High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17894176 <comment><USER3> The ruling is mostly full of shit:

      Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists

I'd like to see evidence to back this up, innocent until proven guilty and all.

      The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale

No, it doesn't. TPB doesn't provide any content at all. Not only that, but it also provides links to non-copyright infringing material. Eg: Some of Nine Inch Nails recent releases have been legally made available over bittorrent in 24/96 high quality.

      Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works

According to wikipedia, TPB earnings in 2006 were $102,035.05 US, and expenses in 2009 were $112,590.40 US (couldn't find data for the same year) but they can't be making a huge amount of profit on those margins.

But the thing that really gets me is our government giving itself power to censor the internet.

<comment><USER4> > No, it doesn't. TPB doesn't provide any content at all. Not only that, but > it also provides links to non-copyright infringing material. Eg: Some of > Nine Inch Nails recent releases have been legally made available over > bittorrent in 24/96 high quality.

And my drug dealer gave $50 to a pregnant woman so that she could get a taxi to the hospital.

If you want to argue why this ruling is wrong you should address the issues of censorship, arguing that The Pirate Bay _isn't_ a site built around copyright infringement (which it is and the founders openly admit this) just does a dis- service to the real problem here (censorship). TPB is a for-profit copyright infringement enabling enterprise, that's why it exists, arguing otherwise is not worth your energy (because ultimately, what does it matter if it enables copyright infringement or not? So do most websites that _don't_ intend on doing that) instead argue that any government should not be disabling access to a website.

<comment><USER5> The issue is not with censorship, it's with what they are censoring. Very few people here would take issue with this court order if it was about a site that exclusively hosted child porn. Therefore yes, the context of "is what TBP does illegal?"

To extend your (frankly poor) metaphor, he wouldn't be a drug dealer if all he did was hold up a sign pointing you towards your nearest drug dealers and he never actually gave you any drugs.

<comment><USER4> Child pornography: illegal Copyright infringement: illegal

censoring child porn websites: right, censoring copyright infringement website: wrong.

Not sure I understand the difference? Either you're for censorship of websites, or you're against it, you can't pick and choose.

<comment><USER6> Child pornography: should be illegal

Copyright infringement: should not be illegal

<comment><USER7> Copyright infringement _should_ and _must_ be illegal but it also _must_ be put into perspective. Using copyright infringement to justify censorship, deportation of citizens, multi-million-dollar fines and lifetime prison sentences - that's a symptom of a broken judicial system and governments with bad priorities / corruption.

Downloading films + music for personal use? Should get warnings and eventually a small fine if the issue persists (not £X per file downloaded - a download != a sale).

Commercial copyright infringement? Large scale should result in a few years of jailtime at the most + seized profits. Smaller scale should vary but should be lenient with profits seized.

<comment><USER8> Every argument against copyright infringement assumes there is some evil destitute world on the other side of having it in place.

We have never in the modern age in any modern first world country ever had an extended time WITHOUT copyright to see what would happen. Everyone just assumes every artist, developer, and investor would disappear overnight and everyone would turn to stone as content is freely distributed.

Or maybe we would just go massive kickstarter style (with some kind of contract guarantees unlike the current system) where the funds people have pay people to make the stuff they want, which is then free for everyone to consume since it is free to reproduce.

It is broken to control content at the distribution level when distribution and replication cost nothing. A really, really import thing to consider - <USER2> people who consume currently copyrighted material do not have infinite funds to consume. They spend their disposable income on limited selections of copyrighted materials. If they didn't have to pay for them, but knew their funds were needed to see that future works were created, they would not go buy 15 cars over 3 years and have nothing to watch on tv, they would give money to the shows and artists they like.

There MIGHT be a slight recession if that happened though, because without the "need" to pay for the things people want, they might take the time to pay off massive debts they have or get a savings buffer. But they could already do that, they just don't have the self restraint to. And if feeding off the inability of people to manage their own lives effectively is the only way for MAFIAA affiliates to stay in business, perhaps they should fail.

At that, why don't they fail? Of all the industries, film has been subject to upheaval approximately never. For the last century the big 5 have been established and held their power base with an iron grip. Independent film is nothing compared to them, indie games vs publishers is not even close to as bad as that situation. The major movie studios have no competition to theaters besides outside media forces but never to competitive "startups" because they control the market.

<comment><USER9> _Or maybe we would just go massive kickstarter style (with some kind of contract guarantees unlike the current system) where the funds people have pay people to make the stuff they want, which is then free for everyone to consume since it is free to reproduce._

The Kickstarter model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record.For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much.

 _At that, why don't they fail? Of all the industries, film has been subject to upheaval approximately never. For the last century the big 5 have been established and held their power base with an iron grip. Independent film is nothing compared to them, indie games vs publishers is not even close to as bad as that situation. The major movie studios have no competition to theaters besides outside media forces but never to competitive "startups" because they control the market._

Not so: the biggest jolt to the industry was antitrust regulation in the 1940s, as discussed here - though paradoxically, in a way that's vaguely supportive of censorship: <http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=178>

<comment><USER10> _The Kickstarter model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record. For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much._

The restrictive copyright model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record. For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much. Even the few musicians who hit it big with a debut album have actually worked very hard beforehand to persuade a record label to sign them, with very little reward.

<comment><USER9> Not necessarily true. The label era was dominated by intermediaries (managers, A&R specialists), but those intermediaries were constantly in search of new bands to promote. Many musicians (authors, filmmakers, your_medium_here) don't necessarily have the skills or desire to become experts in publishing and distribution, and the breakdown of existing models also means the breakdown of cross-subsidization for less commercially oriented acts. There are pros and cons to both models; I'm just objecting to the idea that the new publishing landscape is in all ways better than the old.

<comment><USER11> "don't necessarily have the skills or desire to become experts in publishing and distribution,"

They don't have to be experts, they just have to be good enough. If the decision is 100% of profits goto a label or 30% go to Apple if I just learn how to use iTunes, I think they'll choose iTunes...

Publishing means to make public and that isn't anything special any more, it's been commoditized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Tim-Boss Within minutes of any major ISP implementing a "block" a few thousand people will post on facebook/twitter/blogs and websites links to the plethora of proxies/TOR tunnels/Open DNS settings and VPN's that will instantly negate any ISP level "block" (sarcastic quotes intentional).

This will cost british ISP's hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds to implement and manage, and will at best only delay any would-be knock-off-nigel 30 seconds or so while he learns about proxies et. al. and configures a browser.

Security theatre at its worst...THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!

<comment><USER12> Tor is getting more and more useful. It doesn't take much to mirror TPB with magnetic links tbh

</comment></comment><comment> DanI-S At the risk of hyperbole: Lobbying is a catalyst for the destruction of democracy, and should be cut and cauterised from our civilization like the cancer that it is.

Anybody running on the platform of diminishing the corporate voice to its legitimate, proportional volume would certainly have my vote.

Whether or not piracy is morally excusable, I am certain this form of legislation is not what the British public wants.

<comment><USER13> > _Lobbying is a catalyst for the destruction of democracy_ //

As anyone is allowed to lobby I don't think this is true. In our representative "democracy" though it doesn't seem that MPs are required to act in a representative way. That, IMO, is what destroys the idea of democracy.

If a company lobbies an MP it shouldn't make any difference. It should be the people of the MP's constituency that the company needs to lobby so that they can alter the opinions of the people that the MP is supposed to be representing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does any body really still use TPB as a first stop site? It is usually my site of last resort. To me this is a bit like some weirdo government still freaking out about Rock 'n Roll and Punk Rockers.

<comment><USER15> TPB is my first stop. I've always used private music trackers, but never found much need for it with video (quality is less important and I don't want to deal with seed requirements).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "The biggest culprits of this, really, are the younger demographic who just > haven't been convinced that doing this is somehow morally uncomfortable.

This.

Good luck with that. More probably, when the "younger demographics" grow older and get more voting power, they will likely vote /against/ such corporate tyranny. This means that the music industry has some 20 or so more years of prosperity, at most.

</comment><comment><USER17> It doesn't particularly concern me that this particular website is being blocked, as it's purpose is pretty obvious. Blocking it is laughably futile but it does send a clear message out.

