Is the Era of Free Streaming Music Coming to an End? - <AUTHOR> http://pitchfork.com/features/article/9896-is-the-era-of-free-streaming-music-coming-to-an-end/ <comment><USER2> Former Grooveshark employee here so my opinion might be highly biased but I believe that the genie of free music is out of the bottle and there is no putting it back in, whether that is fair or not, it's just reality. I don't pretend that Grooveshark had anything to do with that change, we recognized that it had already happened and tried to find a way forward for the industry.

Older people, especially those with money, will certainly pay for music either by buying the music or paying for subscription services or both, and I don't see that changing but kids, the ones who I know at least, won't pay for music they can get for free, and they all know how to get it for free. Streaming services try to bring that behavior into the light and at least try to monetize it, but eliminating free streaming is only going to drive them back to the shadows. I really think that efforts to stop people from listening to music for free will be about as effective as prohibition or the war on drugs.

<comment><USER3> They used to say the same thing about PC games until Valve came along with Steam and made it easier and more convenient to buy games legally and install/keep them updated and enjoy the network experience than it was to download them illegally and steal them.

The music industry needs something they can really get behind that's good for both the consumer AND the publisher, and I don't think any of the services right now have really come out enough on top to say that's the one. I would say the big contenders right now are Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music. We'll have to see what happens.

<comment><USER4> What about bandcamp?

A few weeks ago I discovered the Analog Africa label[0], which is all about old school afrobeats. The label lets me listen to any album for free on their bandcamp page, puts in effort to track down the original artists, write great liner notes and blog entries on the process[1], etc.

I don't think I've spent as much money on music as I have on this label in ages.

So yes, I'm very much agreeing with Gabe Newell's claim that piracy is a service problem.

[0] [http://analogafrica.bandcamp.com/](http://analogafrica.bandcamp.com/)

[1] [http://analogafrica.blogspot.com/?view=classic](http://analogafrica.blogspot.com/?view=classic)

<comment><USER3> It's a service problem that none of the current distributors of mainstream music seem willing to solve.

<comment><USER4> They're just trying to milk the old model as long as possible while _also_ having profits with the new one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Before Napster, to hear whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, you had > to pay for it._

What?? Before Napster, we made tapes. I still have tons of them. We exchanged tapes and copied them, and also we recorded the radio.

It was exactly like Napster, only much slower and complicated -- and also, in a way, nicer, because putting a tape together was a form of expression.

I don't think free streaming can go away without being immediately replaced by increased piracy, but we'll see.

<comment><USER6> No, see, home-taping was illegal and in the physical world you can't break the law as easily as in the lawless wasteland that is the internet.

<comment><USER7> Home taping on analog media was not illegal. [1]

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

<comment><USER8> home taping killed music and it was illegal[0]

[0][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music)

<comment><USER7> Media campaign vs actual law.

<comment><USER9> More specifically, differing law in different countries.

<comment><USER7> fair point, my original response was indeed US-centric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are actually two big questions here that seem fairly tied together, but practically speaking are totally separate when it comes music online.

      1. How much money should consumers/advertisers
         be charged for access or proximity to music?
      2. How much money should artists, publishing companies,
         record labels and other rightsholders be paid for
         that access?

Those two definitely seem related. As a theoretical floor on #2 the rightsholders have lots of leverage and so should be able to negotiate for fair (or better than fair) payouts from #1. As a theoretical ceiling on #2 you shouldn't be able to pay out more money than you make from #1.

In reality, the actual floor on how much rightsholders get paid is only up for negotiation if the music comes as a result of interactive streaming from music provided by the rightsholders (read: Spotify). If it's internet radio, where the user doesn't choose what they hear (non-interactive, read: Pandora) the rate is set by Congress regardless of the business income or rightsholder desires. And if it's user-generated content subject to the DMCA (read: YouTube) there's no clear need to pay anything to the rightsholders (see Grooveshark). So, there are tons of arguments about #2.

As far as #1 goes, there's never been a music company that got to million-user scale and was long-term profitable, so clearly companies (and their investors) are willing to send more money out the door than they make. Fixed-rate subscriptions have a perverse property that your best users by engagement metrics are your worst users financially--they cost you the most with all that listening. Advertisement-based monetization matches consumption to revenue, which is nice, but as Pandora and Spotify will both attest, the revenue from ads thus far is way short of what they or the rightsholders would like.

So what to do? Talk about it in the press and see if you can get public outcry to force someone to pay your company more?

<comment><USER11> How could we make #2 much, much higher than #1?

It sounds implausible, but I like the idea of some kind of subsidized access to music.

<comment><USER12> 1\. Government grants program

2\. Basic income

<comment><USER11> Government-subsidized access to music! Absolutely yes. What a fun idea.

<comment><USER12> Subsidizing music and the arts in general is no different then us pouring money into NASA and the NIH.

<comment><USER13> In fact, we already do a little bit of that through the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and various programs run by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian (among others).

In the 1930s, The Works Progress Administration did a lot of interesting things with the arts. Some of it involved prettying up overpasses and federal buildings, and some of it was much more ambitious, like the Federal Music Project ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Music_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Music_Project) ), which did everything from holding free concerts to recording and studying various types of traditional american music.

<comment><USER14> All Western countries do this already. But most of the subsidy money goes to non-popular "high" art - usually classical and/or academic.

But... back in the 1960s and 70s, and to a lesser extent in the 80s, access to unemployment payments in the UK were much easier than they are now. And so a lot of people used "the dole" as basic income while working on a music career.

As an informal system, it worked pretty well. The UK got a lot of tax money from of the most successful musicians, and the entire sector brought in significant international revenue.

It wouldn't work now because there's too much music being made, and too little income from most of it.

You'll still get a handful of exceptional breakout YouTube stars. But you'll get a much bigger mass of wannabes with no real prospects.

That's not necessarily bad, but it would be a first in history - instead of bread and circuses, it's going to be laptops and social media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who used to run fan clubs, and merchandise stores on line for artists I have a fairly different take on this.

Music as an item you buy is DEAD. It has been dying since Napster, and no amount of copy right law, or services is going to put that genie back in the bottle. The tools available to artist now, make it even easier to "make" music, you don't need a full studio any more. Artists are even starting to think this way, watch Diplo and & Skrillex on Charley Rose: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb85hwOotts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb85hwOotts)

How then, does a musiscian make money? Licensing, Concerts, t-shirts and merchandise, an artist is now a brand. Its a brand that has the ability to endorse and enhance other brands. Take a "fan club package", Membership, great seats to a show, meet and greet and photo. All in its going to be between 800-2000 for 3 minutes with a top tier artist, a photo and a hand full of tchotchkes. Heck there are artists that even get paid to show up and have drinks: [http://www.gq.com/story/how-celebs-get-paid-for-club- appeara...](http://www.gq.com/story/how-celebs-get-paid-for-club-appearances)

Here is the grim irony of all of this, the music industry did it to itself. Long before "digital" was a thing touring and t-shirts was how an artist made real money. A record labels creative accounting practices would likely leave an artist with little to no cash from millions in sales. Now that you don't need a label per-se to get distribution, and it isn't where your going to make money anyway, there is less incentive to go that route at all. How many hip hop acts have become successful off of pushing out mixtape at a steady clip? Google will provide you a rather extensive list from several venues.

<comment><USER16> >> The tools available to artist now, make it even easier to "make" music, you don't need a full studio any more.

True for electronic music ,etc - but do you see it being true for rock/acoustic/etc ?

<comment><USER15> I have a good friend that does exactly this, he very much makes "modern folk music", lots of acoustic guitar.

Regardless of what you think of Kesha, she went into a bathroom and recorded a Bob Dylan cover. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNCEV7ZSNFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNCEV7ZSNFo)

[http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/amnesty- international...](http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/amnesty- international-unveils-bob-dylan-tribute-in-honor-of-its-50th- anniversary-20111210#ixzz1gFw7oqrd)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "A perpetual free option doesn't make for a viable music industry"

People have been trained for almost 100 years (since radio) that music is free but ad supported via radio. So thats bunk.

The industry is just pissed people wont buy $20 cds anymore. Suddenly people had another option for on demand music with napster.

Here we are 17 years later and the industry still hasnt gotten over it. I guess why shouldnt they - easiest money ever. But time to put big boy pants back on.

I think ultimately key music services are going to collude or move in lockstep to increase ad frequency. And frankly i think its smart to put the hottest stuff behind a paywall / available only on subscription. Record labels are essentiallly caught in this trap where you can go exclusive and reach a small percent of audience or dont be exclusive and reach everyone. An artist could go exclusive behind everyones paywall, now that would be interesting. Pandora youtube spotify whatever - listen to taylor swift new album now thru subscribing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is the Era of free email coming to an end?

Is the Era of free GPS maps coming to an end?

Is the Era of free social networking coming to an end?

...I see no reason music is any different. Nothing is free, but ads and other forms of monetization will win over subscription services.

<comment><USER19> What are some other forms of monetization besides ads?

<comment><USER20> Market dominance can make you more money. This is why WhatsApp is worth $18 billion. This can often lead to ads but it can also be used to control a market.

