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Comment by daveslash | Hacker News Reader

"My God people, stop using AM/FM Radio! It's an analog signal, and this is a digital world! The quality and bit rate is so low! Use your phone + Spotify + Bluetooth for music! Use your phone + podcasts + Bluetooth for news, talk, and opinion, or switch to satellite radio!"

Problem: In breaking news moments like this, there should be a type of podcast you can listen to in real time, easily accessible for free.

Solution: Radio. You're thinking of Radio.

https://twitter.com/matthewkeyslive/status/12350720664134492...

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This basically happened to me when a friend was scheduling group videogames for the week. "If X and Y had Prime then they could order a switch and have it in time for Friday with free shipping!"*

Gosh, if only there were some sort of local Amazon warehouse that I could travel to to procure the items I require when I require them. They'd probably have a lot of items stored! In fact, some of these stores of items might even cater to one or two types of items only, perhaps necessitating multiple stores at different locations!

* This was a real conversation from a human being.

I had a similar conversation with some folks regarding streaming a while ago.

Friend: Man, I can never settle on something to watch on Netflix/Hulu/Disney+, etc.... It would be nice I could pick a genre and the streaming service is just rotating through a list of popular titles of that genre - something that's just always on that anyone can tune into.

Me: TV. You're thinking of TV.

I really miss that feature of broadcast TV. I know there's some solutions for Netflix, but they're desktop only, and not built-in to their apps.

Unfortunately, the economic incentives for Netflix and similar means they'll never ever develop an app like that, because they want to discourage long-tail viewing.

> It would be nice I could pick a genre and the streaming service is just rotating through a list of popular titles of that genre

Although I would say in this case it's not exactly analog with TV, for two main reasons: ads, and picking a genre. In general, TV channels don't stick to a specific genre, even when it's right on the name (like History Channel).

Also, I doubt your friend would actually want a live, always on thing. They might just end up upset that everything's already mid-way through, or that they can't pause. Netflix "random" feature makes more sense, and I guess even more if you could choose a genre.

edit: seems Netflix doesn't have the 'random' feature anymore

this is kind of like tesla removing am on model 3/y

it's super old and sounds like shit but it works really really well and is great for relaying critical information that we now cannot get

They did? Aw, man....

I love tuning into AM 1610 when driving through National Parks to get park information. AM is great for low-power local broadcast for recorded tourist information on repeat.

agreed. AM 1610 in Delaware is an excellent service that I can't use when we road trip there.

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