What does concern me though is that this is a foot in the door for the government to block other websites they object to in the future.

<comment> k-mcgrady "it's purpose is pretty obvious".

I don't think that's true. Clearly a lot of copyrighted material is downloaded from the site but there is a also a lot of material linked to legally. For example they now promote independent artists on their homepage who have content available on the pirate bay. Nine Inch Nails have a huge collection of unedited concert footage available. Open source software and Linux distros are available.

I think the 'linking to content is illegal' thing really needs to be seriously examined. Are they going to block Google next? Where is the line?

(And I'm saying this as someone who pays for content and really only does download legal content from TPB).

<comment><USER9> That's a bit like saying your historical pirate ship (the kind with sails, cannons and so on) has a cook on board to feed the crew, so it should really be considered as a floating restaurant and the plundering and sinking of other vessels is incidental to that.

<comment><USER18> I love that analogy and want to vote you up... but I don't agree with what you're saying XD

<comment><USER19> At the risk of being meta; I think you should vote up when someone contributes to a discussion in a meaningful way, regardless of server you agree or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hate the whole ethical argument when it comes to copyright infringement. The fact is an unenforceable law is pointless and should not be law. I don't know what the solution is -- and I wish people would spend more time debating and talking about a workable solution rather than complaining, but blocking sites that link or illegally host copyrighted content will not solve a thing. Remember when illegal music downloads stopped after napster got shutdown? Oh wait, a hundred more files sharing clients just took it's place.

<comment><USER21> The workable solution is for content producers to take a long hard look at their business models to see if maybe they can profit without criminalizing a large percentage of the population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Next up: ban Google (including its torrentable Custom Search Engine), Bing and all other search engines listing torrents? Or just ban all search engines except those sanctioned by BPI/MPAA etc.?

The irony is that at this point The Pirate Bay is just a collection of merely 90MB of magnet links which can be downloaded anywhere on the Internet in the blink of an eye.

<comment><USER23> _The Pirate Bay is just a collection of merely 90MB of magnet links which can be downloaded anywhere on the Internet in the blink of an eye._

Someone made a torrent of the torrents on the Pirate Bay (at one point).

Here's the magnet link:

      magnet:?xt=urn:btih:938802790a385c49307f34cca4c30f80b03df59c&dn=The+whole+Pirate+Bay+magnet+archive&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80

<comment><USER24> That's interesting. Is there way to get actual version of this?

<comment><USER25> Paste that link into your favourite (up to date) torrent client.

<comment><USER24> Yes, and then you get a database in a simple no quotes | separated file. Someone presumably got this from piratebay servers. What I'm asking is who and how.

EDIT: though I'm realizing now, that "actual" in English might mean something else than I wanted to say. What I meant (and in my language sounds very much like actual) is probably better described as "current".

<comment><USER23> I think someone scrapped it and created that torrent. You might be asking for some sort of distributed automatically up to date database of pirate bay torrents. That would be cool to have, but its not possible with magnet links like that. The magnet link is based on the content of the file(s). If someone were to upload a new torrent, then the contents of the database changes and the hash changes, and the magnet link changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Are we trying to emulate China or Iran? Obviously a block like this for any tech-savvy person is absolutely meaningless.

<comment><USER23> The UK has also censored Wikipedia in the past.

<comment><USER27> Really? Link?

<comment><USER28> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_W...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_Wikipedia)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This has to be a classic example of closing the stable doors after the horse has bolted.

They're scrabbling around, trying desperately and litigiously to cling on to whatever semblance of the pre-internet golden years they can, but it's too late. _We've got a taste for free shit._

For better or worse - it's not going anywhere. They'd have to cut off our hands to stop us from getting what we want.

The worst part? The harder they make it, the less likely I am to feel _good_ about paying for content.

</comment><comment><USER30> Didn't they try to block porn sites last year? David Cameron ostensibly proclaimed that 'porn sites corrupt the British nation' or something in that vein. The UK is beginning to get a tad too draconian for the 21st century.

<comment><USER22> I think they are still trying.

There is an on-going tabloid newspaper campaign where they are trying to force the ISPs and politicians (especially the opposition) to adopt or commit to an "opt-in" for porn on Internet connections. That is, the default would be required that ISPs take on the cost and legal culpability to block porn.

<comment><USER31> Ironically, most of these tabloid newspapers publish pornography themselves, and staunchly defend their right to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The dark forces behind these organisations couldnt care less about music being pirated. What they really want is a censored, controlled internet where free speach is not anonymous.

You have to understand that the Internet is the only medium not built as a pyramid, where you can control the entire pyramid by controlling the leader. Nobody controls the entire Internet today, so its quite scary for the dark ones. Despite all their power and money, they cant stop the free flow of information on the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't stand it.

How can the BBC claim to be impartially reporting copyright infringement when they call it "piracy"?

It's illegal, it's often immoral, it's not shooting people and stealing their stuff though and sufficiently different, in a moral sense, to make such a claim preposterously immoral in itself.

<comment><USER33> 'Piracy' is as valid a term as 'copyright infringement': [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#.22Pirac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#.22Piracy.22)

<comment><USER13> Your link shows historic use of piracy as a term referring to unauthorised manufacture and sale (ie for profit). It gives no support for using the term for giving away content, nor for simple consumption, against the rights holders wishes - both of these are properly, legally and dispassionately described as IPR infringement.

Even if booksellers in the past had tried to make an emotional attachment between book copiers and pirates I would still find its use in a supposedly unbiased report to be objectionable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's getting like a nightmare vision of capitalism in the 1980s. You know like Robocop or Gremlins 2 where the city sold out to corporations. Corporate interest over common sense.

We'll just have to mail DivXs to each other like we did in the late 90s when bandwith was low...

<comment><USER35> Copyright is a government granted and government enforced monopoly. Its got little to do with capitalism.

<comment><USER34> Rubbish.

When the successful capitalists lobby politicians and pay them off regularly, it's a closed loop between government and corporations.

Us peons don't get a look in.

<comment><USER35> It is well known (but sadly still surprising for many) that capitalists are some of the biggest enemies of capitalism.

What you are describing is _regulatory capture_ , and is caused by government power, if government didn't have so much power there wouldn't be such a great incentive to corrupt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> That's It.

I finally broke. I have been reading for going on two years about SOPA, PIPA, GCHQ snaffling everything in sight. And this is the straw that broke the camel's back.

I have just ... written to my MP.

Dammit. It will achieve nothing, but I am going to keep pushing. I know why they are doing this, but ... please please please, stop choking off industries that might just help us compete against the global behemoths down the road.

<comment><USER37> Try them: <http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/> They also believe in other saner intellectual property laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does anyone know when this comes into effect? Also, does it only affect the ISP's mentioned in the article or ALL ISP's?

Guess i'll just have to use a TPB mirror from now on then...

<comment><USER22> Five ISPs - Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media.

Sixth ISP, British Telecom, has requested a few more weeks to further consider its position and the claimant, BPI has agreed.

However, since these ISP, in particular Virgin Media, cover by far the largest broadband users in the UK, for most intents and purposes this affects the whole UK.

<comment><USER39> > However, since these ISP, in particular Virgin Media, cover by far the > largest broadband users in the UK, for most intents and purposes this > affects the whole UK.

It will cover the majority of non-piratebay users. The piratebay users will just switch to one of the ISPs that is not one of those five.

<comment><USER40> Err... No, they won't. Switching ISPs is the _most_ time-consuming thing to do when all you want to do is visit a site that is being blocked. There are many more practical approaches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Clearly this will stop piracy.

<comment><USER42> Probably not, but it will make it more difficult for users that aren't tech- savy.

(I know that was sarcasm btw)

<comment><USER41> I don't believe so. Most people I know use Google for their torrent searches.

Googling "britney spears torrent" is just going to bring up a different torrent site than tpb.

The clear solution is for UK ISPs to ban Google.

<comment><USER43> I don't. When I google for torrents I usually get a bunch of garbage / ad spam sites which don't actually have the content... so I don't google for torrents.

