Hacker News: foo_barrio

New comment by foo_barrio in "Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale"

foo_barrio — Mon, 05 May 2025 22:26:22 +0000

Bells and metal tubes all can have funky harmonics too (and sub harmonics which is interesting). I don't know if it qualifies as "timbre" but if you remove the initial attack, many instruments sound very similar. There are some tests on youtube that I did a lot worse than I thought I would.

New comment by foo_barrio in "I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective"

foo_barrio — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:19:04 +0000

This has been the majority of my professional coding experience since the 90's ::shrug::. Having to take ownership of some Java Spring application felt a lot like stepping through an assembly program or some random ROM. Each line of code just returns values and modifies a bunch of other stuff at the same time and you slowly build up a mental model of what it's doing and what it's trying to do!

New comment by foo_barrio in "Mandelbrot Set Explorer"

foo_barrio — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 04:34:46 +0000

Works pretty slick for me. Are you considering adding things like super sampling for anti-aliasing and alternate coloring methods like triangle inequality, etc?

New comment by foo_barrio in "Troubleshooting: A skill that never goes obsolete"

foo_barrio — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 19:30:40 +0000

This played out at my last place. My boss would assign my co-worker to build the world's crappiest car in the least amount of time and when it broke down I would be the only one that seemed to be able to fix it (while my co-worker was busy building some other crappy car). I would have built a much better car in the first place! However I would have taken more time and the goal was to build and release as fast a possible. My boss was okay with the risk of said crappy car, my co-worker got promoted and I slowly burned out.

It's a tough balancing to make sure you sell yourself correctly and fight to work on things you want to!

New comment by foo_barrio in "Reasons Not to Refactor"

foo_barrio — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 18:48:28 +0000

I try to never ever use the word "refactor" or "clean up" in any of my work items or even commit messages. My boss and other teams I am collaborating with are like clients to me. Restaurant bills typically do not include explicit line items for "dish washing, mopping, grease-trap cleaning, oil disposal, etc."

The downside is that other people/teams can appear to work much faster and put you at a disadvantage or even risk of being let go due to this perception. Unfortunately this is where IMO you have to play the game and make sure you toot your own horn to the right people sometimes.

New comment by foo_barrio in "Reasons Not to Refactor"

foo_barrio — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 18:39:30 +0000

This is a good point! We've gotten some instances of Chesterson's Fence that some devs casually remove during a "test refactor" that later allowed a regression to make it into prod.

I've caught some errors in "test refactoring" from our multiple levels of testing having large overlap with teach other. Our end-to-end tests have a lot of overlap with the integration tests which in turn have a large overlap with unit testing. The unit tests run in a matter of seconds compared to the end-to-end which can take minutes or in some cases hours for our manual testing so the levels of testing also serve as an efficiency for us.

New comment by foo_barrio in "Connecting a gaming PC to Apple Studio Display"

foo_barrio — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 03:00:27 +0000

I believe "transparent" is the term used when claiming a lossy audio codec is indistinguishable to a lossless one by a human for some definition of an average human. For example I believe aac was considered transparent for most pop music at 160kbps for stereo, 16-bit @ 44.1khz (CD quality). So iTunes selling 192-256kbps was considered more than enough.

New comment by foo_barrio in "Oxidation makes tea black"

foo_barrio — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 21:53:41 +0000

White tea does not undergo the "killgreen" step that green teas and oolongs teas do IIRC. The drying slows the oxidation but does not arrest it. "Aged" white tea is a thing. If you let it sit around long enough it turns deep red. Green tea just turns into stale tea. They even compress white teas into something similar to those "Pu'er Cakes".

New comment by foo_barrio in "Oxidation makes tea black"

foo_barrio — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 17:02:59 +0000

That would be green tea no? You pick the green tea, cook it to denature the enzymes to arrest the oxidization (called the "killgreen" step in Chinese) and voila, green tea! Lots of green teas can be quite smooth and even more so with more careful brewing.

New comment by foo_barrio in "uBlock Origin becomes top addon on Firefox"

foo_barrio — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 16:46:00 +0000

If you argue that from the site's side then you can bring up that ads are taking up data, bandwidth(thus time) and battery (insane JS "game" ads) on the client side no?

