbowman
2pts0
tinyletter.com 5y ago

Microprocessor only wants one thing and it's 0xEA

jamesbowman
6pts0
www.crowdsupply.com 5y ago

Simulating the Asteroids (1979) vector CRT on modern hardware

jamesbowman
2pts0
tinyletter.com 6y ago

Conversation with my dog about HDMI

jamesbowman
5pts0
tinyletter.com 6y ago

The Geometry of River Routing

jamesbowman
1pts0
tinyletter.com 6y ago

My morning cranking the Babbage Difference Engine

jamesbowman
3pts0
backreaction.blogspot.com 6y ago

Dark energy might not exist after all

jamesbowman
2pts0
tinyletter.com 7y ago

Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

jamesbowman
502pts170
tinyletter.com 7y ago

Having Help

jamesbowman
1pts0
electricdollarstore.com 7y ago

Show HN: Electric Dollar Store

jamesbowman
18pts1
tinyletter.com 7y ago

Selling Your Gadget on Amazon

jamesbowman
1pts0
tinyletter.com 7y ago

How it's made: I2CDriver

jamesbowman
3pts0

Was dissatisfied with existing crossword assistance sites, as they all seem to have 2010-era UIs and be so ad-heavy as to be almost unusable. This is my attempt at a fast, light crossword assistant that works well on mobile.

Author here. I did consider this, as others have reported getting ADS1015 marked as ADS1115. If it were an ADS1015 the readout would be truncated at 12 bits. These parts definitely delivered 16 bits of readout.

It's hard. Because everyone claims to be doing TDD, just asking in the interview "do you do TDD" is pointless.

Example. Last year I consulted at an IC company, building a huge "moon-shot" chip. You might expect TDD to be an absolute certainty in such an operation. Not so, individuals had all sorts of justifications for not doing TDD.

Here is one idea. In the technical interviews, when the inevitable "and do you have any questions for me?" moment comes up, ask them to talk about their best test.

If they have a good answer, it's likely you've found somewhere that genuinely values TDD.

Yes, ICs age. Fissures in the subtrate expand with each thermal cycle. Delamination is a similar effect. That's how manufacturers prematurely age their parts -- by endless cycles in the oven.

The biggest culprit is flash memory. It's in almost everything, and has a much shorter life than the 10 years most manufacturers claim.

Yes, the PDP-11 instruction set makes null-terminated strings especially efficient. Strcpy() is 3 instructions per character, for example.

The PDP-11 features that make this possible are (1) post increment addressing and (2) MOVE instructions set the condition codes.

Since everything is always getting worse, at some point in the future we will look back at the clickbait nonsense of 2015 with genuine nostalgia.

"Those were the days of real content. Before it all turned to crap"

Shudder.

I write Forth code for tiny microcontrollers that are embedded in ASICs. They are ROM-based, and have to work first time. Size is a few hundred bytes, so C is out of question.

David E.H. Jones pointed out that the socially sanctioned drugs have something in common: they all taste bad. Or at least, they have a taste that is unappealing to children, and then must be acquired by special effort. Coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol: all taste pretty awful to a ten-year-old.

Implementing a complete application using an FPGA was actually surprisingly pain-free. After a while the fact that the code gets compiled into hardware stopped seeming like a big difference; I just started thinking of the FPGA as a parallel computer. Anyway, I will attempt to answer any questions from HN here. Thanks for looking.