'My life was ruined by a typo' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39328853 <comment><USER3> I was recently hospitlized. The EMT took my id card and entered my name incorrectly (YUEK as opposed to YEUK). I told the nurse and she said there is nothing she can do about it until I check out the hospital.

I waited until I checked out the hospital, and the nurse took my information down. For my situation, I have to follow up with specialist. The clinic received my medical information and the referral from the hospital. The clinic also got the typo from the hospital, plus the wrong insurance information, as well as the wrong cell phone number. I was amazed at the wrong insurance (hospital gave them my dental insurance, but I received a notice from my health insurance regarding my hospital admission before I visited the clinic). How funny. When I went back to confirm my appointment a few days later, the clinic said no one correct my name (wtf?).

What a joke. While I was getting admitted into the hospital for a few nights, the nurses had to pair up in order to figure out how to enter data into the system. The program looks like Excel except it isn't. In some cases you have to enter the data in a different column, in some cases you have to enter 0, in some cases you leave it out. The nurses kept saying "oh I remember you have to do this to get around this issue, oh I think you can ignore this option."

When I met with the nurse practitioner the next day, he couldn't log into his system. I told him I work as a DevOps and he was curious about my role. Then he said he has to call the IT support (managed solution) somewhere in Tennessee and all the vendor would say is try again later). Yeah, after meeting 30 minutes he was able to login.

Here is the thing - typo can ruin life, typo can take away money and time for fixing error, can cause divorce and all sorts of other bad things. Insurance, Social Security, government IDs, Diploma, etc.

There is no reason, in my funny but pretty frustrating anecdote, for hospital to run so inefficient, relying on systems built by incompetent people, product dedicated by policy makers or administrators who really are out of touch with real life (they don't use the system).

You know, I am angry, I want to reform hospital software system.

<comment><USER4> I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered. I signed up with a new ISP a couple of years ago - one of the biggest ISPs in Australia, and during the phone conversation to set up my plan, the operator heard my first name wrong, substituting a 'v' with a 'b'. I didn't realise during the call (because, well, it IS hard to pick up that nuance audibly) until they sent me my sign on links which of course had the typo in my username. Billing information is also all wrong.

When I told them about it, their response was pretty much "Oh, too bad - <USER2> that username is created, it is there for life. You will have to shut down that account and create a new one", meaning I lose all the benefits I got from the promotional transfer.

So I just put up with a wrong first name whenever I sign on or ask for support from them. I still think it is strange that some second or third level support engineer can't just change that info in the database for me, after the proper authentication. I can't believe that something so easy to _create_ over the phone can be so hard to change over the phone.

<comment><USER5> If this is the type of error you want to minimize, NATO phonetic alphabet [1] is worth learning. (Amateur radio is a good place to practice, though I'll admit I'm a bit rusty.)

I actually kinda enjoy these minor discrepancies, because it exposes who has sold my customer data and to whom -- though I've never gone as far as giving anyone intentionally incorrect data with this purpose in mind. I remember my parents also being amused with these copied mistakes, and with greater frequency. Seems plausible that the error rate goes down when most of my utilities/accounts were self-created online instead of typed in from a handwritten form or during an onboarding phonecall.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet)

<comment><USER6> Even with a phonetic alphabet, you can still run into issues. Some people are just surprised when they hear it. "P for Papa" / "was that P as in Patrick?" Sigh... I'm seriously considering changing my surname to something that's trivial to understand in English.

<comment><USER7> Man, my surname is a basic color and people still get it wrong sometimes.

<comment><USER8> Well, #00ff00 could be difficult to dictate over the phone... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Classic Police.

Get the IP wrong. IP maps to one person's account. Arrest a different person at the same address. When asked, don't admit the reason for release until forced to do so many years later.

Mistakes happen, but this is brilliantly compounding incompetence.

Imagine a plane crash that goes: the left engine wasn't maintained, the pilot was drunk, and there was less fuel than there should have been.

If you look back at the event, you don't conclude that those things followed from each other. They're probably independent.

What that means is that less egregious failures are probably happening all the time.

In this case, it probably means that this police department routinely arrests the wrong person after finding out which account belongs to a suspect. It also means that they routinely deny information of their wrongdoing. And it probably unsurprisingly means that they typo things all the time.

I wonder what actions they took. It's not about firing people. It's about making sure policy doesn't lead to poor outcomes.

<comment><USER10> If they have to type the IP address by hand then he was probably not the only person who did time for a typo... Thank goodness they have ipv4 addresses, with ipv6 you would get more typos.

<comment><USER11> Overwhelming chances are that if you mistype an ipv6 address, it points to somewhere nonexistent. That sounds preferable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I read this bracing myself for the usual kafkaesque story of somebody jailed for months or years on a groundless charge, going through endless sloppy trials, hysterical sentencing, and the predictable tragic consequences on career, relations, together with the trauma and abuse of being jailed.

But this case happened in the UK, not the US. After he was "arrested" this man appears to have spent a grand total of three weeks "living with his mother". After these three weeks, his laptop was returned to him by the police and he had been cleared from all charges. However, he laments that "because of what happened" he's suffering of PTSD and he's unable to go back to work. That during the three weeks he was away, his younger son would cry. That the £60k compensation he received from the police for the mistake it's not enough, since he "didn't even get two and a half years' wage". That he hasn't had his day in court, and he needs the world to know he's not a paedophile. The events happened six years ago.

I might be underestimating the impact on one's life and mental health of this kind of things. But this story smells of trying to get a better deal or of some deeper personal issue.

<comment><USER13> When you work with troubled youth, an accusation of child pornography is almost as bad as it can possibly be. Since the police didn't give him an explanation for the mistake up front, I'm sure he lived under a cloud of suspicion after that, hence the concern about being alone with young women.

For 3 weeks everyone around you assumes you're guilty. How do you prove the absence of pornography in your life when the police have all your equipment?

Yes, it could have been much worse. No, I'm not shocked that it was devastating.

(Update: forgot to add, I imagine there's a very real fear during those three weeks that you'll be permanently separated from your children.)

<comment><USER12> Ok, but the police cleared him of the charges. Then he hired a solicitor and thanks to him the mistake was made clear, and he got a totally justified, and very handsome, compensation. One would think that this should be enough to put at rest any possible suspicion. Three weeks are not such a long ordeal, especially when you know from the start it's all a mistake.

<comment><USER14> If you pay any attention to the news, there's been numerous cases where innocent people spent years or even decades in jails before they were found not guilty.

<comment><USER15> I guess this is related to the thread where a bunch of HN users said they stopped reading news altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of Tuttle/Buttle mishap in Terry Gilliam's Brazil movie. Life imitates (dystopian) art.

<comment><USER17> Ha I came here to say this when there was only 1 comment on the page, and you beat me to it. Great movie... too bad we're actually living in it?

<comment><USER18> I posted the scene to a discussion of this elsewhere. From the no-knock warrant to mistaken identity to the bureaucratic nightmare to the utterly inadequate redress, Gilliam hit this square on the head.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE)

<comment><USER19> Terry Gilliam moved to England as an adult. England is _knee deep_ in bureaucratic stuff ups and Brazil was practically a documentary. All he did was change the scenery.

<comment><USER17> To be fair, he also added in a level of tube-based technology that was beyond what was available to consumers of the day. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Related story: The leak of John Podesta's (Hillary Clinton's campaign manager) emails was caused by their IT support person replying that a phishing email was 'legitimate' when intending to type 'illegitimate', a very serious typo!

<comment><USER21> So they claim. I don't think he would have used illegitimate in that context. He probably just said it was a typo to save face.

<comment><USER22> Oh, I can totally believe it was a typo. People who work on campaigns are constantly overworked and sleep-deprived like you wouldn't believe. So they make screw-ups like this all the time.

<comment><USER23> It depends upon what the meaning of the word _" was"_ was.

[https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0](https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> An interesting aspect of this story that nobody else picked up on:

> The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's > partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by > mistake.

So he himself wasn't even the owner of that account. He just happened to have been living in his partner's home. So, why specifically was he targeted even with the wrong IP?

Is this what law enforcement has become? Rounding up the first male of age in the vicinity of a crime? I'm just saying, not only did they have the wrong home but even then they had absolutely no basis even within that home (since obviously no evidence was found during the search), but his life was absolutely ruined.

<comment><USER25> This particular crime is overwhelmingly committed by men.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> >South Yorkshire Police were informed by colleagues in Hertfordshire that they had identified an IP address from which more than 100 indecent images of children had been shared in April that year. The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake.

Here's the reason, for anyone else having difficulty to find it.

<comment><USER27> The story needlessly confuses the issue of the wrong IP address with the fact that his _actual_ internet account was owned by his partner. The two have nothing to do with each other.

The real IP the police were after belonged to someone else living in a different house.

<comment><USER28> I believe he accused them of racism and sexism since he was raided by the police for being a suspected pedophile whereas his white female partner was not even investigated as a potential criminal.

<comment><USER29> I don't think there is any evidence of it being racist. It juts seems more like incompetence to me.

Him being male would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for men to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to suspect him more highly.

