Hacker News Reader

danadamon Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS

They block some user-agents, maybe that's it?

From [1]

> We must regularly implement temporary security measures to ensure the availability of Codeberg's resources and prevent abuse.

> The 403 you have received is expected based on the UA.

From [2]

> What is the version of your chromium? AFAICT <=137 gets 403 Forbidden: [...] while >= 138 works ok: [...]

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3084

[2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3078

danadamon A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts

> IMO, "scroll here" should be the default action for clicking on a scrollbar.

> and Qt does not.

Isn't that what middle click does in Qt?

danadamon English: A vs. An

To me, as non-native, it seems that it may be because the idea [1] of "cases" was already introduced. So, at the start of a conversation you would say:

- The rules of a/the are simple.

- Not really, if you think so, then you haven't considered _all cases_. There's this exception and there's that exception. [...]

but:

- The rules of a/the are simple.

- Not really. There's this exception and there's that exception. [...] If you think the rules are simple, then you haven't considered _all the cases_.

[1] but take what I write with a big grain of salt, I can't explain why I wrote "the idea" or "the start" and I'm not 100% sure if that's correct :)

danadamon English: A vs. An

> The funny thing is is that all the examples you gave are correct English.

> [I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school

According to most comments here this should be "at a school" then :)

danadamon 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

> If you're not on a US-based IP, you should check out https://src.infinitewave.ca/

There is also https://src.hydrogenaudio.org/ (with no IP based restrictions, AFAIK).

danadamon Software is made between commits

> So many of these things would have been really painful to find if I'd had to sift through every line of a big commit.

> So to watch people intentionally balling up an entire PR's worth of commits and squashing them together to throw away the only (in my mind) thing that version control is good for, is truly baffling.

> But yeah, there are plenty of people like the parent in that camp

I'm confused. The parent doesn't want big commits but rather, as they wrote twice, commits that are small, atomic and without noise. So presumably "fix typo" would be removed during rebase but "rename function" would stay and be separate from "implement logic".

danadamon Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

Wayback Machine still has them:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260208100527/https://magicviny...

danadamon EFF is leaving X

IIUC, "clearly shows" doesn't apply to "they have certain concerns" but rather to the part that you replaced with "...". In other words "the statement clearly shows that they value [their certain concerns] more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about"

danadamon English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings

> Your comment really deserves nothing more than an eye roll emoji, but HN doesn’t support them.

(◔_◔)

danadamon 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

I clicked on some random post from 2020, 19 em-dashes.

danadamon The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

Some Google Pixel phones couldn't dial emergency number (still can't?). I don't know if there were any deadly consequences of that.

https://www.androidauthority.com/psa-google-pixel-911-emerge...

danadamon Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

> Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time.

When you do that then the difference between the loudest and the quietest part of the audio gets reduced. That's dynamic range reduction.

danadamon Too Many Open Files

> trace it down to the select bitset having a hardcoded max of 4096

Did it change? Last time I checked it was 1024 (though it was long time ago).

> and no bounds checking!

_FORTIFY_SOURCE is not set? When I try to pass 1024 to FD_SET and FD_CLR on my (very old) machine I immediately get:

  *** buffer overflow detected ***: ./a.out terminated
  Aborted

(ok, with -O1 and higher)

danadamon Show HN: I wrote a modern Command Line Handbook

page 112

> if [[ "${1-}" =~ ^-*h(elp)?$ ]]; then

> ... is an option that starts with one or multiple - characters ...

"one or multiple" is + not *. The regex above will also match "h" and "help" without - character(s).

danadamon Compiler Explorer and the promise of URLs that last forever

I'd probably call it "disclosure".

danadamon As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

I've never used it but sounds like https://rr-project.org/

danadamon The scientific “unit” we call the decibel

> It isn't tho. It's close but not exactly.

It isn't tho :-). It's not close to double loudness. It's double power, which is 1.41 higher sound pressure, which is only slightly louder.

danadamon The scientific “unit” we call the decibel

Some laboratory-grade equipment probably.

> 0 dB doesn’t mean “zero sound pressure”

From the decibel definition, zero of anything is -∞ in dB_suffix scale.

danadamon The Awful German Language (1880)

> English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider ...

the poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos :)

danadamon Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

I use a picture with a solid color because with pictures the text under the icons is white with a black shadow. The "Solid color" option (instead of "Picture") chooses either white or black font color and there is no shadow and I don't like it.

danadamon Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)

I have a bookmarklet, since forever, labelled "sane width", with the following code:

  javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='body { width: 800px ! important; margin: auto !important } '; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'"); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); } })();

It forces the body width to 800px and centers it. Crude but it is enough for me.

danadamon Use Long Options in Scripts

> No, the quotes are not seen by the program. The program receives a list of strings, it does not get the information about whether and how those strings were originally quoted in the shell.

With quotes the program will receive a single argument -n␣o␣p␣e instead of multiple ones -n, o, p, e. At least it works on the machine here:

    ]$ echo "-n o p e"
    -n o p e
    
    ]$ /bin/echo "-n o p e"
    -n o p e

danadamon Pre-Trained Large Language Models Use Fourier Features for Addition (2024)

3Blue1Brown has a very interesting video about how holograms are made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmKQsSDlaa4

danadamon YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

> However, if you put on a headset and apply only frequencies above 16kHz, you will distinctly notice a change in the pressure in your headset's ear cups.

If you put something above 16 kHz at full scale and/or if you play it extremely loud then maybe. With typical music content at typical volumes, I doubt it.

danadamon YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

> When I use an FFT to view the spectrogram on YouTube music videos, it is very obvious that YouTube applies a lowpass filter at 16kHz on all videos (true since 2023 at least).

Maybe with a browser that doesn't support Opus and gets AAC instead (Safari?). With Firefox or Chromium on Linux I get up to 20 kHz, which by design is the upper limit in Opus codec.

danadamon Digital Show and Tell (2013): Xiph's Monty on Digital Audio

That's unrelated. This difference is the inter-aural or inter-channel difference and 16/44.1k can capture that to much greater precision than microseconds.

Some math [1]

44.1k file containing pulses with sub-sample delays [2]

Something similar, but square wave, and nicely showing that timing precision actually depends on bit-depth and not the sampling rate [3]

Some practical experiments with capturing the playback of such files and verifying that the delay is preserved: pulse [4] and square [5]

[1] https://troll-audio.com/articles/time-resolution-of-digital-...

[2] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t...

[3] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/58511-time-resoluti...

[4] https://www.head-fi.org/threads/can-you-hear-upscaling.97295...

[5] https://www.head-fi.org/threads/can-you-hear-upscaling.97295...

danadamon Men Arrested for Transcribing a Movie, Posting Details to a Website

> The problem with sites that extract text from movies and other content is that they reduce people’s desire to pay a fair price for content

A bit strange to use "fair", which (to me) seems to be quite on a subjective side. Do people still think that the price is fair and only don't want to pay it? Or maybe some of them don't consider the price to be fair anymore :-)

danadamon Terminal colours are tricky

Selenized maybe

https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/whats-w...

danadamon Why Not Comments

> So I appended a "=> yes!" to the existing comment as well.

You will read it in 3 months and cry in despair "But why, my past self, why is it needed?!" :-)

danadamon Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

> "I'll be waiting for your patch. Surely you're not as lazy and incompetent as the existing volunteer developers."- Rémi Denis-Courmont

> I see Rémi Denis-Courmont's arrogant attitude and disrespect for users and developers hasn't improved in all these years.

That's out of context quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41282178