Hacker News: danadam

New comment by danadam in "Websites Should Be Printable"

danadam — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:09:45 +0000

> I just made a simple site that didn't set any font sizes anywhere, and a friend of mine complained that the font was too small on mobile. Do I detect a lo-res screen and increase the font size?

Did you use

That would probably be enough to look good on mobile too.

New comment by danadam in "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS"

danadam — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:43:49 +0000

They block some user-agents, maybe that's it?

From [1]

> We must regularly implement temporary security measures to ensure the availability of Codeberg's resources and prevent abuse.

> The 403 you have received is expected based on the UA.

From [2]

> What is the version of your chromium? AFAICT <=137 gets 403 Forbidden: [...] while >= 138 works ok: [...]

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3084

[2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3078

New comment by danadam in "A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts"

danadam — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 23:36:25 +0000

> IMO, "scroll here" should be the default action for clicking on a scrollbar.

> and Qt does not.

Isn't that what middle click does in Qt?

New comment by danadam in "English: A vs. An"

danadam — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:37:39 +0000

To me, as non-native, it seems that it may be because the idea [1] of "cases" was already introduced. So, at the start of a conversation you would say:

- The rules of a/the are simple.

- Not really, if you think so, then you haven't considered _all cases_. There's this exception and there's that exception. [...]

but:

- The rules of a/the are simple.

- Not really. There's this exception and there's that exception. [...] If you think the rules are simple, then you haven't considered _all the cases_.

[1] but take what I write with a big grain of salt, I can't explain why I wrote "the idea" or "the start" and I'm not 100% sure if that's correct :)

New comment by danadam in "English: A vs. An"

danadam — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:04:54 +0000

> The funny thing is is that all the examples you gave are correct English.

> [I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school

According to most comments here this should be "at a school" then :)

New comment by danadam in "24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)"

danadam — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:50:31 +0000

> If you're not on a US-based IP, you should check out https://src.infinitewave.ca/

There is also https://src.hydrogenaudio.org/ (with no IP based restrictions, AFAIK).

New comment by danadam in "Software is made between commits"

danadam — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:07:46 +0000

> So many of these things would have been really painful to find if I'd had to sift through every line of a big commit.

> So to watch people intentionally balling up an entire PR's worth of commits and squashing them together to throw away the only (in my mind) thing that version control is good for, is truly baffling.

> But yeah, there are plenty of people like the parent in that camp

I'm confused. The parent doesn't want big commits but rather, as they wrote twice, commits that are small, atomic and without noise. So presumably "fix typo" would be removed during rebase but "rename function" would stay and be separate from "implement logic".

New comment by danadam in "Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)"

danadam — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:14:45 +0000

Wayback Machine still has them:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260208100527/https://magicviny...

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 :)