jimmies

Anh em ơiiii, vực nào sâu thăm thẳm? —“Brothers, what abyss is deep?” Vực nào sâu bằng cái ly này! —“What abyss is deeper than this glass?” Hò zô ta nào! —“Haul it up!” Kéo cái ly này lên! —“Lift this glass high!”

It’s a pity that the writer didn’t elaborate on the origin of this “chant.” It’s a parody of a chant that’s originally for pulling cannons up the abyss of Dien Bien Phu. The battle alone killed at least 15,000 Vietnamese but brought decisive victory for the Vietnamese in its struggle to gain freedom from the French in 1954.

Alternative way to see it: The author had either a $50 solution, or a $50 solution that comes with a discounted hotair rework station for $150…

I learned it from Superfastmatt. He needed a piece of plastic that retails for $1500 for his van, so he said: “either I have a $1500 solution or I have a $1500 solution but I get a free fancy 3D printer in the end…” that stuck with me.

I used all my brain cells to make a bash script my doorbell, I did not have brain cells left to envision ever needing ssh on it.

A couple of years ago, I lived in an apartment and made a doorbell repurposed from an Amazon Dash button. Basically I have a daemon that sends a message each time a button press is detected to my homebrew mqtt server.

Then I have a bash script that runs on the raspberry pi board that has a speaker installed, something of this sort to play the doorbell chime:

  while [ true ]; do
    mosquitto_sub --exit-after-first-message /my-topic
    play_wav my-file.wav
  done

Wan <—> Wired Lan + Wireless Lan

If you have a beefy wireless Lan that can pull 1.5 Gbps then the two Lan connections combined can still saturate the Wan pipe.

The Chumby with its wiki and open hardware/software philosophy was so ahead of its time and so influential to me. I started my whole career with hacking the Chumby’s user space [1]. The Chumby inspired and took me from an IT worker in a regional public school, to being a professional software engineer, making software shipped to millions of very important machines.

The lesson that I learned from the journey was that working with hardware can be fun and— if you want your career to be long-lasting— better be fun. The Chumby was one of the first devices that showed me that and bunnie was the one who showed me that. I still follow that principle to this day. No day in my life has making firmware or fucking around with hardware devices not something I enjoyed.

1: https://www.engadget.com/2012-05-31-developer-runs-webkit-on...

If your input is Russian mixed with English, it might still be actually faster to do a first pass to process all the ASCII English range first with the aforementioned techniques, then do Russian later in the second pass: imagine you’ll have way less if branches to do.

For banks that insist on doing SMS-based 2FA, I use a less well-known Google Voice number that only I know and don't give to my normal contacts. That number does nothing other than to receive 2FA codes, doesn't forward its messages and calls to any other numbers.

My reasoning is that it would not be trivial to guess the phone number from my account/name, and to guess my name from phone number (unless someone hacks into the bank's db, in which I'm in troubles anyways). Furthermore if someone was able to figure out that link, it would not be trivial to do SIM swap on Google Voice, it would not be trivial to attack the Google Voice app. Two or three stars have to line up for someone to sim-swap that GV number.

But some stupid bank go further to ban GV numbers. In which case I just don't bank with them.

Lol, they botched the first example - that it translates “Our goal is to create a more connected world” to Vietnamese: It has a glancing typo at the end of the sentence “hơn” instead of “hơ.” Also it really messed up the pronounciation: It read “Chúng tôi” as “Chúng ta” - they are totally different words phonetically. The pronunciation also sounds like it’s made by someone who is mentally sick. So they botched in both translation and pronunciation.

That’s so embarrassing - especially for something to show how good their stuff is (although I think it’s probably not the ai’s fault) - just shows how sloppy their people are.

I know they have plenty of Vietnamese engineers there. Did the PR dept just throw this final version of the video out without reviewing with them?

A quick glance to the history of the article, I see it was edited by multiple usernames and IP address at different times. How did you come to the conclusion that it was self authored?

Yes! I'm very grateful and thankful for the opportunity that I have got from HN.

