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Hunpeter

102 karma · joined March 30, 2023

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Hunpeter··on Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
This is a bit off topic, but since you mentioned your guide: I hope this doesn't come off as hostile, but the guide you linked contains a number of inaccuracies and oversimplifications - it's kind of naive in an endearing way, but also leaves the reader with the impression that it covers all there is to music. I guess what I'm saying is it's fine to restrict yourself in what you include in the guide, or even simplify things, but it should be clear that the topic (i.e. music) is far richer and more complex.
Hunpeter··on 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
I don't think you are wrong, per se, but at the same time the skill level of late-game (or even mid-game) encounters has also been increasing. Plus, they usually aim to strike a balance between less intensive but also less efficient activities vs. the ones requiring frequent clicks and full attention but offering quicker progression.
Hunpeter··on I came to write THAT paper with Leslie Lamport
Yup, the HN auto-filtering of titles often messes them up...
Hunpeter··on Position: LLMs Can't Jump
> given a file of compressed text files, adding a new text to it expands it more or less depending on how different the new text is from the compressed.

The 3b1b videos mention how this concept may be used to find similarities between different languages. Researchers have been able to get results that closely resemble how languages are usually grouped into families.

Hunpeter··on Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch
Afaik there wasn't a single widely accepted standard in the Baroque era, but rather different places had different tunings, with the "normal A" varying roughly between 400 and 500 Hz.
Hunpeter··on The Website Specification
But what if Tony the Pony comes?
Hunpeter··on Understand Anything
An important tenet of modern education is that true knowledge is that which the learner (re)constructs in their mind. Heuristic learning (i.e. "trying to figure things out") is often a great way to do this.
Hunpeter··on How to get better at guitar
>For classical students, theory doesn't really start until college.

Well, unless, you are studying here in Hungary, for example, where it starts pretty much right away... (though it is a separate class).

Hunpeter··on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
"Normie" and "happens to own one or two extra homes" seem a bit contradictory to me... And doesn't everyone who invests in something that makes them money exploit economic conditions?
Hunpeter··on The state of SIMD in Rust in 2025
How does one become a "student of floating point math idiosyncracies"?
Hunpeter··on When stick figures fought
Oooh, I really liked ToriBash! I didn't play for very long for whatever reason, but I did think it was a creative and fun game.
Hunpeter··on Show HN: I built a web framework in C
Someone said in another comment, that it makes more sense together with the dereference operator, so int *var means: "dereferencing var gets you an int."

I don't really know C, but personally prefer your version. However, I can also get behind considering the * to be part of the variable, rather than a type: "var is a pointer that happens to hold an int". I mean, maybe they could have used the & operator meaning "var is an address holding an int"? Honestly, it just feels like there's too much tradition and legacy and so on, and what one considers intuitive is the thing that they're most used to.

Hunpeter··on A qualitative analysis of pig-butchering scams
This is also well known here in Hungary, there was even movie about it. It's called "unokázás"; literally: "grandchilding".
Hunpeter··on Becoming the person who does the thing
A somewhat more depressing take: "There comes a time in everyone's life when you look into the mirror and realize that what you see is all that you'll ever be. And you accept that fact - or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors." (Babylon 5, quoted from memory, so probably not 100% correct)

As I'm nearing 30, still in the "I can be anything I want" phase, I wonder when this time will arrive. And whether it is true for everyone - maybe some people possess the ability to reinvent themselves no matter their age. But can you even do that without giving up some contentment?

Hunpeter··on The Relativity of Wrong (1988)
You have made an interesting point but I think your arguments would have more force if you exercised some restraint in categorically stating your opinions about what is wrong and in what way as facts, basically.

Anyway, while I agree on these other types of "wrong" being important, I don't know about calling 1-3. wrong, per se. Also, I'm curious what part of linguistics you consider to belong under the "vanity" label, and why it would be apt to call "pointless" facts (like the age of the Earth) wrong.