<comment><USER19> Market dominance isn't a monetization strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No, but the era of exclusive content is ramping up. While it's not exactly the same thing because it isn't free, you see the same behavior happening in the video streaming industry. Sign deals of exclusivity for the most popular music people will pay for, and get them hooked with a couple ad supported freebies up front.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think we are about to enter a post-recording era relatively soon. Recordings are not native to the medium we use to interact with music anymore. It's no surprise that engagement levels are dropping together with the tolerated prices in the market (selling files/access to files containing recordings). The way to upset and bury the current industry will be to create tools that let us move past this 20th century notion of music consumption - imagine for example hosted song projects with interactivity baked in. The next 10 years will be super interesting.

<comment><USER15> I do agree with your statement about "hosted song projects with interactivity baked in" but I don't think that will displace recordings.

I don't think we are headed to a post-recoring era. I think we are entering an era of MORE recording than ever. What used to take a studio, and a bunch of musicians, is now something you can do with a macbook, and a solid mic. The combination of social media (Facebook, twitter, instagram) and distribution platforms (youtube and soundcloud) not only lets one directly distribute but promote, and interact. For a lot of people in the US this means that "startup costs" to be a recording artist today are negligible.

On the consumption side, how often do you listen to music while engaged in a visual or physical task? Going for a run, commuting to work, washing the dishes, writing code... all settings where recorded music without interaction is something thats easy to consume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> No such thing as a free lunch :)

However, as long as FM radio is still a thing... "free streaming" music is not going to end.

<comment><USER24> But FM radio stations are supported by Ads that the radio stations play to make the money - so whilst it is "free" \- it is through the use of Ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is wishful thinking that the genie can be put back in the bottle, that copying will become harder and that the good times will return to the major record industry.

</comment><comment><USER16> One possibility: maybe having a streaming account would become luxury, a status symbol ? teens "love" that shit. Especially now with music discovery services, which greatly increase exposure to variety of music and make it harder to piracy alternatives to compete.

Or does anybody see a piracy based service that compete with spotify on selection, and easy of use ? how would such service look, technically ?

</comment><comment><USER26> > Before Napster, to hear whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, you had to > pay for it

Huh? "Home Taping is Killing Music" Was the slogan on every LP and tape, and played before every film, in the late 70s and 80s. It wasn't and it didn't. We had crappy ghetto blasters with 2x speed twin tape decks from every Japanese manufacturer designed for tape copying (not that anyone in their right mind copied anything at fast speed). We'd record tracks off the Rock Show on the radio and trade tapes in the playground. We'd borrow LPs to tape, regularly. 95% of my music was on copied tape. None of us could afford to buy all the vinyl we wanted.

Then CD burners came along and copying was so much easier - long before Napster. Just don't let the screensaver or print job kick in if you were on a Windows PC as it'd wreck the burn.

2 generations have been used to having free music, despite what the streamers may wish I doubt YT Red etc will make much of a dent. I'd imagine most will go back to torrents, or step up from CD copying and trade libraries with friends. Those likely to pay are those with Sonos or other home streaming hifi. If streaming becomes difficult to access there'll be a YIFY/Popcorn Time type site along any moment.

TL;DR Does the headline end with a question? The answer is no.

<comment><USER27> > Those likely to pay are those with Sonos or other home streaming hifi.

To be more specific, geriatric and upper middle class.

edit: I actually think that music torrenting is dying because habitual torrenters all have all of the music that they want. The next logical step is to spend $20 on a hard drive and give that entire collection to a friend. Or $80 if you're a fiend for flacs.

<comment><USER28> I'm not in the acquire a lot of new music demographic any longer, but I guess I assume that people must trade their music collections around. I sure would have in college with today's technology. I get that a lot of people use streaming these days but when you can trade around a few thousand songs basically for free..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The whole things was a technical example of moral hazard, and, if you believe moral hazard is wrong, an actual cultural failure.

Using a business model that wasn't self-sufficient - whether VC money, or loss-leader money, or similar - meant that easy streaming stoked a demand and a sense of entitlement in the consumer. Then later, that sense of demand was used as justification to say "Welp, I guess the genie is out of the bottle" and then ask for songwriting organizations to agree to shit fees.

Moral hazard - a risky action was took, when the actual risk was borne by those (the songwriters) other than the people taking the action (Spotify etc).

It's unethical. Saying so is not a failure to accept reality, of course it happened, but it doesn't make it any more ethical. It was a cultural failure and there's a huge counterfactual that is out there that people cannot easily accept - the large amounts of quality, life-changing music that went unwritten.

</comment><comment><USER30> The end of pay streaming music may be coming to an end. The commercial music streaming industry generates less US revenue than vinyl.

What would kill streaming music? A court decision against Google that made them take down all pirated music, or pay vast amounts to the music industry. As long as most music is on Youtube, not much else matters.

</comment><comment><USER31> Even in the UK where you need to pay to watch over the air TV, FM radio is free and has music. Choices are limited, and advertisements are invasive, but it provides a baseline experience.

</comment><comment><USER32> I remember it beginning with a company called SeeqPod, those were the days!

</comment><comment><USER33> Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no"

I think he is missing the key point of advertised streaming too. It's just plain old price discrimination. If there was no outlet for free advertised streaming, than most people would simply just pirate it. This way, they are at least making some money off of those people.</comment>


Show HN: DropCSS – A simple, thorough and fast unused-CSS cleaner - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/leeoniya/dropcss <comment><USER2> The css/js coverage tab in Chrome's developer tools is also pretty neat: [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/images/2017/04/cov...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/images/2017/04/coverage.png)

It drills down into the files, and there's a toggle to unminify: [https://www.vojtechruzicka.com/static/911b02bfd910c9a689e363...](https://www.vojtechruzicka.com/static/911b02bfd910c9a689e363de64a2e8c0/17624/per- line-coverage.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, that's where i got the unused bytes stats from

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What about dynamically changing HTML? Modal dialogs, dynamically loaded divs (depending on access rights), etc.

Unless your css is only ever loaded when the corresponding HTML is, this is going to flag a lot of false positives..

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, you need to keep a whitelist. i made a 10-liner plugin for css-obj (see my other comment) which i use to mark certain selectors with "!keep" which populates my per-page whitelists during initial css blob gen.

if most of your classes are dynamically applied or most markup is missing then this type of tool is probably not for you, especially if you have no good way of html-ifying enough state variations to keep your whitelist managable.

FWIW, i run an SSR'd ecommerce site (with modals and a quite a bit of other dynamic bits) and while whitelisting needs to be maintained, the resulting list is fewer than 30 items and basically static. the items are regex and some cover multiple/related selectors.

an improvement to this project might be to add inline ignore rules like purgecss does. eg /* nodrop * /

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I put this together when looking to replace Purgecss in my build chain due to its numerous and unresolved/unresolvable correctness deficiencies.

TL;DR:

\- Tiny API, ~60 LOC + 3 small deps

\- Does not process `<script>` or JS

\- Smaller and more thorough than Purgecss, UnCSS, PurifyCSS

\- Perf: 2.0x UnCSS, 1.1x PurifyCSS, 0.4x Purgecss

<comment><USER4> Nice work! Will give it a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very nice tool.

Small request. Can you use your knowledge of AST etc. to write another small 60 line script that just counts the amount of style rules in a CSS file?

I have tried this and not been able to do a good job of it, media queries, CSS variables and other things have thrown me off and I think you are coming from a better starting point for this 'simple task'.

Lines of code is not a useful metric with CSS and counting rules is not so simple as parsing is really a browser thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> by 'style rules' do you mean selectors or properties/values?

<comment><USER5> Yes, just the amount of selectors.

Properties/values is another metric worth knowing.

I think that getting a number for both these metrics in the stylesheets rather than the page currently viewed is more useful if you are working on a site.

As well as the stylesheets that are external the rules in an embedded stylesheet are useful. My ideal tool takes a page and gets those metrics from attached stylesheets as well as the inline stylesheets, with inline styles totalled up too.

I have had a go at this using DomDocument PHP but took a guess at the rules based on the total count of '{' \- terrible hack, but okay for ballpark figures. I would prefer to be able to do it properly, but I have not got anywhere trying to do it the node way. I didn't even know about CSSTree/AST.

<comment><AUTHOR> the main loop [1] already only visits "Rule" blocks, so you can just stick a counter in there, taking care to split combinator selectors on "," as i do, and add them up.

[1] [https://github.com/leeoniya/dropcss/blob/master/src/dropcss....](https://github.com/leeoniya/dropcss/blob/master/src/dropcss.js#L23-L24)

<comment><USER5> Brilliant. Bookmarked. Thanks for that.

I am going to have a go with that, I found the main problem I was having and that was a failure to actually obtain some stylesheets. The ones that were without the [https://domain](https://domain) at the front were silently being downloaded blank, parsed as blank and therefore not giving expected results. Garbage in, garbage out rather than anything complicated. Sometimes though you expect the harder bits to be wrong, e.g. only finding 'one match per line' due to not having a convoluted enough regex, or something else complicated.

I have to work out how to present data too so I will finish that bit off using my simple 'count the {' approach as that is near enough for a rule count, and fast too.

However, I am also interested in qualitative analysis to determine if things such as CSS grid is used or if it is all floats, whether CSS variables are used or not and if selectors are all about classes or if there are more advanced ones.

