Hacker News Reader

bheadmasteron Qutebrowser: A keyboard-driven, Vim-like browser

Florian Bruhin (AKA the-compiler, the author of qutebrowser) is one of the kindest and most dedicated open-source maintainers I've ever had the pleasure to interact with.

I've used qutebrowser extensively in the past, and reported a few bugs, each of which has been met with interest and engagement. Some of them even uncovered bugs in the upstream software (e.g. QtWebEngine) which were reported there.

I eventually stopped using it when YouTube ads became too invasive, and went back to Firefox + Vimium + uBlockOrigin. I sometimes miss the programmibility of qutebrowser, but Vimium at least gives me the basic Vim-like browsing features.

bheadmasteron Constraints Are Good: Python's Metadata Dilemma

Go (a.k.a. Golang), with its network-first import system (i.e. import "example.org/foo/bar"), has solved the problem in a surprisingly simple way. You just add a "replace" directive in a go.mod file and you can point your import (and all child imports) to any directory on the filesystem.

bheadmasteron Stop Requiring CRLF Line Endings

The widespread adoption of code formatting tools has rendered the very argument somewhat pointless. I don't even know which identation most of my code uses - my editor autoformat takes care of that.

bheadmasteron Nominal for Storing, Structural for Manipulating

In real-world software writing, there's a huge pull towards nominalism (i.e. naming code parts by their domain purpose), but in my experience, the most useful way is to have structural names for internal mechanisms, then use their interfaces in nominal way by describing their role in the business logic.

That way, all nominalism is simply a descriptive wrapper over structuralism.

bheadmasteron Python, C++ inspired language that transpiles to C and can be embedded within C

Why are you so anal about its name?

bheadmasteron Python, C++ inspired language that transpiles to C and can be embedded within C

The headline is confusing. It is meant to be read as

    (Python & C++)-inspired language [...]

bheadmasteron Indiana police are seizing FedEx packages containing cash

> Sorry to blame the victim and it's easy to say that now but they shouldn't send $43k via FedEx.

Why?

bheadmasteron AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human

Of course, brute forcing a solution by verifying a massive amount of garbage is much less efficient than doing it from scratch.

Verification becomes more productive than sythesis only when the probability of generated content being correct is significantly high. So I suppose, as AI gets more accurate, verification will become more productive.

I'm in a peculiar position with Bing AI. My work provided me an enterprise account, so I can use it for work-related tasks. Often I find myself asking it to write a program for something I don't wanna do myself from scratch, then I just analyze it, see why it doesn't work and fix it. It has got to a point where it's much faster for me to do that, than to read the relevant documentation and figure out how to do it from scratch.

bheadmasteron AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human

> Some people argue that we are quickly moving from a creator economy to a verifier economy.

I wonder if this is a natural development of economic optimization.

Computability theory taught us that it is in general easier to verify that an answer is correct (P) than to come up with the answer in the first place (NP).

bheadmasteron Guile 3.0.10 now ships with support for parens-optional syntax (wisp)

I always liked Guile because 1) it is a Scheme, 2) it is maintained under the umbrella of the GNU Project and 3) it is the system language of GNU Guix.

Wisp may be contraversial, especially in elitist Lisp crowds, but IMO it makes lisp more readable by using the de-facto standard Lisp indentation as Python-esque semantic whitespace.

bheadmasteron Why children perceive time slower than adults

That very much resonates with my thoughts on the matter.

I think the rigid, repetitive structure is what makes days fly by. I remember one time, while I younger and time still felt slow, I was in a sort of youth camp and I spent two weeks in their spaces with many other students. Our days were scheduled from morning to night with various activities, and most of time was either participating in activities or taking a break inbetween them. At the end, I was surprised how fast two weeks went by.