<comment><USER30> Him being black would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for black people to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to suspect him more highly.

This is why it's wrong to just blindly rely on statistics to tell you who to arrest. Prejudice has no place in law enforcement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> He received £60,000. Even adding one more zero wouldn't be enough in my opinion.

<comment><USER32> Hell yes. This makes my blood boil. Anything less than a _£6m payout_ would be too small.

It might actually put the police on notice as well, i.e. properly incentivise them to do higher quality work.

<comment><USER33> The police don't care what the taxpayers have to shell out, it just means sitting through some angry lectures but basically they are no worse. I think compensation for victims of police misconduct should come out of police pensions.

<comment><USER34> If police officers are liable to pay the victims, would anyone want to be a police officer, given their relatively low wages? In order to make them liable for such things, you would have to increase their wages _a lot_. I think one of the problems is that we expect a lot from the police, which we should, but then they are not paid nearly enough for that level of responsibility.

<comment><USER33> Conversely, why would I want anyone to be a police officer that had a problem with this? True, a police officer could be innocent and run into some problems anyway - which is the situation faced by everyone else. I'd certainly be in favor of raising pay if it attracted a higher calibre of applicant, but the pay shouldn't be so high that it becomes economically attractive to take risks with others' life and liberty.

Lots of police officers are reasonable people trying to do a difficult job with integrity. but the job also attracts a lot of bad people who exploit their authority abuse or kill people, and there are types of politician and voter who support that kind of behavior and choose to advance it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm sorry to say, but this is absolutely disgusting. How horrifying for that poor man. Hope he gets his fight back, there just needs to be more severe penalties for mistreatment like this. This is a totally different scenario but reminds me when police kill someone they think has a weapon but is just holding a toy, or when police kill someone that looks like a criminal they're looking for. The sad outcome is most of the time they get off scott free...

<comment><USER36> >there just needs to be more severe penalties for mistreatment like this.

So, what should these severe penalties be? When someone makes a data entry mistake that's corrected (as in this case), should they lose their job? Maybe be thrown in prison for a few years? I imagine dealing with programming errors like this would serve as some pretty effective encouragement for better practices. Of course, people might simply choose to avoid any actions that could result in errors.

<comment><USER37> In this case, the police refused to give him any information after the fact, forcing him to hire a lawyer. The police only apologised after a lawyer got involved, not after they realised that they had arrested the wrong man. Additionally only having an IP address to go on, they chose to arrest him (I'm assuming because he's a man) rather than the person whose name was on the account.

So, the penalty shouldn't be for a mistake. The penalty should be for trying to cover up the mistake over years, and for profiling him based on zero supporting evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> In Poland there were many people killed, potentially due to a coma (,). A court process of the pacification of Wujek [1] was mainly whether a response to question "Should we shoot?" was "No, wait for orders" or "Don't wait for orders" (in Polish less difference "Nie, czekajcie na razkaz" vs. "Nie czekajcie na rozkaz"). This was really a ruining life of many just by one coma.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek)

<comment><USER39> I'm learning polish and every sentence is basically one letter away from disaster.

<comment><USER40> Not sure if clever joke, or irony.

(The lower-case 'P' in Polish)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> With the going rate of accountability for these things I think he made out ok with 60k and an apology. Not that I want the deal, but with prosecutorial immunity, and innocent people getting nothing after decades in prison it's all relative.

</comment><comment><USER42> ... and somewhere out there is a lucky pedophile thinking 'my life was saved by a typo'.

Errors don't always mean the bad guy wins, however:

[http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-09-10/elise- okan...](http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-09-10/elise-okane-gets- saved-typo)

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of the story of a poor editor during Stalin's terror who was shot for omitting a letter : instead of 'commander in chief' he had a typo that read 'commander in shit' (главнокомандующий/гавнокомандующий)

</comment><comment><USER43> Only reading the headline was enough to remind me of Brazil[1]. The movie, while being based on the very premise of a typo ruining lifes, also has the most telling lines in it - the one everybody trying to rectifiy such an issue is bound to get told[2]:

      Mistake? We don't make mistakes!

[1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_\(1985_film\))

[2]: [https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k](https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k)

</comment><comment><USER44> What the article doesn't say (didn't watch any video, so kick me please if need be), is whether the police ever caught the guy they were actually looking for, at the _actual_ IP address.

<comment><USER45> This is a very good point. There seems to be no coverage of whether the actual perpetrator was ever caught.

We employ and compensate the police, admins and fund the judicial system, at least partly in order to serve as a deterrent to criminals. If our system has a high percentage of false positives or punishes innocent people then that reduces the efficacy of the system as a deterrent.

I'm reminded of this exchange between a journalist and a British justice minister where the minister seems incapable of understanding that punishing people who turned out to be innocent isn't an effective system.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> In France we have a ISP (Numericable) who had a shitty system to map the IP to the user. Each time the system didn't found the person, he didn't return an error but, someone, always the same dude. Poor dude… [https://www.cnil.fr/fr/avertissement-public-nc- numericable-p...](https://www.cnil.fr/fr/avertissement-public-nc-numericable- pour-erreur-dans-la-transmission-de-donnees-didentification-sur)

<comment><USER47> There are similar problems with geolocation databases:

[http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch- kansa...](http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> _Following Hertfordshire Police 's admission, Nigel sought compensation for a breach of the Data Protection Act 1998, false imprisonment, police assault/battery, and trespass by police...In October 2016, Hertfordshire Police settled out of court. Nigel received damages of £60,000, plus legal costs..."It isn't enough money," Nigel says, "but after six years of fighting, you're tired."_

That sucks, big time.

It is also true that combative lawsuits actually _increase_ the problem, making it more and more unlikely that anybody will voluntarily admit mistakes. So if you're some police clerk and you mis-type an IP address and somebody's life gets ruined, best circle the wagons and keep your mouth shut. Maybe -- maybe -- you could help the poor schmuck get exonerated, but you'd have to be really careful about how you do it.

I hate that, but that is how large systems of people operate. It quite quickly becomes "us versus them"

There's another aspect to this story that I don't think people discuss enough: for many topics, both law enforcement and the general public are either completely disinterested or want to burn you at the stake. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground or nuance.

Have a picture of child porn on your computer? There are folks who argue that not only should you be imprisoned, but that you should never be released. Are you 20 and dating a 17-year-old? People say that's the same thing. Are you a a teenager and send a naked picture of yourself to a friend? You could very well be a child pornographer.

This, by any definition of the word, is insane.

And it's worse than that. Sexual harassment is such a bad thing that for many folks, there doesn't even have to be any evidence of it. As long as one person says that another person sexually harassed them? Somebody needs to be fired. Somebody should go to jail. There are even those folks that based on a story that one person types on the internet will say "This other person? They're a sexual predator" \-- it's the grown-up version of kiddie porn. You're either completely innocent of everything or you're the fucking Evil One incarnate. Once again, insane.

I have no answers, but I do observe that when this type of over-reaction to any kind of perceived crime happens in a small village, it's not such a big deal. Some small social groups have social norms that vary quite a bit, and over time they influence one another. I am reminded that the Salem Witch trials ended when, in part, folks in the biggest nearby town asked something like "How could there be so many witches in Salem and none here? How does that make sense?"

What we're seeing now is a village-ization of the world. There are people who want only _one_ social group, across the planet, and they want it to have the same norms. That's fantastically fucked up, but I don't think the people doing it have any idea of that. Folks like Nigel are just collateral damage in this mission of theirs.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder where they got that IP address from.

Could this be another Freenet case?

</comment><comment><USER50> I can relate: a good part of my morning was ruined by typing "RAILS_ENv" instead of "RAILS_ENV"...

<comment><USER41> Someone's life is ruined, and he is shamed in the most unjust way possible, and in your mind it merits a coding joke?

Sorry, I just don't understand.

<comment><USER50> You're right, it was in really poor taste. I'm sorry. The downvotes are entirely justified.

(As a poor attempt at mitigation, I had literally just made that typo, which cost me about two hours because I'd run a lengthy migration on the wrong database in a staging environment and then not understood why nothing I tested was working, when I read the BBC News article... and, yes, I thought, "Hey, yeah, me too.")

<comment><USER41> Thank you for your honesty and reflection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> So not NATted IP? Not sure I understand how a typo in the IP could point to someone at the same residence.

And without excusing police conduct or eliding his real distress, I'd also point out that his life was perhaps also ruined by having a peadophile for a partner...

<comment><USER52> Sure, but it's always much more frustrating and disappointing when those tasked with protecting the innocent end up ruining innocent lives. In particular, it's frustrating that better auditing procedures and transparency would prevent things like this from happening.

It's also scary how, due to the persistence of (mis)information on the internet, it is possible to end up with (either undeserved or at least excessive) notoriety that follows you across the world with little chance of escape. Who the hell is going to hire someone when a google search of their name mentions that they were arrested on pedophilia charges? Never mind whether they were innocent.