I was nor I'm the best position in my life when the job offer came. The opportunity boosted my confidence really turned my life around.

I am planning to move email to iCloud+.

- Provides custom domain support.

- Is cheap ($1 for 3 email addresses).

- Has email web interface and imap access.

- Seems to support contacts and calendar sync via carddav, caldav - standard stuff I can sync my other devices with.

- Apple is reputable enough with security.

Drawbacks:

- No standard two-factor authentication like Google, needs an iPhone/mac for two-factor.

- Migrating Google Photos/shared will be a pain in the ass.

Can you elaborate on that? Let's say I'm foo@bar.com, what username could I give to gmail?

You can use the reader mode to get over the website shenanigans.

Perhaps because it's not easy to do so?

Now you have to have a database of a million phones from Shenzhen that you need to keep track of whether it has your bands. Who's gonna pay for their QA and know what phone manufacturers are doing what with their phones?

Zorijushi rice cooker. It can cook rice perfectly and can hold cooked rice for days.

Facebook portal. Yeah Facebook privacy and all that but that's a good product that allows me to call people without having to mess with the phone. The audio and video is super clear. I use it despite it's from Facebook.

Work sharp knife sharpener. It's superior to sharpening the my knives with the stone.

Apple airtags. I often forget where I put my keychain so this is really well executed. Apple airpods. They just work and they are nice enough.

Hakko soldering station. I don't know if the recent Chinese usbc ones are better but the hakko one I have work well enough for everything I want to do.

FYI: If anyone looking for a label printer, get a Rollo and a Pi.

I sell stuff on Ebay from time to time, and one of my pet peeves is not having labels professionally printed and having to tape them. After researching stuff I decided to skip the Dymo stuff and went with Rollo. The Rollo only prints over USB, so I connected it to the Pi0w. It's so godsend nice, I can just shove it into the closet and print from any computer in the network. There is no software to install, it can print from literally any app.

Wifi QR codes? Print it and stick it on anything. Instructions to use an appliance or recipes? Print it. Freaking love it.

One more thing about the Rollo label printer is that they have some sort of deal with USPS so it's always cheaper to print the label from their "shipping manager" web interface. I haven't even shipped 30 packages from the time I got it two years ago and the printer already made the money I paid for it back.

I figure it wouldn't be wise for a person who stays in a cheap motel to rent an expensive car regardless whether they could charge the car there.

Anyone remembers that this girl is on every dead startup website?

https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/parked-domain-girl

I agree with you for the most part. This problem definitely doesn't require ML to achieve.

However, if doing it with a classical approach (matching sprites) takes a person half a day, and doing it with the new fangled proprietary ml takes a person 20 minutes, I do see that doing it with the new fangled ml approach does have some merits. People want to get stuff done.

I'm a barely passable programmer, so not exactly a shining benchmark, so maybe my view is distorted. I don't think I can do duck detection flawlessly with classical programming in half a day and it would be a total pain in the ass to do it that way, to be completely honest with you.

Being off-the-shelf is an added bonus, but not a requirement. This website is called Hacker news, not Bestbuy news. As long as someone else can replicate the results from what is given in the post, I do think the post has enough merit.

There are a lot of annoying stuff about the computer interface nowadays. But in terms of connectors, there are a lot of good stuff we take for granted now. Like how intuitive and fool-proof the connectors are.

So a couple of days ago, I have just fried all three hard drives with the backup of my data, at the same time. They were installed in a new caddy I bought with a common molex receptor for power. There molex receptor has a giant sticker blocking it saying you will fry your drives if you connect to the molex receptor in reverse. I got the pinouts right, tested, it worked. Then, I had to bring the caddy to under my desk. I was scooting under the desk and couldn't see very well. I fumbled and put the cable on reverse, it didn't go in. However, the molex connector got just enough contact to fry the drives.

What I'm trying to say is if it was the USB-A connector or the sata power connector, the issue wouldn't have happened because the pins are recessed. It wouldn't have made contact even when I tried to plug in reverse. I just assumed the molex worked the same way and was wrong.

