HN user

kroger

873 karma

My name is Pedro Kroger and I'm a programmer, composer, professor, and entrepreneur. I'm the author of "Music for Geeks and Nerds". I blog about programming, Python, Lisp, and computer music at http://pedrokroger.net/

Posts28
Comments252
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www.youtube.com 2y ago

Rediscovering Ancient Greek Music: A performance reconstructs the past [video]

kroger
1pts0
www.youtube.com 2y ago

A Narrative History of BSD

kroger
2pts1
world.hey.com 4y ago

Rails 7 will have three great answers to JavaScript in 2021

kroger
9pts1
www.youtube.com 5y ago

The Musical Ruby

kroger
3pts1
robservatory.com 6y ago

Quickly create a nested folder structure via Terminal

kroger
3pts1
www.freebsdfoundation.org 6y ago

FreeBSD Toolchain Modernization

kroger
18pts0
marco.org 9y ago

Automatically test your database backups

kroger
2pts0
www.michaelwlucas.com 11y ago

Tarsnap Mastery

kroger
4pts2
pedrokroger.net 11y ago

PyCharm as the Ultimate Python Debugger

kroger
1pts0
pedrokroger.net 11y ago

Show HN: Modern Python Development with PyCharm

kroger
5pts1
pedrokroger.net 12y ago

Choosing the Best Python IDE

kroger
11pts6
pedrokroger.net 12y ago

How to Get Started with PyCharm and Have a Productive Python IDE

kroger
16pts6
pedrokroger.net 12y ago

How I Made $6,000 in 7 Days with my Ebook

kroger
75pts35
www.reddit.com 12y ago

Rolf Potts, author of Vagabounding is doing an IAmA

kroger
3pts0
www.youtube.com 12y ago

A pragmatic toolchain: TeX and friends and friends of friends [video]

kroger
1pts1
www.youtube.com 12y ago

APL demonstration 1975 [video]

kroger
3pts1
developer.apple.com 12y ago

Apple Developer Videos are Back Online

kroger
1pts1
developer.apple.com 13y ago

Apple Developer System Status

kroger
98pts67
pedrokroger.net 13y ago

How Does Pascal's Triangle Sound?

kroger
1pts0
www.youtube.com 13y ago

A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick

kroger
1pts0
pedrokroger.net 13y ago

Time Tracking for Founders

kroger
1pts0
pedrokroger.net 13y ago

Using Sphinx to Write Technical Books

kroger
2pts0
musicforgeeksandnerds.com 13y ago

Show HN: Music for Geeks and Nerds

kroger
221pts74
nepsweb.co.uk 14y ago

Fonts for Displaying Program Code in LATEX [pdf]

kroger
1pts0
www.youtube.com 15y ago

The Truth In Ad Sales

kroger
1pts0
sf.streetsblog.org 15y ago

Mapping Your City with Pictures Taken by Others

kroger
7pts0
blog.extracheese.org 16y ago

Python to Shell to Ruby

kroger
19pts12
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: ICFP Programming Contest begins tomorrow, are you going to participate?

kroger
7pts0
Sorting in Emacs 3 years ago

I found this on the Emacs Wiki [1]. It seems to work:

    (defun sort-symbols (reverse beg end)
      "Sort symbols in region alphabetically, in REVERSE if negative.
    See `sort-words'."
      (interactive "*P\nr")
      (sort-regexp-fields reverse "\\(\\sw\\|\\s_\\)+" "\\&" beg end))
[1]: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SortWords

Since we are celebrating 30 years of FreeBSD, I thought some people would be interested in this highly entertaining talk by Kirk McKusick.

I'm very excited about this direction (I'm no JavaScript expert, but I didn't like the huge node_modules directory). I think this is noteworthy:

"We've been running a version of HEY on this stack for a few weeks, and it's a peach (full report and rollout coming soon!). No separate watch process needed for builds, no wrestling with configs, instant reloads, none of the node tooling needed at all, with no overall loss of performance or capability. It's the best of all worlds – for us at Basecamp."