[edit: as another poster pointed out, it seems his partner was not the pedophile, but rather that their shared IP address, which was registered to her, was the incorrectly entered value]

<comment><USER53> > better auditing procedures and transparency

Or using "Copy and Paste" rather than manually typing something.</comment></comment></comment>


What people said about the iPhone 9 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://garry.posterous.com/what-people-said-about-the-ipod-9-years-ago-w

<comment><USER3> Critique Steve what you will. Point out iPad's lacking features what you will... The point to learn from decades of digital naysayers who proved clueless is:

Predicting how people will use (and how many will buy) is _not_ as easy as it looks. No where as easy as Monday morning quarterbacking. And Apple/Steve certainly have no 100% track record. But they have batted >.500 - in a ballgame (CE & PCs) where batting >.300 is impressive.

<comment><USER4> Plus... it's naive (IMHO) to consider iPad 1.0 as a static target. With the Release Event behind them you can safely bet they are working on rounding out expanded features for iPad 1.x, 2.0, etc. And (reliable or not) as the following AppleInsider article suggests Apple has probably held back additional features and target audiences:

[http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/29/apple_to_targe...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/29/apple_to_target_ipad_at_business_users_through_new_features_sources.html)

If you try to predict the long-term success of iPad based on 1.0 you just don't get it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good idea: Comparing criticism at the iPad's introduction to criticism at the iPod's introduction

Bad idea: Cherry-picking quotes that are catchy at best, like those that complain that new product did not meet unfounded expectations

Worst idea: Saying iPhone instead of iPod.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah.... I submitted this on my iPhone. I'd edit it if I could.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't mind continuing to discuss the iPad, but really? We've had the exact same commentary posted in at least five different articles on HN. If we want to talk about the iPad, fine, but I don't see why there's a need to keep having articles referencing how much people hated the iPod when it came out. The points been made. We can criticize, condemn, laud, all we want, now we just have to sit back and see how it does.

</comment><comment><USER7> You probably mean "iPod" - not "iPhone".

Don't forget about the classic Slashdot commentary...

 _> >No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. _

[http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257#to...](http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257#topcomment)

</comment><comment><USER8> To be fair the iPod wasn't very good when it first came out. Criticism was warranted. Yes, it evolved to dominate the market, but that doesn't mean every new product that Apple comes out with will follow the exact same path of success.

<comment><USER9> Criticism is _always_ warranted.

The pitfall though, is that most geeks criticize the spec sheet. And in the case of the iPod and iPhone, the spec-list criticism --though still absolutely valid-- was wholly irrelevant.

It seems if Apple had held no event and released no videos, simply mailed out a PDF of specs and photos, 90% of the reaction to this device would be identical.

And it would be just as useful in determining whether users ultimately adopted the device or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Proof you can't listen to the commentators and the haters. You must continue to work on your product with extreme focus. It's easy to armchair criticize things, but hard to deliver. So... deliver._ \- golden words

</comment><comment><USER11> Just because some people on a forum laughed at the iPod when it launched doesn't make the iPad awesome.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hindsight is 20-20. I wonder how many on this forum would have said the same thing about iPod as these guys did.

I resisted the iPod b/c of it's closed system for many years. That's what I didn't like about it when it came out but eventually my resistance was eroded. I broke down and got one and haven't looked back.

Today Apple has become the dominant player in tech when they used to be a niche player. It still amazes me. There is no Pepsi to Apple's Coke. Google could be it but they seem to be wavering as of late, pun intended.

<comment><USER13> Think you are right there. The competition somehow get it soo wrong - <USER2> need to up their game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've seen variations of this article so many times, where are the counter examples? What were people saying about the Apple TV, Macbook Air or any other failure you can think of when it was first announced? The moral here isn't "The iPad will end up being good, too" as so many people I have seen take from it, just that it's hard to predict what will be a commercial success based on stats, or more frankly, how good it is.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Not sure why the Macbook Air is considered such a big failure. Do you have any data that supports this? I don't, but anecdotally they don't seem to be a major flop. We have a number of MBAs in our team, and everyone using them are very happy with them. They still seem to sell when I go into a Mac store.

<comment><USER14> I mentioned it only based on what I had heard from my own coworkers and such. Most of the data I'm looking up now show it being a moderate success commercially, albeit with declining profits. My point remains, though, as I don't think the majority of the comments made about it at the time of unveiling were predicting "moderate success".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wait...

1\. Copy/paste text from forums

2\. Post to blog

3\. Profit???

<comment><USER16> You forgot step 0:

0\. Invent an enormous blogging platform and be an all-around cool guy

Garry links frequently get my auto-upvote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> People said it was just another uninteresting mp3 player. They were right, no?

Didn't the iPod rise to market leader have far more to do with marketing than any performance merit?

<comment><USER18> No, it became the market leader by ignoring the feature race and creating a device that was usable by "normal people." It wasn't the samllest, or the biggest screen, or the most storage, but Apple grew the market to include everyone, not just gadget freaks.

The clickwheel and iTunes sofware were part of the equation, and the iTunes store was the other. If I had told you nine years ago that your nontechnical family members would soon be downloading music from the internet and playing it on their portable device, would you have believed it? Would any amount of marking have gotten them to use a Diamond Rio and MusicMatch?

<comment><USER17> > usable by "normal people."

I haven't owned an iPod, but I remember setting a couple up for my family on a PC. It was _NOT_ some cakewalk. I hit problems and syncing later broke.

There was never anything notably usable about the ipod vs. competing models, especially those with the "drop the mp3 files on the usb drive" approach.</comment></comment></comment>


Wunderlist Is Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.wunderlist.com/blog/join-us-on-our-new-journey/ <comment><USER2> What a shame. But I really appreciated (and was shocked by) how long they kept it maintained after acquisition, and I'm finding Microsoft To-Do a comfortable equivalent so far.</comment>


MetaMask's Vision for Multiple Network Support - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/metamask/metamasks-vision-for-multiple-network-support-4ffbee9ec64d <comment><USER2> Why publish on Medium when they could publish somewhere more crypto-friendly such as Steemit? Or even make their own blog? Is a Chrome Browser extension really how you want to be managing your money?</comment>


Ask HN: Delicious alternative with tag suggestions? - <AUTHOR>

I've used delicious to store my bookmarks for a long time simply because it has great tag suggestion.  They seem to be crowdsourcing the suggestions.<p>Since the redesign they've gotten less and less stable, and I'm just about fed up.  Anyone know of any really good alternatives?  I really want kippt to work, but the lists functionality isn't flexible enough. <comment><USER2> pinboard.in - Give it a try.

<comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://pinboard.in/>

Extremely fast and reliable, no ads, & indexes full text of your bookmarks for search. Highly recommended & absolutely worth paying for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is also <http://linksandi.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Corporate Spies Are Watching Organized Labor - <AUTHOR> https://truthout.org/articles/corporate-spies-are-watching-organized-labor/ <comment><USER2> OK, unpopular opinion follows, bring the downvotes.

1) All of my experiences related to unions have been negative. Things become more bureaucratic and inefficient ("oh no, you can't move that box, we need to wait for the union person whose job description is to move the box"), people are promoted because of seniority and not because of merit, bad performers up to and including flagrant criminals can't be fired because the union would rally to support them no matter how in the wrong they are, etc.

2) FAANG-type jobs have to be the cushiest jobs around. I mean, look at [http://levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi). Who else gets paid that kind of money right out of college, for doing a very comfortable office job, with a ton of perks on top?

I get that unions might be necessary in industries where workers are actually exploited, to protect said workers. But FAANG engineers are pretty much in the opposite situation. I don't like people creating an us-vs-them situation that doesn't exist, just so they can promote their own politics. As I commented recently, if you don't like it, quit ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21636860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21636860)), and let the people who go to work to, you know, do work, do it in peace.

<comment><USER3> > All of my experiences related to unions have been negative.

Except the 8 hour work-day and weekends, I guess? [https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2015/sep...](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2015/sep/09/viral-image/does-8-hour-day-and-40-hour-come- henry-ford-or-lab/)

<comment><USER2> That was in 1938. The status quo is different today, so that doesn't really apply.

<comment> mind-blight One of the biggest employee complaints at almost every tech company I've worked at is a lack of work life balance. Most of my friends who still work in the bay struggle with having a life outside of work. Wanting to work 40 hours a week can be seen as not being dedicated enough, or not being a cultural fit.

I think that's one of the most relevant needs that would drive tech workers to form a union.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Counter to what you see touted on this website, unions are not solely about securing additional material benefits for workers. They are and have always been about changing workplaces from top-down, authoritarian models to ones where workers have a say in their company's work and overall direction. They're about acknowledging that none of these structures function or accomplish anything without labor and shifting their relations of power to reflect this reality.

So while some tech jobs might be quite cushy, I've yet to see any rational or coherent defense of why these (or any) companies should function like dictatorships. It would seems that increasingly, more and more tech workers share this perspective.

<comment><USER2> I've yet to see any rational or coherent defense of why these (or any) companies should function like democracies.

Company X offers to pay me to do job Y. My two options, as I see it, are taking the job and doing Y, or refusing to do Y and therefore not taking the job. I don't understand the logic of _" I'll take the job but then refuse to do Y",_ except if I assume ill-intent from the person taking the job.

