MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thisismytest | 2025-05-04 16:08:13+00:00
That’s just not true. Off the top of my head Lithium, Dumb, About A Girl have critical minor and major chords.

Also part of what made him so good was how he played vocal melody and rhythm off of chords. So in some songs you might have plain power chords but the melody hits important major or minor notes.

I don’t know what your definition for genius is but the guy wrote some of the best songs in human history and did so without a primary collaborator or big production crew of cowriters and collaborators. I think we can call him a genius.
by cue_the_strings | 2025-05-04 16:09:13+00:00
A common thing w/ Nirvana songs is that Kurt plays power chords, and then has the thirds (+ other tones) in the vocal melody.

But also, it was just a (counter-) cultural thing to feign lack of music theory knowledge or practice at the time. Quite a destructive one, I might add.

A nice video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWY4YYmSTWg
by tacker2000 | 2025-05-04 16:09:30+00:00
If you need to rewrite everything every 5 years then you are making the wrong technical decisions up front.

Choose boring tech that doesnt change since its already mature and battle tested and because it is not beholden to the whims of some VC money or whatever.

React itself (not Next.js) doesnt change a lot and will let you run your app for the next decade at least.

Same with any boring PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, dotnet framework out there.

You might need to upgrade versions, but there will very seldom be breaking changes whete you have yo rewrite a lot.
by kennyadam | 2025-05-04 16:09:45+00:00
Plenty of people still use mp3 files. It’s not representative of the average person, although the average person isn’t going to be using this tool, but the large(est?) music tracker still accepts uploads in flac and mp3 format, scene releases are in flac or mp3. For a broader example, when people want to rip music from YouTube, they google stuff like “youtube to mp3” and if you google “download youtube music” top results names like “convert youtube to mp3” and the results not including “mp3” in the title offer downloads in mp3 format. It may not be technically the best format, but my parents know what an mp3 is, they have no idea what aac is.
by serjester | 2025-05-04 16:10:17+00:00
I think this is part of a broader trend of geospatial data just becoming easier to work with. DuckDB is great for quick ad hoc stuff, but I find polars to be easier to maintain. Personally, I'm really excited for polars to (eventually) add true geospatial support. In the meantime, creating a custom h3 plugin only took a couple days and it simplified massive parts of our old geo pandas / duckdb code. The faster we can completely get rid of geo pandas, the better.

[1] https://github.com/Filimoa/polars-h3
Show HN: EZ-TRAK Satellite Hand Tracking Suite
by benbojangles | 2025-05-04 16:10:41+00:00
EZ-TRAK is a comprehensive satellite tracking suite designed for amateur radio operators, weather satellite enthusiasts, and educational purposes. The software interfaces with an EZ-TRAK BLE device which is mounted to a lightweight foldable portable satellite dish antenna to hand track satellites in real-time, providing azimuth and elevation data for optimal antenna positioning.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-05-04 16:11:03+00:00
>Where the responsible casual adult drug users at???

They are around you all the time, but they don't advertise because it isn't a personality defining hobby for them.

Regarding weed, I feel like it is still more common than not. Working professional that will have a gummy or toke in a social setting or after putting the kids down.
by kin | 2025-05-04 16:11:04+00:00
Same, any existing study I've read follows abuse-level or Chronic usage. Would love to know affects of recreational usage.

I'd imagine such a study would be quite difficult because so many things could affect your results: sleep, diet, age, alcohol, covid, etc.

I know nothing about this but I feel like the technology exists to scan your brain before and after to see neuron damage. I just want to know if a single use causes permanent brain damage and to what extent.
by jdiff | 2025-05-04 16:12:38+00:00
Both can be true. There can be nothing physically or metaphysically "special" about human cognition, and at the same time, we can also be very, very far away from creating even a holistic facsimile. We've got echoes of it in statistical, predictive models, though, and that's shoved the idea into the discourse far before its time.
by AdamH12113 | 2025-05-04 16:12:38+00:00
I think the GP is referring to manually operated elevators, in which a human inside the elevator pulls a lever to tell the elevator when to move. When I was a kid, my dad worked in a building with a semi-automated elevator that had floor buttons and an automatic return to the ground floor, but still had the lever. There was an operator inside on weekdays, but if you came in on the weekend you had to operate the elevator yourself.
by wyclif | 2025-05-04 16:13:00+00:00
It's because the fans who like Cobain's songs overpraise him or praise him in the wrong terms: "OMG Kurt Cobain is a genius songwriter."