I think I really need to get the backend bit cludged together for now but then pick up on your work to take things on to this next level. Sometimes a cludge that is ballpark is useful, presenting information can only really be done when you have something to work with. Any developer can find out the information they need, presenting it to a non technical audience in a succinct way in order to back up an argument is a very different proposition.

Believe it or not 'getting the colours right' is a challenge. So imagine I want to convey to some person that shuns code and only cares about pretty pictures that their plans to use this theme or build a Wix/Shopify/Squarespace site is not what they want to be doing. They aren't going to listen to me describing how these easy solutions are not performant. But, with a few pretty graphs and succinct summaries that becomes easier.

I think you have given me the pieces of the puzzle that I need to do this. In my own mind I can imagine the bullet points that summarise the key findings. Best get on with it!!!

Many thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OK, what all these tools have not exhibited so far is upstream optimization of source generator, ie scss.

Dream scenario: 1/ run against generated output via url submission, 2/ receive optimized output, 3/ point at source generator tree, 4/ receive suggested source diffs

Lucid dream scenario: point at repository, receive optimized source diff suggestions on a per-file basis

<comment><AUTHOR> > 4/ receive suggested source diffs.

most of the removed css isnt necessarily useless globally, it's just useless in context. eg a shared bootstrap css grid will be pruned differently on different pages, but there's no single "suggestion" that can be used to modify that shared initial grid.

for css that's leftover by accident that should actually be removed from the source, i agree. but how will you discern the first scenario from the second?

<comment><USER6> Per-group (URLs that operate within a 10% optimization range) cached css, generated by source tree + crawl + ongoing visit data?

Edit, also pls send me a pony. Optimzations have a few audiences, the primaries of which are the visitor and the developer. Source tree prunes ("developer audience") not addressed in my off-the-cuff pipe dream above

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does (or will) this support SCSS, and Angular HTML, and JavaScript/TypeScript/JSX? I'm on a project right now where a tool like that will be immensely helpful pretty soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> most definitely not. at least not in the core.

the aim is to stay simple and target the common baseline; there are ~1e6 css and html supersets with existing tools to output plain html and css. surely it's not difficult to glue the subset you need together.

as an aside, i've come to dislike scss and much prefer to maintain my stylesheets in plain js, without awkward looping constructs, conditionals, variables, "mixins", etc. all of this is an already-solved problem with es modules and the language i already use: js.

check out:

[https://github.com/cssobj/cssobj](https://github.com/cssobj/cssobj)

[https://github.com/cssobj/cssobj-plugin- gencss](https://github.com/cssobj/cssobj-plugin-gencss)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very pithy, Leon. What made you think to write this?

P.s. When you slightly tweak MIT code you need to include the copyright and notice in your license, or ask the copyright holder to switch to 0BSD.

<comment><AUTHOR> > What made you think to write this?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469082)

also, i wanted to see how fast something like this would be if i pulled together all libs that advertise/prove themselves to be "fastest" in their respective responsibilities amongst similar competing libs.

> P.s. When you slightly tweak MIT code you need to include the copyright and > notice in your license, or ask the copyright holder to switch to 0BSD.

thanks, good to know. on the other hand, that adapter is so trivial that i don't think it quite warrants it. there are only so many ways to implement it against that small api surface. anyhow, first i want to see where the whole situation ends up:

[https://github.com/nrkn/css-select-browser- adapter/pull/3](https://github.com/nrkn/css-select-browser-adapter/pull/3)

[https://github.com/fb55/css-select/issues/118](https://github.com/fb55/css- select/issues/118)

i'm also glad that this [1] got merged and released quickly :)

[1] [https://github.com/taoqf/node-html- parser/pull/5](https://github.com/taoqf/node-html-parser/pull/5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish there was something like this not written in JavaScript.

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm sure there will be soon enough. i kind of laughed to myself when calling it "fast" since it takes 175ms to process ~45 KB of data :D. in a compiled language (or wasm) it would no doubt be an order of magnitude faster.

<comment><USER10> Why is wasm faster than javascript? Can't the browser compile javascript to something equivalent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The fact that this is even needed is why I like CSS-in-JS.

<comment><AUTHOR> you might still need it if you plan to use third party css libs, but not wholesale.</comment></comment>


Satellite Radio - <AUTHOR> http://dolske.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/satellite-radio/ <comment><USER2> Months of fun so far for me with the RTL-SDR. I had hoped to get an actuating satellite antenna setup by now but hopefully soon.

<comment><USER3> I got one, too, and I've been reading up on various modulation schemes (signal processing isn't exactly my strong side) to figure out how to decode 978MHz UAT transmissions. Does anyone know a good resource for learning communication stuff for people literate in math and physics but ignorant about communications techniques in general?</comment></comment>


Now hiring in tech? Pony up the perks - tomh- http://gigaom.com/2011/07/29/hiring-engineers-silicon-valley-perks/

<comment><AUTHOR> What a weird article. He says companies are desperate to hire talent (not true) and then gives three examples of perks, the first two of which are prostitution and gambling, both of which are done as one-off events, and neither of which are perks in any reasonable interpretation of the concept.

The third example, of entrepreneurship classes, is not unreasonable, but even better than that would be dropping the clauses on contracts that seize ownership of everything employees do on side projects in their own time using their own equipment, as well as the insane and common contract clauses claiming ownership of work done for so many months after ones leaves. I doubt that is going to happen any time soon, that seems to be a sacred clause to many companies. So instead they offer entrepreneurship classes, with the obvious understanding that should you actually act on them and start a side project you will be sued into oblivion.

<comment><USER2> Yeah. I mean, pay people well, give them something fun to work on, treat them like people, and let them go home on time - it should be enough.

There are definitely other industries (eg. big firm law, finance) where the bigger the hiring perks, the shittier the job - is this really where we want tech to go?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That salary graph isn't very useful. Who cares what the top superstar earns? Tell me what the average senior developer earns.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the graph myself (it was snagged from someone's flickr account according to the credits). The second section does show the average salaries for various positions in and out of the Valley, and the third position shows that those Valley salaries don't even remotely start to compensate for the higher cost of living there, which means that Valley salaries are not only not really competitive at all, but are underpaid by a considerable margin. Cool graph for showing that.

<comment><USER4> The image grabbed from Flickr was of the gorilla costume. The salary graphs were from <http://www.focus.com/fyi/silicon-valley-salaries/></comment></comment></comment>


Request for API scripts & a dynamic advertising aggregator - <AUTHOR>

Looking for scripts for fast (twitter/friendfeed) API status calls. Also any potential dynamic advertising aggregators (does Google adwords accept dyanmic text and return a relevant ad?) <comment><AUTHOR> Got it figured out (went with php), my bigger problem is getting scala to be compiling within Netbeans (works fine within lift, but can't get a lib/package to build, hangs up on scalac).

installed the latest Netbeans IDE, lift, maven, scala plugins

Went through the standard manual setting fun set SCALA_HOME, the path (SCALA_HOME\bin), in netbeans.conf passed in -JDscala.home=%SCALA_HOME% (this installation is screaming, "Mark automate me and make everyone happy!")

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Was looking here: [http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API- Method:-statuses...](http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API- Method:-statuses show)

Any suggestions on a good format? xml/json/rss/atom and does this imply out of date (not current) information?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> so far I have rss (slow, old out of date) php. Can use username and password for a recent update ([http://devzone.zend.com/article/4431-Using-the-Twitter- API-w...](http://devzone.zend.com/article/4431-Using-the-Twitter-API-with-PHP- and-PEAR))</comment>


Prismatic's New iPhone App Released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getprismatic.com/blog/2013/7/18/say-hello-to-a-new-prismatic-for-iphone

<comment><USER2> bias aside, app is looking pretty clean and smooth...

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been a prismatic web user for a few months now, and I think it's a pretty slick app (can't talk about iPhone b/c I don't have one). That being said, I have never seen a story in my feed from the NY Times, WSJ, Economist, or any of the major newswires. Not all of these publishers sit behind paywalls. Can anyone explain why they are not aggregating these sources like Google News and many others are?</comment>


Noisli – Improve focus and boost your productivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.noisli.com/get_combo_by_link/pd8blIFySEkTOHB <comment><USER2> Honestly, this is one of those things that I'm never going to use because it's Web 2.0 and doesn't need to be.

Your core functionality is cool: I definitely would like something that allows me to mix background noises.

But why am I signing up for your service? That has nothing to do with what I want from your app. That just gets in the way of using your app.

Why is there integration with Google Drive? That has nothing to do with background sounds and those permissions aren't happening.

Okay, so you're using the Google Drive integration for your integrated text editor. Why is there a text editor integrated? I have a workflow with a text editor and unless there's something I don't know here, my text editor is better and yours is just going to get in my way. And in fact I can probably name 10 text editors that are better than yours--unless your core product is a text editor, you're probably not going to beat out folks who are actually focused on making a text-editor.

I'd pay <= $10 for your app if I could download it without signing up for anything, without extraneous features, and use it from my taskbar without requiring an internet connection. Ideally I'd configure it once and never have to touch it again except to turn the sound on and off.