Besides, if they block pirate bay, it's only a matter of time before most other popular torrent sites are also blocked. Sure mirrors will pop up, but they won't show up on the first page of a google search's results, at least for a while.

VPN is the way to go.

<comment><USER44> Instead of googling: "content name" + torrent....

..try this: "content name" + magnet.

[http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/12/from-the-tips-box- the-g...](http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/12/from-the-tips-box-the-google- bar-torrent-searches/)

This will return more spam-riddled results over time as magnet links grow in popularity (if more sites follow TPB and go magnet-only), but it'll do for now.

<comment><USER43> Good idea. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I see a google trend coming in the form of 'How to access piratebay in the UK?'

</comment><comment><USER46> Presumably this is the English & Welsh High Court - not sure if this would apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland?

<comment><USER47> Not a brit nor a lawyer. But I thought it was simply _called_ the "High Court of England and Wales" and that the judgments were binding throughout the UK.

<comment><USER23> Nope. The UK is funny. Unlike several 'federated' countries in which each 'bit' has equal power over it's area as each other, the UK has a mismatch. England and Wales are treated together as one country lots of things (law, health system, same notes), but Scotland has a separate legal system, Northern Ireland would have separate laws aswell, but that's a special case cause it has a _ahem_ unique parliamently system.

Wait till you look at other oddities, like the Isle of Mann, which isn't in the UK, or one of the channel islands, which only abolished their feudal voting system a few years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> One can argue that The Pirate Bay just facilitates copyright violation, It never violates any one's copyright. In fact lot of artist's are publishing content through The Pirate Bay.

<comment><USER14> Where does that argument stop? Computers facilitate copyright violation, there for PCWorld and Dell do too. Roads facilitate burglary, etc, etc.

They have legitimate uses, I here the idiots cry. Yeah, so do torrents and TPB.

This whole thing reminds me of the prohibition of things like cannabis. Banned on a false economic and scaremongering premiss, yet the laws remain for emotional nonsensical reasons. Logic and reason get left far behind.

I really dont know what to make of governance any more. Politics is insane. Business seems equally insane. I dont know how I fit in to this any more.

<comment><USER49> ThePirateBay doesn't pretend to NOT be a tracker for piracy. It makes no effort to ensure that the content it tracks is legitimate and has far more illegitimate content than legitimate content. It's not terribly difficult to see why TPB is different than say a computer or a road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I don't agree with shutting down TPB, but I kinda sympathise with the porn industry. They have solid streaming credentials and go out of their way to make content accessible as opposed to companies like HBO. Is their a legitimate excuse to pirating porn?

</comment><comment><USER51> Yippy, the more the goverment tries to control the internet, the more it will go underground, and the more tor will gain in strength.

</comment><comment><USER52> Sharing is not illegal. Selling is illegal.

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder what would happen if TPB started operating as a general search engine. Like, Google, let's say.

</comment><comment><USER54> What the hell? Aren't there more important things out there to tackle than _copyright infringement?_ Sure it's illegal. But there is a massive campaign against pirates, but seriously -- surely there are bigger problems than this to tackle ....

edit: also, i love this quote "We should keep blocking them - they are stealing music illegally."

it's clearly ok to steal music legally. Just as long as you're not stealing it in ways the authorities deem appropriate. </tongue-in-cheek>

</comment><comment><USER55> From the guidelines:

      "What to Submit
      On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
      That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
      reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
      gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Clearly the community has spoken in submitting and then voting this up to be the #1 story on HN. However, I'm having a hard time finding what is intellectually gratifying about these kinds of articles other than in a Slashdot YRO-style basis where different people chime in on censorship, arguments over linking vs hosting, morality of piracy, etc.

Maybe having been a long-time Slashdot reader I've seen these arguments played out ad nauseum. When I started regularly participating in HN over a year ago I found HN to be refreshing in that these kinds of stories didn't make it to the front page. If anything, I'd expect a good hacker would find a blog post detailing lesser-known aspects of the bittorrent protocol interesting. Or a blog post discussing technical workarounds were such a block to be implemented. As I've been around long enough, I'm officially qualified to say that I'm saddened to see HN turning into Slashdot/Reddit.

<comment><USER56> What can be done about it? It's so easy to upvote and comment "this won't stop piracy". The only way I can think is to have an enormous human capcha that is having to repeat the guidelines before being allowed to vote, but that would of course be ridiculous.</comment></comment>


The CIA in the Age of Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.justsecurity.org/68539/the-cia-in-the-age-of-trump/ <comment><USER2> Wow! - "And, when the president dismisses or otherwise spins the intelligence to pursue his personal, rather than national, interests, our nation is put at risk, as are those on whom its security depends."</comment>


REMEMBER THE 13TH. - <AUTHOR> http://www.rememberthe13th.com

<comment><USER2> Despite linking to NASA's social media presences, I'd be very surprised if this had anything to do with NASA. The site appears to be hosted with an outfit called Big Brain in Reston, Virginia, and the owner's identity is concealed in the domain's whois record. Doesn't seem very NASA-like.

I'd say its more likely to be an attempt at a viral email address harvesting operation that's exploiting the current NASA shutdown. Nicely done though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8Cz3MI0...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8Cz3MI0K-cAJ:www.rememberthe13th.com/+&cd=1&hl=pl&ct=clnk&gl=pl&client=ubuntu)</comment>


Who wants to live forever? Scientist sees aging cured - <AUTHOR> http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110704/lf_nm_life/us_ageing_cure

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure this article is worthy of hacker news. It doesn't cite any new information about De-Grey, just rehashes the same arguments he's been making (but not testing) for the last decade at least. In such, its really not news to anyone but those who've never heard of De-Grey.

</comment><comment><USER3> So this means it's of utmost importance that you stay alive for the next 25-50 years so you don't die before this technology comes out.

And when it does come out, chances are it'll be uber expensive initially, so it's also critical you start a multi-million dollar startup in your lifetime.

Hmm.. finally some motivation for me to exercise regularly and not be lazy hacking at my side business =)

</comment><comment><USER4> What could go wrong?

<comment><USER5> Good question, what could go wrong? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

<comment><USER4> 7 billion people having an unlimited number of offspring might put a bit of a strain on our natural resources. Or if you're going to halt all reproduction then you've just ended human evolution.

Those seem like good starting points for a discussion on the ramifications of immortality.

That said, I'm more of a shoot first, aim later kind of guy so I say go for it...

<comment><USER6> People have vastly curtailed their childbearing world over: [http://online.worldmag.com/2009/10/30/world-fertility- rates-...](http://online.worldmag.com/2009/10/30/world-fertility-rates-in- decline/)

Even with no death from aging/age-related diseases, insurance company actuaries still see you dying around 500-600.

These two things together make me think this is all okay 1> Especially if fertility/birth defects no longer get worse with age, people will hold off on having kids. 2> It won't swell the world population as much as many think it will due to the fact that costs still limit people.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Parking Lot Lung Cancer Screening Pays Dividends - <AUTHOR> http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/877722 <comment><USER2> (requires account)</comment>


Users are not programmers, Amazon expects pipe character for user input - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/users-are-not-programmers-amazon-expects-pipe-character-for-user-input-d56c6d178515#.as7hc8tti <comment><USER2> The developers of Anroid likewise think users know what it means to "unmount" a volume safely when they abruptly remove an microSD card. (I suppose they can just Google for the man page, so no big deal, right?)

There isn't much wrong telling users to separate search terms with the | character as such; what is laughable is the (pipe) remark after it. Users will be scratching their heads at why the word pipe appears in parentheses after |, which doesn't look anything like a pipe.

Users can learn to use funny characters. By now, "everyone" knows that # is called hash, thanks to Twitter. It just has to be set up properly.

"Dear user. The | character is called 'pipe' in geek culture, due to a certain historic use[learn more link]. We think it looks nice when you use it for separating pieces of text. In this search box, you can enter multiple terms separated by this pipe character. The software will search for matches for all those terms simultaneously as if they were independent searches, and give you the combined results."

