Hacker News Reader

jay-andersonon US government opens 22M acres of federal lands to solar

I'm not a fan this type of solar development. I live in Arizona and we've bulldozed plenty of the desert. There's lots of life and beauty worth preserving. Instead let's put solar panels on the huge, hot, mostly empty parking lots we're forced to have in the city. It is more expensive, but it can reuse some underutilized space and add some shade within the city. Or put it over agriculture on more rooftops or other similar spaces.

jay-andersonon YOYOZO: How I made a Playdate game in 39 KiB

My playdate arrived a few weeks ago. Lots of good fun little games. A lot of the catalog games look nice, but most are just outside of the impulse purchase to me.

jay-andersonon Praising children for effort rather than ability (2021)

I feel that teachers learning about how their interactions contribute to how young students think and feel about themselves and the subject is important. The teachers directly talking about 'growth mindset' to students seems to work against it. It makes me think of corporate speak. For example 'synergy' is worth thinking about (make sure we're working together effectively and similar), but the when we start talking about finding synergies or improving our synergy, eyes start rolling.

jay-andersonon Phoenix’s Rapid Growth Magnified Its Vulnerability to Heat

> A big goal of the city’s heat mitigation plan is to more than double the city’s tree cover from roughly 10% to 25% by 2030 by planting drought-resistant trees like elms, ashes, and Chinese pistaches, prioritizing historic neighborhoods in the urban core.

That's nice, but just on my street I've seen neighbors take down 3 trees over the past couple years without replacing them. Trees are expensive to trim and care for properly. I haven't heard of anything addressing that. The poorest neighborhoods have almost zero tree cover. The heat + water are and will become larger issues in Phoenix in the next few years and it feels like leadership isn't doing much. On the water front I've heard really interesting things that Las Vegas is doing that should be replicated here (reducing lawns and water waste - example article: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/las-vegas-decla...).

jay-andersonon American universities have an incentive to seem extortionate

I have a child starting college next year. One thing that surprised me is the number of extra fees. It very much reminded me of ticketmaster, comcast, or airbnb hidden fees. Adding them all up for starting next semester the fees are over $1000. This article does say 'tuition and fees' so it's probably taking this into account. Still it surprised me and feels like a pretty scummy practice.

jay-andersonon After the Lawn (2015)

I definitely agree that the advice is regional. I live in Arizona and I've been working to transform my backyard though some managed neglect with some success. The big thing for me was knowing what plants live in my yard: what to keep and what to remove. After killing the bermuda grass, I did get some nice volunteer sunflowers that I've encouraged to the point that we yearly get a good amount of them on our back porch (water settles in the area when it rains). I've added some globe mallow and other natives over time. I've also learned about all the different invasive weeds in my neighborhood (globe chamomile a.k.a stinknet is a plague). This past winter/spring I added more wildflower seeds which turned out pretty nice. I'm hoping over time I can get more native plants or at least more desirable plants to out-compete the less desirables so it gets easier to manage. In the end I think it's more work than a lawn and takes some education, but to me it's infinitely more interesting and enjoyable to work on.

jay-andersonon Using solar farms to generate fresh desert soil crust

This is very neat. I've heard of similar benefits to combining solar panels and agriculture.

I'm glad this is getting some attention. I live in the desert and often I hear from people who don't live here the sentiment that it's useless, dead land, but the opposite is true. The deserts in the southwest US are alive with all sorts of interesting and beautiful plants and animals.

jay-andersonon Noise2Music: Generating Music from Text Using Diffusion Models

I'd like to see something like this used to generate an instrument from text. I don't think the 30 second clips are passable quite yet (I do like the simlish-esque vocals though). But I could see this being able to generate wavetables (or other synthesis methods). Generating an instrument from a text description would be very neat. "scratchy violin", "distorted kazoo", "combo violin and slide whistle", etc. It could be an interesting starting point to play with.

jay-andersonon Effects on the lips of horn players seated too close to the timpani (2014)

When I was young taking horn lessons my teacher told me that being too close to the timpani can increase your chance to miss notes. This paper is useful in showing some evidence for that. This problem is more unique to the horn as its bell points backwards (and to the horn player's right side). From the audience and conductor's perspective (the house) the horns are usually center or on the left side (stage right) of the stage and the timpani are on the right (stage left) so it isn't an issue. However sometimes you show up and you're pointing right at the timpani or bass drum. I played in one group for a while that did that and it was very frustrating working with them to change it (it never happened). They squeezed us in so tight that it just didn't work well for the horns. To be effective the horn really needs some space and good surfaces behind to reflect the sound into the hall.

jay-andersonon Challenges with capturing and storing rainwater for drought in California

https://mead.uslakes.info/level.asp

Looking at past years it seems to usually go up a bit this time of year. It's going to take much more to get back up to levels of past years. 2019-2022 this time of year had a sharper increase than it has now.

jay-andersonon Show HN: Vim online editor using WebAssembly, storing files using IndexedDB

Pretty cool. There's a lot of vim nuances to implement. Everyone is going to have their subset that doesn't work quite right. In my short experimenting with it <shift> in command mode moves the caret up a line which is incorrect.