As is, this doesn't make it any easier to get good background noise than just keeping a collection of .mp3s on my hard drive, because the interface comes with so much unnecessary cruft. Tools like this don't encourage productivity, they encourage pointless tinkering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback, appreciate your honesty.

Of course the text editor is not something for everybody. The users that do appreciate it want to write in a pleasant environment, without worrying to much on formatting. Would love to understand more how Noisli could be more useful for you. Just write me at hello (at) noisli (dot) com

<comment><USER3> The page doesn't load for me at all because I have Facebook embeds blocked. You should probably not be assuming third party javascript will always work and be available.

> Uncaught ReferenceError: FB is not defined

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very cool project.

I made something similar for Android last week: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playwithvo...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playwithvoodoo.soundasleep)

If anyone uses this on a touchscreen device, I'm curious what you think about the slider that Noisli uses for volume control. Do you prefer the slider, or would you prefer to tap on the icon to toggle pre-defined volume states (off, 33%, 66%, 100%)?

<comment><USER5> I just tried this out. I love the simplicity of the homescreen and the simple volume toggle is great.

2 things: 1\. The coffee shop has the Joe Walsh song The Joker in the background. It's a ridiculously catchy song and I found it very distracting.

2\. I couldn't figure out how to turn this off. It went haywire and I ended up with lots of white noise. I had to turn off my bluetooth speaker, and going to applications to force stop. Nothing I did in the app would stop the sound.

A big play or pause button might help in this situation.

Hope this is helpful.

<comment><USER6> A huge issue I've had trying to find music/noise that I can use to drown out background noise is the human voice. I can't find a playlist that has sounds/music without human voice! I found a couple great trance songs that just let me put my head down and really tune everything out... and then there is either a sample of a lyric or even a "hey!" added in for no reason and it pulls me out. And if they don't have a human voice, often it will have some other repeating noise that pulls my brain away from the task. I put on headphones to keep my mind from procrastinating at a time when it really, really wants to. The hardest thing is finding music/noise that doesn't give it any excuse to wander.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks great! I would love it if you added a "coffee-shop" sound, something like this: [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerato...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerator.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> Suggestion noted ;)

<comment><USER8> there are a couple guys at work who are into these types of background noise settings.. but they kept getting upset at what they found because after a while you can clearly tell the cutoff point. you'd hear a quarter drop at some point, then know exactly when it was coming later, and your mind would start focusing on that, and that defeats the point of the thing.

if you could make a mix of coffee shop sounds and then randomize them in a way that feels natural, that would be a hit ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the hint ;) Appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great. I was using Coffitivity which has been featured oh HN before. Unfortunately they tried to launch a paid version and that didn't work out all that well. They wanted to tie it to a facebook account and I can't get on board with that strategy so I decided not to use it.

There's also the fact that they were charging either 4-5 bucks a month (can't recall exactly) for what amounted to 3 additional mp3 files. That's a tough sell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank for the feedback and for sharing your experience. Hope you enjoy Noisli :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love, recommend, and use Noisli often in our open plan office.

The only tiny annoyance is that I really like the ambient cafeteria noise, and after a while I start to notice the looping! There's a very prominent bit where a lady shouts "Swwwwing!". There isn't much you can do about it though other than make the sample much longer, and it's hardly a problem. Just something I notice.

Thanks for the site. I actually registered noisebubble.com a while back with something similar in mind, but you beat me to the punch and I'm happy you did.

<comment><USER11> There's a way to make this harder to detect: create "loops" which are actually a multitude of loops that have prime number lengths. The individual components will repeat, but "beats" of simultaneous repeats won't exist, giving the illusion of a much longer sequence.

I've seen an example in graphics used to create very large tiling patterns from a small image space. See:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110410071059/http://designfesti...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110410071059/http://designfestival.com/the- cicada-principle-and-why-it-matters-to-web-designers/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the hint ;)

<comment><USER11> Since people are likely to play several loops at once, you might make a policy that _all_ loops are different lengths, in prime integer numbers of seconds. I haven't checked for how long your segments are, but that would allow users to mix-and-match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is great. Why do you need an 8 character password? Are you planning on adding some kind of a payment feature later? For things I don't care, I just use a simple password.

<comment><USER13> >For things I don't care, I just use a simple password.

Maybe you don't care, but others might.

<comment><USER11> One problem that is exposed by low-quality / frequently reused passwords isn't so much poor password protocol among users (though there's that), but _overauthentication_ on the part of sites and apps.

If your users are giving you poor passwords, maybe _you shouldn 't be using accounts._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fun fact: Spotify has playlists like this. Keeps them under the "Sleep" collection.

But this is awesome! I love the clean aesthetic.

/me goes back to blasting bad pop music through youtube

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Glad you love it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I discovered that if you turn all the sounds on, it quite rapidly has the opposite effect of the submission's title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe activate just a few for now ;)

<comment><USER16> alert - "Whoa there, you sure that's relaxing?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Neat tool. Your page completely fails to render, however, if I keep connect.facebook.net blocked.

Stops processing at FB.init({ appId : '1496974077209368', cookie:true, xfbml: true, version:'v2.0'});

<comment><AUTHOR> The website should be back ;)

<comment><USER18> Failing to load for me on Firefox 35.0.1 with the Disconnect add-in. Working fine in IE.

ReferenceError: FB is not defined application-96c626561436c4678adfdaf2587c9beb.js:11386 "SoundManager V2.97a.20140901 (HTML5-only mode)" application-96c626561436c4678adfdaf2587c9beb.js:20912 "SoundManager 2 HTML5 support: mp3 = true, mp4 = true, ogg = true, opus = true, wav = true" application-96c626561436c4678adfdaf2587c9beb.js:20912 "SoundManager 2: Ready. ✓"

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a 4 month old daughter and paid for a white noise app to help her sleep / calm down. This is a perfect replacement with better design etc.

I urge you to make an app marketed towards parents - I would pay for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! If you have iOS we also have an app :) [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noisli/id862773459?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noisli/id862773459?mt=8)

<comment><USER19> Just purchased :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I listen to this whilst surfing the web:

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

Also handy:

[https://coffitivity.com/](https://coffitivity.com/)

[http://www.getworkdonemusic.com/](http://www.getworkdonemusic.com/)

This is a personal favorite too - Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoqNeR3_UA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoqNeR3_UA)

Personally, whilst coding, I enjoy absolute terrifying silence.

<comment><USER21> Can't remember where I found it, but someone once shared this command to fake the Star Trek engine noise:

play -c2 -n synth whitenoise band -n 100 24 band -n 300 100 gain +20 flanger

<comment><AUTHOR> that would be a funny combo :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is a free app that has the same basic functionality that came out a few months ago: [http://noiz.io/](http://noiz.io/)

<comment><USER23> > a free [OSX] app

I was expecting a mobile app. Or at least something cross-platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have an iOS app [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noisli/id862773459?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noisli/id862773459?mt=8)

<comment><USER23> I was talking about the app the person linked to, not noisli.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have always like the ambient sound stuff, but normally those sites are not well designed. This site is pretty darn good looking. Any plans on an Android app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the kind comment! About Android app, yes ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> As a frequent Raining.fm and Coffitivity user, I find this awesome, and will definitely give it a try while working!

I'd strongly recommend finding an easier name to remember/spell though. If somebody told me "go to noisli.com", I'd spell it noisely.com. Ideally it should be something that's easy to remember and speaks to its function (noisey.fm, ambient.fm, and backdrop.fm are all available domains).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the awesome :) Give it a try and let me know how it goes :) That would be great!!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We just released the new version of Noisli ([http://www.noisli.com](http://www.noisli.com)), a tool I created out of a personal need to achieve more productivity having to work on loud co-working spaces or working in total silence from home. Hope you find it useful too :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like [http://asoftmurmur.com/](http://asoftmurmur.com/)

<comment><USER27> It is more the other way round. Asoftmurmur was pretty ugly [https://web.archive.org/web/20141012204201/http://asoftmurmu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141012204201/http://asoftmurmur.com/) but has recently updated to look like noisli.com.

Don't get me wrong Asoftmurmur.com is also great, and I tend to use a combination of noisli and it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's an app for Mac/iOS ($4.99) called WhiteNoise that does a similar thing. It also has a really extensive library of new sounds you can add: [http://www.tmsoft.com/white-noise/](http://www.tmsoft.com/white-noise/)

<comment><USER29> Android too. It was one of the first things I bought when I moved from iOS to Android. Helps me sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Page a few seconds loading and ended up as a blank page, (due to Facebook not loading).

I'm not convinced there's any reason to use this instead of [http://mynoise.net/](http://mynoise.net/)

<comment><USER31> Even more closely related: [http://asoftmurmur.com/](http://asoftmurmur.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Color of this page hurts my eyes :( Ability to change background color would be great, after sitting in front of terminal for hours this green background is too bright.

<comment><AUTHOR> You find the option to stop the background color clicking on the wheel icon on the left menu ;)

<comment><USER32> Yes, but it does not save it's state between page reloads and not attached to my account. Also not sure what is the point of account. I would like to stop background and be able to stay anonymous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is there a limit on the amount of sounds I Can activate? it seems as if after playing with combinations for a while, something gets stuck so I can activate/deactivate one of the sounds and nothing happens until I deactivate a previous one.

Is this normal?