New comment by foo_barrio in "The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues"

foo_barrio — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 14:57:19 +0000

The throttling is so severe it is effectively blocking. The throttling goes down to 50KiB/s on my PC trying to download a basic youtube video. That around 0.4mbps which puts you barely around the bandwidth needed to stream a very low quality 360p/480p video. For reference, this video is about 2 minutes long and that's how long it took me to download it via the last version of youtube-dl:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVRInek075g

New comment by foo_barrio in "The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues"

foo_barrio — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 14:36:23 +0000

I think software can create a good version of a video taken from a middle-tier camera. My 8-year-old DSLR, Nikon D750, can take 4k video at 60fps. Its sensor has more dynamic range than even high-end screens can produce. When I take a picture of my TV I can see individual pixels. That camera can capture every bit of info my screen is putting out. I bet from a 4k/60fps video from my camera you can process it to produce something closer to a 1080p/30fps BlueRay rip.

This was not the case with handy-cam theater rips. Those things were at best 480p and could never capture the picture projected on a screen even in the best conditions.

New comment by foo_barrio in "Loudness War"

foo_barrio — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 14:17:26 +0000

The final mastering/mixing has an avg db level they target. The more compressed mixes tend to have much louder avg db. Some of these modern "loud" mixes target -3db whereas the previous ones could be -10db or something. Played at an identical volume, the more compressed track will sound louder due to this target. Loudness war is an apt name. Just look at the sample waveforms on the wikipedia page:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

New comment by foo_barrio in "End-of-life dates"

foo_barrio — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 15:03:20 +0000

Interesting that you read it as "end of life-dates". I read it as "end-of-life dates" and thinking it was about very old people or terminally ill people dating each other and supporting themselves up through the end.

New comment by foo_barrio in "Final Fantasy 7: An oral history (2017)"

foo_barrio — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 19:30:02 +0000

I loved FF7. They definitely make games like that today! It's just that we've since grown and don't have as much time to sink into a game and you're more influential when younger. I played Breath of the Wild 2 years ago and I'd 100% put that game up against any of the wonderful RPG/Action games I played as a child (going as far back as Ys Book I & II on a Turbo Duo and Fate of Atlantis on PC).

New comment by foo_barrio in "Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness"

foo_barrio — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 07:25:40 +0000

The chicken/egg question always irks me. Eggs came first. Eggs have existed far longer than chickens (eg dinosaur eggs). Whatever the first thing we could possibly call a chicken came from an egg.

New comment by foo_barrio in "Clone culture and its continuous impact on indie developers"

foo_barrio — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 01:47:27 +0000

I don't like this take at all. Copying is always easier than creating no? A lot of times the things that make or break or game are fine tuning the mechanics in order to balance difficulty/reward etc. Once this is done it's trivial to copy.

Games are more like music than food IMO. It's trivial to copy a song once you hear it. That doesn't somehow mean it's not a worthy song.

New comment by foo_barrio in "Is this the end of the Cannonball Run?"

foo_barrio — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 16:03:13 +0000

I'm in the Northeast (Fairfield County, CT) and see red light blowing on an almost daily basis. Even during rush hour after 2020. I mean people even anticipate it. At least twice a month I'll see a clear intersection and a light that has been green for 2-3 seconds and cars are still waiting because some idiot is just barreling along in broad daylight with no intention of stopping coming the opposite way.

New comment by foo_barrio in "Software correctness is a lot like flossing (2020)"

foo_barrio — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 05:05:10 +0000

Even simple type systems like in Java can help with correctness. For example if you have a list of "Person" but the code itself assumes it's a unique list of people you can convert that list to a Map. Further if the map is assumed to never accept null values for either key or value you can capture that in some kind of "People" class that enforces invariant assumptions.

You're right that is does not prevent actual logic bugs but in practice, a lot of bugs are sometimes caused simply by bad inputs. With types you can make it so that logic never gets bad input eg (sqrt(NonNegativeDouble) instead of sqrt(double)) can potentially eliminate some error handling code.

New comment by foo_barrio in "The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed"

foo_barrio — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 00:06:23 +0000

Why would a company choose to do anything that didn't directly make money or cut cost? Companies often have to be compelled to do things where the ROI is measured in decades no?