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think a normal user can find pipe character. Small "L" is "l", capital "i" is "I" which looks like pipe character and I have a Mac Pro with Turkish keyboard and pipe character is not even printed on the keyboard. Users are accustomed to split things with comma so natural choice would be comma. [http://superuser.com/questions/416472/how-do-i-type-the- pipe...](http://superuser.com/questions/416472/how-do-i-type-the-pipe- character-on-a-macbook-pro-lion-with-a-turkish-q-keyboa)</comment></comment>


Web game extras get Office of Fair Trading scrutiny - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22109188

<comment><USER2> > _Mr Elithorn said the OFT did not want to ban in-game purchases, but wanted > to be sure that games-makers are complying with relevant laws. Consumer > groups or parents with evidence of games aggressively marketing in-game > extras should contact the OFT, it said._

The UK has strict laws about advertising. Many reports to the Advertising Standards Authority are from competing firms. Company_A see an advert from Company_B, and they report it. Sometimes this is because they're domain experts and know what's realistic or not in an advert. Sometimes it's because they're a competing firm and they're doing whatever they can to cause pressure for the competition.

It'll be interesting to see who reports sleazy games.

Also, advertising codes are easy to find. It's not so easy to find a list of rules for in-game purchases aimed at children.</comment>


As the rest of Europe lives under lockdown, Sweden keeps calm and carries on - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/28/as-the-rest-of-europe-lives-under-lockdown-sweden-keeps-calm-and-carries-on <comment><USER2> It has to be said besides this non-restrictive answer from the government most Swedish companies are making responsible changes to keep the spread from running totally unchecked. All companies I know from friends working there has implemented WFH policies for everything that such a policy is possible for. In such an environment I think the government's response is a quite good one. Individual responsibility. Try to mimimize exposure, use social distancing, wash you hands and try to move things online if you can so that people that can't do that can do that more safely.

The only part that seems harder struck by this than most other of the country (according to the health departments numbers) is the capital. I wouldn't be surprised if harder restrictions would be implemented there if the spread continues to grow.</comment>


Comcast says it's "not feasible" to comply with FCC cable box rules - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/why-comcast-claims-the-fccs-set-top-box-plan-is-a-technical-nightmare/ <comment><USER2> Comcast is being willfully uncomprehending. The FCC is telling them to provide means to programmatically identify a subscriber, authorize the subscriber's device or program, get an available content list, and then receive a media stream. IP, QAM, fuzzy pen-and-ink sketches on vellum, whatever, as long as they document it well enough for anybody else to write to the spec.

Comcast uses Lawyers; it's partially effective.

If the FCC had more pull they would ask an industry consortium together with Public Knowledge and EFF to design an API, and then mandate the use of that API on all video systems.

That would then collapse as the cable companies desperately want to avoid competing with each other.

<comment><USER3> Most of the objections from the cable companies seem to be about DRM concerns, licensing (from studios), and ad-stripping. If 3rd parties are allowed to remove or replace ads, it will dramatically change cable television, and mean that consumers will have to pay for all the costs of television program production themselves, without the subsidy of advertisers. I am not sure whether that would be better or worse than the current model, but it is not obviously better.

I am not sure that the FCC has the authority to mandate the creation of an API. Putting that aside, how exactly would you force agreement on an open API? What do you do if parties disagree? You can't always split the difference, and you may end up with a very limited API which could even be unworkable. This could end up like the cable card, which was eventually recognized as a failure and discontinued.

You are also skipping over some of the more problematic issues with the FCC proposal, such as how the cable companies must certify that 3rd party boxes maintain user privacy. I am not sure how the cable companies are supposed to do this, and it seems like the FCC is just using that requirement as a way to blame the cable companies when the 3rd parties inevitable do violate expectations of privacy. The FCC is doing this because the FCC has no authority to regulate the 3rd parties.

<comment><USER2> The FCC had authority to mandate CableCard; that's an API with an embedded hardware implementation.

How do you force compliance? There are always ways. Remember the digital transition? There were carrots and sticks for broadcasters, TV manufacturers...

Why do you think the FCC won't have authority to regulate the third parties? The FCC has jurisdiction over interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. I don't see why that would end at the demarcation between a TV service and a set-top box, app, recorder or TV, and history says it does not end there.

<comment><USER3> The digital transition wasn't an issue of carrots and sticks, it was an issue of 'we're taking the spectrum back, so deal with it'. The FCC owns the spectrum, so it had broad authority to do almost whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted to do it.

The FCC can force the cable companies to comply with almost any regulation, but the issue is how you create the API. Do you vote on contentious issues? Do you have an FCC arbitrator/mediator? What happens when there is a conflict, or the API needs to be changed? What can the FCC do when an (unregulated) 3rd party messes with the API?

The FCC doesn't think it has the authority to regulate third parties, which is exactly why its proposals require cable companies to certify that the third parties will follow FCC regulations. If the FCC had any authority to regulate third parties, they would; the FCC is not exactly restrained in its regulations. This is not conjecture, I heard an FCC commissioner explain that this was the reasoning.

<comment><USER4> The FCC doesn't own the spectrum. The spectrum is public a asset. The FCC is the administrator of that asset. I am not trying to nitpick but this is an important distinction.

Originally broadcasters were allocated spectrum and in exchange were expected to fulfill some some basic responsibilities for the public good such as being required to show a certain amount of news content every day. This seems to have been forgotten but these crooked monopolists. They coax and fiber plant also uses public right aways in order to connect to households this is also a public asset.

Their business model is predicated on having access to these public assets(right aways and spectrum.) and yet at every turn they financially gouge customers, provide a substandard experience and prevent citizen from having any choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually, I'm willing to believe that a large cable monopoly's IT department is so incompetent and poorly run, that implementing this successfully is not likely for them.

That's not a valid excuse though. A landlord ordered legally to fix a broken heater cannot avoid their duty by complaining "But I'm so BAD at working with heaters! They're confusing!"

<comment><USER6> I worked in IT at a telco, and you are spot on.

The IT department was incompetent and poorly run, and they couldn't implement anything new for less than 400% of budget (time and money) and it usually didn't work very well.

Although, that's not the reason to not do something like this. The reason not to do something like this is because the bottom line is more important, and impacting that is not good.

<comment><USER7> Bad IT is standard and expected for enterprise, period. I've spent years going around to different companies that fail to do some of the most basic best practices from 1995. Retention of decent engineers is impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can understand Comcast's point. They're moving away from their QAM-based system, to an IP-based one, and one of the inherent assumptions of the design of the latter is that they own and control the network end-points that provide the video to the display device. Building a nation-wide multi-channel video distribution network is no small feat, and takes some non-trivial engineering work.

Then along comes the FCC, and says they don't get to own and control the network end-points anymore, thereby throwing a massive wrench into the works, and messing up the assumptions upon which their network is architected. Large complex systems don't just magically change overnight because of a governmental decree, despite how much legislators and administrators might seem to wish so. It would take a great many man-hours to rebuild their current system to comply with the update.

How many? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? More? I have no idea, but I do know it ain't gonna be a small number, never mind the monetary costs. And that's just the capital investment to get compliant. Ongoing support is also going to costly. And you can be confident that Comcast would then pass those costs on to their customers in the form of higher subscription fees, and high bring-your-own-device fees (or a corresponding use-our-device discount if the FCC prohibits the former).

<comment><USER4> I'm not understanding your comment. A QAM tuner provides the modulating/decoding of the RF signal over coax. If they are moving away from this then fine but why does that design have "inherent assumptions" that "they own and control the network end-points that provide the video to the display device."? So they can continue to charge people $10 a month in perpetuity? That's about the only reason for that assumption. I certainly can't think of a technical one.

Its hard to read a comment like this and find it any way credible:

"Comcast argued that "running our network code directly on third-party devices without our application [is] not feasible."

Running our "network code"? What? What does even mean? Thats like saying the "system is down." It's the kind of crap that customer service reps say to people when they have no clue why something isn't functioning.

The cable companies have zero credibility at this point. This is about continuing to gouge people that it that have no other choice in getting bits delivered into their home in 2016.

<comment><USER8> That there are assumptions that they own and control the network end points is betrayed by the comment that you don't find credible. I agree that the comment is poorly worded, but to me, it indicates that the set-top boxes they're renting out are more complex than just than something that naively decodes whatever video codec stream(s) is/are thrown at it.