<comment><USER4> The broader condition of wage-labor is (in the absence of unions) of course though that you agree to some form of top-down power relation or starve and die. Unions contest this broader premise as opposed to your specific one.

<comment><USER2> > or starve and die

I reject your strawman argument. FAANG engineers will hardly starve and die if they choose to work somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And network analysis enables them to spot the early stages of organizations forming, and their "trajectory", and potentially to intervene to ensure they don't gain traction and get to a critical stage where they are highly likely to go "mainstream".

I did have links to a couple of papers describing this, but misplaced them, and google isn't forthcoming...

<comment><USER6> It's true, but I wonder if the way employees organize themselves will transform in such a way to make graph analysis less useful - similarly to how recent protests seem to work. From what I've read about Occupy protests, the Yellow Vests, and now Hong Kong protesters, they're all spontaneous and decentralized. Instead of an individual or a small group of leaders energizing the movement, there's something of a shared idea (a meme, if you like) flowing through the network, and once it crosses a threshold, you suddenly have thousands of people protesting.

(This immediately suggests a strategy to combat such organization: instead of trying to find out who the leaders are - which will fail, because there are none - one should focus on misinformation to create enough doubt and noise that the threshold for spontaneous organization isn't crossed.)

<comment><USER7> Have the yellow vests achieved anything?

Not that that protests have to achieve major results. Sometimes the main thing is to get exposure so that powers that be realize there is foment that needs addressing (in a positive way, not in a crackdown way).

<comment><USER8> > _Have the yellow vests achieved anything?_

Yes. Quite a lot. The leadership went from not acknowledging their protests, talking down on them and promising to go on with all the reforms, to want to talk, and taking down certain parts of the laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anybody who's serious about labor organization needs better opsec. Don't talk union on the job. Don't use company equipment to schedule meetings. Don't meet in large groups. Don't post on publicly accessible/searchable networks. Adopt a cell structure.

Management should not know workers are talking union until the workers are organized and on strike. Fuck Taft-Hartley and the NLRB.

</comment><comment><USER10> > They're part of a three-member Republican cabal

Whatever the merits of the article I have a hard time taking it seriously with this kind of language. If this kind of language were used in the other direction the author would immediately be labeled a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist.

<comment><USER11> Is it the cabal label that bothers you? For context, the sentence before:

> Ring and Kaplan want to reconsider the longtime ban on labor spying. It's a > sleazy idea, but typical for these two.

So they are working together, and perhaps "cabal" is too colorful of a term, as it also implies doing it in secret. It would appear they're quite open about it.

<comment><USER12> What bothers me is the entire framing, that they're agents working in service to corporate overlords rather than honest people making the decisions they think are right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Labor organization will always fight an uphill battle without parallel communication infrastructure.

I've been curious whether there could be a niche for cobbling together a dedicated network infrastructure for organizing labor. It'd likely be legally fraught, and constantly under siege; but I figure it could be done.

Tenant based encrypted-at-rest data of chat content and schedules. An onboarding knowledgebase mechanism. These are solved problems. The biggest issue would seem to be screening people for trust to keep the Union's affairs from just finding their way back to management or having someone plant proprietary info to end up blowing the entire thing up via eDiscovery and lawsuits.

It's funny how technology seems particularly useless at solving social problems and usually just serves to exacerbate them.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think unions have been pretty poor at using technology to circumvent corporate spying and interference. If the employer is frustrating attempts by employees to meet and discuss issues, then they should be able to take their discussions online.

An online forum managed by the union is all that would be needed. But crucially, the union would need to be smart about who they give access to and also have good security people analysing usage/IP addresses and the like. Also make users agree to a declaration that they are legitimate users before granting access. If company spy does get access the union should send lawyers after them for accessing a computer system without permission. Of course it wouldn't be perfect, stuff will leak - but it would be a lot more secure that discussing union issues on company premises and on company equipment.

Maybe I'm looking at the issue too simplistically, but I find it odd that in this day and age unions still try to organise and discuss things the way they did decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER15> Another sign that we're in a new Gild Age?

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age)

</comment><comment><USER16> Unions recruit at work.

</comment><comment><USER17> Do know evil.</comment>


I was about to make a note on my iPhone - <AUTHOR>

I was about to make a note on my iPhone. Then I realized, that as a Canadian citizen, the NSA would be immediately analyzing the contents of my note and likely reporting back to CSIS its subversive nature.
A few days ago this would have seemed like paranoid delusion. In the past week we have realized how far the tentacles reach, and we must now reconsider our choices of technology. Amazing that a note I write on my phone is considered fair game for foreign spy agencies.
I had always assumed that Skype messages were recorded, even before 2011. I had always assumed that email was read. There is a huge difference between assuming something is happening and knowing that the very worst of those are true. <comment><USER2> If you make a note on your iPhone using, say, Evernote or send a handwritten mail using Bubbles (Example on the footnote [1]) then for sure your context cannot be parsed/processed by NSA/MITM no matter what. Not certainly without a powerful and adaptive OCR.

[1] [https://bubbleideas.com/letters/the-tiger-by-sir-william- bla...](https://bubbleideas.com/letters/the-tiger-by-sir-william-blake) (Observe that the handwritten poetry are free paths and it could have very well been written in another language or signs.)

Disclosure: I am one of the guys behind Bubbles.</comment>


With Medical Bills Skyrocketing, More Hospitals Are Suing for Payment - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/us/hospitals-lawsuits-medical-debt.html <comment><USER2> In some ways, this might turn in to a good thing.

Don't get me wrong, it's a terrible thing for all of the people involved.

But, I'm going to put on my 'perennial optimist' hat -- a hat which I _very rarely_ wear, mind you -- and try to find the potential for a good _end_ to this story.

See, outside of medicine, you generally can't make people pay for stuff unless they agreed to do so -- and almost always, you have to document the cost up front.

Have you ever been to the auto mechanic? You know how they give you paperwork up front with estimated prices? Turns out that they have to do that -- and get your consent for any price increase _before_ they do any extra work if they want to be guaranteed that they'll be able to make you pay.

Turns out, the law works that way for just about everything except healthcare -- where, of course, you can get bills after-the-fact from doctors that you have no business relationship with whatsoever, that you've never met, and had no way of knowing about.

So, maybe in the long run, courts will start to apply the same common doctrines that cover every other kind of commercial transaction to some of the more egregious of these suits (at which point that'll become the precedent, and the practice of making up prices after-the-fact based on what they think they can extort out of you will have to end.</comment>


Running Linux apps on Windows using andLinux - <AUTHOR> http://www.andlinux.org/ <comment><USER2> What is the difference between andLinux and coLinux?

<http://www.colinux.org/>

<http://www.andlinux.org/>

They seem to have similar logos and website...

<comment><USER3> My understanding is coLinux is just the kernel recompiled as a Windows executable while andLinux includes a Xserver to run GUIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want to try this, but the download won't start for me. I'm skeptical about running a distro that can't even put up a good server!</comment>


Sandboxed applications for Gnome, part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/07/23/sandboxed-applications-for-gnome-part-2/

<comment> TD-Linux I can't seem to comment on that blog, so I'll write my comment here.

I think this is absolutely a wonderful idea in general and needs to happen soon. Once any program a Linux user is running is compromised, essentially the whole machine is compromised. This is quite unfortunate.

My main complaint is the file chooser dialog. I would much rather see a traditional file chooser - the arguments given for reinventing it don't hold up. You can pass file descriptors between processes. If you want to select a "cloud file", use fuse with some pretty integration, which is just how GNOME 3 does it right now.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is mobile app cargo culting. Running untrusted code on your phone is not a good model for desktop software, particularly in UNIX.

<comment><USER3> Where in the article does it advocate running untrusted code?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Absolutely horrible idea. Linux users aren't exactly in desperate need of protection from their computers.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, you run as root at all times? :)

<comment><USER4> Yes? In fact I hate getting prompted for privileges/passwords/etc. I don't run antimalware either, neither on Linux nor Windows (permanent admin there too). I know what I'm doing when I'm working on the computer and I haven't gotten malware in years.

<comment><USER3> Even if you know what you're doing, do you know what your computer is doing? In detail?

I have only the most general of ideas of what my computer is doing at any one time. I know that the software I was using one year ago was riddled with vulnerabilities that were undetected at the time. It seems foolish to assume that the software I'm using now doesn't have similar issues.

I personally welcome anything that lowers my security risk. Sandboxing applications seems a fantastic idea, if it can be done without unduly affecting my workflow.

<comment><USER4> > Even if you know what you're doing, do you know what your computer is doing? > In detail?

It's just like a car. You don't have to know how your car's engine works to be able to tell tell when your car isn't running like it's supposed to. As for my computer, I know it in as much detail as I think is necessary for telling whether or not the computer is "healthy", so yes. (See my response to the other comment for more.)

<comment><USER3> Your computer can be compromised without demonstrating any visible signs of it. For example, a keylogging process takes minimal CPU and bandwidth (especially if zipped and batched), and could be inserted by an unknown zero- day vulnerability. It _might_ be caught by a IDS, but the long and short of it is that there's simply no way of telling for sure whether or not a machine has been compromised or not.

