Hacker News Reader

pierrecon Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display

The pattern in OP's project can be called phyllotaxis. This is supported by the link you provide which gives even looser examples that are still described as "exhibiting phyllotaxis". A lot of words refer to nature if you look into semantics, not surprising if you consider the amount of beautiful and useful patterns it gives us.

pierrecon Music Theory for Programmers

For metallophones used in Gamelan music, I don't think the key difference is emphasis on higher vs. lower overtones. Rather, their overtones don't follow the harmonic series but are still well-defined. Their tuning goes along with that, and it works given that particular non-harmonic timbre, but wouldn't work with western classical instruments, which tend to approximate the harmonic series in their overtones. In all cases the lower overtones remain the most audible and the most important ones for tuning and finding consonance.

pierrecon Fractal Jittered Voronoi Partitions

Interesting but I'm trying to imagine, what kind of features are we talking about here, leaves on the ground? Bumps on a terrain heightmap? Also do you mean one feature is placed in the center of each voronoi cell?

PS everything you've posted on HN seems "dead" until now, but I think your project TideGlass looks cool. A valid if niche way of turning realtime 3D art into a complete product, and the scenes look really well done. Would try it if I used MacOS.

pierrecon Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions

The links are cropped because they were copied from the "rendered" version of the original comment which you'll find by scrolling down the thread. Working links:

https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/Evidence/reports/BMed....

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-30583-2_...

pierrecon Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions

>Obviously not dispositive

You're too kind. The article is sloppily generated and is basically unchecked fiction presented as fact. It gives a few links and none of them support what it's saying. The "video version" of the article is even worse, it's a perfect example of the garbage that's currently filling up youtube: https://youtu.be/rmpbI4oMqwA

pierrecon Sperm Whales blow bubbles to achieve restful, vertical sleep

Yup, the old brap n' snap. Everyone who swims around whales knows and fears this.

pierrecon Blender 5.2 LTS

I also spent a while looking for non-video resources recently. This one is a couple of versions behind but I don't think it's outdated: https://studio.blender.org/training/blender-fundamentals-45-...

The official manual is more readable than you'd think. It actually switches back and forth between "tutorial" and "reference" style. The intro sections are often in tutorial style and the detailed sub-sections are more reference style. It worked well for me for intros to specific topics. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/index.html

pierrecon Hengefinder: Finding when the sun aligns with your street

Interesting, I've planned similar shots before and used different tools that serve a similar purpose. The Photographer’s Ephemeris has nice visualizations: https://photoephemeris.com/

NASA's Horizons ephemeris is also pretty good at preparing data for this. I've used it with a little script to check when the sun/moon will be in a given box. This hengefinder looks neat and really streamlined for its purpose though.

pierrecon Cannibalistic attacks between gray seals leave telltale “corkscrew” injuries

Oddly enough, I've seen a similar injury on a dolphin before. Well, the head was missing, but the cutoff point could be described as "corkscrew". None of us had a good idea of the cause, but this hints it may have been predation or scavenging.

pierrecon Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

Fair point, my (and many people's) point of view is very virtual instrument centric. I'd still say that better impulses would improve the tool for the potential luthier application.

pierrecon Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

In this area of research, there's this classic trap that many fall into (including myself, many times). You focus on modeling things like the vibrating string, the resonant body, etc. to perfection. But it still sounds, uh, not great, because the more important and difficult part is modeling detailed control and the human/instrument interface. Air fluctuations around the violin sound like a fun experiment, but I don't think you'll get much additional realism from that, compared to a simple/classical impulse response model.

Even in this case, they're choosing the easy path (plucked, pizzicato), but the human/instrument interface is still audibly oversimplified while the resonant body has an unnecessary amount of "realism". The sound of pizzicato has a distinct character because the player's finger/skin slides a bit on the string as they're plucking, among other factors, which sounds like it's missing here. This can be tricky to implement because it's not necessarily a one-way impulse. The string is already vibrating and affects the finger, hence "interface".

This applies 10x more with bowed strings.

pierrecon I gave every train in New York an instrument

The music all by itself is not particularly enjoyable here. What's great is the concept, execution, and the way data from an unlikely source is directly audible in the music. What defines art will always be fuzzy, but this particular work is a good example of art I can appreciate: presenting known things in an unusual way, playing with perception to create new connections between remote concepts, and sometimes providing a stepping stone to, as you say, enlightenment.

pierrecon Generative art over the years

Generative art inspired by Arabic art happens to be a rabbit hole I went down last year and still have my notes on. Research on the topic seems to have waxed and waned sufficiently long ago that the best resources I found have suffered from bit rot, thankfully much of it can still be accessed through the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140701114342/http://www.cgl.uw...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180426122308/http://www.wozzec...