I think, and as this post suggests, it's much more the case that "Kurt Cobain had very good instincts for someone completely untutored" which is a different thing altogether.
by ninkendo | 2025-05-04 16:13:30+00:00
I was responding to your second paragraph, where you talk about modern programs having to request memory from the OS with malloc and free. This isn’t true, malloc and free are not operating system concepts, they are ways for your program to divide up memory address space that is already mapped to you.

To bring this back to the SNES, you could totally use malloc and free on the SNES, but it would be just vending pointers to the address space you can already use. But my point is that this is no different from a modern OS, because malloc and free are just managing the address space you already got from the OS using mmap. And plenty of malloc implementations avoid repeated calls to mmap by mapping a large amount of space up front.

My point is, “having full access to the hardware” is completely orthogonal to whether malloc and free are a good idea. You can use malloc/free on a flat address space, just like you can use them on a big fat mmap() region. Instead, the reason you’d generally avoid malloc/free on SNES is that the amount of physical memory is so tiny that it’s generally a bad idea to do any dynamic memory management. Instead you want fixed regions representing in-game entities and logic, and the memory addresses you use should be managed manually in fixed size buffers.

(If you’re still not convinced, consider that malloc and free work just fine in DOS, where there’s also no virtual memory and you have total access to the physical memory space in your program. DOS doesn’t have mmap, and malloc implementations on DOS just stick to managing the flat, physical address space. No MMU or virtual memory needed.)
by yobid20 | 2025-05-04 16:13:51+00:00
So I was a heavy user. Every weekend, up to 5 pills a night, for years through college and into early 20s. This was back in the late 90s early 2000s. Now I am in my 40s. Top rated software engineer by my peers, sharp as hell, getting even sharper every year as my knowledge still grows, described as a true 10x expert engineer because of how much I do and code circles around everyone else. I am not saying this to brag. My point is simply that if there were some sort of permanant damaged cognitive effects, it never affected me like that. I never had any negative side effects ever. Or perhaps there was and I could have been the next Einstein but damaged myself to be where I am now. Guess I'll never know. I havent done again since I was around 22 or 23. It just stopped being enjoyable to me and everyone else I knew had already moved on past the party phase of their lives.

Also, a weird coindidence, during the heaviest usage phases, those were also my highest grades during college.

Do I regret using it so much? Not really. That was probably the happiest I've ever been in my entire life. I have very good memories , some of the best I've ever experienced. Often I think back I wish I could go back and do it again. Being an adult and getting old simply just sucks.
by palata | 2025-05-04 16:14:14+00:00
Were you born with the knowledge that a video takes more space than a photo that takes more space than a text?

Or is it rather that you consider yourself one of the few people smart enough to memorise it? I find that very condescending.

I don't believe that one needs 3 postdocs to understand it. In fact, I do happen to have explained it quite a few times, and I don't remember anyone not understanding it.
by dismalaf | 2025-05-04 16:15:27+00:00
"Portable" apps on Windows just don't write into the registry or save state in a system directory. They can still assume every Windows DLL since the beginning of time will be there.

Versus Linux where you have Gnome vs. KDE vs. Other and there's less emphasis on backwards compatibility and more on minimalism, so they need to package a lot more dependencies (potentially).

If you only install Gnome Flatpaks they end up smaller since they can share a bunch of components.
by crucialfelix | 2025-05-04 16:15:34+00:00
Just like many punks before him, he did know chords, but he wanted that classic punk naive sound and in interviews he claims he doesn't know anything. It's about moving up and down the neck and finding the sweet, sick and weird sounds.

