Hacker News: ssttoo

New comment by ssttoo in "SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit [pdf] (2017)"

ssttoo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:25:01 +0000

It was so popular in studios to use an old Yamaha ns10 speaker as a kick (bass) drum mic that now Yamaha started making and selling an “official” version.

I personally used a toy guitar amp for this purpose https://music.stoyanstefanov.com/2017/03/30/diy-sub-kick-mic...

New comment by ssttoo in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

ssttoo — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:21:08 +0000

Will the app work on it?

Also will you need a $xx/month cell phone subscription plan? With a credit check and everything?

New comment by ssttoo in "Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat"

ssttoo — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:55:53 +0000

A friend was about to start this Monday. Last week Oracle called to rescind their offer

New comment by ssttoo in "Decision trees – the unreasonable power of nested decision rules"

ssttoo — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:35:25 +0000

I just wish we’d stop with the “unreasonable” click-bite. Cheapens an otherwise excellent article, like “7 x (number 6 will surprise you)” of yesteryear

New comment by ssttoo in "Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals"

ssttoo — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:34:06 +0000

Excellent! For a music project of mine I found MusGlyph [1] which is also all about ligatures, like typing ssss for 4 beamed sixteenth notes. There are some ligatures I need that are not in the font, I contacted the author and he encouraged me to add them myself. So now I’m spending quality time with FOSS called FontForge. Also subsetting a ligature-heavy font for the web turns out an interesting challenge. Wrote up my experience here [2]

[1] https://www.notationcentral.com/product/musglyphs/ [2] https://highperformancewebfonts.com/read/subsetting-and-liga...

New comment by ssttoo in "Typing for Love or Money: The Hidden Labor Behind Modern Literary Masterpieces"

ssttoo — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 07:59:50 +0000

Add Bulgaria too. I liked Illusions but a good friend of mine was simply in love with it, bought and gave copies to everyone. And for his birthday last year I almost gave him a signed copy of the Seagull I saw at a local second hand bookshop in LA. I hesitated because of the price and when I came back it was gone.

New comment by ssttoo in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

ssttoo — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:16:35 +0000

Just pushed another update to https://sightread.org which generates sheet music to practice sight reading and music dictation. Still rhythm-only, now with support for asymmetric (odd) rhythms like 7/8

New comment by ssttoo in "Show HN: ÆTHRA – Writing Music as Code"

ssttoo — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:28:12 +0000

Ha, I was just playing with making a simple pad in webaudio and it evolved into a progression-playing backing track tool (vanilla html/js/css page). It would appear there are a lot of us in the Venn intersection of programmer/guitarist/practice time alone enjoyers.

New comment by ssttoo in "Where to Sleep in LAX"

ssttoo — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 23:48:38 +0000

Not only US. A friend’s flight was late and about to land in Munich after the airport closes. So they had to land at a different airport and then take the train to Munich.

New comment by ssttoo in "How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission"

ssttoo — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:32:27 +0000

There’s the weird incentive for schools to appear selective. That’s why UCSD would rather reject great candidates because chances are they’ll go to the likes of Harvard. Why accept candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere? Better to be the dumper than the dumpee and improve your rankings. It’s awful.

New comment by ssttoo in "JavaScript's For-Of Loops Are Fast"

ssttoo — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 08:40:05 +0000

> to make sure V8 doesn't optimize out something too much

A bit more explanation of “something” and ”too much“ would have been educational

New comment by ssttoo in "I canceled my book deal"

ssttoo — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:37:56 +0000

I’ve published several books with them. Only once I asked and they managed to find the beast. They didn’t promise but they did deliver.

New comment by ssttoo in "Frank Gehry has died"

ssttoo — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:26:59 +0000

He also designed a Facebook’s office in Menlo Park. The roof was literally a park, seemingly blending with the bay and you could go for a nice nature stroll mid-day by just going up a flight of stairs. https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/facebook-campus-in-menlo-...

New comment by ssttoo in "Exploring Large HTML Documents on the Web"

ssttoo — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 08:07:15 +0000

Yup, it’s web performance advent calendar in its 17th edition. I’m the maintainer, AMA. Also still accepting contributions for this year.

New comment by ssttoo in "Short Little Difficult Books"

ssttoo — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:16:28 +0000

Let me add also Blindness by José Saramago, it has pages-long paragraphs and sentences, characters have no names just descriptions… it’s surprising at first but not hard to get into. Amazing book!

New comment by ssttoo in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

ssttoo — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 06:08:39 +0000

https://SightRead.org - free, ad-free, etc, vanilla js (except for the abcjs notation library) web app to practice sight reading. Currently rhythm-only, but more is planned.

New comment by ssttoo in "How the brain's activity, energy use and blood flow change as people fall asleep"

ssttoo — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 13:24:22 +0000

I recently started exploring supplements. Turns out a lot of what you find in the likes of CVS and Whole Foods can be all over the map: from 0 of the actual ingredient to 10x what’s on the label. Current consensus on reputable brands seems to be Thorne, NOW, Life extensions, and Pure. The last one acquired by Nestle, make of that what you will.

New comment by ssttoo in "Don't use AI to tell you how to vote in election, says Dutch watchdog"

ssttoo — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 15:20:07 +0000

Meta.ai (at least its WhatsApp version) has been really ghosting me lately. For example I asked “what’s CA prop 50?”. Answer:

> Thanks for asking. For voting information, select your state or territory at https://www.usa.gov/state-election-office

A real answer flashes for a second and then this refusal to answer replaces it.

Similarly when I asked about refeeding after a 5-day fast: “call this number for eating disorders”

New comment by ssttoo in "Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions"

ssttoo — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:46:36 +0000

Lovely! Couple questions…

- where did you get the noises, are they your own recordings?

- how hard it is to support earlier iOS? For folks like me who are on older phones that cannot be upgraded anymore (iOS 16 personally)

New comment by ssttoo in "Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself"

ssttoo — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:07:13 +0000

Ha, I was just recently thinking about what you do with attention in different languages. In my native Bulgarian (обръщам внимание) you “turn” your attention as in you “direct” it. Same word for when you turn a page. Like you have but a single attention and it’s up to you where you direct it.

In French (correct me if I’m wrong) you “make” attention, « faire attention ». Like there’s unlimited amount of attention and you can always make more.