Also, is there a way to cache the files locally? if I deactivate a sound and activate it 3 seconds later, it seems to have to load it again (there's a delay) instead f being instant-on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, we know about this problem :( and actually this is also a browser limitation. Definitely working to enhance this!

<comment><USER33> Awesome! will keep using it anyway :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are great! Thanks for the support ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is great! Being able to save my favorite combos and set an "off" timer is nice, now would it be possible to set a timer to automatically switch to another (random or specific) combo? I'd light to define day/night cycles or sun/rain cycles :)

Also, once you saved a combo, how do you edit it? It seems there is no way to get back to the home page once a fav combo is started.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Just click on the star icon to open/close the combo view ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wish it would tell you somewhere that you can only have a certain amount of sounds at once, that was a bit confusing. Great work though!

<comment><AUTHOR> The sound limitation is actually due to browsers limitation. Will keep working to enhance the experience! Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nice! Might I just propose better color contrast between text and background? Sometimes it's a little hard on the eyes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Actually, now there is the option to stop the background color at any time ;) Just click the wheel icon on the menu and there it is :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> In case anyone is interested in getting this functionality on Android, I run a competing service that has an Android app:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gabemart.a...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gabemart.asoftmurmur&hl=en)

<comment><USER38> Can't download it on my oneplus one, says it's not compatible. Do you know why that might be?

<comment><USER37> Yeah, unfortunately there's a persistent problem with the One where playing more than a few audio streams simultaneously results in stuttering or crashes. I've looked into it but never found a reliable workaround. Every few months I take another look, but no luck so far. It's the only modern device that I've had to list as incompatible, but it's a real shame because it's a great phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Looks like a nice app, bought it for iOS.

I love the "animate" feature of this page: [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/rainNoiseGenerator.php](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/rainNoiseGenerator.php)

Any change of the app getting something like it? Or perhaps a new app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the support and for the kind feedback! Definitely will keep it in mind for further developments ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is like anti-noise-reduction. Which to me is weird. It's the fan white(?) noise which makes my blood pressure go up not down. So I wonder if it isn't just a myth that this should be calming at all.

That said, I still think the page is very well made and the sounds sound great! Well done!

</comment><comment><USER41> Great job, I'll be trying this out during my next sprint. So far Soundrown is my favourite. Both seem very similar in functionality but I prefer the visual style of Soundrown more. [http://soundrown.com/](http://soundrown.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Please give Noisli a try and let us know ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm in my happy place.

www.noisli.com/get_combo_by_link/LfuyDN4ryc0DE7x

Where did you source these loops for this project?

<comment><AUTHOR> So glad you found your happy place on Noisli :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The Soundcloud links are giving me a 502/504 which means that I don't hear anything.

<comment><USER44> Open the browser console, go to the resources tab, and delete all the soundcloud api local storage/cookies/etc. Perhaps at soundcloud.com too. I had that problem, mine works now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I've noticed on the propeller and nighttime sounds that there's a gap in their playback as the loop starts again that's honestly quite jarring. Especially when the propeller is the primary background sound.

Even the fire has a noticeable pause.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The iOS app ($1.99) should more prevalent here too (it's buried in comments below):

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noisli/id862773459?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noisli/id862773459?mt=8)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the support :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Awesome tool! I've been a big fan of Rainy Cafe for quite some time but I'm going to give this one a shot this week. Thanks!

[http://rainycafe.com/](http://rainycafe.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! And please let me know how it go ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Looks and sounds fantastic. Very well done. Love the simple interface.

Only annoyance is that the sounds are stacked in 2 columns on a laptop. I'd love it if I could see more of them on my screen at once.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the suggestion!! Will keep it in mind!

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Very nice, I've been listening to [http://rainytunes.com](http://rainytunes.com). Good to know I have yet another option.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is awesome, looking forward for an android app so I can use on my tablet and try with my daughter. Too bad that the website is going offline :(

<comment><AUTHOR> We are working on it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> FYI I get a blank white page with Chrome. Version 40.0.2214.111 m (64-bit). Checking source, it's all loaded. Just nothing showing.

Works fine in IE 11.0.15

<comment><AUTHOR> Experiencing some load problems. Please, be patient :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I would pay for a version that had an Australian bush option with occasional kookaburras and bell birds, maybe lyre birds and wattle birds too.

</comment><comment><USER53> HEY NOISLI !!!

Your site isn't loading in Firefox or Chrome.

Others have mentioned it, but it looks like you missed their comments. Just thought I'd mention it again.

</comment><comment><USER54> Thanks for reading our comments!

What does your site offer that [http://mynoise.net/](http://mynoise.net/) does not?

<comment><USER55> Can you consider sharing your Mnemosyne deck about Ruby and other technology? I am currently making something identical and it would be pointless energy on duplicating something already done.

Note: I am posting here as commenting on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184615) expired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This might be niche, but if you happen to have access to creative-commons liscenced fiddle and mandolin music, that helps me focus.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will keep it in mind ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I like it. I've used Simply Noise in the past but will give Noisli a try next time I think of it!

</comment><comment><USER58> Future feature request: ASMR sounds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> The thing that will improve your focus most is called "The Well-Tuned Piano".

</comment><comment><USER60> What's the benefit of signing up? Couldn't find any information about it

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you can find more info ;) [http://www.noisli.com/features](http://www.noisli.com/features)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Hm, this is maybe the smartest project I've seen, in a while. Great work! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Reminded me of Myst. So nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> tool to drive you nuts at work if white noise isn't your thing

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a selection of other sounds too. What about birds and water stream? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> For a splitsecond i read Nisoli, and i had a micro-heart-attack.

</comment><comment><USER65> Lovely webapp. Looking forward to your android port! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> noisli is one of product I love to use. and it seems server is on fire! I hope lots of people can get some productivity boost by using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> can you also add a frequency bar? I like the sound of the train, but not constantly. I'd like to adjust how often it happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! Will keep it in mind ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Love the coffee shop. Great job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Just a white page in Opera 12.

</comment><comment><USER70> noisli, where's your android app and mac app?

</comment><comment><USER33> This is delicious!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Sign up with google permissions:

>"Upload, download, update, and delete files in your Google Drive. Create, access, update, and delete native Google documents in your Google Drive. Manage files and documents in your Google Drive (e.g., search, organize, and modify permissions and other metadata, such as title)"

Hell. Fucking. No.

<comment><USER72> I'd guess that these permissions actually only pertain to files that the app itself creates.

<comment><USER73> Is that how permissions work? I was under the impression if you gave the app permissions to read write and delete files in your storage, it could (in theory) read/write/delete anything it wanted?

<comment><USER74> You are right, that's why the permissions are scary as hell.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: what would you build if you could analyze trillions of rows? - <AUTHOR>

With all the Google I/O news, I failed to notice the BigQuery description that reported it was geared towards "analysis over datasets containing trillions of records" ( http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/bigquery-and-prediction-api-get-more.html ).<p>What interesting things would you do with BigQuery which you could not do before as an independent developer? <comment><AUTHOR> My thoughts are revolving around server log analysis. Google Storage (where the data needs to be) could be where I choose to warehouse every server event for my projects because of the BigQuery feature.</comment>


Is this a good site idea? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, i have watched this site for quite some time but never posted anything but i would like to hear your opinion about a website idea i had these days. I'm not an entrepreneur although i have considered for a while to get on the roller coaster and try some of my ideas.
To put it in short i'm a huge fan of any gadget so i was wondering if there would be any interest in a website, where members have profiles showing their gadgets (phones, game consoles, mp3 players etc), where each member can post a personal review of his gadgets, post notifications on new gadgets, sell old ones.
Could have a microblogging platform like:
"User X just bought an IPhone".
Thank you for your time :) <comment><USER2> This sounds like a side project, if it is done then it should be done for fun and not relied on for any sort of income.

Here's why I don't like this idea:

1) Niches are failing. TechCrunch just covered yesterday about a social network for shoe lovers that folded after two years. Yes gadgets can encompass a lot of niches but you're really only appealing to the niche of hardcore gadget freaks, the ones who drool over every new phone (well, they did before the iphone.)

2) Your monetization would be horribly difficult. Reviews would be your biggest draw, but you're drawing the hardest of hardcore buyers, they are smart and able to find the best deal. If your advertiser isn't the cheapest then they're not going to see revenue. Sure the SEO might be such that you get less hardcore fans, but the community is going to be extreme gadget users and thus very likely unfriendly to newbies. The classified idea may get some use but you can't charge for listing, the user might as well use Ebay which promises a bigger audience to see the ad. And handling the transaction such that you can take a fee is a hairy business.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've already made that facebook app, it didn't do so well.It was called iGot, as in "check out what I just Got." It let users put products on their profile and post a short review. I only had a couple dozen people ever use it.

</comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't personally interest me, but I can imagine there are people who would use it. Why don't you prototype it on Ning and see if the idea gets any traction? That would seem like a quick and easy way to get feedback.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds more like a blog than a real business. I know one website where I could enter my gadgets. Did that once but never looked at it again...

