Readers reply: what are the best defunct products and overlooked innovations? | Hacker News Reader

Readers reply: what are the best defunct products and overlooked innovations?

theguardian.com

40 pointsbeardyw10 comments

I really want a successor to the Hear One buds. I was going to wait for v2 to dive in the ecosystem. I'm surprised the company folded.

> I nominate the wonderful Here One smart earbuds from Doppler Labs. They had assorted tricks, but one was an absolute life-changer for me, for the year or so it lasted. In a crowded restaurant or bar, with lots of other people talking at once, it let you “focus” your hearing, via a little pointer in the app, so you could hear only the person or small group you wanted to hear. The rest was muffled out. It was like having a directional mic you could point at the people you wanted to hear. It was smart enough to know (mostly) which voices to focus on and which to muffle.

Or maybe (shakes fist at clouds) they should just turn that gosh-durn music down!

If there's not even a dance floor, why is it fun to have to shout to the person next to you and have your ears ringing the next day? It's it simply that if you can't talk, you buy more drinks?

Even if the music is low, drunk crowds can be loud enough to impair my ability to hear a conversation.

I do also have this problem in large/crowded/concrete-walled venues (looking at you, Pizza Express), but it's so annoying when there's an entirely optional 85dB+ noise floor apparently just to make absolutely certain I can't hear a thing anyone says until I say "screw it" and head home to nurse the tinnitus.

It’s done on purpose. It’s done so that people don’t feel too comfortable, eat, pay, and gtfo.

It's not just music, it's also the noise of people talking, combined with the interior design of the restaurant so that sound bounces off all the surfaces. I read somewhere that there's been a trend in American restaurants to intentionally make them noisy like this.

A local ice-cream and bagels café had extremely loud music. It was also the only place you could go at night which wasn't a drinking establishment, so it was packed with students and people like me reading books or with their laptops, or couples talking.

The music was so loud I found it painful and when I sat in there I wore earbuds plus noise cancelling headphones over the top to block out some of the sound.

One day the music got even louder and stayed that way for weeks.

Eventually I asked them if they could turn it down. They said no, they had decided to play the music louder so that customers wouldn't linger after eating their ice cream or drinking their coffee. Making room for more people to come in.

The same place also had a 30 minute wi-fi access policy after each purchase. It took me longer than 30 minutes to drink a mug of hot tea!

Amazingly the music is still painfully loud and it's still popular. I waited outside recently while a friend got their bagel, because I was holding a baby and we both felt the noise level was dangerous to the little one's hearing. It's just an ice cream and bagel café ffs. I doubt anyone enjoys the music and I expect the staff's hearing is damaged by their policy.

I never heard of Hear One until now. I need this, heating exams insists my hearing is fine, and yet…

From an audio processing perspective, how would I even build the software?

My guess is it's using timing of arrival. If there are two microphones a head apart there is a usable difference left to right. Just filter out what is out of sync given a difference. Over to you!

it's a well studied problem with many standard algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect

Reply on news.ycombinator.com