jay-andersonon Sierra Christmas Card 1986: A Computer Christmas

https://archive.org/details/sierra-christmas-card-1988 - It's on archive.org as well. When I tried it the music didn't work though.

jay-andersonon Strg.snek

I like it overall. That said there are some frustrating aspects of it. The green world is a warp maze with small entry points. That's where I quit. If I could slow it down I'd have a better time. I've never been good at quick reaction time games and this requires accuracy in getting into the warp doors and quickly re-orienting to the exit point. I'm sure others will enjoy this challenge.

jay-andersonon American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

We have bots scraping some of our pages at work. We've attempted to reach out but haven't received a response. We don't mind the bots so much themselves, but we want them to be well behaved. Currently they are making calls over and over again that return a 4xx response and are a significant portion of our traffic. We want to request that they stop making bad requests and slow down (we do have throttling in place, but this just gave them more errors to ignore and retry.).

I'd love for an open third-party like this one. It'd even help with prioritizing features that we're missing in our first-party products.

jay-andersonon The Subcontrabassoon Project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM3QaSqraPY - He has a nice little edited demo uploaded as well. I hope he's able to get the keywork going soon.

jay-andersonon Clap: The New Audio Plug-In Standard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_03JJ7Ca5g - This is a discussion on The Audio Programmer which give some examples and some motivations behind it.

jay-andersonon Horrible edge cases when dealing with music

Definitely. Pieces end up being listed something like "Symphony No.3, Mvt. II", but they only show the performer which is the orchestra playing rather than the composer so I have no idea which symphony it is. I haven't seen any service get classical music right.

I think your list is pretty good (composer/piece/orchestra/conductor/performers). It'd be nice to also have a field for the movement. Also I totally agree with custom sort order being a must. E.g. for choir pieces swap out 'orchestra' for 'choir', for piano pieces only include 'performer' field, concertos should have the 'soloist' before the orchestra, etc.

jay-andersonon First Raspberry Pi Powered Ultra-Small Form Factor Rugged for Defense, Aerospace

According to this page the 40 pin IO is available through a MIL-DTL-38999 connector. I've always liked those military connectors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Military_connector_specif...

jay-andersonon Canyon.mid

I've sung or hummed along to canyon.mid a time or two. We're good. The meaning of the word 'song' has expanded in popular usage. I play the horn (french horn) and I smile an nod when someone calls a clarinet a horn.

jay-andersonon Bespoke Synth 1.0 – open-source software modular synthesizer

Sunvox was my first thought as well. Watching the intro video it seems in bespoke the modules' internals are more visible. Though it's missing the sequencer portion compared with sunvox.

jay-andersonon My Life in E-Ink

What software do you use for reading and syncing with your BOOX?

jay-andersonon Draw an iceberg and see how it would float in water

One of the first things I did. I expected it to turn on its side. In general if you draw a triangle it will end up with one of the edges up.

jay-andersonon Fan Death

Italians have a similar superstition about being hit by gusts of wind, 'colpo d'aria'. Often sickness are attributed to it, but not death like this article.

jay-andersonon Who needs a case? The 3D Printed Mil-Plastic is here

Nice. It'd be fun to have a military connector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Military_connector_specif...

jay-andersonon Exciting Days for ARM Processors

I still have my sheevaplug. It was great to have a small self-contained computer at the time. The raspberry pi definitely fills that spot today, but it isn't a full self-contained package like the sheevaplug was (for the pi you need to figure out the case and power).

jay-andersonon The silence of the owls

Owls can make some noise when they want to as well. My grandparents had an old abandoned silo on their property that we knew some barn owls were roosting in. We went out at dusk to watch them. It was amazing how quiet and graceful they were. But they didn't like us being there and swooped down to yelled at us a few times. Since we didn't hear them coming and it was quiet out they took us by surprise and really made us jump.

It was also neat looking through their pellets at the bottom of the silo to see what bones were recognizable.

jay-andersonon Ubuntu Deepin Desktop Environment

I've used elementary os [1] in the past. This initially looks similar, but less polished. I hadn't heard of dde [2] before. It'd be nice to explain it on this page or provide a link.

[1] https://elementary.io/ [2] https://www.deepin.org/en/dde/

jay-andersonon A quiet roadside revolution is boosting wildflowers

When we bought our house it had a lawn in the backyard. I never really liked taking care of it. Last year I worked on getting rid of the bermuda grass in my back yard. This year I put out some wild flower seeds and watched what came up. I still worked on removing the plants I didn't want, but I let a lot of the weeds come up. Most of the seeds I put out didn't take, but that's fine. I got to know the natural plants that come up. Others look at it and see an unkempt yard, but it makes me much happier than my lawn ever did. It's green, it takes less water (zero) and if you watch closely there are more birds, bees, lady bugs, and others than I ever saw with the lawn.

Stories like this one of a more careful management of land make me hopeful. I'm working to get something better going with my little plot of land too.

jay-andersonon Key practices for achieving large professional goals

I worked with the author at a past company. He was an ideal coworker. He's an excellent communicator and was great at cutting through whatever else was going on to help us get the important things done. I'm happy to see his writing pop up here.