</comment><comment><USER6> facebook app.</comment>


The Lessons of Shell Shock - <AUTHOR> https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/lessons-shell-shock <comment><USER2> George Carlin's contribution to that history:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0)

<comment><USER3> "I'll betcha, if we'da still been calling it 'Shell Shock,' some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time." — George Carlin

[https://youtu.be/hSp8IyaKCs0](https://youtu.be/hSp8IyaKCs0)

<comment><USER2> The link in your post leads to the exactly same video: hSp8IyaKCs0 only over youtu.be instead of youtube.com.

Which surely confused me: I expected something new. What was the goal of giving that link then?

<comment><USER3> You are correct —- I had this on file and should have removed the link before posting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a moment I thought this was going to be about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_\(software_bug\)) but then I wondered why would History Today write about a software bug from a couple of years ago. Turns out the linked article was not about the software bug.</comment>


Fair Tax: Tax Gap of Silicon Six over $100B This Decade - <AUTHOR> https://fairtaxmark.net/tax-gap-of-silicon-six-over-100-billion-so-far-this-decade/ <comment><USER2> > Profits continue to be shifted to tax havens, especially Bermuda, Ireland, > Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

The US just can't do anything to these countries. Too far from the Middle East.

The US can't do anything to the companies either. It is private business, you see? Corporate personhood. For non-corporate persons there is FATCA.</comment>


Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cowbell/sharedrop <comment><USER2> Firebase is a really attractive service to quickly and easily bring powerful features to any app, but I can't help it.. I feel like I'd be including yet another way for Google to track people. Therefore I avoid any app with Firebase in them, no matter how cool they are. Am I overly suspicious here?

<comment><USER3> yes, you are. Google has no incentive to spy on Firebase projects because any project using firebase could contain sensitive data and any company that believed Google would spy on the data would not use them so Google would lose market. The same is true for AWS and Azure

<comment><USER4> But since Google knows that companies believe that they won't spy on them for the reasons you've outlined, then so long as they're real cautious about it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use Firefox Send (works on all browsers), it's end to end encrypted and has automatic expiry: [https://send.firefox.com/](https://send.firefox.com/)

<comment><USER6> For the tech savvy people, checkout ffsend as fully featured CLI tool for Send (shameless plug): [https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend](https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend)

<comment><USER7> Wow! Thank you so much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool project but it's not remotely a clone of AirDrop. AirDrop is one of those things that can only be done by Apple, at least on iOS. I have many apps that have "documents" on iOS. I can select them in the app, pick "Share" and then pick "AirDrop" and send them to my Mac. AFAIK I can't do that through this. I go into those apps, select some files and pick send to Safari and I get an error, Safari doesn't support the files. I go into Safari and pick some file but Safari or iOS doesn't let me browse the files of other apps.

Maybe it's possible to make a native iOS app you could send the files to that would use same WebRTC protocol but going the other way, Mac to iOS device seems impossible. Where as I just tried it via real AirDrop. I choose a file on my Mac in Finder. Picked Share->Airdrop. Selected my iPhone. I was given the option to open the file which then gave me a list of all apps that I could send it to. I picked an app and the app's folders appeared. I chose a folder to save it to and then ran the app to check it worked. It did.

I supposed Mac to iOS you could make your native iOS app the target and then from there select the files and "share" them with other apps on the phone.

<comment><USER8> Seems like it would be a cool side project to create a minimal iOS app that simply acts as a share target for this. Similarly for android and Windows. That would make it much easier to send. You'd still have to either visit the site or scan the QR code to receive, but making sending smoother would be a dramatic improvement.

AirDrop is one of those things that is truly wonderful in how easily and simply it works, but makes me really annoyed with Apple for not opening it and allowing it to be cross platform. Android had something similar for a while but it barely worked, and Google never put any effort into making an iOS app (which obviously would not have been as good as native, but better than nothing). Bluetooth itself has a function of airdrop-like sharing actually, but it was mainly used for spam and it's basically nonexistent in modern mobile Bluetooth stacks. Something like AirDrop that truly works well cross- platform but wasn't easy to spam would be so wonderful.

<comment><USER9> I want an app in the Share menu of macOS that enables me to send content to any executable (e.g. shell script). Services menu isn't the same and too many steps to set up.

<comment><USER10> Not exactly what you're looking for, but I do something similar with [https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/](https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Sean-Der [https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole](https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole) is another great one.

* Native Client (in Go so you use pretty much everywhere)

* Uses PAKE for E2E security. Even if the server is hostile they can't get anything.

<comment><USER11> Chiming in with yet another alternative, I had success with [https://github.com/psanford/wormhole- william](https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william) which is also Go, but is compatible with the original python wormhole.

I think the main difference is that webwormhole tries to use STUN/firewall hole punching to connect two nodes, while the original implementation will use a TCP-TCP relay as fallback.

I recently needed to transfer a 30 GiB file within a restricted network but the firewall blocked webwormhole, so I ended up with -williams instead.

Hopefully at some point all these project can converge into something that supports ALL the solutions :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "ShareDrop allows you to send files to other devices in the same local > network (i.e. devices with the same public IP address)"

That's an interesting definition of "same local network". So, this doesn't work for networks not behind NAT? Or for IPv6?

<comment><USER13> I believe it means same subnet, but it's possible that it only works behind a NAT because it uses an out-of-network service (Firebase) to tell it who's on a single network (i.e. who has the same public IP).

<comment><USER7> But that's just the thing, you've written the same thing as they have.

> who's on a single network (i.e. who has the same public IP)

Those aren't even close to equivalent. Now that most ISPs offer IPv6, they aren't even equivalent most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess it would be a bit better to call it "inspired" by AirDrop rather than a "clone", as it doesn't use AWDL for discovery (rather, it seems to use Firebase).

<comment><USER15> And the internet requirement also makes it definitely not a clone. This is addressed in the readme, but still, don't call it a clone then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like it doesn't work on iOS.

What happened to AirDrop? It used to "just work" and now it rarely works.

In the last two days I experienced: \- Unable to discover devices (a constant AirDrop frustration) \- Transferred a video from iPhone to Mac, had to wait for video to be converted first? \- Transferred video from (different) iPhone to Mac, transfer repeatedly resulted in a corrupt 0 byte file

AirDrop has become totally unreliable.

<comment><USER17> Could the latter issue be due to a HVEC codec mismatch? I have an old Mac and it doesn't handle that codec well.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I investigated the conversion issue and it seems it's due to HEVC / H.265 video being the default in iOS 11, but not supported in older versions of iOS / OS X. I was transferring to a Mac running OS X 10.13 High Sierra.

I had always thought of AirDrop as a straight file transfer, but that's not the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Snapdrop is also available: [https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop](https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop)

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks quite useful for cross platform transfers on the same network. I've been using AirDroid [1] for quick cross platform transfers on the same network and Firefox Send for transfers over the Internet.

When I tried this on iOS (different browsers, though they're all using the same engine underneath), it was stuck on the loading screen. Turning off content blockers didn't have any effect.

Edit: Figured out that this doesn't work on iDevices (at least older iOS versions). There's an alternative called SnapDrop [2], whose FAQ has this question and answer:

 _> SnapDrop a fork of ShareDrop?

> No. ShareDrop is built with Ember. Snapdrop is built with vanilla ES6. I > wanted to play around with Progressive Web Apps and then I got the idea of a > local file sharing app. By doing research on this idea I found and analysed > ShareDrop. I liked it and thought about how to improve it. ShareDrop uses > WebRTC only and isn't compatible with Safari browsers. Snapdrop uses a > Websocket fallback and some hacks to make Snapdrop work due to the download > restrictions on iDevices._

SnapDrop looks like a better alternative to me.

[1]: [https://airdroid.com](https://airdroid.com)

[2]: [https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop](https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm using "Just an Email" [1] for quite a while now, on a self-hosted server. QR-code generation has been integrated - I simply press "Start" on my computer, scan the QR code with my mobile, and can share links, files and texts in realtime. That's easy enough for my use-case.

[1]: [https://github.com/mustakimali/just-an- email](https://github.com/mustakimali/just-an-email)

</comment><comment><USER21> To get reliable WebRTC don't you need a Turn server to relay your traffic when the NAT is too bad? Where does this get a Turn server?

<comment><USER22> Hi! ShareDrop author here. It doesn't use any TURN servers and that's why it doesn't work if one is required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been using this for quite a while, and recently I've run into the trouble that the fire base account was overcapacity. Not sure if it's been fixed since then, but I've had to use the QR code instead of the automatic detection. Still, really nice tool.

<comment><USER24> Seems to still be an issue:

> FIREBASE WARNING: The Firebase database 'sharedrop' has reached its peak > connections limit. If you are the Firebase owner, consider upgrading. > ([https://sharedrop.firebaseio.com](https://sharedrop.firebaseio.com))

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks pretty good, but it also seems to have stagnated. Latest commit was in January 2019. It would be nice to have a shorter URL for rooms, so it's easier to share with others.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would love to have something like this but self-hosted and without the Firebase dependency. But maybe this would be a starting point.

</comment><comment><USER27> There are many of these webrtc file sharing services. Most of the time, the traffic ends up getting relayed.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is this actually transferring over LAN? So you could share a very large file on a slow connection?

<comment><USER29> Yes, it can

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is pretty neat, just tried it between iPhone Safari and MacOS Safari. Worked well.

