Hacker News: cousin_it

New comment by cousin_it in "Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages"

cousin_it — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:27:41 +0000

This looks cool! I wonder if the same feeling can be achieved without a fixed grid though. Some kind of pointilist or halftone rendering, but with free positioning of points.

New comment by cousin_it in "Protest against housing crisis in Spain"

cousin_it — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 10:02:27 +0000

> Madrid has 3.4Mln people and is the second-largest city in the EU. How big do you want it to become?

Bigger, obviously. Because the number of people who want to live in Madrid or visit it is higher than that. This can create a lot of economic surplus. Part of that surplus can be used to pay off locals (e.g. with housing in the newly built stock) so they win too.

The real problem, as far as I can tell, is that there's no socially accepted system for paying off locals. So locals end up resisting growth, because there's nothing in it for them except higher rents, and everyone loses.

New comment by cousin_it in "The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities"

cousin_it — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:16:21 +0000

Yeah. I like how Kat Woods phrased it: "You can give the slowest child sprinting lessons, but there are still nine chairs."

New comment by cousin_it in "Whistle Synth Mac App"

cousin_it — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:13:19 +0000

I think looking cool matters a lot in live music, maybe even more than the actual music. Blowing into a harmonica while carrying a backpack full of cutlery looks really dorky. But two people with drums+whistling and guitar+vocals can be made to look cool.

New comment by cousin_it in "Whistle Synth Mac App"

cousin_it — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:18:33 +0000

The first time I saw it, I thought about playing a drumkit and whistling a bassline at the same time, with someone else on guitar and vocals, making a full rock sound with two people. But then I was too lazy to try it.

New comment by cousin_it in "True Rate of Unemployment"

cousin_it — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:35:59 +0000

I think it's more than "you need to know them". You need to be a friend to them and do things for them in turn. Play a part in the mutual help network. If many people free ride on it, it dies.

New comment by cousin_it in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

cousin_it — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 06:37:03 +0000

I don't really like the concept of "guests" being applied to people living somewhere for years, working, paying taxes, making families and friends, sending children to school and so on. I think it would be more humane if this concept was minimized, and instead the concept of "no taxation without representation" was applied. Fast track people as much as possible. Maybe one year as a voiceless "guest" is okay for a human being, but not more than that.

New comment by cousin_it in "To become a better writer, read as much as you can"

cousin_it — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:35:03 +0000

Yeah. I've seen the same puzzling thing in game development. People don't seem to want to make good games! They want a hat that says "I made a game". That done, they want a hat that says "my game is successful", so they go on subreddits asking for promotion advice. Honest comparison with existing state of the art is seen as annoying; advancing the state of the art isn't seen as a goal at all.

New comment by cousin_it in "An Interesting Fourier Transform – 1/f Noise (2007)"

cousin_it — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:35:42 +0000

When I was learning DSP, I was surprised by the fact that generating pink (1/f) noise, sample by sample, is not mathematically easy at all.

One practical approach is passing white noise (every sample independent random) through a "pinking filter", which is a sum of a bunch of lowpass filters at different frequencies, so that the sum of their cutoff "knees" approximates the frequency curve of pink noise. Another approach is generating in chunks using Fourier transform from a desired shape. Given the ubiquity of 1/f noise, you'd think there would be a simpler and more direct algorithm, but no.

New comment by cousin_it in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

cousin_it — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:33:30 +0000

The article makes an interesting point. Like, sure, AI slop is nasty; but also maybe the job itself was bullshit all along (making powerpoints, or coding yet another todo app and so on), and you were only making peace with it by adding a human element which wasn't strictly necessary. Now with AI that illusion is stripped away, and you see the job for what it really is: just how little it means.

New comment by cousin_it in "Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness"

cousin_it — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:55:34 +0000

A bit off topic, but I'm guessing Aristotle himself would say that chasing "status in the workforce" (as opposed to leisure, riches, wisdom, power etc) is itself a good example of slavish disposition. Status in the bosses' eyes, amirite?

New comment by cousin_it in "Explorative modeling: Train on the best of K guesses"

cousin_it — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 17:35:26 +0000

No mention of GANs? As far as I remember, their images felt much more like "sampled from training data" than "averaged from training data". The idea was that you train a "discriminator" that tells generated images apart from real ones, and make the "generator" try to fool it. But somehow it lost to diffusion models, and now all AI imagery looks like slop, when GAN outputs (though imperfect) didn't look nearly as slop. I don't really know what happened though.

New comment by cousin_it in "Learning Musical Multitasking"

cousin_it — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 19:33:39 +0000

Is HN showing post and comment times as recent when they really aren't? I see an exchange between Rochus and jefftk "1 hour ago", ending with a "thanks, posted" and that blogpost is from July 25. Today is July 29.

New comment by cousin_it in "Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves"

cousin_it — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:24:23 +0000

Oh, who gives a damn. Half the games in my Steam library don't work since Apple killed 32bit. When they fix it, I'll know they care about Mac gaming.

New comment by cousin_it in "Regressive JPEGs"

cousin_it — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:20:29 +0000

Nice! I think you can approximate timing somewhat, by making your web server create the "jpeg" on the fly and send it to the client in timed chunks. The source could even be a webcam, so the "jpeg" would go on forever.

New comment by cousin_it in "Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)"

cousin_it — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:33:37 +0000

Could great works substitute for having a scene? After all, writers have been inspired by Dostoevsky without being part of the same scene as him, and often without being part of a scene at all.

New comment by cousin_it in "The room the economy can't see"

cousin_it — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:52:13 +0000

If people can move freely, and there's no price mechanism to allocate housing and construction, there will be problems. So "taking the market out of real estate" is a very big ask. In the USSR you couldn't freely move to another city, you needed to get government approval on the basis of a job change. People complained about this registration system all the time.

New comment by cousin_it in "The room the economy can't see"

cousin_it — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:45:32 +0000

Good point, didn't think of it. And yeah, I don't know in general which goods should be more vs less free-market.

New comment by cousin_it in "The room the economy can't see"

cousin_it — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 14:05:55 +0000

Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.

New comment by cousin_it in "The room the economy can't see"

cousin_it — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:46:43 +0000

You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.

Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.

That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.