I think it's a reasonable assumption that the set-top boxes that Comcast provides are loaded with at least some proprietary Comcast code that takes care of the various functions the TV box provides (scheduling/channel guide, on-demand, authorization, DRM-handling etc). I think it's also a reasonable assumption that Comcast's video distribution network (and related systems, like billing) are also built with the assumption that the endpoints will have Comcast's code running on them. It could well be that the set-top boxes for their new system are naive MPEG decoders running completely stock OEM firmware, but until presented with evidence of such, I think the former is more likely.

<comment><USER4> "I think it's a reasonable assumption that the set-top boxes that Comcast provides are loaded with at least some proprietary Comcast code that takes care of the various functions the TV box provides (scheduling/channel guide, on-demand, authorization, DRM-handling etc)"

In other words a web app? Why does that require dedicated and proprietary hardware? What am I missing?

<comment><USER8> Maybe a web app, maybe not a web app. Whether the code running on the Comcast set-top boxes is a web app or not doesn't matter. What does matter is that is is that the code running on the Comcast set-top boxes is likely built with the assumption that it would only ever talk to Comcast's back-end, and Comcast's back-end is likely built with the assumption that it will only ever talk to Comcast's set-top box code.

In other words, they're going to be tightly coupled. Sufficiently so that decoupling them enough to provide an API compliant with the FCC's proposed ruling is going to be an expensive engineering task that Comcast would rather not have to spend money on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Guessing that Comcast is willfully ignoring how cable TV works in Germany and presumably much of the rest of Europe. We have smartcard readers (and cards) that we slide into the appropriate slot on our TVs that do the decoding. I paid 4 EUR/mo. for mine because I knew I was moving, but could have bought it outright for less than 80 EUR. The optional external receiver instead of the smartcard reader was 100 EUR.

Then again, even the most expensive cable package runs about 35 EUR/mo. There is no HBO, though.

<comment><USER10> Comcast already supports cablecard. They have to by law. The FCC proposed regulations go further than cable card.

<comment><USER3> Cablecard has been eliminated as a requirement by "Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act Reauthorization" (STELAR). It was eliminated because it had failed to increase competition in the set top box market, while increasing cost and energy consumption.

<comment><USER10> Ah makes sense. I know Verizon still supported it last year. Do you know if cable companies are ending their support?

<comment><USER3> I think they are going to wait to see how this rule pans out before deploying their next generation of set-top boxes, which are unlikely to contain cable cards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Comcast to world: "We can't be bothered to implement an API to comply with regulations, so we well fight the regulation. Meanwhile, we will fight tooth and nail against anyone else getting access to public rights of way in our service area!"

</comment><comment><USER12> From the monopolists' perspective, I guess every day you delay can be measured in vast sums of money. Moreover, if they're aware of the reality that the "Set top box" has a very limited lifespan in the future, they may just be milking the market while they have it, and to hell with anything else.

<comment><USER13> The economics of this business is just weird. Last year comcast gave me a deal: TV + Internet for much less than the price of internet service alone. A "special deal" for one year. I took it. The year was almost up so I called yesterday to cancel. Turns out I can renew this "special" deal, and it's still cheaper than IP service alone. And the agent said to just call again next year and they'll give it to me again. The TV boxes are in the closet -- the agent said if I returned them they would cancel the deal and I'd pay the list price for IP service.

Ironically Nielsen selected my home as a place to track my "tv" viewing but when I told them we don't watch cable or broadcast they weren't interested. Every three months I have that conversation over again. What's funny is they just announced they had "found a way to track Netflix viewing" \-- yet they could have been tracking it the same way they track other TV viewing: by asking people. But they don't. Hmm.

BTW odious as Comcast is (and boy do they plumb the depths) I have to praise them for providing full routable IPv6 to every house. I know in Europe and SE Asia that's old hat, but for the US it's exotic.

<comment><USER14> Dump the boxes and pick up a cable card. Comcast rebates you $2.50 for having a cable card on your account[0].

[0]: [https://www.xfinity.com/equipmentpolicy](https://www.xfinity.com/equipmentpolicy)

<comment><USER13> That's hilarious. The hack value makes it worth the hassle for the $2.50. Plus it will take up less room in my closet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder what the tech crowd would say if government was to order Apple to release windows- and android-compatible OSes, or if it was to rewrite Google's Youtube API terms of use at its convenience.

You guys seem to have a pretty heavy dislike to your cable providers, which is OK, but I wonder how you would react to similar requests towards tech companies.

<comment><USER16> Cable providers are monopolies. In most markets, customers have literally zero choice as to what provider to use. This means that they need to accept a fair amount of government regulation, because there are no market pressures to act as corrective forces without government regulation. Meanwhile, the tech companies you listed are not monopolies (and when Microsoft did engage in monopolistic behavior, they were found to be violating antitrust and were subject to some regulation, e.g. no more bundling IE with Windows and making it difficult to get other browsers, etc).

<comment><USER15> Let's not lie to ourselves. Google has as close as it gets to having a monopoly. Monopolies are everywhere in our industry. For the last 5 years, the key questions to get funding were policed versions of: "can you build a monopoly" and "if we give you money, what will be your dumping strategy". And that behaviour is exemplified by e.g. the transportation market conquest by Uber.

Imo, Microsoft's antitrust is not something that would happen again, because politicians now care about international power rather than domestic balance, aswell as the fact tech companies now invest significantly in lobbying.

<comment><USER17> 65% of market share is a monopoly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Before I dropped cable TV, I refused to subscribe anything that required a set top box. My house still has an antenna in the attic with a cable running down to the basement where an A/B switch will flip the whole house from cable to antenna. No extra boxes on any of my TVs. Granted, I never wanted pay per view anyway. WoW can still be used like that by just plugging the cable into the TV, but oddly you need a box to get "digital" channels outside the normal local ones. Of course that's another fucking scam because there haven't actually been analog broadcasts for 7 years in the US, yet the cable companies down-convert everything and then charge more to get it unaltered.

</comment><comment><USER19> Other things Comcast & the cable industry deem infeasible:

1> Operating in an open market - they've lobbied against 2 cable providers in a zip code. 2> Providing reliable, high-speed service and realistic prices - US internet prices are among the highest in the developed world, while being woefully slow in comparison. 3> Moving with the times - heard of the 300 GB monthly cap? 4> Not subverting the competition - Cable companies have been known to throttle speeds to competing services like Netflix. 5> Protecting your privacy - Selling your data and usage patterns to 3rd parties

</comment><comment><USER20> comcast response tl;dr:

"Our system is old and we would keep up with the new but we don't really want to lose money because of your so called laws and we have zero care about being consumer friendly."

</comment><comment><USER21> "It's not possible to document the information flows. Here, let me tell you how the information flows work so you'll get why I can't explain it."

</comment><comment><USER22> Did they also stomp their feet and say "But I don't wannaaaaaaaa"? Just curious.

</comment><comment><USER23> Come on. This is the FCC not the ATF or EPA. The FCC has historically been very good about reasonable, understandable (even to the layman) requirements. Comcast really doesn't have much of an argument here IMO

</comment><comment><USER24> s/feasible/profitable</comment>


How to Learn Piano with Technology - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/how-to-learn-piano-with-technology-923b6008cf7f?source <comment><USER2> These sorts of tools are definitely useful, especially for those that otherwise wouldn't have access to music instruction. But there would be huge pieces missing: teaching musicianship (perfect accuracy is a _bad_ thing), finding repertoire to engage the student, arranging performance opportunities...

Basically, I think these tools replace bad piano teachers. Of course, there are a lot of bad piano teachers out there (a large percentage of all teachers, I'm sure), so I'm not saying that this sort of thing doesn't have value in increasing access.

Disclaimer: I might be a bit biased, since I have a music degree, have taken ~15 years of piano/organ lessons, and am also married to a piano teacher.

<comment><USER3> Serious question: what does it mean that perfect accuracy is a bad thing? I'm not a pianist and I'm not a professional, but I'm an amateur oboist (20 years in student/amateur orchestras). I think of technical accuracy as necessary but not sufficient for playing music. When I really have a piece down technically I can focus 100% on musicality, but I want the technical parts down solid.