I don't know why the article claims this was a Nirvana discovery. It started in the 70s. Discharge, Wire then Fugazi, Minor Threat. These people are smart, just raw, and they like blunt aesthetics.
by cue_the_strings | 2025-05-04 16:15:40+00:00
Yeah, that's definitely 'the' Kurt thing, vocal melody completing power chords.

I do hate how he (and the whole generation, and some of the punks before him + no wave crowd as well) pretended that they didn't know any music theory or practice at all. That was quite destructive for so many of us who aspired to play music in our teens, especially if you weren't exposed to music theory and practice in childhood through other means.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-05-04 16:16:07+00:00
Compensation packages are just that - a package. Complaining about one individual component in isolation is disingenuous.

Unions sent a couple of the big car makers into bankruptcy. They've sent all kinds of companies into bankruptcy - the idea that anything they are suggesting is good by nature is about the same as suggesting communism is good by nature. Sounds pleasant, doesn't work.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-04 16:16:18+00:00
His lifestyle - activism included - is a fantasy of pastoral individualism which is only possible because science and technology keep the lights on for everyone around him.

He still doesn't use a computer, and his wife still uses a typewriter to transcribe his rustic hand-hewn longhand.

But after that the words are typed into a computer by another assistant.

Would a return to small-scale farms and communities be a good thing? Of course. But he's blaming "lazy city folks" when the real culprits are corporate raiders and would-be plantation owners.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/2/20862854/wendell...
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-05-04 16:16:43+00:00
Another advantage of democracy is a source of popular legitimacy for the government, which helps prevent coups. Dictatorships struggle with this, and have to apply other countermeasures to prevent coups.

Unless a dictator is some kind of super-popular national hero or has managed to convince everyone that they have a divine right to rule, they depend on the support of a group of elites to maintain their power, and have no choice but to prevent other ambitious people from concentrating power themselves. This means that even in cases where the dictator happens to be wise, skillful, and benevolent, their regime will suffer from corruption and fragility, because they have to keep doing favors for their support group to keep them loyal or else risk a coup.

Being a dictator is a position that tends to invite well-grounded paranoia and suspicion, because you know that ambitious and bloodthirsty people want your job. So you need to keep files on people.

They can't defer too much independent authority to talented bureaucrats or military generals or private business leaders, at least not without some guarantees on their loyalty, or else they run the risk of those people attempting to seize power. They can mitigate this by developing a cult of personality, but that makes it impossible to gracefully admit mistakes, and in conflict with maintaining a free press.
by Ancapistani | 2025-05-04 16:16:57+00:00
The balance here is changing quickly with GenAI.

We’re already at the point where it’s trivial to set up a bot that examines PRs, reads the docs, and points out any inconsistencies or things that should be added. It’s not much more work to automate having the bot push docs to the PR, or to have it open a second PR specifically for the docs.

I’ve not tried to generate docs from scratch in a project with AI, but it is exceptionally good at reading, understanding, validating, and maintaining human-written docs.
by brudgers | 2025-05-04 16:17:48+00:00
The dongles are common because they predate widespread availability of bluetooth equipped laptops and desktops by about a decade…00’s versus 10’s.

Dongles are also plug and play (no pairing dance) and more readily support multiple devices on the same computer.

Bluetooth has gotten better over the years but it doesn’t provide a meaningfully better alternative for the it-aint-broke consumer mouse market.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-05-04 16:19:36+00:00
Like you say, trying to learn to do something in Asp.net core can feel like pulling teeth. I'm usually surprised to find there's a first party library that does what I need, yet I couldn't find it for hours.

I have complaints about Laravel, but I think it's a lot easier to find examples, and modern PHP has static typing improvements. But I would much rather use C#
by badsectoracula | 2025-05-04 16:19:59+00:00
The equivalent of "Windows portable apps" on Linux isn't flatpaks (these add a bunch of extra stuff and need some sort of support from the OS) but AppImages[0]. AppImages are still not 100% the same (and can never be as Windows applications can rely on A LOT more stuff to be there than Linux desktop apps) but functionally/UX-wise they're the closest: you download some program, chmod +x it and run it like any other binary you'd have on your PC.

