<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: dietrichepp</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dietrichepp</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:23:28 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=dietrichepp" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I also run some accounts on BlueSky and Twitter that focus on 1-bit art:<p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/1bitdreams.bsky.social" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/1bitdreams.bsky.social</a><p><a href="https://x.com/1BitDreams" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/1BitDreams</a><p>I see maybe 10 or 15 new pieces of 1-bit art posted on those platforms each week. A couple recent ones:<p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/ncesium.bsky.social/post/3miwkrqev5k2b" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/ncesium.bsky.social/post/3miwkrqev5...</a><p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/oddbones.bsky.social/post/3mi7pedpndk2h" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/oddbones.bsky.social/post/3mi7pedpn...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:07:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902494</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902494</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902494</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Drugwars for the TI-82/83/83 Calculators"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I remember playing this, but also a puzzle game called “dstar”, which I ported to the web: <a href="https://www.moria.us/games/dstar/play" rel="nofollow">https://www.moria.us/games/dstar/play</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:40:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449305</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449305</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449305</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Game Boy Advance Audio Interpolation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is great stuff… basically, an easy way to get much higher quality audio out of a GBA emulator.<p>I’ll add some context here—why don’t more games run their audio at 32768 Hz, if that’s such a natural rate to run audio? The answer lies in how you fill the buffers. In any modern, sensible audio system, you can check how much space is available in the audio buffer and simply fill it. The GBA lacks a mechanism to query this. Instead, what you do is calculate this yourself, and figure out when to trigger additional audio DMA from the VBlank interrupt. You know the VBlank runs every 280896 cycles, and you know that the processor runs at 16777216 Hz, so you can do some math to calculate how much data is remaining in the audio DMA stream.<p>A lot of games simplify the math—it’s easier to start a new audio DMA in your VBlank handler, but that means running at a lower sample rate, which will sound pretty crispy.<p>YMMV, some people like the crispy aliased audio. If the audio weren’t crispy, the sound designers probably would have adjusted the samples to compensate. Other factors being equal, I’d rather listen to what the original artists heard when they were testing on real hardware, because that is <i>probably</i> closer to what they intended, even though it has a lot of artifacts in it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:42:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949096</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949096</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949096</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Recently fixed bugs in an audio encoder / decoder (VADPCM) I reverse engineered from the Nintendo 64, and some people are apparently using it to dub Conker’s Bad Fur Day into Spanish.<p>On-and-off again working on a Mystery Dungeon style game but I have a lot of obligations taking me away from it.<p>Planning on making demoscene entries this year.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:53:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939424</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939424</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939424</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Toll roads are spreading in America"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If we only had trucks on the road, we’d need less road, right? The street where I live could be about a third of the width if it were not for personal cars.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:22:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404366</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404366</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404366</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Toll roads are spreading in America"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The civic barely does anything to a road, except require its existence and maintenance, and it turns out that roads are expensive to build and maintain (even if only damaged by weather).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:20:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404345</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404345</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404345</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Awk Technical Notes (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Why are you using the locale-specific [:space:] on source code?<p>Because it’s the one I remembered first, it worked, and I didn’t think that it needed any improvement. In fact, I still don’t think it needs any improvement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Nov 2025 17:10:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938869</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938869</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938869</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Awk Technical Notes (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Somebody wanted to set breakpoints in their C code by marking them with a comment (note “d” for “debugger”):<p><pre><code>  //d
</code></pre>
You can get a list of them with a single Awk line.<p><pre><code>  awk -F'//d[[:space:]]*' 'NF > 1 {print FILENAME ":" FNR " " $2}' source/*.c
</code></pre>
You can even create a GDB script, pretty easily.<p>(IMO, easier still to configure your editor to support breakpoints, but I’m not the one who chose to do it this way.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:56:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932093</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932093</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932093</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Awk Technical Notes (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Awk is still one of my favorite tools because its power is underestimated by nearly everyone I see using it.<p><pre><code>    ls -l | awk '{print $3}'
</code></pre>
That’s typical usage of Awk, where you use it in place of cut because you can’t be bothered to remember the right flags for cut.<p>But… Awk, by itself, can often replace entire pipelines. Reduce your pipeline to a single Awk invocation! The only drawback is that very few people know Awk well enough to do this, and this means that if you write non-trivial Awk code, nobody on your team will be able to read it.<p>Every once in a while, I write some tool in Awk or figure out how to rewrite some pipeline as Awk. It’s an enrichment activity for me, like those toys they put in animal habitats at the zoo.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:35:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45931107</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45931107</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45931107</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Things you can do with diodes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have the Heritage HA-609A. I considered going 500-series. Maybe some day in the future. For now, I have two preamps and the HA-609A in a 4U rack, and most of my other gear is in storage. Keeping things light.