Definitely need to add a womp womp on a compile error
Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
221–230 of 336 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#222Yes! I wish there were better tools for getting sound out of the terminal. I got bored waiting for long running scripts to finish one day and wrote this bash one liner. Now I can run a command and put a pipe and the zzz alias on the end and it will tell me when it’s finished. > alias zzz='echo "zuhg zuhg\n" "work work\n" "lowk taar\n" "jobs done\n" "sawobu\n" "dabu\n" "i can do that\n" "be happy to\n" "OK\n" "no time…
Upvote for the excellent Wacraft II reference. Those are some of my favourite sound effects, and they are often quoted among my friends. Here's all of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gntGbsmTY_E
And don't forget the last track on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwWh1xy6gvU
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#223I've heard of using "Geiger counter allocators" -- custom allocators that make a small click whenever an allocation happens to get a sense of when a program is doing lots of allocations, especially lots of small allocs, as it's running.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#224I once had a very boring job with long compile times. I played a sound at the end of the build script, because otherwise I would just start goofing off and not doing anything.
(I quit shortly after that.)
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#225From [1] The story of PING: ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure. [1] https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~m…
Mac version, courtesy of chatGPT: stdbuf -oL ping news.ycombinator.com | grep --line-buffered -o "[0-9]* bytes" | xargs -I {} say "Ping {}"
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#226For long running scripts, I like to finish them With something like `say "wake up lazy bastard`.
My previous employer has a wiki full of procedure containing this kind of easter egg.
(I knew the founders and it made them laugh, so no issue there)
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#227A while back I prototyped (very roughly) an auditory equivalent to “syntax highlighting”, using ambient tones and white noise, rather than discrete beeps/sound effects. [1]
I’m actually revisiting this project right now! I’m reimplementing it in Rust and also exploring different ways to communicate parser state and other contextual information through sound.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#228This sounds like an idea borrowed from games or other media where doing certain actions results in an audible feedback. This is often done for the benefit of the audience, or to enhance the gaming experience, but I had an idea to implement this in my workspace to somehow influence my brain and make it more enticing to write code and somehow beat procrastination. I wrote a Python daemon which on startup loads small .w…
Count me in as interested!
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#229I configured Visual Studio to play sounds if a compilation succeeded or failed (to wake up if it's taking too long). I also configured it to play a sound if a breakpoint is hit (quite useful if you are debugging a game and some assert you don't care triggers)
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#230Continuous testing tools would make good use of audio. It's been a minute since I have been in need of such a tool, but I could appreciate differentiating sounds for passed/failed.