Hacker News: danadam

New comment by danadam in "EFF is leaving X"

danadam — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:45:01 +0000

IIUC, "clearly shows" doesn't apply to "they have certain concerns" but rather to the part that you replaced with "...". In other words "the statement clearly shows that they value [their certain concerns] more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about"

New comment by danadam in "English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings"

danadam — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:23:16 +0000

> Your comment really deserves nothing more than an eye roll emoji, but HN doesn’t support them.

(◔_◔)

New comment by danadam in "10 years of writing a blog nobody reads"

danadam — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:28:15 +0000

I clicked on some random post from 2020, 19 em-dashes.

New comment by danadam in "The Therac-25 Incident (2021)"

danadam — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 09:20:01 +0000

Some Google Pixel phones couldn't dial emergency number (still can't?). I don't know if there were any deadly consequences of that.

https://www.androidauthority.com/psa-google-pixel-911-emerge...

New comment by danadam in "Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy"

danadam — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 04:49:05 +0000

> Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time.

When you do that then the difference between the loudest and the quietest part of the audio gets reduced. That's dynamic range reduction.

New comment by danadam in "Too Many Open Files"

danadam — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 19:27:19 +0000

> trace it down to the select bitset having a hardcoded max of 4096

Did it change? Last time I checked it was 1024 (though it was long time ago).

> and no bounds checking!

_FORTIFY_SOURCE is not set? When I try to pass 1024 to FD_SET and FD_CLR on my (very old) machine I immediately get:

  *** buffer overflow detected ***: ./a.out terminated
  Aborted

(ok, with -O1 and higher)

New comment by danadam in "Show HN: I wrote a modern Command Line Handbook"

danadam — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:20:04 +0000

page 112

> if [[ "${1-}" =~ ^-*h(elp)?$ ]]; then

> ... is an option that starts with one or multiple - characters ...

"one or multiple" is + not *. The regex above will also match "h" and "help" without - character(s).

New comment by danadam in "Compiler Explorer and the promise of URLs that last forever"

danadam — Thu, 29 May 2025 01:31:16 +0000

I'd probably call it "disclosure".

New comment by danadam in "As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook"

danadam — Wed, 28 May 2025 15:26:55 +0000

I've never used it but sounds like https://rr-project.org/

New comment by danadam in "The scientific “unit” we call the decibel"

danadam — Thu, 22 May 2025 13:00:56 +0000

> It isn't tho. It's close but not exactly.

It isn't tho :-). It's not close to double loudness. It's double power, which is 1.41 higher sound pressure, which is only slightly louder.

New comment by danadam in "The scientific “unit” we call the decibel"

danadam — Thu, 22 May 2025 12:01:31 +0000

Some laboratory-grade equipment probably.

> 0 dB doesn’t mean “zero sound pressure”

From the decibel definition, zero of anything is -∞ in dB_suffix scale.

New comment by danadam in "The Awful German Language (1880)"

danadam — Fri, 16 May 2025 13:15:46 +0000

> English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider ...

the poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos :)

New comment by danadam in "Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?"

danadam — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 01:17:15 +0000

I use a picture with a solid color because with pictures the text under the icons is white with a black shadow. The "Solid color" option (instead of "Picture") chooses either white or black font color and there is no shadow and I don't like it.

New comment by danadam in "Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)"

danadam — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:56:37 +0000

I have a bookmarklet, since forever, labelled "sane width", with the following code:

  javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='body { width: 800px ! important; margin: auto !important } '; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'"); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); } })();

It forces the body width to 800px and centers it. Crude but it is enough for me.

New comment by danadam in "Use Long Options in Scripts"

danadam — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 14:41:49 +0000

> No, the quotes are not seen by the program. The program receives a list of strings, it does not get the information about whether and how those strings were originally quoted in the shell.

With quotes the program will receive a single argument -n␣o␣p␣e instead of multiple ones -n, o, p, e. At least it works on the machine here:

    ]$ echo "-n o p e"
    -n o p e
    
    ]$ /bin/echo "-n o p e"
    -n o p e

New comment by danadam in "Pre-Trained Large Language Models Use Fourier Features for Addition (2024)"

danadam — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 20:44:41 +0000

3Blue1Brown has a very interesting video about how holograms are made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmKQsSDlaa4

New comment by danadam in "YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)"

danadam — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 18:07:52 +0000

> However, if you put on a headset and apply only frequencies above 16kHz, you will distinctly notice a change in the pressure in your headset's ear cups.

If you put something above 16 kHz at full scale and/or if you play it extremely loud then maybe. With typical music content at typical volumes, I doubt it.

New comment by danadam in "YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)"

danadam — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 17:58:16 +0000

> When I use an FFT to view the spectrogram on YouTube music videos, it is very obvious that YouTube applies a lowpass filter at 16kHz on all videos (true since 2023 at least).

Maybe with a browser that doesn't support Opus and gets AAC instead (Safari?). With Firefox or Chromium on Linux I get up to 20 kHz, which by design is the upper limit in Opus codec.

New comment by danadam in "Digital Show and Tell (2013): Xiph's Monty on Digital Audio"

danadam — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 01:51:35 +0000

That's unrelated. This difference is the inter-aural or inter-channel difference and 16/44.1k can capture that to much greater precision than microseconds.

Some math [1]

44.1k file containing pulses with sub-sample delays [2]

Something similar, but square wave, and nicely showing that timing precision actually depends on bit-depth and not the sampling rate [3]

Some practical experiments with capturing the playback of such files and verifying that the delay is preserved: pulse [4] and square [5]

[1] https://troll-audio.com/articles/time-resolution-of-digital-...

[2] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t...

[3] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/58511-time-resoluti...

[4] https://www.head-fi.org/threads/can-you-hear-upscaling.97295...

[5] https://www.head-fi.org/threads/can-you-hear-upscaling.97295...

New comment by danadam in "Men Arrested for Transcribing a Movie, Posting Details to a Website"

danadam — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 11:59:28 +0000

> The problem with sites that extract text from movies and other content is that they reduce people’s desire to pay a fair price for content

A bit strange to use "fair", which (to me) seems to be quite on a subjective side. Do people still think that the price is fair and only don't want to pay it? Or maybe some of them don't consider the price to be fair anymore :-)