Of course as I'm practicing, I am deliberate at working on both the technique and playing expressively. If I'm not deliberate about it, it's too easy to just focus on nailing the technique - it's a lot easier than the musicality.

<comment><USER4> For a simple example, any music that "grooves" (makes you want to tap your feet) tends to not be perfectly sub-divided into 4 beats. Different players in the same band may be intentionally (and/or subconsciously) hitting their notes on different parts of the beat to increase this effect. In this type of scenario there really isn't any substitution for practice and "feel", a metronome would never get you there.

In terms of piano, GP may have been referring to rubato, or holding notes for longer/shorter than notated for artistic effect.

<comment><USER3> I see. I guess it was just me misinterpreting "perfect". To me it's obviously not perfect to play like a robot.

<comment><USER5> Agree, "perfect accuracy" was a bad choice of words. When learning a new song it's best to "never play a wrong note" – to make sure you play each note with 100% accuracy, no matter how long it takes you. This trains your muscle memory _much_ more efficiently than playing less than perfect and undoing the muscle- memory-learned mistakes as you go along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My main reason for learning to play the piano is being able to compose or better express myself through music. I was "intuitively" learning to play the piano for 2-3 years, going through periods in which I would just sit at the piano and play the keys I liked, find the keys that corresponded with the sounds in my head and just letting go and having my hands move in the directions they wanted to. I got pretty cool results and loved the depth of my music, but I realized that I needed a teacher to make the next step.

Being guided by a teacher was invaluable and I recommend it to everyone. Mine focused on improvisation and music theory and i realy loved it. I was moving forward much faster than on my own. Unfortunately I lost trust in my teacher, after finding a little song on his youtube channel (he has a channel on which he teaches stuff with synthesia videos) that he shared a week after my first session with him, which resembled very much what I had been working on at home and shown him. I was really bummed out, never had the guts to ask him how that happened and stopped returning, because he kept asking me to play stuff that I worked on at home...and eventually I stopped playing alltogether.

After reading this article I got excited again about piano playing. Just found this awesome channel with lots of high quality synthesia teaching videos, including one of my favorite songs (Ab Ovo by Joep Beving: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qRV68k3-jo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qRV68k3-jo) )

<comment><USER7> > I would just sit at the piano and play the keys I liked, find the keys that > corresponded with the sounds in my head and just letting go and having my > hands move in the directions they wanted to

this should not be underestimated. I've learnt piano from a young age but you can get "stuck" in your learning. this is a great way to free yourself and get back to enjoying it again

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If anyone is interested, I've been building a tool to help you learn sight reading and other piano skills. It runs in your browser and connects to a keyboard with the web midi api (chrome only)

You can check it out here: [https://sightreading.training/](https://sightreading.training/)

It's opensource: [https://github.com/leafo/sightreading.training](https://github.com/leafo/sightreading.training)

It's very WIP, but I've used it a lot and I've definitely got a lot faster at reading notes. There isn't a good way right now to read rhythm in it. I pretty much use it as an experimental area for me to test new ideas to practice stuff, so there are a lot of little tools in there

<comment><USER9> I've been using SRT (thanks!) along with these 2 sites:

* Prelude: [https://www.getprelude.net/#/sightReading?_k=wequj6](https://www.getprelude.net/#/sightReading?_k=wequj6) (source: [https://github.com/BHSPitMonkey/Prelude](https://github.com/BHSPitMonkey/Prelude))

* Sheet Music Tutor: [http://www.sheetmusictutor.com/](http://www.sheetmusictutor.com/) (source: [https://github.com/philippotto/piano-trainer](https://github.com/philippotto/piano-trainer))

Web MIDI is amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Finding _the_ piece you badly want to learn next is important to learning the piano -- just as finding a Roald Dahl or a J.K.Rowling book is important to learning to read.

Oh, and Bernhard's posts:

[https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,12590.0.html](https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,12590.0.html)

<comment><USER11> The problem is that you probably don't have an exact idea how difficult each piece is and might pick Chopin after Chopsticks.

<comment><USER12> I always recommend this list.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/comments/5k9jci/what_are_some...](https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/comments/5k9jci/what_are_some_easy_pieces_i_could_learn_to_keep/dbngvwk/)

Although, Minuet to Gymnopedie is a big 'jump'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It should be noted that there is a great Linux clone of Synthesia (which is awesome, btw!):

[http://linthesia.sourceforge.net](http://linthesia.sourceforge.net)

EDIT: I wouldn't necessarily agree that learning a piece with [Syn,Lin]thesia means you don't gain any theory - its really a matter of picking your piece. Learn some great theory by loading it up with a Debussy!

Screenshots here: [https://screenshots.debian.net/package/linthesia](https://screenshots.debian.net/package/linthesia)

<comment><USER14> I started studying piano as child (music theory also), and still do 15-20 years later.

I cannot, _at all_ , play from something like synthesia. I need partitions. I wonder why.

<comment><USER15> Me neither. I don't think synthesia is even remotely comparable in usefulness to a partition. It's really hard to read ahead (without the keyboard reference it seems really hard to identify which note is which) and estimating note duration from the note length is not as easy as just looking at the note. I always thought it was more of a gimmick (when talking about reading piano specifically, I assume it's more useful when creating music) than something actually useful.

<comment><USER14> Even for creating music, there must be easier ways to automatically write the partition of what you're playing ?

I never had a digital keyboard, so I never looked into capture methods.

I have used MuseScore, which has gotten much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Also tried in learning piano on my own, and pretty fast ended up taking real classes with a teacher. Piano is like tennis, you can easily develop bad habits and they are extremely hard to remove.

<comment><USER17> I was self taught on piano for years, and when I finally started taking lessons I had so many bad habits to break that were holding me back.

Reading notes was not the problem, but my technique for how I was physically striking the keys needed a lot of attention. Legato, phrasing and dynamics are the real challenge and it's tough to practice things with such subtlety on digital keyboards at all. I still do it, but every time I play on a real piano I have to recalibrate.

The author says he chose a piano without weighted keys, I think that's ultimately not the right choice if you are truly interested in learning piano and eventually want your skills to translate to a real piano. Pretty early on the proper technique is based on weighted keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I bet it's not as effective as an old lady with 5 decades of piano teaching experience. Every town has one.

<comment><USER19> Although I'm not totally disagreeing, I think a lot depends on the student/teacher relationship. Growing up I had piano lessons and the two people teaching me (not at the same time) were very nice/patient/encouraging, however they never really grabbed my attention the way goofing off and playing with the different piano voices, and following along with my pianos built in"tutor" songs did. I think my earlier more traditional lessons taught me a lot, however year without practicing later, the only songs I remember how to play are the ones that were built in to my piano, and a few others I taught to myself.

<comment><USER20> It also depends on the student/teacher match. I took piano for many years as a child. Unfortunately, I had a teacher who was firmly an advocate of the Suzuki method. The Suzuki method is a good method for some students that highly emphasizes precision. Songs are played over and over again until they are rigidly precise. I do not necessarily have an objection to this in principle, but for myself, I have a very small "twitch" in me that is normally wildly subclinical, but makes it very difficult for me to hold a rigidly steady beat for more than a minute or two without a twitch showing up. Even by the standards of music this normally wouldn't mean much, I never even noticed it playing trombone in band, even marching band, but in the Suzuki program it meant I was stuck playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in a variety of rhythms for what looms in my memory as years. I don't know how long it actually was, but it was way too long; by the time I moved on, I could only play sheet music in C, a crippling blow for a pianist.

Or, so I thought. A couple of years after I stopped formal lessons, I started composing on keyboard, and was deeply shocked to discover that when I was doing my own thing, I had no problem whatsoever playing in the key of my choice. It turns out that if you play enough scales for a given key, you can play in that key just fine.

Nevertheless I never did develop the ability to play sheet music in arbitrary keys without a _lot_ of work constantly going into remembering the key.

I would have done a lot better with a teacher that figured out the Suzuki method was a poor match for me. Or if I had had enough knowledge to figure that out myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Piano is not about mechanics. Everyone can do that. Piano is not about playing. It's about hearing! And no app can replace professional human being with ability to hear these tiny nuances. Sorry to say that but if you want to play music, not piano, get a teacher.