Security isn't an absolute; it's just a matter of how much risk you're willing to allow for convenience. Ideally you make it hard enough to compromise your machine that an attacker won't bother.

<comment><USER4> > Your computer can be compromised without demonstrating any visible signs of > it.

Yours can too. How do you know yours isn't?

<comment><USER3> I don't. Absolute security is impossible, all I can do is take precautions that minimise the risk. That's why sandboxing of apps seems a rather good idea: it reduces the risk without adding much inconvenience to the user.

<comment><USER4> > I don't. Absolute security is impossible

Yeah then why do you suddenly jump when I tell you the same thing? To the best of my knowledge I don't have any malware, and to the best of your knowledge you don't either. Seems pretty equal to me, yet somehow you freak out when I say the same thing as you do. I'm pretty sure I'm _at least as certain as you are_ that my system doesn't have any malware, so if that's not enough of an assurance for you then it shouldn't be enough for you either.

<comment><USER3> Because regarding the sandboxing of applications, you said:

> Absolutely horrible idea. Linux users aren't exactly in desperate need of > protection from their computers.

If you agree that your system can be compromised, why would you say that an extra layer of protection was a bad idea?

<comment><USER4> Because I'm almost certain that it will cause some kind of inconvenience down the road. It's unlikely to be "free" \-- no OS-level security feature I've seen has been "free" in terms of convenience.

<comment><USER3> Just off the top of my head, hard drive encryption is an OS-level security feature that's reasonably "free" in terms of convenience.

But even if all previous efforts have failed, which I really don't think is the case, trying to improve security is surely a laudable goal. And even if _you_ would consider sandboxing to be inconvenient, there are plenty of people who'd love to have something like that.

Right now, if I open up an application, I have no idea what directories it's accessing or servers its communicating with. Forcing an app to tell me whenever it wants to access something new would be fantastic, and as a side effect, it would put pressure on application programmers to reduce the number of privileges they ask for.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Thankbox – collect messages and cash for team occasions - <AUTHOR> https://thankbox.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

Thankbox is idea I started working on last year but had to park due to other commitments. At the start of March, when I realized that everyone is going to be working remotely, I decided to dedicate to it completely and get it out for teams to use.

The idea is super simple - it's a better, online alternative to the paper card + envelope collection that you'd have for a team member occasion. It's also great for remote groups of friends.

In 2 minutes you create a Thankbox for someone, share a link to your team to add messages, gifs & (optional) money contributions. Once it's done you pop in the recipients email and they get a secure link where they can see all the messages and claim any money as a gift card to whatever merchant they want.

On a technical note, this product has forced me to learn frontend coding, as I've been a pure native mobile engineer for ages. I've done this all in Vue.js (with Laravel in the backend) and have been having _so much_ fun. Definitely more enjoyable than working on apps - the iteration cycle alone is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hey - this looks awesome, especially now that more folk are having to embrace remote working - definitely going to be trying it out. And welcome to the frontend ;-)

One thing that often happens when folk move on is that they pass out their contact details - usually email address to enable people to keep in touch with them - does thankbox allow the recipient to send a message to all those that contributed? This would allow them to express thanks (should they want to!) and possibly share contact details.

<comment><AUTHOR> >And welcome to the frontend Thanks! I can't believe it took me so long to embrace it haha.

Yeah, so anyone that adds a message to a Thankbox can leave their email in order to get a link to edit their message before the box is sent. This is optional - I really only aim to collect data that's necessary.

I'm currently working on a feature to allow the recipient to respond to everyone who contributed (if they left their email) which I think would address what you mention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was invited by a friend to contribute to a birthday card on it and loved the experience. Great job, will use this in the future!

</comment><comment> joe-pritchard Looks great, we'll definitely take a look for our next birthday! Will it be subscription based for teams or priced per contribution?</comment>


CRUD: Node vs. Rails - <AUTHOR>

If one is building a CRUD/BASE website to be used on both mobile and desktop browsers, which would be the best framework to use on the server side, Rails or Node?
I'm building the site to serve a niche segment of the social dating marketplace.  It will be profiles, email, a lot of uploading and viewing of pictures.  I want my users to primarily access the site through mobile devices but there will be a desktop version as a fall-back.  The major sites in this space have a lot of customers but don't seem to be keeping up with the times.  Go to any of them and you'll think you've gone back in time seven years.  They've also all been very slow to get on the mobile bandwagon.  As for me, up until three years ago I was a web developer.  I'd started out as a Unix sys-admin before moving on to web development with ColdFusion and then ASP.NET (I hate Microsoft technologies but that's what my company used.).  I learned just enough JavaScript to get by.  More recently I've read the "pickaxe" book and a couple of Ruby books and I must say I like Ruby a lot.
My biggest concern is that speed, which has never been Rails's strong suit, is critical for mobile users.  My thought was that even if Node wasn't built with CRUD/BASE apps in mind, if you can still create such apps with Node, why not use it and eliminate that worry right off the bat?  Second, both Rails and Node will have steep learning curves.  If I'm going to invest a lot of time in learning a framework, why not learn Node and get in near the "ground floor?"  Knowing it will also give me the flexibility in the future to build real-time social apps that RoR isn't suited for.
Ruby/Rails Pros: - More mature technology - Great community - Faster development time due to "convention over configuration" - A lot of books, blogs, etc. on Ruby on Rails - I like Ruby
Ruby on Rails Cons: - Blocked threads and GC can impact performance and require more infrastructure (= more $) - Less flexibility due to "convention over configuration" - Configuring servers appears to be challenging at times
Node Pros: - Performance shouldn't be an issue - One language (JavaScript) on both client and server - Growing and enthusiastic community
Node Cons: - Better suited for real-time apps that require a persistent browser/server connection than for CRUD apps - Event-based will require learning curve - Not 1.0 yet so libraries, etc. will be changing a lot - Frameworks (like Express) are less mature than Rails - Less documentation and just a couple of books (more coming) - I don't hate JavaScript but it seems somewhat "ugly" compared to Ruby <comment><USER2> I would probably choose Rails, it gives reasonably more chances to reach the finish line successfully and with less problems, and the "speed downside" is not an issue (see all big websites like Hulu/Basecamp etc). There are also mature solutions to common problems via gems (Devise, CanCan, Omniauth, CarrierWave, ActiveScaffold, Ancestry etc) that get you to the finish line even faster. And programming synchronously is a lot easyer .

There is little reason to use Node unless you do realtime stuff or you foresee concurency issues, and even so, there are alternatives like EventMachine. (The Node ecosystem is maturing, there are packages like Everyauth and such, nevertheless I would choose Rails)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would choose Rails as well. You will spend more time than you remotely expect working with node (for all the reasons you mention...they really do add up), and an unfinished app, no matter how fast, is useless to your users.

<comment><USER4> Yes. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Get it working first, then worry about whether it works well enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You are comparing something which doesn't placed to be compared, nodejs are plainly a language, if you compare nodejs, you shall compare it with ruby instead. if you want to compare rails, try compare it with a framework build on nodejs instead, something like expressjs or my favourable railwayjs.com</comment>


MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia - <AUTHOR> http://musicbrainz.org/ <comment><USER2> Just to push home the awesomeness of crazy music nerds that together create MusicBrainz, please have a look at these two examples:

1\. Number of releases per album individually tagged: [https://musicbrainz.org/release- group/f5093c06-23e3-404f-aea...](https://musicbrainz.org/release- group/f5093c06-23e3-404f-aeaa-40f72885ee3a)

2\. The amount of metadata for an album: [https://musicbrainz.org/release/b84ee12a-09ef-421b-82de-0441...](https://musicbrainz.org/release/b84ee12a-09ef-421b-82de-0441a926375b)

When you get used to this kind of high quality metadata, it's just so so sad to see how companies like Spotify treat metadata. As an example, look up Bob Marley & The Wailers on Spotify and try to find original releases, and then compare that to the list found here:

[https://musicbrainz.org/artist/c296e10c-110a-4103-9e77-47bfe...](https://musicbrainz.org/artist/c296e10c-110a-4103-9e77-47bfebb7fb2e)

...and the sad part is that the metadata is freely available, with a permissive license.

<comment><USER3> The amount of data is amazing – but I find that it's both a blessing and a curse. It absolutely excels at the use case of tagging audio files (as a lot of people here are noting), and as an encyclopedic reference (its purpose). For other software integration use cases, where there is any ambiguity involved whatsoever, a huge portion of code needs to be dedicated to deciding which recording/release/etc. is the likely intended or "canonical" entity. I find that the rankings from the search API are not nearly good enough for this.

Consider a recording search for "smells like teen spirit". Any human with cursory knowledge of pop music would point you at the Nirvana single from the 1991 release of Nevermind (in this particular case, it's likely even true in every locale). But MusicBrainz has no notion of popularity, common sense, or the real-world context of any of its entities, so the recording from Nevermind isn't even on the first page of results. Heck, the first result isn't even a Nirvana recording. The second result is from an obscure live bootleg album. In my opinion this should be considered a bug. This stuff matters!

