Hacker News Reader

donbraeon Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

What a hero. Rats are so smart. I previously asked what I think was an official account on Instagram and was relieved that the rats are apparently too light to set off the mines.

donbraeon LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

I use ScreenFloat[0] in a similar way to catch differences between GUI settings, like the cPanel PHP extensions selector, which has tons of checkboxes. Position a screenshot of settings for site A over the settings for site B, adjust the transparency, and any differences will jump out.

[0] https://eternalstorms.at/ScreenFloat/

donbraeon Native Linux VST plugin directory

I hope the CLAP plugin open standard[0] will lead to more VSTs being made available for Linux. My favourite synth, Diva[1], has already been ported over (its maker, u-he, co-developed CLAP.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLever_Audio_Plug-in [1] https://u-he.com/products/diva/

donbraeon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://www.jamieonkeys.dev

Mostly posting about web development.

donbraeon Eat Real Food

You can get all the nutrients you need, easily, from a vegan diet, with the exception of B12 (a cheap supplement will cover that).

Also, human ‘canines’ are pretty pathetic. They’ll do the job in getting meat off bones, sure, but are nothing compared with my dog’s teeth – he has proper canines. (He also doesn’t have to prepare and cook meat before tucking in. Humans are actually pretty lame meat eaters even in comparison to other omnivores like dogs, let alone carnivores like lions.)

donbraeon Pig Video Arcades Critique Life in the Pen (1997)

Pigs are amazing animals: intelligent, sociable and empathetic. The way we treat them – confining pregnant sows and nursing mothers to weeks or months in gestation/farrowing crates, and gassing them underground in slaughterhouses – is truly appalling.

donbraeon Rats Play DOOM

Also in the genre of animals playing video games: ‘Pigs can play video games with their snouts, scientists find’ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56023720

donbraeon Domains I Love

A few of my favourites: brr.fyi, sheep.horse, timeflies.buzz, pudding.cool and bad.coffee.

donbraeon Better typography with text-wrap pretty

This is great. I’ve already been using `text-wrap: balance` on headlines. Before, I was concatenating certain words with ` ` to try to avoid bad wrapping at certain viewport widths. (Doing so is still a useful trick in edge cases.) `text-wrap: pretty` should fix similar ugliness in body text.

donbraeon Show HN: I built a website for sharing drum patterns

Or as the developer you can play some silent audio in the background via an `<audio>` element: https://github.com/donbrae/onscreen-piano-keyboard/blob/main.... This will ensure the Web Audio API produces sound even with the ‘silent’ switch active.

donbraeon The Frontend Treadmill

I wonder whether AI being the new and shiny thing will lead to a reduction in ‘innovation’ in front-end frameworks. Front-end dev seems to me to have been a solved problem for years now, yet there are still new ways of doing things for marginal gains. I personally just use vanilla JS (having never built anything Facebook-scale which would necessitate using a tool like React) and would be happy if instead of working on yet more front-end stuff, folk will otherwise build something AI-related, both because that is where the hype is but also because it’s genuinely exciting.

donbraeon macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)

One of my favourite tips is to hold down Command while dragging important apps, files and folders to the Finder toolbar in order to ‘pin’ them. You can then drag files to ‘Open in…’ (eg, images to ImageOptim) or just launch apps.

donbraeon Dolby Atmos for music streaming is a waste of time

If I’m on headphones (usually wired) I’ll choose the Dolby Atmos mix pretty much every time. As the article notes, it’s great for classical and jazz recordings. But I prefer the Atmos mixes for other genres and styles of music, too. The various instruments/parts seem to have more room to breathe in the mix, and I hear new things in familiar tracks.

donbraeon I designed my website to look like a chat log

The background does give a slight dizzying effect on scroll. His logos are good, though, and I like his no-nonsense attitude.

donbraeon Apple Maps on the web launches in beta

I normally find that stuff I build for the web just works in Chrome and Firefox and it’s Safari that requires hacks and workarounds, even when I’m using standard APIs that are widely supported. I’d have to go out of my way to have something work in Chrome but not Firefox.

donbraeon The British Newspaper Archive

This is a great resource. Used it to research writing in the Scots language in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

donbraeon Equinox.space

Ah, you also did the Transmit 3D truck for the Panic website. Nice work!

donbraeon AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License

The actual page at suno.ai: https://app.suno.ai/song/da6d4a83-1001-4694-8c28-648a6e8bad0....

donbraeon AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License

Impressive! Quite a nice song, too.

donbraeon Miles Davis and the recording of Kind of Blue

Interesting, as most jazz is not freeform and typically follows an agreed chord sequence. Certainly, jazz improvisation tends to feature lots of notes, often played at fast tempos, but ‘messing around’ it definitely isn’t. Jazz improv requires years of concerted practice and deep thinking. If you analyse a great jazz solo, it becomes clear that it isn’t random notes, or a ‘mess’. To me it’s astonishing that anyone can create something so intricately structured on the fly. Of course, you’re free not to like it.

donbraeon Miles Davis and the recording of Kind of Blue

And soon to be a film: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20414360.

donbraeon The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close

Things are a bit healthier elsewhere: I was in a WHSmith here in Scotland about a month ago and there were three Linux magazines on the shelf. There are others, too, like Computeractive and Retro Gamer.

donbraeon William Friedkin, Director of ‘French Connection’ and ‘Exorcist,’ Dies at 87

His new film, ‘The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial’, will premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival.[0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/movies/william-friedkin-v...

donbraeon MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

These are really impressive. Providing the ‘prompter-composer’ can generate high quality, stereo mixes — these all appear to be low bitrate, mono files — you could probably use them right now for various ‘wallpaper music’ purposes, where originality is not required or is even a detriment: ‘on hold’ music, low budget video productions, symphonic film scores etc.

Producing this kind of anti-music is pretty soul-destroying for a musician, anyway, so the machines might as well do it. We can then spend our time working on stuff that means something, and if we’re lucky and it connects with enough people, make a living from it.

donbraeon MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

Does that mean you ban users from using browsers that are not Edge?

donbraeon Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

I’d been using Spotify since 2009 and switched to Apple Music last year. The Apple Music UX is worse, but Dolby Atmos makes it worth it. As someone who listens to a lot of jazz with headphones, it’s a significant improvement over standard stereo. I’d go back to Spotify if they added the feature.

donbraeon Show HN: GPT-4-powered web searches for developers

This cites its source, though. Some of the content I’ve written[0][1] has appeared as a citation (in Perplexity, Google snippets etc.) and this is exactly what I want as a content creator. It answers the user’s question directly and provides my material as a source for further reading. A win-win.

[0] https://www.jazzkeys.fyi/bebop-enclosures/ [1] https://www.makforrit.scot/scots/read-scots/

donbraeon [dead]

I occasionally see websites made with this tool and appreciate the aesthetic. A pleasant change from the usual corporate web design. Examples at https://cargo.site/In-Use.

donbraeon Show HN: JazzKeys.fyi – Tutorials for jazz and funk keyboard players

Fair enough. I reduced it.

donbraeon Show HN: JazzKeys.fyi – Tutorials for jazz and funk keyboard players

Sorry, that was in celebration of the launch. In fairness to me, I limit it to the first load and don’t run it if the user prefers-reduced-motion.