Personally i vastly prefer AppImages to flatpaks (in fact i do not use flatpaks at all, i'd rather build the program from source - or not use it if the build process is too convoluted - instead).

[0] https://appimage.org/
by danlitt | 2025-05-04 16:22:27+00:00
I care! It is unnecessary complexity, and frankly ugly. If you can avoid repetition, then you should, even if the reason is not obvious.

To give you a concrete example, consider caching (or, equivalently, compiling) web pages. Maybe you have 100 articles, which share a common header and footer. If you make a change to the header, then all 100 articles have to be uncached/rebuilt. Why? Because somebody did not remove the duplication when they had the chance :-)
by asdf6969 | 2025-05-04 16:22:29+00:00
> explained you'd missed your flight because they gave you the wrong airport, and the airline would have rebooked you and everything would have been fine

Do you really believe this? There are a lot of bad airlines. Enough that a terrible airline is often the best option.

This usually just leads to getting dicked around for so long until you need to just do the original plan anyways. It only works if you have infinite time. Ideally he could just book a new flight and send them the bill
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-04 16:22:38+00:00
I think that populism has an element of "tear the system down", which is something that goes considerably further than the usual "throw those bums out".

When Biden ran against Trump, he tried to appeal to voters who were unhappy with Trump, but nobody called him a populist. He was just a normal politician. Trump isn't. Neither is Bernie Sanders.

How do you decide? I can't give you a clear answer there. Still, there is a difference. (Maybe "do they talk like a normal politician"?) Most out-of-office politicians are on the Biden side; only a few are on the Trump/Sanders side.
by techjamie | 2025-05-04 16:22:53+00:00
The funny thing about AI being used to write emails is that, in my opinion, writing emails is a terrible use for it. I've tried having it help me word things in emails because I tend to sound a bit stand-offish in writing, but getting the AI to help with that just tends to make me sound like some kind of pretentious HR manager, and nobody I'm emailing would believe I would write like that.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-04 16:24:07+00:00
Yeah, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face to other engineers.

It's like people just talk in memes or something.

This is how a lot of discourse feels these days. People living in very different realities.

Though in this case, seeing the most complex C++ app they've built would illuminate what's going on in theirs.
by photochemsyn | 2025-05-04 16:24:58+00:00
It's probably consumer-oriented social programming that's responsible - the ideology of 'more is better' is pretty baked-in these days. The entire business model of the recreational drug industry - both legal and illegal - is built around the heavy user, regardless of whether the substance is alcohol or amphetamine.

The amusing thing from the chemist's point of view is that the legal substances sold cheaply over-the-counter - ibuprofen, aspirin, etc. - or even the prescription antibiotics, which are not much more expensive - are not easier or harder to synthesize than the illegal drugs, from LSD to MDMA. Incidentally, a large proportion of what's clandestinely sold as MDMA is just some amphetamine derivative like Adderall, possibly blended with small amounts of fentanyl to create the 'happy glow' effect.

Literally the only reason there's a lot of money in the illegal drug business is that the drugs are illegal. This in turn generates associated profits in the private prison industry, as illegal industries are unregulated and typically use violence to enforce contractual agreements, instead of the courts.

Just legalize and educate - excessive drug and alcohol use destroys your mind and your body in exchange for fleeting pleasures, it's never a good idea.
by Demiurge | 2025-05-04 16:25:50+00:00
And ogr2ogr is also very helpful:

ogr2ogr -f "PostgreSQL" -t_srs "EPSG:2274" PG:"host=host user=user dbname=database password=trustno1 schemas=schema" shapefile.shp -nln new_name_for_table

I'll give DuckDB a shot and compare to postgis. Eventually, I think the issue for me would be that I use all the vector outputs via apps connecting to the same database.
by Mistletoe | 2025-05-04 16:26:31+00:00
We got an old landline big red phone and we had it for quite a while using Magic Jack. It was a fun anachronism to have and use and give out to friends as a number we will always hear if it rings. I'm going to get it again when we move in a few weeks to a new house. As my friend Nick described it when we got rid of it- "It feels like the world lost a bit of whimsy". The world we live in needs whimsy.

