Hacker News: jamesjolliffe

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "Almost no skill required to cook a steak"

jamesjolliffe — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:33:15 +0000

Lol, I'm not sure the author expected to set off an army of nerds arguing how difficult it is to cook a proper steak.

God I, totally unironically, love HN.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "Show HN: A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world"

jamesjolliffe — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:31:21 +0000

Tangential, BUT, here is a grid map of ARDA from a (M)ulti (U)ser (D)ungeon text game from the 90s that you can still play: https://mume.yllemo.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=maps:...

You can literally still connect to this game from your terminal: telnet mume.org 4040 IIRC.

When I was a teenager, a buddy and I printed out giant copies of that map, laminated it, and put it on the wall in front of our computers while we hunted hobbits on our orc characters. Was pretty rad.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

jamesjolliffe — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:27:26 +0000

This is so weird. I love it. Thanks for sharing!

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "Three hundred synths, 3 hardware projects, and one app"

jamesjolliffe — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:15:17 +0000

Good point - again for this, filter cutoff knob position or MIDI CC value percentage of 0/max value # would be mapped to cutoff frequency Hz #.

And yes, envelope times have different transition formulas between points, like linear vs logarithmic, as you stated. But again, having a direct map for of just A,D,S,R ms times would give you a rough approximation of amp env, save you a ton of time, and honestly, just serve as a sanity check sometimes, when trying to recreate similar "classic" subtractive patches between synths.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "Three hundred synths, 3 hardware projects, and one app"

jamesjolliffe — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:24:55 +0000

OK, call me too synth nerdy, but have you guys ever longed for a project that allowed you too match stuff like envelope times and between synths?

E.g. (totally made up values in this example) if you want to approximate the amplitude envelope from SH-101 to Bass Station 2, if the attack knob is at 5/10 position on 101, that's 500ms, which means you need to set attack knob to 6/10 on Bass Station 2 to get same attack time?

I hope this gets made one day, but I'm too poor and stupid to make it.

Anyways, this sort of system would make it much easier to create "universal" patches that would work between synths.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "Desk for people who work at home with a cat"

jamesjolliffe — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:27:42 +0000

Rewatched this movie last week. Best movie I've seen in at least a year. Robert Altman is immortal.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job"

jamesjolliffe — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:03:38 +0000

Huge admiration and respect for this guy. Jealous of his people skills. Legit, what % of developers on HN do you think are well-rounded enough to pull this off?

Godspeed bro.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "Workers report watching Ray-Ban Meta-shot footage of people using the bathroom"

jamesjolliffe — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 09:07:08 +0000

Great! Maybe I can finally get a woman to see me naked!

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"

jamesjolliffe — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:59:52 +0000

I love this comment. Thank you for your provocative first sentence, esoteric historical anecdote, and nuanced take. Goddamn Hacker News rules.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking"

jamesjolliffe — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:54:22 +0000

Wow this guy can write. I don’t even agree with his point or pessimism. I just enjoy reading this.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else"

jamesjolliffe — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:40:33 +0000

Another serious flaw with the modern American economy is that too much of our money is spent betting on whatever lottery ticket dream we are sold will grant the highest returns. For too long, we have been investing in software companies like Meta hoping for unicorn returns, paying no attention to the fact that many of these companies do little to materially improve the real world we live in, while our communities and infrastructure fall into disrepair. Who wants to invest in a lower-margin construction company, when there is a chance company some tech company X might come up with an addictive imaginary widget on our phone that has a marginal cost of almost nothing after the first one is built.

Now, all this new hardware we're building is powering AI that is only proven to improve the quality of our software, and will likely displace many of the middle class "white collar" jobs we have left. Buckle up boys, we are in for a bumpy ride.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "KORG phase8 – Acoustic Synthesizer"

jamesjolliffe — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 03:19:29 +0000

Sounds really cool to listen to someone talk _about_ this synth.

Sounds pretty meh listening to the synth itself in any demos I've seen so far.

Still an awesome product and piece of tech art.

Myself, I can't imagine buying this synth for anything other than putting on a shelf to look at and talk about.

New comment by jamesjolliffe in "Ask HN: What video games do you play during the day?"

jamesjolliffe — Mon, 30 May 2022 14:53:55 +0000

Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike on Fightcade.

App loads instantly unlike most modern games, and if you're in the US, you can quickly find a match. You can challenge anyone in chat room to a quick first-to-3 or first-to-5 which will take 5-10 minutes. It's a great adrenaline rush that totally takes my mind off coding b/c it's so fast paced and PvP. Then back to work.

Easy to get into for beginners, but the mechanics are incredibly deep and people have been mapping the engine out for 20 years, so there is so much to learn if you choose to.