So cool to see another person going to UT on HN! I'd love to organize a Jet Lag style game in Austin sometime.

Not at UT yet, but going to UT in the fall to study applied math! I'm definitely looking to organize more fun stuff like this in Austin.

Should be back up now

Hi! Wanted to share this cool project me and some friends worked on during the summer of '23, now that the video is finally edited. It was an incredible experience, hope you like it :)

No comment on the thread, but I smiled at seeing myself quoted on HN :)

> The alternative would be that anyone could send notifications to an app

No, the alternative is that anyone with a password the app generates can send notifications to any app, which is (effectively) how WebPush and UnifiedPush work. The server that knows the secret URL can send a notification to that website or app.

2 is exactly how removal from sets is O(1) whereas lists are O(N)

Since this is a tutorial for newbies, I'm intentionally using a chip with years of code, flashing, and peripheral circuit examples. It's also compatible with the Arduino Nano pinout so students can add peripherals with outside circuit examples.

For personal projects, I also prefer using fancier chips like the ESP32 series or the new generation of ATtinys.

I think my top level post here reads overly critical.

I'll say that I think what you're covering is very good material, in that some of the most difficult "first steps" is convincing the student to finally push the "buy" button and actually get a PCB shipped to them.

In the great scheme of things, beginners don't need the newest chips, so you're right. But... I dunno. If they're bothering to build their own PCBs, then at that point they're likely ready to appreciate these benefits from the more recent chips.

One of the biggest problems with recent ATtinys and older ATMega328pb chips is the variable clock rate. If you run at 1.8V, you can only run at 4MHz and the code will be unstable at 20MHz. Keeping track of this changing voltage is... annoying. And its wasteful: If you can run at 24MHz at 1.8V (like these more recent AVR128DB32 chips), then you can get both performance and low-power compared to being forced to run at 5V.

Or alternatively, you can run at 5V and get the full benefits (lower noise, more robustness, easier integration with 4.5V level MOSFETs instead of 3.3V or lower voltage MOSFETs)

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But you're right. There are benefits to using a decade old chip for educational purposes. But I still feel like encouraging pcb-designers (even at the beginner level) to use the most recent set of chips is half the fun. Newer chips really have some very nice features that make life a lot easier.

> why not just distribute your message over that channel in the first place

Latency? You can hand deliver a password ahead of time, but not messages.

One-time pad isn't a password. It is a flash drive or hard drive full of random bits.

The difference between those is just one of scale and storage.

You still have to reliably move a chunk of out-of-band information in a way such that it gets to (and only gets to) the person you want to have it.

The difference between one-time pad and stream cipher is provable, absolute secrecy, and really good secrecy. If don't care about that, there is zero point to one-time pad.

Also, it isn't just a "chunk", for one-time pad it has to be the same length as the messages. Which is fine if just short messages but a lot harder if lots of data.

If can exchange lots of data, better off using them as keys for stream cipher.

With my usage of checking OTPs 3-4 times a week, it lasts for ~3 months.

Nice project idea. The Nordic chip in the Pinetime might be more efficient than this ESP-32 though, and there's been a lot of development effort into infinitive for it.