Hacker News: ssttoo

New comment by ssttoo in "Dolly Parton has died"

ssttoo — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 19:53:29 +0000

And written the same day she wrote Jolene

New comment by ssttoo in "How Blackwing Pencils are Made [video]"

ssttoo — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:12:31 +0000

These pencils are sort of an “industry standard” for folks who write (or annotate) music because you can be fast with low effort due to their softness. And also easy to erase since you didn’t damage the paper, there’s no need to press hard to leave the mark

New comment by ssttoo in "Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg"

ssttoo — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 01:22:36 +0000

Looking at the first example [1] looks like there is high pass, low pass, and two more “cuts”

[1] https://github.com/AARomanov1985/Audio-Cassette-Simulation/b...

New comment by ssttoo in "If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?"

ssttoo — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:35:19 +0000

No VPN just home, in California

New comment by ssttoo in "If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?"

ssttoo — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:09:03 +0000

And, I noticed yesterday, old.reddit.com now requires login. Which renders a blank page on my phone. Check and mate.

New comment by ssttoo in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

ssttoo — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:19:35 +0000

I don’t know about the brain but it’s good for the final results in my experience coding, writing and composing (orchestral music). The results are better and it takes less time if I start with pen and paper before “committing” to the computer. One of my favorite authors Jennifer Egan also writes fiction on paper (non-fiction articles still on the computer). More thoughts: https://www.phpied.com/starting-in-the-analog-domain/

New comment by ssttoo in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

ssttoo — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:05:16 +0000

Is the burden of proof on me, the developer? Do I need to prove in perpetuity that I didn’t get a job or a free flight to talk at a conference because of my free software? (Which had a flaw that hurt someone)

New comment by ssttoo in "Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]"

ssttoo — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:47:24 +0000

IIRC Facebook switched to HG from SVN in the 2010s, one (main?) motivator being that the single repo was getting too big and svn’s only way was to start splitting it up. Which was against the philosophy of openness of the single repo. No idea what’s Meta doing now.

New comment by ssttoo in "Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone"

ssttoo — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:41:32 +0000

I recently skipped a concert at the YouTube theater in LA because my phone is too old for Ticketmaster or Hollywood Park apps. Even though you can go and buy a ticket at the box office they have to send you the ticket to the app. No option to print it or any non-app way.

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