The situation is even better with usb-c now, it's not that you can't plug in it wrong, there is no wrong way to plug the cable. It doesn't matter what the voltage is, the chip will negotiate the power. USB succeeded for a reason, and I'm glad that it did.

Let's just say the government is super evil and they covered up 99 deaths every 100 deaths for some reason, although we have no evidence that they did. They lost 50,000 people.

The US lost half a million.

Are you happy now?

To put that into perspective, the US has lost more than half a million people due to the Coronavirus. Vietnam lost 50 people. And there was no war.

I am a software developer in the US with a Vietnamese origin, so I am no historian and my views are probably skewed.

I am among the minority Northern Vietnamese people in the US, most Vietnamese people in the Bay Area are (refugees) from the South. People can tell where one comes from with one's accent. It was undeniable that much suffering and injustice was done for Southern people, especially after the war ended. So many still have a lot of resentments against the Hanoi government in particular and people from the North in general. Some still secretly view Northen international students in the US as red princes and princesses. The truth is far from that, they are just ordinary people looking for a better life. Many of the Northern people also have resentments with the current government as much as anyone else. However, I have to say much of the suffering and conflict is fading. I am so glad that in the last three years I was in the Bay Area, I have made many new Vietnamese friends, and have gone to many Vietnamese-owned shops buying groceries. I have not once had bad experiences with anyone in here. We spoke to each other and caring about each other despite of the differences.

When I was a student in the US, I borrowed as many books and DVDs about the Vietnam war I could from the library and began watching to understand where I came from, and what to make of the war. I am still searching for the answer. One thing I began to understand is the reason that the North won the war. The people from the North did have a charismatic leader and more importantly, they had a sense of righteousness and revenge when they participated in the war. I still remember vividly, one day I watched an (American) documentary about a farmer after the 1972 bombing operation. The bomb killed all of his family members and all the pigs he raised and left him with nothing. He cried and vowed to fight till he dies. The guy had lost everything, he had nothing left to lose. That was the moment I realized it was inevitable that the North would inevitably win.

I see that pattern a lot in places that talked about the war, for example in the article:

She was only 24 years old but had been widowed twice. Both her husbands were soldiers. I saw her as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who’d made great sacrifices for her country.

I do not have as much exposure (or at least as much as I wished) to the literature, arts, and music of the South, but I can say that the sense of righteousness while fighting wasn't as strong in places that I have looked into.

My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.

By chance, I just revisited the Vietnam war and the scar it left a couple of days ago, how much it matters in my everyday life, and wrote an essay about it on my blog. Here is the blog I wrote a couple of days ago about the war, btw, if you're so interested: http://www.tnhh.net/posts/lullaby-of-the-artillery.html

The problem here was that Apple is the only one who knows what's wrong with this new laptop and they don't have time to try to recover the data. Had the rights-to-repair law passed, the author would have had the option to try with a third party that could have saved his work (or to see whether it is an option). For many, $1000 for not losing two weeks of work is a small price to pay compared to redoing all the work.

The issue with having only first-party repair is that you have no choice other than to lose data.

A while ago I was bored and asked myself if I can actually solve leetcode problems with excel as a joke, and hence leetcode-excel was born. XLSX and everything.

https://github.com/htruong/leetcode-excel

I got bored after a while and didn't try to solve more problems.

Here is a fun thought: Excel has potentials in teaching non-programmers to think about algorithms. Translating a problem or a function from Excel to a programming language has the potential to break the ice for people who just "can't write a program."

Thanks for the suggestions. I know this implementation has more holes than a swiss cheese, but I will try to plug them as I figure out how to deal with js callbacks :)

I read the M5paper Factory Test app [1] and it has tons of interesting details.

m5stack has several other example applications in their repo, but I learned a lot from reading their source code in the test app. Their code is quite sane and organized. You just need to be tolerant to their spelling from time to time, I figure English is not their first language (just like me).

1: https://github.com/m5stack/M5Paper_FactoryTest

I have edited the code on the link above and added the license text.