Hacker News: moosedev

New comment by moosedev in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

moosedev — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:36:32 +0000

I must have missed the 8GHz CPU era.

New comment by moosedev in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

moosedev — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:28:56 +0000

Right. It captures the destabilizing effect of stochastic terrorism, without the terroristic intent. It’s a neat phrase.

New comment by moosedev in "Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear"

moosedev — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 04:29:07 +0000

The earliest I've used was Protracker, which was the most popular tracker in the early heyday of the format (late 80s - early 90s), but the earlier Soundtracker was the OG "tracker", and probably used the same layout, but I'm not sure. https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Soundtracker_History

But if FL Studio (formerly FruityLoops) and Renoise use the same layout, as others have said, then those are probably going to resonate with a wider modern audience :D Or maybe just call it "FL Studio / Renoise / tracker layout"?

I don't do computer keyboard note entry any more, but I still have the muscle memory for that 4-row layout from hours spent with it in the late 90s :D And I'd totally use it in your game. (My MIDI keyboards are kinda too far away from the mouse and monitor.)

New comment by moosedev in "Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear"

moosedev — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:13:58 +0000

This, but (or "and") use the 4-row layout that dozens of tracker programs used[0], to fit over 2 octaves on the computer keyboard.

On a US keyboard:

QWERTYUIOP[] is the white keys starting at middle C. (The row above is the black keys; the 2 key plays C#.)

ZXCVBNM,./ is the white keys starting an octave lower. (S plays a low C#.)

The two ranges overlap; e.g. Q and , both play C in the same octave.

Grew up composing music on a computer this way when my (musical) keyboard didn't have MIDI and I couldn't afford a better one :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

New comment by moosedev in "The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café"

moosedev — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:46:11 +0000

It’s a Zen proverb.

New comment by moosedev in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

moosedev — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 20:21:02 +0000

I broadly agree with the author’s point there, but disagree with the specific language he used. In my view, engineering includes those pesky non-technical considerations, like the business context and the human factors, which bring their own tradeoffs and priorities to the engineering decision-making.

That is, his “pure engineers” are not really doing engineering, at least under my understanding of the term, whereas (some of) the impure engineers actually are! :)

New comment by moosedev in "Cassette tapes are making a comeback?"

moosedev — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:51:31 +0000

> CDs never had any DRM

Oh, but they did, and quite infamously :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5549-2/

https://www.networkworld.com/article/715376/network-security...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240779158_Lessons_f...

New comment by moosedev in "The Junior Hiring Crisis"

moosedev — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 05:41:09 +0000

They’re going to get promoted anyway. The “senior” title will simply (continue to) lose meaning to inflation.

New comment by moosedev in "Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer"

moosedev — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 03:19:02 +0000

I love vintage computers, have a vintage computer collection, and have enjoyed visiting computer museums, but does this computer museum website really need to send me desktop notifications?

New comment by moosedev in "CS234: Reinforcement Learning Winter 2025"

moosedev — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:21:38 +0000

2024 lecture videos are on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rN4wG6Nk6sNpTEb...

New comment by moosedev in "Google Antigravity"

moosedev — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 10:53:02 +0000

> I believe it is aimed at investors.

I think it’s more likely aimed at the (internal) promotion committee.

New comment by moosedev in "A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator"

moosedev — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 05:08:12 +0000

And according to TFA, the AI slop results are also from Reddit!

New comment by moosedev in "Young graduates are facing an employment crisis"

moosedev — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:03:56 +0000

Thread from 30 days ago (albeit without much discussion at the time) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294488

New comment by moosedev in "U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites"

moosedev — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 02:45:23 +0000

I assume it's Supreme Leader.

New comment by moosedev in "Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry"

moosedev — Sat, 10 May 2025 20:06:17 +0000

Another vote for the 68000 series :)

New comment by moosedev in "The coming knowledge-work supply-chain crisis"

moosedev — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 04:47:17 +0000

Thanks, I like your framing in terms of the impact on "trust".

> Generating more complex solutions that are possibly not understood by the engineer submitting the changes.

I'd possibly remove "possibly" :-)

New comment by moosedev in "The coming knowledge-work supply-chain crisis"

moosedev — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:18:11 +0000

Feeling this too. And AI is making it "worse".

Reviewing human code and writing thoughtful, justified, constructive feedback to help the author grow is one thing - too much of this activity gets draining, for sure, but at least I get the satisfaction of teaching/mentoring through it.

Reviewing AI-generated code, though, I'm increasingly unsure there's any real point to writing constructive feedback, and I can feel I'll burn out if I keep pushing myself to do it. AI also allows less experienced engineers to churn out code faster, so I have more and more code to review.

But right now I'm still "responsible" for "code quality" and "mentoring", even if we are going to have to figure out what those things even mean when everyone is a 10x vibecoder...

Hoping the stock market calms down and I can just decide I'm done with my tech career if/when this change becomes too painful for dinosaurs like me :)

New comment by moosedev in "Exercise before bed is linked with disrupted sleep"

moosedev — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:47:50 +0000

That’s fair, I didn’t think about climates actively hostile to “gentle” exercise :)

New comment by moosedev in "Exercise before bed is linked with disrupted sleep"

moosedev — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 18:06:11 +0000

Sample of one, but I find gentle exercise in evening (like walking) isn't a problem. A moderate-to-intense run in the evening does affect my sleep, though.

New comment by moosedev in "The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A"

moosedev — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 06:40:53 +0000

The ST very subtly so, even :)

> "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", referring to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals.

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST