Hacker News: butterflyhug

New comment by butterflyhug in "Learning Musical Multitasking"

butterflyhug — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:12:14 +0000

Re: Bach, also factor in that an organ player’s two hands would often be playing on two separate manuals (keyboards) that produced different sounds from each other and from the footboard. The player could activate a different set of stops (groups of pipes that provide a consistent sound for each note playable in the range of the keyboards) for each keyboard or footboard, and could also vary those selections to some extent during a piece’s performance.

If you look past conventional terminology, an organ really a single instrument in a similar way as a multi-input and multi-output synthesizer is a single instrument today — the difference is more that even a modern organ generally encodes most of the technology limitations of Bach’s time, whereas a computer-based synthesizer’s additional sound flexibility reflects the broader technology capabilities of our current times.

New comment by butterflyhug in "Rewriting a large production system in Go"

butterflyhug — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 23:07:58 +0000

Not all Internet protocols are HTTP. If you're running a service where long-lived connections are the norm, "simply fronting a bunch of servers with a load balancer" can require a pretty smart load balancer. E.g. IMAP connections often last hours or even days, and are required to maintain a degree of statefulness.

New comment by butterflyhug in "Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users"

butterflyhug — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 16:26:20 +0000

Couple this with amerine's suggestion to allow release packages from private repos, and developers could also use GitHub to sell closed-source software.

New comment by butterflyhug in "A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail"

butterflyhug — Sun, 30 Jun 2013 18:17:30 +0000

True. If your ISP won't remove your IP from the blacklist, you could probably use a commercial service (a la Amazon's SES) for outbound SMTP while running your MX and mailstore at home. That would have somewhat different privacy tradeoffs, but it's not that different if you expect most of your email recipients to be hosted elsewhere... I may try this.

New comment by butterflyhug in "Refactoring GitHub's Design"

butterflyhug — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 14:47:42 +0000

> if you interact with the repository you probably know which language(s) it is coded in, and if you don't you probably don't care.

I don't care about language per se, but I do care about managing the operational complexity of our stack. The programming language is a relevant factor on that score. A project in a new language may require new staff expertise, a new interpreter, a relatively high number of new dependencies, a relatively high investment in new monitoring systems, etc.

That said, I don't like the language color bar so far, because I'm having trouble confidently identifying which color is which language. For example: the reddish/orangish color space has JavaScript, Ruby, and the various JVM languages. The appearance of these various reds and oranges frequently shifts due to f.lux and differences between the three monitors I commonly use at work and home. Maybe I'll learn the colors better as I get used to the new repository format, but then maybe I won't.

In practice, I look first at the project description and the beginning of the README to see how the project describes its own strengths and weaknesses. Many projects describe their major language choices and runtime requirements as a part of that description, so I never look at the language color bar unless I need to.

New comment by butterflyhug in "Nonprofit Startups Are Just Like Their Counterparts"

butterflyhug — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:11:08 +0000

There are such laws on the books in at least some U.S. jurisdictions, but it doesn't really cause anybody to lose their tax status because there are legal workarounds. It is very common for a nonprofit organization's Articles of Incorporation (and any other legally-binding statements of purpose) to be written like this:

"This benevolent, charitable and eleemosynary institution has been organized [...under the appropriate state law for a charitable organization...] and shall be operated exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, literary, or scientific purposes within the meaning of §501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code of 1986 as the same may be amended from time to time. Within the foregoing purposes and not by way of limitation, [the organization shall perform its core mission]."

New comment by butterflyhug in "Mozilla and Xiph's new Daala video codec to compete with h.265"

butterflyhug — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 17:58:17 +0000

H.264 != H.265. Theora tried to compete with the former, Daala will try to compete with the latter.