Maybe boredom is needed for time to go slowly, and we just don't have time to be bored.

bheadmasteron Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

You can even avoid using passwords altogether by using hardware security keys.

bheadmasteron AnandTech Farewell

> what would have happened if search engines had been prevented from displaying search results from news organizations that happened within the last month

News sites would probably change whatever metadata Google is using to check site age to make their news articles appear one-day-more-than-month old to Google crawlers, all as a part of Search Engine Optimization techniques.

bheadmasteron Boxxy puts bad Linux applications in a box with only their files

    - queer
    adjective
    1.
    strange; odd.
    "she had a queer feeling that they were being watched

bheadmasteron Show HN: Monogo – Evolve your go workspace to a real monorepo

> That's really funny, but I don't think the go community is ready for that level of humor yet, maybe one day.

I am a Gopher, and ironically, I didn't quite understand what this means. Would you care to elaborate?

bheadmasteron Calling All Hackers

We could argue about the history of hacker culture and its inclusivity, but it would most likely be just a series of proofless claims from both sides. I personally have never seen or heard of a person rejected from any hacker clique because of their sexual orientation. I've heard of a few having their contributions refused for trying to push political agenda [0], but then again it wasn't their identity that was refused, only the contributions related to advertising that identity.

I don't feel like the neo-queer-hacker culture you're discribing is particularly welcome to anyone who disagrees with them. I've heard of multiple instances of people calling for bans of people who said something they disagree with [2]. That is completely opposite of "inclusive". Inclusivity only matters when it includes people you disagree with.

> Coraline Ada Ehmke slew the meritocracy buddha in 2018

It doesn't surprise me that a person who hasn't shown much skill or merit is arguing against meritocracy. It is in her own interest to do so.

[0] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814

[1] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

bheadmasteron Calling All Hackers

For what it's worth, I didn't mean "actually" in an either-or sense, but more in an unexpected-correlation sense. I tend to avoid ontological discussions on this topic.

English is not my native language, I sometimes miss the subtleties.

bheadmasteron Ask HN: Determine sound quality of a file, objectively?

> What's the script's license?

For legal purposes, let's say GNU All-permissive License. I promise not to sue :')

bheadmasteron Calling All Hackers

> I edited my comment to provide it, instead of asking you to do so.

Nice of you to do that. Thank you.

bheadmasteron Calling All Hackers

As with any novel phenomena, especially in sociology, it is very hard to provide tangible evidence for anything. If you demand nobody speaks of anything of sort without hard evidence, rarely anything would ever be said.

bheadmasteron Calling All Hackers

Trans folks may in general possess qualities that make them better hackers, but they certainly aren't the only ones, so I wouldn't call hacker culture inherently trans.

That would imply that non-trans people are somehow outsiders, which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill, regardless of the person's identity.

bheadmasteron Calling All Hackers

There have been hypotheses that a significant number of trans women (i.e. biological men who identify as women) are actually on the autism spectrum. Considering natural tendency of autistic people to prefer isolated activities and puzzles, there may be a correlation between hackers and trans women.

bheadmasteron The U.S. Navy's $100M checkbox (2019)

For anyone reading this, if you want to remove this "clever" CSS font-size, here's the option you need to disable in Inspect Element screen:

    :root {
        font-size: calc(1vw + 1vh + .5vmin);
    }

It is bound to the <html> tag itself, so there's no need for element hunting.

bheadmasteron Ask HN: Determine sound quality of a file, objectively?

Seems that way. Probably because I'm using Maximum delta of the difference as the metric. Using some intergral-like function (e.g. average amplitude of all samples) would probably yield better results, but I have a hard time getting any useful data out of this script on my home computer. Weird.

I'll possibly work more on this topic, maybe I'll make a HN post.

bheadmasteron Ask HN: Determine sound quality of a file, objectively?

> Does this work if the encoders are different?

I have no idea, honestly.

I've tested my script (from a sibling comment of yours) with twolame [0] encoder, and I don't know if the results are good enough to indicate 64kbps true bitrate:

    user@host:~/temp$ ./main.sh 36-twolame-reencoded.mp3 
    320: 0.032303
    256: 0.045563
    224: 0.059769
    192: 0.074631
    160: 0.204269
    128: 0.229187
    112: 0.309540
     96: 0.302414
     80: 0.310181
     64: 0.367279
     56: 1.133713
     48: 1.106262
     40: 0.444473
     32: 1.030777

[0] https://www.twolame.org/

bheadmasteron Ask HN: Determine sound quality of a file, objectively?