</comment><comment><USER31> > _Sharedrop: HTML5 clone of Apple 's AirDrop – easy P2P file transfer powered > by W_

Powered by W? Is W a new programming language or JavaScript framework?

It looks like @todsacerdoti is not aware that Hacker News submissions are limited to 80 characters in the title. They probably wanted to submit _"HTML5 clone of Apple 's AirDrop - easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC"_ which is 73 characters long and represents the current project headline on GitHub, but then they added the project name at the beginning _"Sharedrop:"_ turning the title into a 79 characters long string cutting "WebRTC" out. I think this would have been enough: _"Sharedrop - Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC"_.

<comment><USER32> Looking at the GitHub page, they probably wanted to write WebRTC.</comment></comment>


Do we need Wikileaks? - <AUTHOR>

This is not dissing the work Wikileaks is doing. But fundamentally, is there a need for it? Why wouldn't whistleblowers just publish the information themselves? An organization like Wikileaks (or FEE) could post advice or procedures on how to release sensitive data securely.<p>The danger here is relying too much on just one organization, which may decide to filter, distort or refrain from publishing altogether. <comment><USER2> Wikileaks (2010) is not Wikileaks (2006).

I think we do need Wikileaks, but the objective and impartial 2006 version.

Today, there is not even a wiki at wikileaks.org. If an archive of the wiki exists, its not easy to find on their website. There used to be multiple ways of sending information, including online upload, email and multiple postal address around the world, now there is only one postal address in Australia. I get the impression that they are only interested in major scoops these days.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whistleblowers can publish this material themselves. However, once you publish the material, you also need to make sure that mainstream news sources pick up on it and report it, otherwise you are just some guy with a blogpost somewhere.

Wikileaks is now a "brand name", if you will, and leaking through them makes sure that, unless you yourself decide to confess like Manning supposedly did, you both remain secure and yet are noticed.

<comment><USER4> Additionally, they do check into information before publishing, so being associated with the "brand" lends some credibility to the information being leaked - much more than some anonymous blog would have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> iwr: I started to question that a while ago. I think the biggest reason that people go there to make public the information is the "Publicity" it gets. Think about it. You hear the word "Wikileaks" and you exactly what is going to follow.

Personally, I think people should be uploading to systems/programs like FreeNet and have that pass around up there. Then start using media (mediums?) on the web as a way to move it around faster. For instance, (and of course the irony of it) bit torrenting could be used as a medium.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't remember Wikileaks claiming monopoly on whistleblowing. The fact that no other has emerged yet, suggests that we badly need it/

</comment><comment><USER7> I think they are necessary evil to keep the authority on their feet and never take anything for granted.</comment>


Noma's taste of tomorrow: creating the future of food - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2016/03/features/inside-noma-copenhagen <comment><USER2> The last few months I've noticed how many people at the top of their respective professions put artificial and somewhat arbitrary limitations on themselves which seems to help creativity flourish.

Rene Redzepi as seen here does a geographic restriction and also was only vegetarian, though I believe will be adding meat to the menu in the future.

Another chef is Magnus Nillson at Faviken, which is more geographically isolated and uses much more local items.

In a recent interview I learned that Steven Spielberg used to (maybe still does) try to artificially restrict the budgets of movies he directed so every possible thing was not at his disposal.

<comment><USER3> Noma was never vegetarian, but now appears to go in that direction: [http://www.eater.com/2015/9/14/9324311/rene-redzepi- closes-n...](http://www.eater.com/2015/9/14/9324311/rene-redzepi-closes-noma- urban-garden)

<comment><USER2> Only seasonally in the future though:

"At the new Noma Redzepi plans to eschew the "predictable progression" of a tasting menu in favor of a "reverent adherence to seasonality." In the fall, the menu will focus only on dishes made from wild game and "foraged autumnal ingredients." In the winter, Noma will transform into a seafood restaurant. And in the spring and summer where "the world turns green," Redzepi says that Noma will "become fully vegetarian," with most of the produce coming from the restaurant's farm."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finishing up René's journal now, great read: [http://www.amazon.com/Ren%C3%A9-Redzepi-A-Work- Progress/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Ren%C3%A9-Redzepi-A-Work- Progress/dp/0714866911)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a puff piece about a restaurant. I'm not really seeing how it's different from other high-end restaurants doing unscalable things to stand out.

<comment><USER3> What is the basis for your assertion that standing out is their motivation, as opposed to wanting to offer their guests a fantastic culinary experience?

<comment><USER5> I'm not asserting that. Wired implicitly is with the "future of food" headline, and by running the story in a technology magazine. Also, whoever posted it here is implying that it's somehow interesting to hackers or as a startup. (Otherwise it would make more sense to post it to some other community devoted to gourmet dining.)

<comment><USER3> Quote: "I'm not really seeing how it's different from other high-end restaurants doing unscalable things to _stand out_." \- my emphasis.

I did not post this, but from my perspective there are very interesting parallels between the hacker approach to problem solving and the way noma approaches cooking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anthony Bordaine visits Noma in one of his shows on Netflix if you want to see more, it was alright.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes I wish that every article had a short tl;dr at the top.

This post looks great offering awesome pics and an interesting topic but I am too ADD to read it (and wondering if it's worth the time).

<comment><USER8> TLDR: Award-winning Danish high-end restaurant specialises in locally sourced highly-seasonal food, including ingredients which are foraged rather than farmed; has attached "Food lab" to find and promote innovative ways to use Scandinavian ingredients, including tasks such as finding out why wood ants taste like lemongrass and perfecting fermentation techniques.

If reading about high end food preparation makes you salivate it's interesting enough (and really not that long), but certainly doesn't justify the ludicrously hyperbolic headline.

Edit: corrected country

<comment><USER3> "ludicrously hyperbolic" \- talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

<comment><USER8> Do you think the idea that the "future of food" revolves around high end restaurants putting arbitrary geographic restrictions on food sourcing isn't ludicrous or isn't hyperbolic? Why not?

<comment><USER3> Noma is much more than its geographic restriction. They experiment with insects, which are likely to be a important source of protein in the future and the novel application of preparation method, for instance fermentation. But the geographic restriction in itself is an important part of the future of food, in a world where climate change is a an existential threat and transporting bananas and rice 1000s of kms is not sustainable. Demonstrating to the world what can be done through local sourcing will be defining for the future of food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Food prep without hats or hairnets? yum.

<comment><USER10> Those dishes undergo scrutiny far beyond what would allow a hair to slip in. They literally inspect every leaf. If a hair falls unnoticed into the food they are completely failing at their job.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best minimal CSS Framework for side project - <AUTHOR> Hi, I'm starting a small side project to learn web development and have fun. Could you suggest a good CSS Framework for it? My candidates are:
https://github.com/picnicss/picnic (it seems the most simple) https://github.com/jgthms/bulma/ (very easy, but very minimal) https://milligram.github.io/ (more complete)<p>Fot javascript I want to use Vue.js because it's easy, clean and I can control it.
Using Flask (Python) for backend. <comment><USER2> Hi lormayna, I'm the creator of Picnic CSS, thanks for considering it! If you don't mind me asking, why did you consider using Picnic and why wouldn't you choose using it? I'm trying to improve it constantly and I'd really appreciate your opinion from the point of view of "learning web development" (:

If you have any question you can just reach me here or on github

<comment><AUTHOR> I like PicnicCSS because it's simple, it's clean and it's nice. It has almost all the components that I need for my ideas.

<comment><USER2> Awesome, what components is it missing? If they make sense within Picnic's goals I might add them (:

<comment><AUTHOR> A modal for example

<comment><USER2> Oh but there _are_ modals: [http://picnicss.com/documentation#modal](http://picnicss.com/documentation#modal)

Edit: although the html is quite ugly, sometimes I wonder if I should just add some bits of js

<comment><AUTHOR> A footer components would be great :)

<comment><USER2> Completely agree, I tried in the past but it felt too invasive. Maybe a few tamplates which include nav/footer layouts would be nice

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> andrei-m-visan I use Pure CSS from Yahoo. It is very light and easy to use. [http://purecss.io](http://purecss.io)

<comment><USER3> Seconded. I've been using this for about 18 months on various projects. Really like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Skeleton, perhaps.

[http://getskeleton.com/](http://getskeleton.com/)

<comment><USER5> I really like Skeleton because it's so simple. Sadly it looks like the author has abandoned the project but there are some forks on Github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> IMO if this is a side project to learn web development, your best bet is to pick one of the nice looking examples given in this thread, and then don't use it, just imitate the style.

Why? Because if you use a framework rather than learning CSS, you will just waste time learning that framework's quirks which will not transfer over to anything. Most of the desirable features of these frameworks can easily be replicated with flexboxes anyway. Your own effort may not come out quite as smooth looking but you will learn a lot more along the way.

I say this not as a CSS expert, but a guy in a similar situation who wasted a lot of time fiddling around with Bootstrap only to end up ditching it almost 100% in favor of custom CSS.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://iamsurface.com](http://iamsurface.com) pure css material, not updated in a while but looks great and has modals with pure css [https://imperavi.com/kube/css/](https://imperavi.com/kube/css/) almost not minimal but pretty cool [http://jxnblk.com/gravitons/](http://jxnblk.com/gravitons/) really minimal

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://knacss.com/](http://knacss.com/) is very interesting but the documentation is French only :(

<comment><USER9> It's neat indeed, but I don't see the difference between the normal grid and the responsive grid at the bottom of the page you linked.