Of course the topic is still alive to some extent, but the above 2 "dead" homepages remain some of the best entry points I've found overall.

pierrecon Lunar Flyby

They are not shy about publishing LRO data. It looks like this (one for each LRO camera, narrow angle then wide angle):

https://data.lroc.im-ldi.com/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR...

Feel free to assemble these into nice composites or 3D renders.

pierrecon Revision Demoparty 2026: Razor1911 [video]

The parts where it exits fullscreen and starts messing around with separate windows is really well done. In a way it's playing with the limits of what defines a demo (ie. the user's desktop is part of the performance), which is something I love to see. Same with the notepad animation part. I wonder if they implemented their own notepad-alike from scratch or it they used something like this: https://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Note...

pierrecon Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]

>they haven’t adjusted course to go round the far side of the moon yet

They did, 3 days ago! Maybe this is being pedantic (?) but the trans-lunar injection burn they did on April 2 put them on the complete trajectory including return to Earth. Though there are still possible correction burns that can be done to increase precision (the first 2 of these were already canceled).

pierrecon "Roadrunner": a bipedal, wheeled robot for multi-modal locomotion [video]

I could ask you the same question.

pierrecon How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]

Though since we can't really see 3D, we could never have that "one circle zooms in" effect.

Well, the 3D structure just needs to be sufficiently "holey" for the effect to become apparent. For example a cage-like structure, or a house with no roof (when seen from above).

pierrecon How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]

This kind of technique can be used in 3D space as well! The analysis here represents Escher's techniques as conformal maps in the complex plane. Conformal maps are also possible, though more limited, in R^3. This is something that I explored some years ago and wrote an article about it, though it focuses more on graphics than math: https://www.osar.fr/notes/logspherical/

pierrecon Chest Fridge (2009)

Now that is the coolest fridge I've ever seen. Found a video of it in action (yes, featuring the same dad joke all over the comments but that is not stopping me): https://youtu.be/RoGuvvzHY1A?t=416

That entire place is mind-bending.

pierrecon Building a TB-303 from Scratch

The plugin in that demo isn't by Jeskola, it's by HD (Haldreamer) who I believe is a Russian audio developer who made some nice Buzz plugins in the early 2000's. Source: I have it installed and I just checked the "about" box.

pierrecon Earth Garden: Field Recordings Around the World

If what you want is the sounds of nature around the world, I can't recommend Gordon Hampton's work enough!

pierrecon The Xkcd thing, now interactive

Come on, HN, you can't let this information stay under the front page for 13 hours and everyone's like "ah yes of course". Please don't register the mousemove event handler on window, that old school hack never really worked and was obsoleted 10 years ago when the pointer API became standard.

Things are much nicer now and the problem is entirely avoided by using pointer events: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/set...

pierrecon Elvish as She Is Spoke [pdf]

For some context, the author later became the language consultant for Rings of Power, therefore having to fill a very similar role to David Salo, whose work gets much critique in this essay. Makes you wonder if the ideal of "don't translate English to Elvish" was preserved when faced with the reality of the series production.

pierrecon The three year myth

I love this and will make it my motto. Scale yourself 100x every 3 years, or you're too slow. If I manage to keep it up roughly 11 years I will finally achieve planet scale.

pierrecon Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you

OK, I sent the email myself. You don't have to do it. Just once, not 5 times per day. Agree about community awareness, but I think emailing the mods is more effective than responding to one of the 1000 comments this account is making.

pierrecon Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you

I would suggest sending this as an email to the mods instead of a reply, what you're doing is practically a bug report to the bot owner right now. The resulting discussion isn't super interesting either (IMO).

pierrecon Why is the sky blue?

I thought the charming ambiguity came from "fried" either acting as an adjective or as a verb. These aren't just any shrimp, they're chef shrimp, and they've prepared some delicious fried rice for us. Isn't that incredible? Shrimp fried rice.

pierrecon JuiceSSH – Give me my pro features back

It shouldn't be problematic if the processor supports it well. For example modern Windows is always running as a VM and people are barely aware of that.

pierrecon Impeccable Style

I can confirm the broken UI. The demo container disappears as you scroll down, leaving a blank space that takes up most of the screen. I want to make a snarky joke about this but I'm just tired at this point.