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Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
31–40 of 443 posts
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#32I switched to Neovim from Sublime Text after trying copilot in Sublime, feeling sad, and then watching The Primeagen and his glorious mustache for too long. Ostensibly I wanted to be able to code on the production server like a miscreant with the same tools as my laptop. However I just wanted to regain command of my dev environment after years not coding. I also reorganized the furniture in my office and got weirder…
So, how was the switch to Neovim? Which plugins did you settle on?
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#33I watched Lex Fridman interview Richard Wolff and have spent 2 weeks going hard into marxist and anarchist theories and practice. Working through 2 books, a dozen browser tabs, interviews, etc. It's rare something catches my interest like this (especially non-technical). But I'm really enjoying all the different perspectives and formulating my own fantasy scenarios.
If it hasn't made it onto your list yet, Ursula K. Le Guin's book titled "The Dispossessed" is a great exploration of anarchism in practice through a sci-fi lens
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#34Micropython on an Adafruit Feature to make a dual deploy altimeter for high power rocketry. Got really into control theory and all the fancy math for determining the state of the rocket on the way up. Then got into device drivers and improving on the ones that come with CircuitPython to get higher performance out of barometers and IMUs. Then got into circuit board design and fabrication starting from zero for an i2c pyro board that fires the ejection charges (little tubes of blackpowder and an e-match used to eject parachutes). That was pretty interesting, i have the advantage of a handful of hardware engineer friends to answer my questions when i get stuck.
It's all sitting on my desk, first flight will likely be in May.
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#35So, I decided to install Linux on my formerly-Windows-only laptop, and thought it was cool enough to go full time and ditch Windows completely. The downside was the lack of access to top tier games. No problem though, my plan was to take a break from gaming, figuring that by the time Linux had caught up with compatibility, computers would also be much more powerful and I'd be able to resume gaming at some point in the future on better kit, and not have to worry about janky framerates on struggling hardware.
Linux proved interesting enough that I kept finding all sorts of cool new rabbit holes to go down - shell scripting, filesystems, Python, databases. It was side-quests within side-quests! Plus, having kicked my gaming habit, I had plenty of time to explore these.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, that was 23 years ago. I ended up getting a career in tech, relocated, got married, had kids, lived the American Dream... The "life" rabbit hole kind of got in the way of my plans, so I can't wait to finally get back on track and play GTA III on a decent box.
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#36For me, it's DIY audio.
The thing about diy'ing audio (primarily speakers but also amps, DACs etc) is that you can get top of the line performance for a fraction of the market price. A $50,000 speaker setup that would bring tears to your eyes could be made for perhaps $5000. A DIY $500 kit can perform similar to a $2-3000 set of speakers. Open source amps with gerber files on github are amazing.
The biggest reason it's so easy to get amazing value is because that $600 speaker only has $150 of materials. Upgrading its $25 woofer to a $80 one would help a lot, but no company would do that and not sell it now for $1000 if they could.
However the biggest allure for me is not beating commercial systems on cost, but making what I want. A small speaker with deep base? Easy. Speakers with quasi-active noise cancellation behind them? Sure, why not. Speakers that'll make the most overpowered/fancy beach-boombox sound like a crappy toy? Simple.
The only limit is your imagination and time/money.
I'd very much recommend diyaudio.com, but be warned, parts of this field are mature while others are still in effective infancy. Also, being an engineer (electrical/mechanical) helps a lot, there's a ton of signals processing and electrical/mech oscillation.
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#37MH370. There was no intermediate step as I saw somewhere it was the 10th anniversary of its disappearance and decide to get a quick update on the current status of all the evidence and theories. Ended up spending the entire day reading about radars, pings and aviation controls.
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#38A quick and dirty, shallow one, that I just opted to brute force out of curiosity.
An online game I play includes an optional two player Russian Roulette type feature (non-fatal). I got to wondering if there was an optimal betting percentage to use, if you set aside some money as a betting seed. So I spent time coding up a really ugly brute force "just run lots of games and see".
Pretty much the answer is you'll lose more often than you win, looks like your best bets are around 2% of whatever money you have left of your betting money.
If you play 75 games, at 2% of your betting pool, you'll come out ahead only about 49.8% of the time.
There's more efficient ways of working that out than I bothered to do, which was to create a basic abstraction for a gun. For example, your odds of winning is essentially 50%, given two players. For every "game" I simulated, I could have just picked a random integer between 0 and 1 instead. Faster and the same effect.
As best as I could find, there are no good betting strategies on a coin toss (which is what this really is)
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#39This past month, I’ve been reevaluating my dev environment and workflow. My goals are to reduce RSI, be more efficient, as well as learn all my tools as deeply as possible. And have fun!
- I’ve ditched VSCode and gone all-in on NeoVim. I’ve spent a bunch of time watching Primeagen, etc., tweaking my vid config and learning how to navigate as efficiently as possible.
- Switched from QWERTY to Colemak-DH to hopefully reduce RSI. I’m at about 70wpm with decent accuracy after 4 weeks. My QWERTY skills are gone. I like Colemak, but we’ll see how I feel in another month or two.
- Finished my custom hot swappable Sofle keyboard, and spent many hours customizing the layout. I think I’m pretty close to feeling comfortable. I’m using home row mods, which I love. Currently using Kailh box whites (clicky). Might switch to Gateron Brown Pros.
- Been going through a “Build your own git” course, to understand git as deeply as possible.
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#40I switched to Neovim from Sublime Text after trying copilot in Sublime, feeling sad, and then watching The Primeagen and his glorious mustache for too long. Ostensibly I wanted to be able to code on the production server like a miscreant with the same tools as my laptop. However I just wanted to regain command of my dev environment after years not coding. I also reorganized the furniture in my office and got weirder…
Neovim — as good for a mid-life crisis as a Porsche, and a fair bit cheaper.