The Red Phone

https://www.amazon.com/Desk-Telephone-2500-Analog-Phone/dp/B...
by notahacker | 2025-05-04 16:26:55+00:00
Yeah. And if you did want to analyze it using classical western tonality, then taking into account vocal melodies, quite a lot of it sits better in minor...

Power chords were quite heavily used by some of the bands Kurt liked and were easy to play, hence the stuff that sounded good when he was noodling used a lot of that. Nirvana weren't innovators in tonality, but they had great crunchy guitar tone, catchy hooks and a singer with a raspy voice - exactly what you'd expect a band that didn't care about music theory to potentially excel at, and exactly what was needed to breaking the trend in layered reverbs and guitar hero solos of the 80s ...
by NobodyNada | 2025-05-04 16:27:51+00:00
The point is that "the system has only one program running at all times" is not an explanation for why there's no dynamic memory allocation, because modern operating systems use virtual memory to give the illusion of a flat address space that the program is in full control over. You can use the .data/.bss sections of an executable exactly as you would use memory in a SNES game.

And in fact, on many game consoles newer than the SNES (such as the PS1, N64, GC/Wii, DS/GBA, etc.) there's no operating system and the game is in full control of the hardware and games frequently and extensively use dynamic memory allocation. Whether you manage memory statically or dynamically & whether you have an operating system or not below your program are almost completely orthogonal.

Rather, the reason why SNES games don't use dynamic memory management is because it's impossible to do efficiently on the SNES's processor. Dynamic memory management requires working with pointers, and the 65816 is really bad at handling pointers for several reasons:

- Registers are 16 bits while (far) addresses are 24 bits, so pointers to anything besides "data in a specific ROM bank" are awkward and slow.

- There are only three general-purpose registers, so register pressure is extreme. You can store pointers in the direct page to alleviate this, but addressing modes relative to direct-page pointers are slow and extremely limited.

- There is no adder integrated into the address-generation unit. Instructions that access memory at an offset from a pointer have to spend an extra clock cycle or two going through the ALU.

- Stack operations are slow and limited, so parameter passing is a pain and local variables are non-existent.

All of these factors mean that idiomatic and efficient 65xx code uses static, global variables at fixed addresses for everything. When you need dynamism, you make an array and index into it instead of making general-purpose memory allocations.

But as you get into more modern 32- or 64-bit processors, this changes. You have more registers and better addressing modes, so the slowness and awkwardness of working with pointers is gone; and addresses are so long that instructions operating on static memory addresses are actually slower due to the increased code size. So, idiomatic code for modern processors is pointer-heavy and can benefit from dynamic memory allocation.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-04 16:28:09+00:00
But it ought to be reported, maybe not negatively, but at least skeptically. Representing the people against the elites almost always means destroying (to at least some degree) the system that has elevated those elites.

That may be needed, it may be justified, but we still need to ask what the replacement system is. It is easy to criticize, but harder to offer a better alternative. It is easy to destroy; hard to build. The populist's answer to what comes next often boils down to "trust me, bro" - there isn't a concrete, workable plan. As a result, the net result often winds up worse than what came before, not just for the elite, but even for the people the populist claimed to represent. This is true even if the populist was honest, that is, sincerely had the interest of the common people at heart.
by andybak | 2025-05-04 16:29:15+00:00
Arguably we tend to attempt to hear atonal music in a key (or temporal sequence of keys) despite it's attempt to avoid that.

I suspect something similar about bitonality. We hear one of the keys and then try and interpret the other notes in relation to that.

(warning. I am neither a music theorist or an expert in the psychology of music perception. But this is HN so yolo...)