jkern's comments

On: Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the mo...

[jkern]

We're earthlings. Let's blow up earth things

On: Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

[jkern]

I enjoy Sonic Youth a fair bit, but in the majority of cases find Thurston Moore completely uncompelling as a singer.

[Modified3019 → jkern]

I’m the exact opposite, I find Kim absolutely grating a nerve in almost all the songs where she’s the primary singer. Thurston has a laid back sound that fits many of the tracks really well imo.

That said, I find I tend to either absolutely love or (more likely hate) their stuff in general. Not a big fan of random noise, though I can somewhat appreciate how the experimentation influenced others.

[Doctor_Fegg → jkern]

“Completely uncompelling” can be a virtue. One of the factors that makes New Order such a peerless band is Bernard Sumner’s unaffected, almost amateurish singing.

[nativespecies → jkern]

Some of the worst lyrics in the biz for sure

[OfSanguineFire → nativespecies]

The older I get, and the more my knowledge of poetry has expanded, the more turned off I am by the doggerel that most popular-music lyrics are. My rock listening is increasingly limited to shoegaze, a genre where the vocals get so submerged in the mix, you can’t even make out the words and nothing hinders you from enjoying the pure sound.

[art-not → OfSanguineFire]

I hate to give indie rock recos, but you may really like the album "Perfect from now on" by the band Built to Spill.

Here's lyrically one of my favourites from the album: https://genius.com/Built-to-spill-randy-described-eternity-l...

[OfSanguineFire → art-not]

I really appreciate your recommending me something. Often people might just bristle that I said anything negative about popular music (even if it’s purely a matter of my personal taste) and not even try to help me find something I might like.

That said, in your song, as remarkable as the first verse is (and it’s a great tune), the second verse is too close to pop tropes for me. FWIW, my favourite popular-music lyricist is Scott Walker, who I feel is fully a match for the 20th-century poets I enjoy, e.g. [0] [1]. Would love to find other similar lyricists.

[0] https://genius.com/Scott-walker-sunn-o-herod-2014-lyrics

[1] https://genius.com/Scott-walker-track-five-lyrics

[art-not → OfSanguineFire]

Wow those are incredible lyrics. Thank you for the recommendation. I'll be checking him out

I will say if 'pop' music has failed you, and you're largely into instrumental music, I can't recommend Dead can Dance enough. Specifically Serpent's egg if you never listened to them. They're largely 'instrumental'(the singer made up her own language). The only song with defining lyrics on the album I also think are super beautiful:

https://genius.com/Dead-can-dance-ullyses-lyrics

[OfSanguineFire → art-not]

I’m well familiar with DCD. I’m also aware that Brendan Perry’s lyrics of the 1980s are faux-profound and were created in a cloud of pot smoke. I suspect even he was eventually embarrassed at what he had written as a young man, as that material disappeared from concerts and he adapted a different lyrical approach for later efforts.

[art-not → OfSanguineFire]

Haha fair enough!

[justinator → nativespecies]

Teenage Riot is a masterpiece.

Looking for a ride to your secret location

Where the kids are setting up a free-speed nation for you

Got a foghorn and a drum and a hammer that's rockin'

And a cord and a pedal and a lock, that'll do me for now

[slibhb → jkern]

Same, but I like Kim Gordon's voice

[jkern → slibhb]

Totally agree. Kim's vocals are usually way more interesting

[danieldk → slibhb]

Lee songs are sparse, but also great!

[rufus_foreman → danieldk]

Love his singing on Dinosaur Jr's "Little Fury Things"

On: Roundup herbicide ingredient connected to epidemic...

[jkern]

Glyphosate is great for killing the invasive Tree of Heaven which is rampant in my area. Really the only time I've needed to use it personally

On: How Netflix uses Java

[jkern]

I'm not trying to be harsh, but it genuinely sounds like you have no idea what you're talking about

[kaba0 → jkern]

You can be harsh — it is pretty dumb to come here shitting on a whole platform, when they don’t even know the basics.

[oldnet → kaba0]

Tell me ... why it's only netflix what makes CPU go on max? Why netflix is giving me info message when I turn on VPN in the middle of movie? Why it's only netflix who stop working another second when my internet connection has quick failure?

Sorry but it seems that you have no idea how netflix really works.

[kaba0 → oldnet]

Do you even know what a frontend/client is vs a backend?

The frontend is anything but java (the website uses javascript, they have mobile apps, not sure what they are written in, but besides android having a few necessary wrappers, these are also not java applications).

You don’t see the backend and they do different things between different services so not much point in comparing them - that’s a huge, complex, partially cached-at-your-ISP even network infrastructure.

Besides, Java itself is very fast and is itself no reason for an applications’ (especially network-related) bad performance. It literally runs like half of the internet, with basically every other top 100 IT companies having business-critical infrastructure dependent on it.

[oldnet → kaba0]

BE doesn't need constant info about user if BE would be correctly written.

I never saw BE which sends so much requests to FE for user info. Someone just has no idea how to use Java without making CPU wild.

[frederikb → oldnet]

The point that the others are trying to make is that these questions are not relevant in the context of the backend technology choices. The REST or GraphQL endpoints could be handled by monkeys writing bits via typewriters and it wouldn't affect the CPU usage in your browser.

On: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

[jkern]

It really is jarring that this is about the actual justification for a war, and his response basically boils down to "well we don't know they haven't done it or if they might in the future".

On: The Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained

[jkern]

Bit of a Pyrrhic victory isn't it?

On: March 20 ChatGPT outage: Here’s what happened

[jkern]

Funnily enough I've had a very similar bug occur in an entirely separate redis library. It was a pretty troubling failure mode to suddenly start getting back unrelated data

On: Ask HN: Can I see your scripts?

[jkern]

I do a similar thing, except for making gifs:

    if [ -z $3 ] 
    then
        echo "usage: $0 file start_seconds duration [scale=600] [fps=15] [crop]"
        exit 1
    fi

    if [ -z $4 ]
    then
        SCALE=600
    else
        # w=iw/2:h=ih/2 half size
        SCALE="$4"
    fi

    if [ -z $5 ]
    then
        FPS=15
    else
        FPS=$5
    fi

    if [ -z $6 ]
    then 
        CROP="crop=iw:ih:0:0,"
    else
        # CROP="600:ih:250:0" full height
        CROP="setsar=1,crop=${6},"
    fi

    rm "${1}.gif" &> /dev/null

    ffmpeg -ss $2 -t $3 -i "$1" -vf  ${CROP}fps=${FPS},scale=${SCALE}:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen palette.png -loglevel error
    ffmpeg -ss $2 -t $3 -i "$1" -i palette.png -filter_complex "${CROP}fps=${FPS},scale=${SCALE}:-1:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse" "${1}.gif" -loglevel error

On: Ask HN: Can I see your scripts?

[jkern]

Ohhhh that's lovely

On: Ask HN: Can I see your scripts?

[jkern]

I'm not sure bashrc tweaks completely qualify but considering it involves probably the most convoluted shell script I've ever had to come up with I'll plug https://github.com/jkern888/bash-dir-collapse. I like having the current directory in my prompt but got annoyed at how long it could get so made this to shrink the overall length without completely sacrificing the full path