Hunpeter··on Zenobia Pay – A mission to build an alternative to high-fee card networks
As someone with little financial knowledge, I'm curious why that is the case and how those estimates are calculated. I've seen stores offering a discount on cash payments, citing card-related fees as the reason.
Hunpeter··on Show HN: Piano Trainer – Learn piano scales, chords and more using MIDI
Hi, when you say you don't know which fingers to move do you mean within the context of a piece of music, or just the scales themselves? For the latter, I can give you some advice (though if you search something like "piano scale fingerings" on Google images, you can probably get some fairly standard fingerings for both hands).

Each diatonic (major, minor or modal) scale consists of 7 distinct notes, and the fingering is always 1-2-3 1-2-3-4 in one direction, and the reverse in the other direction, however, you need to find where this sequence starts within the scale. The more black keys there are in a scale, the fewer the possible comfortable positions. Always put your thumb on a white key, and prefer putting your 3rd and especially your 4th fingers on black keys, if possible. (Fun fact: for the major scales, once you have your right hand's fingering, you can imagine mirroring the keyboard and your hand around the D or G# key and you get another major scale with a good fingering for the left hand).

DO NOT start with C major if it's your first time learning scales. Maybe start with E major (4 sharps) as it is comfortable and you can use the mirrored fingering in the other hand.

Hunpeter··on Four years of sight reading practice
I mean, Bartók is really not that random: polytonality, pentatonic and octatonic stuff, whole-tone scales etc. are all things you can practice and put into work in his music. (You can argue that Schönberg is even less random, cause serialism, but that probably doesn't help too much when playing the piano).
Hunpeter··on The Deathbed Fallacy (2018)
"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And thus, our lives slip away moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
Hunpeter··on Someone at YouTube needs glasses
> Why would you be on HN if you weren't a programmer?

This isn't (exclusively) a forum for programmers (in fact, since it belongs to YC, maybe you'd expect businesspeople etc.) For example, I'm not a programmer, and I've never worked anywhere near the IT sector, yet I visit HN often. Also, if you look at the frontpage there are usually many topics not related to programming, or even tech in general.

Hunpeter··on MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
Reminds me of the monks in the third season of Babylon 5. Who says you can't both be an IT person and a cleric?
Hunpeter··on An oral history of "We Built This City," the worst song of all time (2016)
Obviously, the worst song of all time is "The Most Unwanted Song" by Dave Soldier.
Hunpeter··on What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase?
Yes, I'm Hungarian, and I'm not even mad (pun intended) about "mad" matching "madzag". I find that we ourselves sometimes conflate characters and letters, so many people's first thought would be that "madzag" is six letters. I think most other digraphs e.g. "sz" or "gy" are considered more tightly bound, so one would be unlikely to say that "szám" (=number) is four letters rather than three.
Hunpeter··on What Every Developer Should Know About GPU Computing (2023)
I've been binging Branch Education the last week or so, and I concur that the videos are exceptionally well made. Some commenters noticed one or two mistakes in some of them, but nothing major.
Hunpeter··on Order and orient the keys on your keychain
I've encountered an old safe which required two keys to open, one of them turning the "wrong way" - perhaps it's an attempt to slow down a possible burglar by making it "surprising"?
Hunpeter··on U.S. court orders LibGen to pay $30M to publishers, issues broad injunction
Maybe a billion-dollar company has more money to spend on lawsuits than artists do? Doesn't make them the good guys, but I'm not surprised that it's them doing it.
Hunpeter··on Fighting back against proper noun feature names (2021)
"Please place the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube on the Aperture Science Super-colliding Super-button".
Hunpeter··on Why are the violins the biggest section in the orchestra?
Addendum: some orchestras tune to a slightly different A (442 Hz is common I think), and the oboe player often gives a B-flat as well for those instruments where that's more natural.
Hunpeter··on Microplastics in the olfactory bulb of the human brain
Nanomachines, son.
Hunpeter··on The centrality of stupidity in mathematics
Tangentially, modern educational paradigms also characterize learning as a process of construction happening within the student's mind, rather than a transfer of knowledge.
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