This is an area I've dedicated a lot of time to when integrating MusicBrainz with my project, and it strikes me as something that MetaBrainz could spend time on to make the platform more accessible. Answering simple questions about music is currently quite difficult to newcomers on account of the overwhelming amount of data. Consider a world where it's possible to stream every recording from every release in the MusicBrainz database: it should be easier to make "Alexa, play Dark Side of the Moon" work without it needing to ask whether I mean the 1994 Netherlands CD release.

(FWIW, it's totally possible to build these heuristics on top of MusicBrainz today, but having better built-in support for determining this stuff would be nice. Spotify is absolutely amazing at figuring out what song in its entire catalog should be the top result even when I've only typed a few characters.)

<comment><USER4> "Canonical" can't apply to music releases in an objective and definitive way.

Context certainly matters (first, modified, compilation, remaster, remix, audiophile pressing, and so on) but you can't even nail "canonical" to first release, especially for singles, because there may be early promo mixes, radio mixes, vinyl mixes, iTunes mixes, and so on - all mastered differently.

Most people's idea of "canonical" is really "The version I want to hear without having to specify other details". But that's subjective and likely to be significantly different for some non-trivial percentage of users, especially in different territories.

Spotify probably just makes an informed stab at "most popular" \- which is a good heuristic and will work most of the time, but is hard to calculate when you don't have Spotify's stats.

<comment><USER3> You've described the issue pretty well, and I understand (and agree with!) all of that – like I said, I've devoted a LOT of time to solving this.

> Most people's idea of "canonical" is really "The version I want to hear > without having to specify other details". But that's subjective and likely > to be significantly different for some non-trivial percentage of users, > especially in different territories.

Yup! You are describing the problem literally any search engine faces. And yet, Google/Bing/etc. provide pretty smart results. So, do you think the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" recording by Francis Drake is the BEST first result, as MusicBrainz says it is? Is a live bootleg recording the BEST second result? In any locale? MusicBrainz is NOT primarily a search engine, but all that data has very little value if people (and other software) can't actually find it! This absolutely harms adoption.

OK, so we might not need to nail down a "canonical" version when we live in a world with search ranking scores. I totally realize "canonical" is a bad word choice on my part – but it's really how people think of these things!

> Spotify probably just makes an informed stab at "most popular" \- which is a > good heuristic and will work most of the time, but is hard to calculate when > you don't have Spotify's stats.

I bet they do it that way too, but I think you're throwing in the towel way too early here. :) I have a system that works amazingly well and nearly always chooses the most likely intended recording without any listen count data. MusicBrainz has a LOT of data available to it, what type of heuristics might make sense here? I use a ranking system that takes all these factors into account and, like Lucene, assigns a score:

• Number of releases & release groups the recording appears on (the most well- known recording is more likely to appear on additional albums like compilations, and more likely to be widely released in lots of countries).

• How old the release is relative to the other search results (earlier matches are more likely to be the original).

• Whether the recording is from a release with a "single from" relation to another album (the target LP is more likely to hold the recording we want).

• Whether it's from a release that's an Album or EP (positive weighting), or Live (negative weighting), whether the recording ONLY appears on Compilation albums (negative weighting), whether it's any other type of release like Bootleg (strong negative weighting).

• Whether the recording has ISRCs entered for it (more well-known recordings are more likely to have ISRCs in the first place, and also more likely for people to have entered them into MusicBrainz).

• Whether MusicBrainz users have entered any tags and ratings for it (weak but positive correlation with how popular it is).

• Domain-specific string similarity metrics; essentially, query expansion that makes sense specifically for song titles & artist names. This lets certain matches remain equivalent when it makes sense (e.g. "mambo number 5", "mambo no. 5", "mambo #5", "mambo number five" should all be exactly equivalent in terms of string matching. Lucene does some of this already of course, but not nearly enough – I have a query expander with hundreds of examples where Lucene does a worse job)

I can think of more too, that my system doesn't currently use. All that's without relying on any external data source! But if you want to go one better, it's also possible to correlate results with other APIs like WikiData, DBpedia, Spotify, YouTube…

In most cases, I've found that there's enough of a delta between the top score and the second-best score to determine which one is "correct". (Yes, that word, I know…)

Ideally MusicBrainz would be on par with a human expert in determining which recording you most likely meant, and I believe that it CAN do this today, but it doesn't.

<comment><USER3> Also, note: in theory MusicBrainz already has metrics for the number of clicks, views, lookups, and edits certain entities get through their site and API. I bet these are strongly correlated with listens/popularity.

<comment><USER5> >In theory MusicBrainz already has metrics

What does "in theory" mean here? Do those tables exist in whole or some part? Is this a matter of indexing an existing data set or hoping some data was acquired by accidental consequence?

<comment><USER3> I'm assuming it already exists due to the existence of pages like [https://musicbrainz.org/tops/mb_top_stuff.html](https://musicbrainz.org/tops/mb_top_stuff.html) and [https://stats.metabrainz.org](https://stats.metabrainz.org), I'm just not positive of it. :)

Even if it's not collected though, it's data that they at least already have the _ability_ to collect by simply flipping a switch, as opposed to spinning up a whole new ListenBrainz service and hoping it gains traction.

<comment><USER6> Oh, and the mp_top_stuff.html page was created less than a week ago.

You're absolutely right that we could, in theory, have that data, but we do not currently. Not in any usable form (for this purpose) anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been contributing data and code to MB and it's sibling projects for over two years now and the community has been great from day one!

Just to name a few of the other projects, there's AcousticBrainz [1] collecting acoustic information which may be pretty useful for machine learning, CritiqueBrainz [2] for collecting user reviews of songs, albums and more, ListenBrainz [3], an open scrobbling service a group of people including former last.fm employees initially hacked together in a weekend, and finally BookBrainz [4], which tries to be what MB is but for books.

During the last year the people running MB have worked on getting companies using the data to support the project resulting in a quite impressive list of supporters [5] including big names like Google, Spotify and the BBC.

MB has also collaborated with our fellow data nerds over at the Internet Archive to create the Cover Art Archive. [6]

In general the project is run by people who equally love both data and hacking. Feel free to stop by on the IRC channels #musicbrainz and #metabrainz on freenode!

[1]: [https://acousticbrainz.org/](https://acousticbrainz.org/) [2]: [https://critiquebrainz.org/](https://critiquebrainz.org/) [3]: [https://listenbrainz.org/](https://listenbrainz.org/) [4]: [https://bookbrainz.org/](https://bookbrainz.org/) [5]: [https://metabrainz.org/supporters](https://metabrainz.org/supporters) [6]: [https://coverartarchive.org/](https://coverartarchive.org/)

<comment><USER8> Cover Art Archive is an amazing database and I try to contribute as often as I can. I have been able to find entire sleeves including lyrics, short anecdotes etc. for a lot of obscure music I have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow. This brings back memories. At uni in the early 2000's I hacked up a geeky "last.fm" inspired music stat service. The idea was to be able to reliably track music being played without needing a plugin for winamp/foobar2000/other media player and without needing the mp3 file to have meta data.

I lightly modified a version of the Filemon driver from Sysinternals and wrote a little C program that used the driver to monitor for mp3s being played and then grab the perceptual audio hash of the file using trm.exe from Musicbrainz. It then sent the resulting fingerprint off to my website (written in glorious PHP3 no less!) and you could login with an account to see stats on the music you'd been listening to (done with meta data pulled from Musicbrainz).

Surprisingly, it worked reasonably well ...though very sure if I looked at the code now I'd run away screaming.

Really cool to see they're still going strong after all these years!

<comment><USER6> FWIW, you may be interested in ListenBrainz[1], an open alternative to Last.FM. We're _just_ about to launch the beta which should be the milestone for when we'll promise to keep submitted listens around Forever™. :)

[1]: [https://listenbrainz.org/](https://listenbrainz.org/)

<comment><USER10> Great work! Could you comment on the difference between your offering with ListenBrainz and LibreFM?

<comment><USER6> Libre.FM sets out to be a ~1:1 (open) "clone" of Last.FM (or least the AudioScrobbler part of Last.FM), while ListenBrainz aims to improve on Last.FM/AudioScrobbler. E.g., the AudioScrobbler protocol only allows for a given subset of metadata items to be submitted, while ListenBrainz's native API allows you to submit basically all the data you have on the file.

Compare [http://www.last.fm/api/show/track.scrobble](http://www.last.fm/api/show/track.scrobble) 's 7 item specific metadata fields (artist, track, album, trackNumber, mbid, albumArtist, duration) to [https://listenbrainz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dev/json.html#...](https://listenbrainz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dev/json.html#submission- json) \- as ListenBrainz is part of the MetaBrainz "umbrella", one of our own main highlights is that we can now actually submit _all_ MBIDs associated with a file, not just the Recording MBID (ie., Artist MBID(s), Release MBID, Release Group MBID, Track MBID, Work MBID(s), possibly Label MBID(s), etc., etc.), but also stuff like language, performers, AcoustIDs, ...