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2025 04:21:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807393</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807393</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807393</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Things you can do with diodes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It would be like this either way.<p>The N side has negative charge carriers. It has a positive charge in the depletion region because the charge carriers are missing. Likewise, the P side has positive charge carriers, and when they’re missing, you get a negative charge.<p>This is true whether we live in the current universe or live in an alternate universe where we say that electrons have positive charge. The depletion region is where the charge carriers are <i>missing</i> (depleted), so you get the opposite charge of whatever the charge carriers are.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2025 01:18:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806510</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806510</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806510</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Things you can do with diodes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Conspicuously absent are some of the analog circuit applications. Here are three of my favorites:<p>1. Frequency mixer, used for heterodyning, important in radio, so I hear. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_mixer" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_mixer</a><p>2. Log converter, where the output voltage is proportional to the logarithm of the input voltage. <a href="https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/374440/log-converter-circuit" rel="nofollow">https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/374440/log-c...</a><p>3. Diode ring, which provides variable gain, used in analog compressors like the Neve 33609 (I have a clone of the 33609, and I’m very fond of it)<p>Think about this: if you have a nonlinear device like a diode, then the dynamic resistance changes depending on the operating point. If you modulate the operating point, you’re modulating the dynamic resistance.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:27:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806185</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806185</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806185</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "QuickDrawViewer: A Mac OS X utility to visualise QuickDraw (PICT) files"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Fantastic—I’ve written a QuickDraw PICT converter, but I focused narrowly on just extracting pixel data. The format is basically a way to encode QuickDraw drawing commands, and getting the original image back (in the general case) means reimplementing QuickDraw.<p>The old Mac game Avara used this format for levels. It was funky… you could place blocks in a 3D world, and control elevation and height by changing the corner radius of rectangles. You needed a QuickDraw image editor to make levels, like ClarisDraw.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2025 02:49:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45639832</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45639832</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45639832</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, other Mac AV models did the same thing. I remember doing this on the 6100/60AV that we had.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Oct 2025 03:28:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45631903</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45631903</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45631903</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Why is choral music harder to appreciate?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I listen to a fair amount of choral music, from plainchant and organum up through modern and contemporary works. I think the short answer is missing, which is that most choral music just isn’t that <i>exciting</i>.<p>The Wikipedia article for the Motet has an interesting quote which echoes the sentiment here:<p>> [the motet is] not to be celebrated in the presence of common people, because they do not notice its subtlety, nor are they delighted in hearing it, but in the presence of the educated and of those who are seeking out subtleties in the arts.<p>This quote is attributed to Johannes de Grocheio in the 1200s! That means that people have been saying that choral music is hard to appreciate for more than seven hundred years.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 Aug 2025 05:14:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010447</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010447</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010447</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "A month using XMPP (using Snikket) for every call and chat (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Company I worked at back then used XMPP. There was something that you could paste into the chat that would make all of the Mac clients crash, and to fix it, someone with a different client would have to join the chat and type a lot of comments to flood the history.<p>I am not surprised to hear the protocol is an abomination.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:30:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727914</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727914</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727914</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Taking this moment to promote 1-bit art! I run a couple accounts which promote 1-bit art and I’m trying to figure out how to expand what artwork is included. These are just personal accounts that retweet art from 1-bit artists on BlueSky and Twitter.<p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/1bitdreams.bsky.social" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/1bitdreams.bsky.social</a><p><a href="https://x.com/1BitDreams" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/1BitDreams</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Jul 2025 16:55:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44543309</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44543309</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44543309</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Planetfall"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The one complaint about sound design is how the background music works. I think it starts playing when you’re not active, but on any given playthrough, it never gets a chance to trigger.<p>There are separate soundtracks for each faction, I think.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 May 2025 17:59:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064791</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064791</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064791</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "A note on the USB-to-PS/2 mouse adapter that came with Microsoft mouse devices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Interesting, I have a Roland S-330 from the late 1980s and my main concern getting it was the floppy drive viability. It didn’t occur to me that the mouse would be difficult.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:58:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43508279</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43508279</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43508279</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dietrichepp in "Whose code am I running in GitHub Actions?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sounds like you are assuming that I have a server always running for this stuff? That assumption is wrong. I don’t want to run CI servers. If I had servers always running, I would install Jenkins on them and the problem would be solved.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Mar 2025 15:27:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43483279</link><dc:creator>dietrichepp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43483279</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43483279</guid></item></channel></rss>