Hacker News: Pete_D

New comment by Pete_D in "Clear Your Terminal in Style"

Pete_D — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 20:40:34 +0000

Good point, I should have said TTY driver (all my information is from half-remembered reading of https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php, any mistakes are my own).

With respect to rebinding, what is "stty intr ^D" doing if not rebinding the interrupt character to ^D?

I feel your pain about not having SIGINFO though.

New comment by Pete_D in "Clear Your Terminal in Style"

Pete_D — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 18:34:02 +0000

The terminal can optionally catch some characters and convert them to signals. By default, ^C sends SIGINT, ^\ sends SIGQUIT, and ^Z sends SIGTSTP. Programs can disable that for their own purposes (stty -isig) and you can rebind them to other characters if you want (stty intr, stty quit, stty susp) but I don't know why anyone would these days.

New comment by Pete_D in "500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format (2016)"

Pete_D — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 18:56:00 +0000

Amiga icons really felt like they were miles ahead of the competition and I'm surprised more of their possibilities didn't take off in other OSes.

- could change the icon for individual files/folders

- could have differently-sized icons

- different icons for unclicked + clicked state

Eternity II Puzzle

Pete_D — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 17:26:06 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_II_puzzle

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283180

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Pete_D in "Dawn, a WebGPU Implementation in C++"

Pete_D — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 17:13:03 +0000

Thanks! I'd actually been looking for that software rendering article for a while as well and couldn't find it.

The silent epidemic of America’s problem with guns

Pete_D — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 17:11:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50292935

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276850

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by Pete_D in "Dawn, a WebGPU Implementation in C++"

Pete_D — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 18:05:45 +0000

Genuine question from someone looking at toying with graphics programming who had never heard of WebGPU before today: does this mean I should hold off on learning WebGL? How different are the two?

New comment by Pete_D in "Ask HN: What are some example of low tech improving your life?"

Pete_D — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 18:24:58 +0000

I didn't appreciate how big of a deal washing machines were until mine broke down and I had to do all my laundry in the bathtub for a couple of weeks waiting for a replacement. Hand-washing is a lot more of a workout than you'd expect, and getting things dry without a spin-cycle afterwards is a pain too.

New comment by Pete_D in "Twitter to label deepfakes and other deceptive media"

Pete_D — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 18:48:26 +0000

The problem is that this allows a neat loophole in which governments can sidestep any inconvenient civil rights obligations by privatisation of otherwise public space. For a real-life example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_Square#Occupy_Lond....

New comment by Pete_D in "Some Useful Probability Facts for Systems Programming"

Pete_D — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 18:09:50 +0000

There are lots of fun ways to smooth out short-term variation in game randomness. This article shows a few used by various Tetris games, with one of them being your deck-of-cards approach: https://simon.lc/the-history-of-tetris-randomizers

One of my favourite techniques not listed there is weighting the probabilities by distance, so individual outcomes get more likely the longer you've not seen them (making the gamblers' fallacy real, I guess).

New comment by Pete_D in "New brain networks come ‘online’ during adolescence"

Pete_D — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 17:59:28 +0000

Depression has quite a few weird effects on memory, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overgeneral_Autobiographical_M...

New comment by Pete_D in "Let's Destroy C"

Pete_D — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 17:55:57 +0000

Off topic, but in today's bitter and divided world, it's reassuringly wholesome that people can still get together to recite the alphabet in GitHub comments.

List of Chess Variants

Pete_D — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 18:43:51 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_variants

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184294

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Pete_D in "The Effect of Cold Showering on Health and Work (2016)"

Pete_D — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 18:41:31 +0000

> cold showers can be dangerous for people with per-existing heart conditions

I think cold showers trigger the diving reflex[0] ("most noticeable effects are on the cardiovascular system, which displays ... in humans, heart rhythm irregularities"). I don't have a real source for that, but I tried cold showers a few times and found it impossible to breathe when I had cold water spraying on my face, like I could feel my airway closing involuntarily. Warm/hot water doesn't do that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex

Write combining is not your friend (2013)

Pete_D — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 19:43:33 +0000

Article URL: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2013/01/29/write-combining-is-not-your-friend/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22173294

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Pete_D in "Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo"

Pete_D — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 18:42:11 +0000

Thanks! Recognizing and remembering tones is one of the things I struggle with most, so I'd use this a lot.

A couple of comments: for 水果, it only accepts shŭi gŭo, not shúi gŭo. I know that is technically correct, but the voice synthesis sounds it out with the sandhi. More a question of philosophy I guess, but thought it was worth mentioning.

Also, it might be nice to have an option that hides the characters, so you're forced to rely on hearing rather than just knowing that e.g. 多 is dūo.

Looking forward to seeing what else you do with it!

Metacognition in the Rat (2007)

Pete_D — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 18:30:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1861845/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22172498

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Pete_D in "Single dose of psilocybin eased cancer patients' anxiety, depression for years"

Pete_D — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 18:03:45 +0000

> Shrooms seem to be the next wave of legalization an in some ways it seems like it is already partly legal.

Weirdly, fresh shrooms were legal in the UK right up to 2005, when they were put in the same category as heroin and cocaine. I remember walking past shops openly advertising them. (Peyote cactuses too, which according to Wikipedia are still legal.)

New comment by Pete_D in "Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019)"

Pete_D — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 19:27:13 +0000

May as well chip in: https://petedeas.co.uk

Sometimes I wonder if I should do more with it, but I don't know what.

New comment by Pete_D in "Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019)"

Pete_D — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 19:09:28 +0000

I hope you keep the pure-CSS version around somewhere, because that is technically amazing. I thought I'd accidentally disabled umatrix when I first saw it.