<comment><USER8> Look the difference [https://lut.im/RCbxJiKqPR/Vsz5iYdI0EYaYRfE.png](https://lut.im/RCbxJiKqPR/Vsz5iYdI0EYaYRfE.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use [http://www.basscss.com/](http://www.basscss.com/). Version 8 was just released which was restructured into standalone modules. Use what you need.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not really "minimal" but it's very easy to get started with and has everything you need: [http://semantic-ui.com/](http://semantic-ui.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Tangentially related, I want to draw a (potentially non-responsive) layout and then have CSS generated for me. I am hoping my development time will be faster. Is there a good website for this?

</comment><comment><USER13> On a slight tangent, does anyone know what the best minimal grid is? I'm looking some something I can can use when prototyping.

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://mincss.com/](http://mincss.com/)</comment>


Why we love repetition in music - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/why-we-love-repetition-in-music/

<comment><USER2> As a musician I was prepared to roll my eyes at this article but it's really good.

When I was a kid I would play with Music Construction Set on my Apple ][, "painting" lots of random notes into one or two bars and then putting repeat signs around then. What sounded totally random and annoying at first became kind of catchy once you listened to it eight times in a row.

The composer that I really admire for unabashedly using repetition before the Minimalists really took off with it is Olivier Messiaen (the Turangalîla Symphony has lots of great examples). Classical music is historically largely about continual transformation, and he was unafraid to just cut and paste big sections. It worked magnificently.

<comment><USER3> I had the same reaction when I saw the title, but then I saw the author. Her book on repetition won the outstanding publication award from the Society for Music Theory this year. I haven't read it yet, but I've heard her present and she was really fascinating (even though I'm normally not interested in cognition at all).

<comment><USER2> I didn't realize she had a book on the subject (although of course now I see that it's mentioned in her byline). Thanks for calling my attention to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I heard somewhere - reference long lost, sorry - that repetitive music makes us happy, but _slightly unpredictable_ repetitive music keeps us _really_ happy.

It's like the brain has a threshold; under the repetitive threshold is boring, but too far above it is also boring. We need this middle ground where breakdowns or middle-eights or whatever they're called have this magical property.

This supposedly explains the popularity of jazz. Which leaves me personally baffled, but there you have it. The sciences!

<comment><USER5> The first thing I thought about while reading the article was minimalist classical music, like Philip Glass.

I think Glass does the repetitive/unexpected thing exceptionally well, though it's often subtle.

If you're already familiar with Glass (or if you like Beck) you might want to check out Beck's song from Rework, an album of remixed Glass: [https://soundcloud.com/dunvagenmusic/nyc-73-78](https://soundcloud.com/dunvagenmusic/nyc-73-78)

It's repetitive, but has enough of the unexpected mixed in to make it a stimulating listen.

<comment><USER6> The _second_ thing I thought about was Brian Eno and his attempt to 'learn' a sound recording of a city street by listening to the recording many times. He began to anticipate certain sounds and hear them as belonging to a structure.

I'm not finding a Web reference. It was described in a book by David Toop

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great article. It's wonderful to see rhythm celebrated for how it makes us feel.

The Guardian had an article a few days ago on an emerging emphasis of bridge rather than chorus, and the role of repetition, in recent blockbuster hits by Ariana Grande, Iggy Azalia, Nicki Minaj and others.

The article has a great quote from the founder of Motown:

             "Don't bore us, get to the chorus!" Berry Gordy once joked, understanding that this is what listeners truly gather around.

[http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/dec/22/2014-...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/dec/22/2014-when- songwriters-burned-the-chorus-and-built-the-bridge)

<comment><USER8> This is a weird article. What is referred to as the bridge is the pre-chorus, a common element in pop music. Bridges are also common, but generally only happen once in a song (I can't think of any exceptions) and are typically a 'journey' to somewhere else before coming back to the original theme. An example of a bridge is about 2.5 minutes into John Mayer's Find Another You: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QcaHBTfGU8&t=2m38s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QcaHBTfGU8&t=2m38s).

<comment><USER9> Amusingly, a lot of the tunes that are familiar as jazz standards, e.g., "Take the A Train," have a short AABA form, that the musicians refer to as the "bridge." But I suspect that jazzers abuse music terminology.

The bridge is where you find out who really knows the tunes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This question might be slightly off-topic: some time ago I read an article (might have been on Wikipedia) which explained why music more than other art forms sticks with certain atmospheres, memories or moods. I unfortunately didn't bookmark it, and I couldn't find it again. Does anybody have an idea where to find it?

</comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic article.

For those interested, certain artists like Swans[1], Godspeed You! Black Emperor[2], and ISIS[3] really take it to the next level with subtle changes in each refrain. As an added bonus, they are all _fantastic_ for programming.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HKIjG9JH6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HKIjG9JH6c)

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

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3S3zuHRqlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3S3zuHRqlk)

</comment><comment><USER12> _> this illusion demonstrates what it means to hear something musically. The 'musicalisation' shifts your attention from the meaning of the words to the contour of the passage (the patterns of high and low pitches) and its rhythms (the patterns of short and long durations), and even invites you to hum or tap along with it. In fact, part of what it means to listen to something musically is to participate imaginatively._

That's exactly how mysticism sees music. As a level above speech.

</comment><comment><USER13> When I watch or listen to anything for the second time I only get about 75% of the enjoyment out of it. But it might be something wrong with me ...

<comment><USER14> Novelty effect is strong, but there might be a u-shape there. Have you ever tried to get past the valley?

<comment><USER13> I really enjoyed Spotify and had many play-lists with my favorite music. But when the discovery of new music declined and I got bored with my play-lists I closed the account and have never opened it again.

The curve never go up, but with some songs it have flattened and those are my favorites. But it has more to to with the feelings associated to those pieces then the music itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The sequence "sometimes behave so strangely" exhibits syncopated notes on a diatonic scale, 2/4 type meter, and a progression that adheres to chords of a melody. It seems unlikely that something this musical would often appear in normal speech, never before noticed.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, the sample was quite clearly handpicked for increased impact (and faster habituation, probably). But the argument is (I believe) about the fact that you can easily handpick such samples from perfectly normal spoken phrases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Boots and pants and boots and pants and boots and pants

</comment><comment><USER17> It's called – stutter edit.

> The stutter edit[1] is a musical production technique, most often known for > its use in electronic music, in which fragments of audio are repeated in > rhythmic intervals.

Electronic musician Brian Transeau (better known as 'BT') developed the "technique", coining the phrase, and later released it as a standalone plug- in.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stutter_edit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stutter_edit)

<comment><USER18> No it's not. A stutter edit is about much shorter pieces, and notably _not_ about repetition. I'm not sure where Wikipedia got that from. It's about adding little silent gaps to tracks.

<comment><USER17> Did you even read the wikipedia page? Check out "Skylarking" and "Tomahawk" by BT for a good sample of what it sounds like.

<comment><USER19> that wikipedia page, not to put too fine a point on it, is complete bollocks and reads like a marketing script for the izotope plugin.

check out the date on this announcement:

[http://www.kvraudio.com/news/dblue_releases_glitch_v1_1_9_39...](http://www.kvraudio.com/news/dblue_releases_glitch_v1_1_9_3973)

this program was "old" and wasn't the first. ableton added beat repeat in 2005, and there was vst's i can't remember the name of that did it before that.

you've hit a nerve anyway, BT is easily my least favourite electronic music artist ever and so I am probably not capable of reasonable debate hereafter. i think he's possibly the most overrated producer in the world.

<comment><USER20> I can pull examples of sample mangling that fall under these definitions from, at least, somewhere around 1993-1995. Someone seriously is saying BT invented this shit?

<comment><USER19> yeah people are seriously saying it. read that wikipedia page, it's beyond ridiculous.

earliest i can think of is the aphex remix of flow coma and i'm not even trying.

> Electronic musician Brian Transeau[3] developed the "technique", coining the > phrase, and later released it as a standalone plug-in. Until this point the > majority of stutter edits were created through deliberate manual editing > techniques rather than automated processes (such as the eponymous plug-in). > The audio plugin is named "Stutter Edit" and was co-released by iZotope and > Sonik Architects.[4]

it's not like izotope release a plugin in 2002 which does the same thing, oh wait it is:

[http://www.kvraudio.com/news/bitshift_audio_release_phatmati...](http://www.kvraudio.com/news/bitshift_audio_release_phatmatik_beta_for_macos_31)

"developed the technique" is such a weaselly phrase. did he develop the technique, or did he further develop a technique that already existed. to my understanding neither is true. he's a crap musician to boot.

<comment><USER17> Transeau found that software tools to accomplish this weren't readily available. So, he decided to develop his own, forming his own software company, Sonik Architects. And later Sonik Architects was acquired by iZotope.

It's like saying: "Columbus didn't discover America because it already existed" or "Newton didn't discovered 'Law of inertia' because it already existed".

<comment><USER19> > Transeau found that software tools to accomplish this weren't readily > available.

he could have used google, but keep believing!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>