Also, ListenBrainz is linked up with MessyBrainz[1], which should work as a buffer to have even listens submitted without MusicBrainz identifiers be able to eventually get linked up to the MusicBrainz database.

[1] [https://messybrainz.org/](https://messybrainz.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What (and when something) ends up on the first page never ceases to surprise. I've used this I don't know how long. Could it be 15 years? Their official tagging client (Picard) is OK, but I prefer tagging using Mp3tag and the MusicBrainz database.

<comment><USER12> I fear now an entire generation (Gen Z) grows up with services like Youtube, Musical.ly, Spotify and iCloud/GoogleCloud for their photos.

They never interact with images and audio files, they don't know about metadata at all. They don't use notebook or a PC. They are vendor locked to iOS or Android. They are not dumb, but less and less have the initiative search around and try out new things outside the box. They stay inside their apps, they don't know the vast web outside that can be searched with Google search engine. (it depends on parents and schools to inspire them to try out more)

<comment><USER13> Aww piffle. :)

It's not like the previous generation of people all explored the vast web. They didn't. They didn't even use it until relatively recently.

The percentage of those that are intrigued by technology and have the wanderlust to explore the digital landscape are probably exactly the same (perhaps more now) as the previous generation. Those people that you refer to as "vendor locked" now would never have even used computers in the past generations, or used them only for Office apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd just like to reiterate how utterly amazing MusicBrainz is. It's so extremely useful that I decided to make it the backbone of a new playlist format I developed[1], one which (roughly) uses MusicBrainz IDs instead of filenames for playlists.

This makes playlists resistant to filename changes, moves, or even losing all the actual audio tracks and having to buy them again, all because MusicBrainz provides so accurate metadata.

[1]: [http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/](http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/)

<comment><USER15> I really like the idea of your universal playlist format, are there any players that support it?

<comment><USER14> None yet, I'm afraid, although I'm writing a beets plugin to convert from pls to UPL and back. The problem with the plugin is that it's just not that useful unless you have a whole playlist manager to go along with it, which beets doesn't do very well right now. I'd be very happy if there was a player with good playlist management functionality that would support it, or that I could write support for, but I don't personally use any...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love MusicBrainz and have been using it for a project of mine for the past few years. In the course of developing that project, I ended up making a GraphQL interface to the MusicBrainz API: [https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz](https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz)

You should try out the demo queries linked from that README if you want to get a sense of the depth of information available in their database.

</comment><comment> half-kh-hacker I've been using MusicBrainz' Picard to tag my music files (that I acquired 100% legitimately, I assure you.) for a few months now.

They seem to have everything I throw at them, except for: 1) Extremely new releases (on the order of a-few-hours-after-release) 2) Some niche songs that haven't been officially released (soundtracks for some Korean television shows)

<comment><USER16> How does that work? How do you use MusicBrainz to tag music files?

<comment><USER17> > _MusicBrainz Picard_

is a metadata editor, doing both audio fingerprinting and manual tagging(while fetching data from musicbrainz) where that is not available: [https://picard.musicbrainz.org/](https://picard.musicbrainz.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Heh. I was on a team of Amazon engineers in Edinburgh back in 2007 who were tasked with building "another IMDB that we can sell ads on", and we ended up using a MusicBrainz dump to start up a music encyclopedia website. The idea was to take the raw data but organise it in a more user friendly way, add easy click-to-edit user participation and gamification, etc.

I remember seeing Robert Kaye wandering around the office when he visited us to talk licensing terms, although as the most junior employee I didn't get to talk to him myself. We also chatted to Col Needham, the founder of IMDB, and asked him "so, how do you become a massive media-encyclopedia site?"; his answer was "it's easy, just start 17 years ago."

Really we had no idea what we were doing, and although we got some surprisingly dedicated users (we sent T-shirts to a couple who'd contributed hundreds of thousands of edits!), the site folded after a few years.

I'm very glad to see that MusicBrainz outlived us and continued to thrive :)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20111005012125/http://www.soundu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20111005012125/http://www.soundunwound.com/)

<comment><USER6> Heh. It's about 17 years since MusicBrainz started now. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I discovered MusicBrainz Picard about a year ago and it handled my collection pretty flawlessly.

I was always wanting to know since then if there are other maintained/curated music databases.

I also didn't realize at first that they offer a public API. The Picard client was decent, but I'd be interested in a command-line solution. Does anyone know if this exists?

<comment><USER20> I will wholeheartedly echo the sibling's suggestion for beets ([http://beets.io/](http://beets.io/)).

No music makes it into my collection unless it's been imported via beets. It has a powerful import/query/alter API, sufficient config options, and a nice plugin system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Full props to Robert Kaye, the founder. He's been raising this child for 15 years now.

<comment><USER22> They had a pretty close call at some point and nearly died. All is well that ends well.

There also was freedb ([http://www.freedb.org/](http://www.freedb.org/)), not sure if that is still kept up-to-date.

<comment><USER7> It seems like MAGIX Software is now running FreeDB.

As far as I understand it, it's data quality really isn't great and according to their statistics [1], they've only had just over 7,000 album requests last week.

[1]: [http://www.freedb.org/en/statistics__album_requests.14.html](http://www.freedb.org/en/statistics__album_requests.14.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I used the MusicBrainz API a while back for a side project that got me sued for some reason ([http://tcrn.ch/2rEox3h](http://tcrn.ch/2rEox3h)).

As I recall, it was pleasant to work with and did what I needed it to quite nicely, aside from a feature that my code had depended on being removed — anonymous/unauthenticated search — at which point the project was already basically dead and not worth trying to fix (that was just the last nail in the coffin). In any case, nice to see that it's still active.

<comment><USER22> So, given that you had already predicted you'd get sued, who sued you and what for?

<comment><USER23> Well, I hadn't exactly predicted it — the quoted joke was from the top of the site's FAQ page, meant to imply that users of the service would get in trouble for being complicit in copyright infringement / piracy — but it also wasn't all that surprising when it happened. I was sued by the current Napster ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster_(streaming_music_servi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster_\(streaming_music_service\))) for alleged trademark infringement.

In the end we settled before it ever went to trial, so unfortunately that quote never found its way into a court transcript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The code that runs it is open too: [https://github.com/metabrainz/](https://github.com/metabrainz/)

</comment><comment><USER24> always nice to see something of such utility pop up. musicbrainz has most assuredly been around for what seems like forever now, and there's a reason for that. their tag database is second to none as far as im concerned. unfortunately for me, the only music I keep locally is my own music that I've made, and I can almost guarantee that that wouldn't be on there. plus i tag all my music properly to a point that might seem religious and obsessive because I hate music files without metadata (which is why I export in mp3 as well as wav; wav for higher quality, and mp3 for labeling purposes; I could probably just use flac but compressed audio like mp3 also has the benefit of being less space intensive).

either way, nice to see it

<comment><USER25> If all you're using MP3 for is the space saving and metadata, you might like ogg/opus. It's the Opus codec (the state of the art in audio codecs right now) in an Ogg wrapper.

You'll find a portable player capable of handling vinyl before you find one that plays ogg/opus, but desktop software is mostly fine.

<comment><USER26> VLC on Android supports opus. Unfortunately, most other players don't (I think this is a actually a bug in the Android media scanning library and not the players themselves though)

<comment><USER27> If an open source music format isn't a requirement for you, AAC is as efficient as Opus and playback support is universal – no version of iOS or Android has ever shipped without AAC decode support, for example.

Mp3tag also handles MP4/M4A files wonderfully.

<comment><USER28> AAC when well encoded sounds great, but there are too many sub-par encoder implementations that just don't sound good - sometimes worse than MP3.

If you're encoding AAC use either Apples encoder, or one of those from Fraunhofer:- Fhg-AAC available as a paid plug-in, or free with WinAMP, or the Open Source FDKAAC implementation originally for Android, but now available cross platform.

<comment><USER27> > _…there are too many sub-par encoder implementations that just don 't sound > good - sometimes worse than MP3._

Whoa, I'd never imagined that could be the case and appreciate the heads-up. I've only had experience with the Apple and Fraunhofer encoders so far.

Mind calling out the offender(s)? This summer I'm releasing a best practices guide (and hopefully tools) to help podcasters move to AAC, and that would be useful to mention.

<comment><USER29> The FFMpeg wiki has some information, including calling out its own "vorbis" encoder as sub-par and not recommended (but apparently they also support a different "libvorbis" encoder that does not suffer from problems?) See [https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/HighQualityAudio](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/HighQualityAudio)

Also for AAC in particular there are a few options [https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Offtopic question: Is there a similar tool for managing or tagging metadata for movies and television?

<comment><USER31> [http://www.filebot.net](http://www.filebot.net)

Very powerful file renaming tool that also leverages TheTVDB, AniDB, TheMovieDB, etc for TV and movies. Both GUI and command-line versions available, I always use the (free) command-line version even though I paid for the GUI.

It also accepts scripts, has smart/fuzzy matching, and is an all-around good renaming tool for other things too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I hope these guys don't flip like Gracenote did...Gracenote was all crowdsourced user contributions (for a long time at least) but then they closed off the data and sold it to Sony for $250+ million.

