Hacker News: Hunpeter

New comment by Hunpeter in "Understand Anything"

Hunpeter — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:42:45 +0000

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.

New comment by Hunpeter in "How to get better at guitar"

Hunpeter — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 06:27:43 +0000

>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).

New comment by Hunpeter in "US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes"

Hunpeter — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:54:16 +0000

"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?

New comment by Hunpeter in "The state of SIMD in Rust in 2025"

Hunpeter — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 11:46:05 +0000

How does one become a "student of floating point math idiosyncracies"?

New comment by Hunpeter in "When stick figures fought"

Hunpeter — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:32:28 +0000

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.

New comment by Hunpeter in "Show HN: I built a web framework in C"

Hunpeter — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:50:23 +0000

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.

New comment by Hunpeter in "A qualitative analysis of pig-butchering scams"

Hunpeter — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 19:20:19 +0000

This is also well known here in Hungary, there was even movie about it. It's called "unokázás"; literally: "grandchilding".

New comment by Hunpeter in "Becoming the person who does the thing"

Hunpeter — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:52:19 +0000

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?

New comment by Hunpeter in "The Relativity of Wrong (1988)"

Hunpeter — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 16:32:03 +0000

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.

New comment by Hunpeter in "Zenobia Pay – A mission to build an alternative to high-fee card networks"

Hunpeter — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 07:51:19 +0000

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.

New comment by Hunpeter in "Show HN: Piano Trainer – Learn piano scales, chords and more using MIDI"

Hunpeter — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 17:40:51 +0000

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.

New comment by Hunpeter in "Four years of sight reading practice"

Hunpeter — Thu, 22 May 2025 21:05:55 +0000

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).

New comment by Hunpeter in "The Deathbed Fallacy (2018)"

Hunpeter — Sat, 10 May 2025 20:27:20 +0000

"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."

New comment by Hunpeter in "Someone at YouTube needs glasses"

Hunpeter — Fri, 02 May 2025 10:25:11 +0000

> 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.

New comment by Hunpeter in "MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia"

Hunpeter — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 07:48:00 +0000

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?

New comment by Hunpeter in "An oral history of "We Built This City," the worst song of all time (2016)"

Hunpeter — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 20:11:07 +0000

Obviously, the worst song of all time is "The Most Unwanted Song" by Dave Soldier.

New comment by Hunpeter in "What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase?"

Hunpeter — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:42:51 +0000

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.

New comment by Hunpeter in "What Every Developer Should Know About GPU Computing (2023)"

Hunpeter — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 11:07:26 +0000

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.

New comment by Hunpeter in "Order and orient the keys on your keychain"

Hunpeter — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 07:58:50 +0000

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"?

New comment by Hunpeter in "U.S. court orders LibGen to pay $30M to publishers, issues broad injunction"

Hunpeter — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 06:56:04 +0000

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.