Hacker News: ancientstraits

New comment by ancientstraits in "Audacity 4.0"

ancientstraits — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:19:09 +0000

I think you're right. Audacity does have a "zero-crossings" thing, but when I tried using it a long time ago, it didn't seem to work, and I just learned to do fade-in/out for everything. Maybe I did something incorrectly.

New comment by ancientstraits in "Audacity 4.0"

ancientstraits — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:58:07 +0000

I have been using Audacity 3 for making music with samples for a few years. And it sort of worked, but there were a lot of things that were inconvenient, like the project sometimes not saving, or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip.

I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them.

New comment by ancientstraits in "TabBoo – add random jumpscares to websites you're trying to avoid"

ancientstraits — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 18:04:31 +0000

This is a very unexpected way to try combatting addiction. I don't know how well it will work, but I will consider it.

New comment by ancientstraits in "Hand Tracking for Mouse Input (2023)"

ancientstraits — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 18:12:08 +0000

It unsettled me a lot about just how much work was put into making the JavaScript version of this work instead of a purely Python version, due to how OpenCV works. I wonder how universal the laggy OpenCV thing is, because my friend faced it too when working on an OpenCV application. Is it so unavoidable that the only option is to not use Python? I really hope that there is another way of going about this.

Anyways, I am very glad that you put in all that effort to make the JavaScript version work well. Working under limitations is sometimes cool. I remember having to figure out how PyTorch evaluated neural networks, and having to convert the PyTorch neural network into Java code that could evaluate the model without any external libraries (it was very inefficient) for a Java code competition. Although there may have been a better way, what I did was good enough.

New comment by ancientstraits in "Show HN: Compiling C in the browser using WebAssembly"

ancientstraits — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 01:04:46 +0000

A few weeks ago, I tried to compile Clang to WebAssembly, but got several different errors, and tried fixing a lot of them, but some of them seemed kind of impossible to fix, so I thought I would try again at a later date. However it seems I will not need to try again. I feel angry that someone made a convenient solution before I did, but also happy, because this probably implies that they made a consistent process to compile Clang for WASM.

New comment by ancientstraits in "Make timelapses easily using FFmpeg"

ancientstraits — Sun, 19 May 2024 16:16:39 +0000

Hmm, I wonder why `-pattern_type glob` doesn't work on Windows. Perhaps it is something that could easily be programmed into the source code?

New comment by ancientstraits in "Pinnacle – a modern tribute to the 1986 classic, The Sentinel"

ancientstraits — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 19:53:07 +0000

I looked up what "the sentinel" was, and it turns out it was a game in 1986, that works on the BBC Micro and Commodore 64, and has 3D graphics! I didnt even know it was possible to do that on average computers in 1986!

New comment by ancientstraits in "U.S. students will take the SAT online"

ancientstraits — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:58:25 +0000

The online SAT was much easier than the written version, because (1) You don't have to read big essays anymore in the reading part, and (2) both math sections have the Desmos graphing calculator, with absolutely no features taken out. Desmos is far more convenient to use than a TI-84 for many things, so it made all the problems, especially the hard ones, much easier.

Also, in my opinion, their Bluebook testing software is actually pretty good, especially compared to other digital testing software I had to use over the years, like ClearSight.

New comment by ancientstraits in "Solving the darknet riddle (2022)"

ancientstraits — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 23:31:37 +0000

I am so impressed that you were able to figure so many things out in the puzzle! I feel like I would never be able to do that, but I feel like all that is needed is a lot of patience, a lot of time, and a lot of deep thought.

Right Side Up (2008)

ancientstraits — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 13:13:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/right-side-up-2008-05/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102886

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Rotating Point

ancientstraits — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 13:37:55 +0000

Article URL: https://ancientstraits.github.io/rotating_point.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899739

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ancientstraits in "Luxury Media"

ancientstraits — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 22:11:26 +0000

Perhaps someone should make a monthly HN magazine, with the top articles and a "Who's Hiring?" section.