Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.

Yea, I tried streaming for a while, and found exactly that. When I play some genre-specific stream with a goal of discovering new music, I find it's basically full of unremarkable, generic musak, punctuated by maybe 0.1% memorable, great tracks that I'm motivated to bookmark for later. Are these few needles worth slogging through hours of haystack? After a few years I have sadly concluded "no."

Not sure why this is. Has it always been this way (0.1% great stuff in a sea of mediocre?) or are "content creators" of today just more focused on churning out quantity than artists of the past?

You’ve discovered the Pareto Principle. It’s true about literally everything.

So now I was on the German and the English Wikipedia entry of the Principle and noticed a noteworthy difference:

English: While it is common to refer to pareto as "80/20" rule, under the assumption that, in all situations, 20% of causes determine 80% of problems, this ratio is merely a convenient rule of thumb and is not, nor should it be considered, an immutable law of nature.

German: The 80-20 distribution in the Pareto principle often leads to the false assumption that a sum of 100 is mandatory. In fact, however, any other distribution is possible, in which, for example, 50 % of the efforts lead to 90 % of the effect, and again 50 % of the efforts lead to the remaining 10 % of the effect. This is easy to see in the trivial case that 100% of the efforts are the cause of 100% of the success. [0]

It's interesting how this explanatory information is lacking in the English version. Should be a cool project for an LLM to transfer information between the different language versions of a Wikipedia entry.

[0] Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

It's "true", yes, for almost everything, but there is a lot to gain from recognizing the difference between 80/20 and 90/10 or even 99/1, etc. Just like 99%, 99.9% and 99.99% uptime are VERY different promises to meet, while looking virtually identical to a layman.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com