<comment><USER6> MusicBrainz was created partly as a reaction to Gracenote's handling of CDDB; see [https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About](https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About) and [https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About/History](https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About/History)

It would be completely against the spirit of the project to close in on itself, and as Leo_Verto mentioned, also pretty hard. With the core data available as CC0 and all the source code needed to run the servers, anyone could legally take all the data and set up a "LibreMusicBrainz" in some hours in the unlikely event that the MetaBrainz Foundation (the organisation created to support MusicBrainz and the other *Brainz projects) should ever flip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Whilst it is great to be able to tag music files with masses of MB metadata, I have a feeling that the true value of the MB database has yet to be realised.

Because of the underlying design and relationships between albums and recordings and musical pieces (or works), once it reaches some level of critical mass you can start to mine the data for things like:

Who has recorded versions of Vivaldi's Four Seasons Spring in London?

Which artists have recorded both Greig's Piano Concerto and Chopsticks?

Who has recorded "A Day in the Life" other than by the Beatles?

</comment><comment><USER34> Datomic, Rich Hickey's majestic datalog-driven, time traveling database uses musicbrainz data for their tutorials. Check it out if you want to play with this data in a really novel way.

<comment><USER6> Link? I tried looking around in [http://www.datomic.com/support.html](http://www.datomic.com/support.html) but I couldn't find any references to MusicBrainz (or music data of any kind).

<comment><USER35> This looks like it: [http://blog.datomic.com/2013/07/datomic-musicbrainz- sample-d...](http://blog.datomic.com/2013/07/datomic-musicbrainz-sample- database.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A related site - freesound.org

Both MusicBrainz and Freesound are truly international in scope. They cover metadata and sound for Indian classical music and such genres too. The CompMusic research team publishes to both of these.

Edit: CompMusic url - [http://compmusic.upf.edu/](http://compmusic.upf.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER37> One of my side projects is a music recommendation system. Music brainz has been great for this. Tying together all the music services out there. In addition the biggest perk is you can do a slave of their database, and have it replicate on an interval.

<comment><USER6> Are you aware of the AcousticBrainz[1] and (upcoming/in-development) ListenBrainz[2] projects? We at MetaBrainz (the organisation behind MusicBrainz and the other *Brainz projects) really hope that the combination of data MusicBrainz, AcousticBrainz, and ListenBrainz will enable powering a lot of open recommendation engines. :)

[1]: [https://acousticbrainz.org/](https://acousticbrainz.org/) [2]: [https://listenbrainz.org/](https://listenbrainz.org/)

<comment><USER37> No I was not thank you for sharing :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This was done once before. It was called CDDB.[1] That went from open to limited access to totally proprietary. Fortunately, this new one is under GPLv3, which makes it tough to pull that one again.

There's FreeDB ([http://www.freedb.org](http://www.freedb.org)) which does roughly the same thing, starting from the old CDDB database before Gracenote, and then Sony, bought it. Their database dump is supposedly available.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB)

<comment><USER39> GPLv3 is a _software_ license, i.e. not appropriate for data. I suspected the folks behind MusicBrainz would know that, so I did some looking around and found this:

"The MusicBrainz Database is split into two components for licensing purposes.

"Core data

"The core data of the database is licensed under the CC0, which is effectively placing the data into the Public Domain. This means that anyone can download and use the core data in any way they see fit. No restrictions, no worries!

"Supplementary data

"The remaining portions of the database are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This allows for non- commercial use of the data as long as MusicBrainz is given credit and that derivative works (works based on the CC licensed data) are also made available under the same license."

Source: [https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About/Data_License](https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About/Data_License)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been trying to figure out which music metadata database is worth my time "improving", since there are three that are commonly used. MusicBrainz, Discogs and Rate Your Music. I use Discogs currently because you can expect high quality metadata, and I use that data in a Foobar2000 plugin to tag my music correctly.

It's the constant questioning I do for Wiki sites, since there are multiple for most subjects. Am I alone in this struggle? I wouldn't mind being talked out of using Discogs for the sake of creating / managing metadata that will be the most useful.

</comment><comment><USER16> I tried to play with the API, but I almost always get "The MusicBrainz web server is currently busy. Please try again later.".

Is there a more reliable way to query this data without running a full server on your own?

<comment><USER33> MB is a victim primarily of its own success - with a lot of Kodi clients requesting data as well as MB's own tagger, Picard - but also of spammers leeching bandwidth.

This is not the first occasion when demand has exceeded capacity, but any capacity added soon gets swallowed up.

Suffice it to say that the MB team is urgently looking into how to stop this happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What about [http://linkedbrainz.org](http://linkedbrainz.org) ? Is it a dead project?

<comment><USER6> LinkedBrainz is not something that the MetaBrainz team is directly involved with, however, according to themselves, «[they are] back, if basic for now.»

(Note that there's also a "GraphBrainz" project (also not something MetaBrainz is involved with), posted about earlier here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14479031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14479031) )

<comment><USER41> Looks like GraphBrainz stands for "MusicBrainz + GraphQL". Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with RDF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> mappable.com uses this to allow users to build a hierarchical artist/album/song voronoi exploration tool.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's good that MusicBrainz exists as open data project and continues to stand up against Sony America & Sony DADC defacto monopoly on audio+video metadata and digital supply for the media industry.

MusicBrainz is the third project of it's kind. Two previous older projects got bought by the media industry (Sony and Magix). Such a database gets useless if it doesn't receive updates.

First there was CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD (compact disc) information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a (nearly) unique disc ID and then queries the database. As a result, the client is able to display the artist name, CD title, track list and some additional information. CDDB was invented by Ti Kan around late 1993 as a local database that was delivered with his popular xmcd music player application. CDDB is a licensed trademark of Gracenote. In March 2001, CDDB, now owned by Gracenote, banned all unlicensed applications from accessing their database. As of June 2, 2008, Sony Corp. of America completed acquisition (full ownership) of Gracenote. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB)

Then there was freedb. freedb is a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content is under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculates a hash function from the CD table of contents and uses it as a disc ID to query the database. If the disc is in the database, the client is able to retrieve and display the artist, album title, track list and some additional information. It was originally based on the now-proprietary CDDB (Compact Disc DataBase). On October 4, 2006, freedb owner Michael Kaiser announced that Magix had acquired freedb. On June 25, 2007, MusicBrainz – a project with similar goals – officially released their freedb gateway. The latter allows users to harvest information from the MusicBrainz database rather than freedb. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb)</comment>


Show HN: Silly resource site I made for parents - <AUTHOR> https://virtuallearningresources.com <comment><USER2> Not silly at all and much appreciated, thank you.

PS: If anyone reading this is able to recommend resources (educational and/or fun [and/or silly]) for a nine-year-old interested in history, dinosaurs (of course) and space, I'd love to hear them.</comment>


Interesting idea, asking for backers with subscription instead of money - <AUTHOR> http://www.yoovi.co/

<comment><USER2> What I want to know is how did they get 5,000 email addresses without spending any money or building anything?</comment>


Stupidly simple (but surprisingly helpful) tool for developers using Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> https://bootstrapbreakpoints.com/ <comment><USER2> Huh, apparently webdevs mean something else with that term, and their meaning is not even on the Wikipedia page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakpoint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakpoint)

I wish they'd come up with some other term rather than confusing it with something that's been around since the 40's...

<comment><USER3> Yeah, because it's not like we don't appropriate words all over the place anyway, and reuse words for all kinds of similar and dissimilar purposes.

Using "breakpoints" to describe the /points/ where the layout /breaks/ over is not a new term and quite well understood when talking design / layout.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layou...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layout/Media_queries#How_to_choose_breakpoints)

[https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_mediaqueries.asp](https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_mediaqueries.asp)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Added Tailwind support now too.</comment>


What is meditation and mindfulness good for? - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/what-is-meditation-mindfulness-good-for <comment><USER2> From article: "no 'no thoughts, the goal of meditation is not to empty the mind, but to observe the present moment non-judgementally." Judgmentally is misspelled, and many practitioners would disagree with that statement.

Sounds like they're confusing mindfulness with meditation, I don't think the ways you can use your mind is accurately represented by either "mindfulness" or "meditation." If you want to describe something as complex as thought, a richer vocabulary should be used.

If meditation was as amazing and useful as I've heard, I would expect to see more greatness achieved by it's practitioners. Tibet should be WRECKING it.

I predict comments regarding the many great people who are great, and claim the usefulness of meditation. Remember that many of these people have other traits, like vegetarianism, follow Judaism, were born on Thursday's. For every great person that practices meditation, I can point to many more who do not.

Some people are productive through placebo, some in spite of things, and some because of things. Placebo, and in spite of are probably more common.

<comment><USER2> Mind you, they appear to have actually well researched the area, check out their analysis: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m_tiYlDIyNpp6WGUgKd5...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m_tiYlDIyNpp6WGUgKd5nTu6r7MySFqIc5MDS0JJSoM/edit#gid=7)</comment></comment>