<comment><USER22> Even if no app can replace a critiquing and guiding human teacher entirely, it could try.

Do many apps try that? Maybe it's a huge opportunity.

<comment><USER23> I would think so too. Everybody recommends finding a teacher (and a good one at that), but that's not possible for many people. Most people don't have access to good teacher, money to pay one, or enough time for scheduled lessons. Should they give up playing altogether? Even video courses are not good enough because they don't critique your technique or offer suggestions on how to improve playing at your level.

All the apps I've seen are terribly non-musical. They take small part of music (ear training, sight reading, repetition of phrases) and make you train in isolation. I would like to see an app that teaches music in context of music. Show me a concept in isolation (for example minor triad, or ii-V-I progression, or triplets), then play me some actual music examples, then allow me to exercise what I learned with some accompaniment and correct my mistakes. Such app AFAIK doesn't exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm 40 years old, starting working with the Simply Piano app a few months ago and spend about 30 minutes to an hour each day practicing. I have zero prior musical experience. I think a piano teacher would probably be an excellent investment, my daughter started piano around the same time with a teacher and she is progressing slower, but I can see that she already has a much more solid base than I do and will learn to play much better than I likely ever will. However I'm not in this to learn in any serious way, just to noodle around and play songs that I like and I find that working with an app that gives instant feedback is a relaxed and low pressure way to do that.

<comment><USER25> The thing I like about Simply Piano is that I _actually do it_. But a lot of that is because I can do it on a little keyboard plugged into my phone on the train.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty sensible self teaching approach. I thought this would be mostly about tools like synthesia, glowing LEDs built into keyboards and Ableton piano rolls.

My sense is that not many people get far with self teaching piano but some are happy to be able to e.g. comp chords out of Oscar Peterson's etudes book slowly or play a few pieces out of those Fabor Adult Piano books, which are pretty good.

I think most people that try to self teach a difficult instrument, trumpet or violin, give up. My sense of difficult is that anything I didn't learn as a kid is more or less difficult (I had 15 years lessons on 3 instruments)

</comment><comment><USER27> Community college classes are a great way to satisfy that need to learn. Usually, community colleges have group keyboard classes, which are a great, cheap, and not-intense introduction to piano playing.

</comment><comment><USER28> I studied piano performance in college. I do not recommend learning without a good teacher if you plan on taking it seriously. There's a lot that can go wrong. Also, in terms of information sharing, it's very difficult to find accurate/good information about playing the piano correctly without a good teacher (these are in pretty short supply) as a lot of that information just gets passed from student to teacher and isn't typically shared all that openly.

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting!

The piano is one of the hardest instruments to learn to play and play well especially compared to the guitar. I could teach anyone to play the guitar in a few sittings especially one with only three strings. Add more strings as the student progresses and in a few months or less they will know how to play rhythm guitar minus bar chords.

It took me years of sitting and playing daily to become a proficient player.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've been learning piano for the past few years, and I will say I fell in love with the iOS app Simply Piano ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simply-piano- by-joytunes/id1...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simply-piano-by- joytunes/id1019442026?mt=8)). I would highly recommend it for learning.

<comment><USER31> I've been learning with Simply Piano for about 6 months now and I'm amazed at my progress in that time. I'd highly recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> An interesting alternative: [http://www.flowkey.com/](http://www.flowkey.com/)

</comment><comment> sylvain-geinoz Of course you can learn a lot on the internet, but it can take more time than you think. I'm not saying this apps are bad. But I just think sometime learning with a true person in front of you is more efficient. For exemple the fear of doing something wrong can add some pressure so you will have more motivation and learn faster.

</comment><comment><USER33> Tech is nice but it's motivation that finally makes you learn piano. There's no replacement for a teacher that pushes you forward and of course you putting in the time.

Tech is similar to a siren calling you and then disappoints you. It might even be worse since you lose motivation and will eventually stop trying.

</comment><comment><USER34> Yousician ([https://yousician.com/](https://yousician.com/)) is another interesting app to help you learn. Useful for learning to read notes, but also listens to what you play and gives you feedback.

</comment><comment><USER35> If the author is reading this, you can "move" the headphone port but purchasing a 3.5mm extender and velcroing it to the side of the piano, allowing for some more play in the line. Or a bluetooth device.

</comment><comment><USER36> Local company applying AR tech to learning piano (and eventually other instruments)

[https://www.music-everywhere.co/](https://www.music-everywhere.co/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Great, good luck on your journey and thanks for posting about your experience!

Maybe the commenters that insist on getting a teacher didn't read the end of the article?

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm just about to start down a similar road with my 5 year old son. I'm intrigued how it will turn out. Yamaha EZ220 + Synthesia on Android.</comment>


Android gets a new, dramatically better, Chromium based webview. - <AUTHOR> http://developer.android.com/about/versions/kitkat.html#44-webview

<comment><AUTHOR> The old Android webview was prohibitively horrible. You couldn't build real apps in it. I've been waiting for this for years.</comment>


What makes Bach sound like Bach? New dataset teaches algorithms classical music - <AUTHOR> http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/11/30/what-makes-bach-sound-like-bach-new-dataset-teaches-algorithms-classical-music/ <comment><USER2> The question of what makes Bach sound like Bach is, needless to say, not addressed.

The actual thing they're reporting is:

'"You need to be able to say from 3 seconds and 50 milliseconds to 78 milliseconds, this instrument is playing an A. But that's impractical or impossible for even an expert musician to track with that degree of accuracy."

The UW research team overcame that challenge by applying a technique called dynamic time warping — which aligns similar content happening at different speeds — to classical music performances. This allowed them to synch a real performance, such as Beethoven's 'Serioso' string quartet, to a synthesized version of the same piece that already contained the desired musical notations and scoring in digital form.

Time warping and mapping that digital scoring back onto the original performance yields the precise timing and details of individual notes that make it easier for machine learning algorithms to learn from musical data.'

It also mentions that they attempted to apply existing deep learning algorithms designed for speech recognition to their new dataset, hoping to be able to accomplish a task such as predict a single missing note from a long string of notes. It does not say whether this worked.

<comment><USER3> Hi savanaly,

When we talk about "what makes Bach sound like Bach," the technical concept we have in mind is the recent work in computer vision on style transfer. For example,

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576](https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576)

We are excited to work on adapting these models to the musical domain!

As for note prediction, you can see our results in our paper:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.09827](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.09827)

Our are results for simple (2-layer, not very "deep" models); we were interested in understanding the low-level "features" of music rather than building a model that maximizes performance. Nevertheless, the results are quite promising; I'm confident that someone using our dataset with a deep network and a lot of gpus could blow our numbers out of the water! :)

Tutorials on how to set up and evaluate this task are available on our website:

[http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~thickstn/start.html](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~thickstn/start.html)

<comment><USER4> I'm an (ex-)musician playing with machine learning, this is very interesting, will check it out! Kudos for curating the dataset. So your goal initially is to basically build polyphonic transcription with CNN's?

I am starting to record my own dataset for solo jazz piano - all midi though. Monophonic melodies, and matching chord voicings and voice leading from one chord to the next. With the goal of learning to generate a good sounding jazz piano arrangement to a given melody with nothing except monophonic input.

Style transfer is good at essentially texture transfer - I suspect it won't work that well for understanding music theory (or text), especially with long time series dependencies, but will be very curious to see what emerges.

I'd like to hear more generative music samples from DeepMind's WaveNet too, the piano samples they published sounded very good, but it was unclear what the model had learned or generalised - and how much was semi-randomised recall. I haven't seen the open source implementations of WaveNet produce as good results yet - probably because it's computationally very expensive to train and run, and that limits experimentation. I saw Aäron give a talk on it a couple of weeks ago which helped me understand the stacked dilated convolutions - but would still like to hear more music examples :)

<comment><USER3> Yes, we're starting with the transcription task. CNNs for local prediction are interesting, and we're also curious about capturing the temporal structure of music with something recurrent. It seems like a time series model that understands something about western music should help with music transcription just like language models help with speech transcription.