Okay, I got nerd sniped [0]. Here's the script I've made:

    https://gist.github.com/paskozdilar/6095fe73c80ad21fda3f518177699149

This isn't an exact method, so it will only print bitrates and their respective "difference" parameter. In general, as the difference parameter rises, you're more likely to have reached the "true" mp3 quality, and a sudden jump in difference parameter is an almost certain indicator of true quality.

E.g. for a System Of A Down song "36", encoded at 320kbps, I get the following output:

    user@hostname:~/temp$ ./main.sh 36.mp3
    320: 0.075272
    256: 0.121475
    224: 0.160858
    192: 0.193726
    160: 0.237717
    128: 0.308029
    112: 0.363953
     96: 0.409012
     80: 0.454941
     64: 0.578598
     56: 1.105850
     48: 1.081100
     40: 0.629898
     32: 1.223129

Here, we have a jump immediately after 320kbps, which shows that this file is true 320kbps.

When I compressed the song to 64kbps and then re-compressed it to 320kbps, I get this result:

    user@hostname:~/temp$ ./main.sh 36-reencoded.mp3 
    320: 0.146484
    256: 0.146484
    224: 0.146484
    192: 0.146484
    160: 0.146484
    128: 0.146957
    112: 0.178665
     96: 0.210373
     80: 0.175171
     64: 0.211609
     56: 1.054886
     48: 0.944687
     40: 0.505280
     32: 0.852020

As we can see, the most significant jump happens from 64kbps to 56kbps, which confirms that this file's true bitrate is indeed 64kbps.

Though, as sibling comment says, it's not confirmed that this kind of process works across encoders. I think that it should, because MP3 as a lossy codec mostly removes higher frequencies, and re-encoding compressed signal with same bitrate should remove less higher frequencies, because there are less to begin with. But I have no way to confirm - I'd need an array of encoders to actually verify this.

[0] https://xkcd.com/356/

bheadmasteron Ask HN: Determine sound quality of a file, objectively?

> I sometimes come across mp3 files with a high bitrate, but they sound bad which suggest that they were re-encoded from a bad/low-bitrate source.

You could try re-compressing the mp3 file to lower and lower bitrates and check the amplitude of differences. Since mp3 is a lossy codec, there will always be a slight difference, but you should see a sudden increase in difference when you surpass the "true" encoding bitrate.

You could probably write a script for it using ffmpeg and some other tools to generate a bitrate-difference chart.

bheadmasteron Trainwreck Design

In that case, you can use "-t ext4" (or whatever filesystem type you use) to show only disks formatted with this filesystem type.

On my machine, none of the snap/tmpfs/efivars stuff shows up:

    user@hostname:~$ df -ht ext4
    Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/sdc       1007G   49G  908G   6% /

bheadmasteron Trainwreck Design

If your disk is mounted at root ("/"), which is the case of most default distro installs, you can run "df -h /" to get only your disk info:

    user@hostname:~$ df -h /
    Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/sdc       1007G   49G  908G   6% /

bheadmasteron Grok-2 Beta Release

> By arguing that they weren't, what was left of your credibility for this argument has evaporated. My guess at this point is that you were probably one of the "moderation massagers" when this PR piece for Musk's Truth Social of chatbots was posted. You got irritated a little too quickly when I commented on the moderation.

You're attacking my credibility and character, instead of attacking my arguments. That's ad hominem.

> Further proof that this post was being PR-managed comes from the fact that my comment at the root of this thread was flagged many hours after the original post, maybe even a day later. Only someone who's keen on PR appearances would bother to do that, probably someone within the organization.

That's no proof of anything. Timing of the flags is random and depends on the attention of registered users. Your comment was flagged because you broke the rules [0] again:

    Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

An "evidence" is a fact that indicates that something is true. A comment that breaks the rules being flagged isn't evidence of anything. That line of reasoning is akin to attacking a police officer, then shouting "police brutality!" after they fight back. Yes, police brutality may exist, but it's not applicable to your particular situation.

Start following the rules, and then if you get flagged, your argument will make sense.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html