I didn't know much about it, so I googled a little bit:

Robert Strandh is also the author of McCLIM, the free implementation of the Common Lisp Interface Manager. [1]

I found this to be interesting: "So, one example that appears to baffle people is that SICL LOOP uses LOOP for its implementation. But there is no contradiction here, because the LOOP macroexpander runs at, well, macroexpansion time, which will happen in the host Common Lisp system during bootstrapping. After that, there is no trace of the LOOP macro." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8285747

[2] https://cliki.net/SICL

The Musical Ruby 5 years ago

It's an interesting presentation by Jan Krutisch at the 2019 European Ruby conference. He shows how to generate electronic music with pure Ruby.

There's a related web site [1] and all code is on GitHub [2]:

  - https://ruby-synth.fun
  - https://github.com/halfbyte/rubysynth

You can use different ways to enter pitch [0]. A common way is to use the "octave.pitch" format, such as 08.04, where 08 is the central octave (if I remember correctly) and 04 is the note E. It's common to use a score generator such as PythonScore [1, 2], and some people (myself included) like to use a regular programming language to generate the scores. I've used Common Lisp, Tcl, and Python in the past. Csound has a few frontends [3] that people may like. AFAIK, Csound can read notes from a MIDI keyboard as well.

[0] http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/PitchTop.html

[1] http://jacobjoaquin.github.io/csd/pysco.html

[2] http://write.flossmanuals.net/csound/methods-of-writing-csou...

[3] https://csound.com/frontends.html

EDIT: remove some repetition

I didn't know about:

    {A..C}{0..3}
"This sequence creates every combination of A to C and 0 to 3—i.e. A0, A1, A2, A3, B0, B1, etc."

And:

    echo {a..z..2}
    a c e g i k m o q s u w y
"The ..2 bit tells the expansion to only output every second letter."

Clicking on links in the terminal is a nice feature. If you press cmd + click it opens your browser or finder. I occasionally enjoy this convenience.

On Terminal.app you can cmd + double click to open a link on the browser. (it doesn't open a path on finder though)

I finally finished my book about PyCharm!

I'd like to offer 20% off for the next 36 hours for Hacker News readers. Use the discount code "HNEWS1" (without quotes).

I'll be around for the next few hours if you guys have questions.

He used troff:

"Real Unix books are written using troff and this book follows that time-honored tradition. Camera-ready copy of the book was produced by the author using the groff package written by James Clark. Many thanks to James Clark for providing this excellent system and for his rapid response to bug fixes. Perhaps someday I will really understand troff footer traps."

http://www.troff.org/pubs.html#apue

Wow, I'm surprised by some of the comments here and on SO. Talk about promoting diversity!

For people saying that programmers need to know English. I agree, I speak English as a second language myself. However, learning English is not easy for everybody as isn't learning programming. Some people find easier to learn something in their native language. They can learn English later. Also, you can be a good programmer without speaking English at all, provided you have access to learning material. (Naturally, speaking English will be a huge advantage)

In the 1600s you had to speak Italian fluently if you wanted to be a musician. Today you can learn the meaning of words like "forte" and "stringendo", without having to really speak Italian. Programming is pretty much the same; one can learn the meaning of things like "if" and "function" and learn the big concepts (abstraction, algorithms, etc) in their language.

EDIT: formatting

Do you have a link to you blog post? I'm super curious about your story. I can relate to you wanting to go back to Italy; it may not be the best place to have a startup (bureaucracy, etc) but it can be a fantastic place to live in! (I spend a couple of months in Italy every year, and I always can't wait to come back!)

As people mentioned, as an EU citizen, you can move to another European country (much easier than moving to the USA).

Since you are a student, you may want to enroll in the Erasmus Programme [1] and use it as a stepping stone.

Also, I'm curious to know where you are in Italy. Does it make sense to move to bigger cities like Milano or Roma? You'll have a better chance to meet like-minded people in a bigger city (for instance, there is a Python meetup in Milano [2]). If this makes sense, you may use this a stepping stone before moving abroad. (bigger cities are also good to meet people from other countries living in Italy, as they may help you with contacts, etc)

[1] http://www.erasmusprogramme.com [2] http://www.meetup.com/Python-Milano/events/160502642/