The style transfer stuff comes later and as you observe, we'll probably need some new ideas to make that work well. I haven't thought about this deeply yet, but my intuition is that maybe instrumental timbre is an audio analog of visual texture, so maybe a reasonably direct "port" of style-transfer to the audio domain would let us construct demos that, for example, rewrite a cello recording to sound like trombone.

Let us know when your dataset is complete! I love jazz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Albert Schweitzer pointed out (in [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486216314](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486216314) ) that in many cases it's hard to understand Bach's music without understanding the lyrics. The mood of the music will change from cheerful to somber (or whatever) seemingly randomly, but if you understand the lyrics, it's not random.

<comment><USER6> Schweitzer may have been a thoughtful guy but I think this case is a reach; after all the vast majority of Bach's work had no libretto at all (including for example all the organ fugues, and the Goldberg variations and Brandenburg concertos).

However a counterexample from my own life: I only learned German starting in my late 20s and when, 10 years later I heard the Matthäus-Passion and could understand the lyrics I wept...and I don't even know much about christianity.

<comment><USER7> Professional Bach singer here: member of American Bach Soloists, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Bach Collegium San Diego, Carmel Bach Festival.

It's actually not true that the "vast majority" of Bach's work had no texts. Bach wrote over 200 cantatas (with around 5-10 movements and separate texts each) plus an assortment of masses and 4 extremely large choral/orchestral works: the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, the Christmas Oratorio, and the B Minor Mass.

Looking at the catalog of all of Bach's works, which I have here, BWV (Bach Werke-Verzeichnis) numbers 1 thru 1071, you get all the way to BWV 525 before you even get out of the vocal works. Numbers 1 thru 524 are all cantatas, masses, oratorios, lieder, the many chorales of course, secular and comic cantatas, etc. And of course many/most of these are far larger than the individual organ works.

(Bach actually wrote a lot more cantatas than this; but only around 224 of them survived. Another hundred or so were lost.)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for correcting my hyperbole, which I suppose is due to my bias for his keyboard works which I like to play (at home -- I doubt anyone suffer through my playing). I do like the masses and passions though, so you are spurring me to listen to more choral work!

<comment><USER7> Totally check out the cantatas; many of us feel that the cantatas are the real heart of Bach's work. Bach was fundamentally a church musician.

<comment><USER8> If you have an iPhone or iPad I would reommend the Bach cantatas app to learn about Bachs cantatas:

[http://www.cantatasapp.com](http://www.cantatasapp.com) and [https://appsto.re/de/HecH5.i](https://appsto.re/de/HecH5.i)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is really interesting, but it confused me at first. Given the title and the problem posed in the article's intro, I figured this would be a dataset of sheet music, ie. the notes and durations specified in some printed music. However, reading more it appears to be focused on recordings (ie. audio) and annotating those recordings with information about where each note starts and stops.

So to me this seems more directly applicable to transcription (ie. taking audio and turning it into sheet music) or synthesis (taking sheet music and turning it into audio of a human-sounding performance) than it does to composition or finishing unfinished works by famous composers. The output of the compositional process is generally sheet music, not audio, so it seems to make more sense that problems around composition would be trained and learn in the sheet music domain.

I'm not a machine learning researcher though! This is just my impression as a musician.

<comment><USER3> Hi haberman,

I'm one of the authors on this paper. You're right that the most direct applications of this dataset are transcription and synthesis. One of the cool aspects of end-to-end learning models is that they discover a "representation" of data that can be useful when applied to other tasks. We speculate about some tasks like recommendation and composition on our website:

[http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~thickstn/musicnet.html](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~thickstn/musicnet.html)

We're also interested in music like jazz and pop, for which good scores are often unavailable. Classical music is nice for training models because we can use sheet music as labels to learn a representation. Many aspects of this representation, such as rhythm and harmony, may transfer to other musical genres. Learning about classical recordings could bootstrap learning for other kinds of musical audio.

So while you're right that it's probably easier to learn a model to complete Bach using symbolic sheet music, we feel that addressing complex tasks directly from raw audio is worthwhile!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This news reminded me of this gem, from back in the day (I think 1996-ish):

[http://www.markheadrick.com/midi/absmfaq.txt](http://www.markheadrick.com/midi/absmfaq.txt)

In section 1.4 they very emphatically state that "with current technology, IT CAN'T BE DONE."

They conclude: "Think of it this way: If you don't mind spending more than the US national debt on computer equipment and waiting a few years for the job to complete, you can have a system that MIGHT accurately convert the digital waveform data of a 5 minute song into a small, compact MIDI file.

Otherwise, you can blow a couple of thousand dollars hiring a professional band of studio musicians and engineers who can probably give you what you want in about one day."

It is humorous for its emphatic-ness, but also educational for being a picture into how we've historically thought about this problem.

</comment><comment><USER10> This announces a new dataset where recorded performances are precisely synchronized to MIDI transcriptions. Obviously the article doesn't seem to get the implications quite right (it's very useful for performance-related research, not so much for AI composition).

As a composer, the coolest potential I see here is training a model to create realistic mockups from MIDI compositions. For that purpose, though, it would be better to start with a fully monophonic/solo-instrument dataset, which would simplify the learning. Also, MIDI data is not entirely sufficient: annotations on dynamics and playing technique would be necessary to make a good mockup tool, since this is the kind of information one might even give to human performers.

Anyways, it would be tough for such a tool to catch up with current state-of- the-art, sample-based mockup tools, which are already baffling in their realism, although they usually require a lot of work to get good results. But one can always dream of a "Stokowski" or "Karajan" neural network that interprets your MIDI composition with emotion and sensibility!

</comment><comment><USER11> i ran into a few issues trying to study classical music with a computer. first of all is merely putting in some representation of the musical score into a file. This was accomplished by MIDI but I am hoping for a more standard way that looks more like the notes of a score.

Another problem is once you have the music there's a tremendous amount of "interpretation" that a musician does. the nodes may each read 1/8 but a musician might add or subtract 1/64 has he/she feels is good.

other times the change is more mathematical 1/8+1/8+1/8 might have to actually be read 1/12+1/12+1/12 = 1/4 but that is much easier to fit into a computer

I have said nothing of dynamics (loud/quiet), articulation (stoccatto, slurring etc).

scores are available in IMSLP and other sources. but are computer files available as well?

<comment><USER5> You might look at GNU Lillypond, which might be the type of representation you are looking for, since it can be made to look like the notes of a score.

Here are some collections of music in that format:

[http://www.mutopiaproject.org/](http://www.mutopiaproject.org/)

[https://github.com/trending/lilypond](https://github.com/trending/lilypond)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is interesting to note that in 1990 there was an expert system composed of a myriad of handmade rules that could produce Bach-like harmonizations.

[http://www.global- supercomputing.com/people/kemal.ebcioglu/p...](http://www.global- supercomputing.com/people/kemal.ebcioglu/pdf/Ebcioglu-JLP90.pdf)

Unfortunately I can't seem to find the samples now, but to my (untrained) ear they sounded as Bach as the real thing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Professor David Cope of UCSC has done extensive work in this space, starting with his EMI algorithm. His algos + DBs have created some in incredible music in the Bach style.

</comment><comment><USER14> Relevant project to train a model that generates Bach music

[http://bachbot.com/](http://bachbot.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: actions.im - the new community platform focused on empowering people - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on the project: http://actions.im It's a community platform empowering people to achieve extraordinary results.
You can share your instructions and see how it helps the people follow the steps you've published.
Unlike wikihow and other instructions sharing sites, actions.im provides personal mobile TO-DO lists built based on your instructions.
Please share your opinion on the project. <comment><USER2> I would improve UI/UX, otherwise good job Sergey! :) PS: you can use "Show HN: blah blah" to show your projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Azat. Will work on that. Do you have any specific points on usability?</comment></comment>


Version V0.4 Release of Nodebeats,CMS Built Using MEAN Framework - <AUTHOR> https://www.nodebeats.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Nodebeats is a Content Management System built using MEAN Framework. Please visit the link and do give us your suggestions and support us. Thank you</comment>