Hacker News: bikitan

New comment by bikitan in "Introduction to Computer Music [pdf]"

bikitan — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 03:48:53 +0000

Understanding the soul of music and creativity at a mathematical is something that not that many people are trying to do. But there is an entire world of technology that underpins modern music and sound that is built soundly on math, like digital recording digital signal processing, synthesis, physical modeling, and plenty of other stuff, and this seems to be what the book's focus is.

Sure, there have been plenty of attempts to distill music to a mathematical essence. Certainly the ancient Greeks tried this, and traditional counterpoint resembles math in a number of ways. But at the end of the day, mathematical descriptions of math and music theory more generally are more useful as descriptive tools to help give language to what people are doing musically and to understand why we perceive some things as sounding better than others.

Starting with numbers can be good in some respects, like understanding the circle of fifths or how scales are built out of intervals, how chord progressions and harmony work and how to reharmonize, all of which can be augmented with a solid conceptual understanding. But at the end of the day, your ear and creative spirit are your primary asset when it comes to creating good music. This is why computer-generated music has been so bad up until AI took over. Great for building arpeggiators or backing tracks, but good luck creating a beautiful melody in a purely numerical rule-based system.

New comment by bikitan in "Rv, a new kind of Ruby management tool"

bikitan — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 02:47:13 +0000

It's important to note that Microsoft's choice of Go for tsgo was because it would be easier to port the existing TypeScript codebase due to the structural similarity of TypeScript and Go. If writing from scratch, they likely would not have chosen Go.

Which is not to say that Go can't do well in tooling. Only that Go was not necessarily their first choice.

New comment by bikitan in "The Future Is Niri"

bikitan — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 22:29:14 +0000

At the same time, the author refers to things like "decades" of muscle memory and finishing "all of college." I wonder if there's just an error somewhere?!

New comment by bikitan in "Hyundai just launched its cheapest EV in Japan"

bikitan — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 05:06:48 +0000

This is key. The yen is still weak, so framing it in terms of today's value in USD is going to make it seem much more affordable than it actually is for the average Japanese person.

New comment by bikitan in "Show HN: ts-remove-unused – Remove unused code from your TypeScript project"

bikitan — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 20:10:04 +0000

I was in a similar spot, but knip offers more information that ts-prune, and ts-prune may trip on some newer TS syntax. I've been happy using knip so far.

New comment by bikitan in "Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – Isolated Declarations"

bikitan — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 04:24:44 +0000

But why would any of that need to be done manually in a .d.ts file? You can just write your type definitions in ts files

New comment by bikitan in "Infinite Craft"

bikitan — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 23:30:38 +0000

It broke once I got up to "Baconosaurwolfthulhucornicornthulhu"

New comment by bikitan in "The New York Times buys Wordle"

bikitan — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 05:17:29 +0000

> of course, I pretty much expect the NYT to fuck that up, but oh well, that always happens over time

They have a number of free games that don't require any kind of account or registration. I am optimistic that they won't introduce any unsavory elements to it and turn off the playerbase it's amassed.

Take a look: https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords

New comment by bikitan in "Larry King has died"

bikitan — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 16:48:38 +0000

"Deciding for yourself" doesn't mean jumping to conspiratorial conclusions based on an ambiguous, off-the-cuff remark from 1992, though. And just looking at the comments on that video you can see what sort of agenda these people are bringing to their judgments.

New comment by bikitan in "This Anime Does Not Exist"

bikitan — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 20:12:19 +0000

No, it's gibberish that resembles Japanese writing but doesn't actually form real symbols (although some are close)

New comment by bikitan in "MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder"

bikitan — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 23:30:51 +0000

Great idea. One issue that I'm seeing with English/Japanese in particular is that while there is a significant overlap of names that are orthographically similar, the pronunciation varies considerably to the extent that the same pronunciation would not be intelligible as a name in both languages.

For example the name Marie is on there, which in English would be "ma-REE" while in Japanese it would be like "ma-ree-ay"

I imagine anyone using this tool would have enough knowledge of both languages to cull those results, though, so not really a problem in practice. Just an observation.

New comment by bikitan in "Surviving Your 40s"

bikitan — Mon, 07 May 2018 08:55:10 +0000

This might be a reference to the mythology that has developed around cultures and languages that don't count above a certain low number, as in a counting system that goes 'one, two, many.'

https://numberwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/is-one-two-ma...

New comment by bikitan in "Usage of content management systems for websites"

bikitan — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 05:06:45 +0000

They describe their methodology here.

https://w3techs.com/technologies

New comment by bikitan in "How I learned to program"

bikitan — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 03:14:22 +0000

> My class had a couple of kids who already knew how to program and were making good money doing programming competitions on topcoder

> High school (1996 - 2000)

This does't seem right. What sorts of competitive programming sites were around that early?

New comment by bikitan in "Surgeon admits to branding initials on patients' livers"

bikitan — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 08:29:10 +0000

Evokes a certain PBF comic: http://pbfcomics.com/comics/transfer-patient/

New comment by bikitan in "Shitcode"

bikitan — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 06:05:07 +0000

Cute, but doesn't hold a candle to the commentary and context provided on the daily wtf.

New comment by bikitan in "Show HN: 3D Game Programming using bitblting in Windows"

bikitan — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 08:01:43 +0000

"Extremely deep" is an understatement. It's long, deep and plodding enough as to be completely inaccessible to any but the most dedicated, and you have to be willing to spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours by the time it's over, going through it.

I love and appreciate what he's trying to do, but it's overkill.

New comment by bikitan in "Amazon Hub"

bikitan — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 02:19:28 +0000

In Japan people use these little wooden stamps with their names engraved instead of a signature. Throw 印鑑 into image search and you can see examples.

New comment by bikitan in "Trump's FCC Votes to Allow Broadband Rate Hikes for Schools and Libraries"

bikitan — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 04:49:47 +0000

An aggregate +6.3 for Clinton doesn't translate to "100% sure he wouldn't win"

New comment by bikitan in "Iridium Browser – A Chromium-based browser focused on privacy"

bikitan — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 04:13:43 +0000

Is that a scrolling marquee in 2017?