steamer25

You're here on HN reading (and commenting!) on Mother's Day (or just Sunday depending on your locality?). You don't seem completely unmotivated ;) .

> I'll just keep my eyes near the top of the screen and scroll so my eyes don't have to move

That reminds me of the Spritz interface for reading text which came out a few years ago: http://spritzinc.com

I'm a little surprised it isn't super ubiquitous by now, especially since everyone has their own small but personal screen nowadays.

Maybe it's too encumbered with licensing or didn't have enough marketing follow-through?

I was replying to another sub-thread here and had another thought:

It might be easier for your son to express what he's learning if you can catch him while he's got e.g., a piano or guitar at hand. Humans have a hard time generating compound musical waveforms using just their bodies/vocal-folds (though it can be done to a limited extent as in Mongolian throat singing). Having him play the sounds as he explains them will probably also help cement the concepts in his own understanding ;) .

> to fully appreciate musical qualities, you have to play around with sound

@jimbokun: It might be easier for your son to express what he's learning if you can catch while he's got e.g., a piano or guitar at hand. Humans have a hard time generating compound musical waveforms using just their vocal folds (though it can be done to a limited extent as in Mongolian throat singing). Explaining it while playing it will probably also help cement the concepts in his understanding ;) .

I agree that to fully appreciate musical qualities, you have to play around with sound and that text alone won't suffice. On the other hand, your description of radiation hitting the retina might be a decent primer on color theory which has about as much to do with photography and painting as music theory has to do with playing an instrument. My goal was to demystify the jargon by showing that it has very tangible definitions which can be understood by even analytical audiences like HN (of which I include myself).

The gist of music theory: It sounds interesting when sounds with simple frequency ratios are played at the same time. E.g., playing a 440 Hz tone at the same time and 660 Hz tone has a 2:3 ratio. Some combinations of frequencies, when played before or after other combos can establish an expectation and then either fulfill it or negate it. E.g., if you take the ratio above and then play 440 + 587, it'll sound like it's moving forward and that the second combo has 'arrived' as you might have expected. The 587 is derived by fixing the first note but inverting the relationship from 2:3 to 3:2 (and then doubling the frequency of the second so you don't have to move so far from 660).

Most everything beyond is attaching labels to the frequencies and combos. Just as we have names for frequencies of light (red, yellow, blue) and patterns (gradient, checkerboard) there are names for frequencies of sound (A, C#, E) and their combinations (major, minor). There are also more esoteric terms (chiaroscuro in painting, neapolitan flat 9 in music) for people who've spent so much time on a subject that the basics have become boring.

Oh, and there's also divisions of and patterns for time in music theory. E.g., "hold this note for twice as many milliseconds as the previous one".

There have been some good resources here on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=music%20theory&sort=byPopulari...

Khan describes the long straddle (3:53): https://youtu.be/2HIRaOQDRho

Eugene Khutoryansky has lots of good animated visualizations. E.g., this one on Maxwell's equations: https://youtu.be/9Tm2c6NJH4Y

Circuit Jam helps a bit for practice: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.circuitjam

Also, stack exchange: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes

It's ironic (cue pedants) because they're denouncing one-sided presentations that advance a particular agenda while using a facade of ostensibly independent-minded locals that are actually mouthpieces for their remote overlords.

It betrays that their indignation isn't so much over dangers to democracy as it is their loosening grip on the ability to frame the discussion of any given day.

https://youtu.be/TRBppdC1h_Y

https://youtu.be/0ljI-isM0bg

I can't register with my email. "There was an error with your request. Please try again."

I remember some documentary with Jack White talking about how he tries to make music composition more difficult on purpose. I had a very similar reaction to yours--the example they played under his voice over wasn't very impressive to me and I'm not much of a Jack White fan to begin with.

Now that I'm writing this, I suppose one useful concept is that of constraints promoting creativity by forcing you to come at the blank canvas from a different mindset than you're used to.

I suppose there are some times to struggle and grow but other times, like a competitive swimmer shedding his 'drags', to engage our full unhindered capacity free of such artificial handicaps.

Another musical example for me is the band Amaranthe. They usually make extensive use of modern production techniques but their talent is also very evident when they're unplugged:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/J4Jhpx2Qmz4?start=61&end=290

Music video for the same song: https://youtu.be/D8lV1To-_fU

Could you point out some of the updated advice on ulcers?

I think that'd be an uphill battle.

E.g., I, for one, oppose federal interference with the technical decisions of ISPs via so-called net neutrality. I've written my representatives on multiple occasions saying so. If I lived in Montana, I'd be similarly opposed to the state government's meddling. As a citizen of Minnesota, I'd actually oppose an overreaching federal government if they tried to overturn Montana's law. Even though I think it'd be better policy for Montanans, I regard Montana's rights as a state as more important than my ego's desire to direct their policy from afar.

My guess is that a lot of other opponents of federal internet regulation would agree.

I'm actually quite glad to see this playing out among the various states as 'laboratories of democracy'. In ten years, we'll both have a lot more data on which policy promotes better offerings.

What I'd really like to see is one of the states declare municipal grants of telecommunications monopolies to be void. E.g., if some town has contracted with Comcast to be the only ISP legally allowed, then the state would come in and say that those terms are legally unenforceable and that the town has to license at least one or two competitors or face charges from the state.

I try to avoid hyphen-based range notation. It's sometimes hard to tell if a single hyphen was intended to be a minus sign. Double hyphens look like ASCII em-dashes. I've never heard of of the triple convention and would be confused if you neglected an inline explanation.

Here are some alternatives:

* English: from 1 to 3

* Some programming languages: 1..3

* Math: [1, 3)

I guess this also the main purpose of the en-dash* : http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/en-dash.html . The problem there is that en-dashes can be inaccessible as in my case--typing on a phone.

* I actually originally missed your point because you forgot the hyphen between 'en' and 'dash'.

If anyone else was surprised as I was to hear that Verdana was disliked, here's the most compelling argument I found against it:

While it was meticulously designed for on-screen legibility, these days higher resolution screens and anti-aliasing, etc. are a better solution than meddling with the letter shapes e.g., taller x-heights, bigger openings, etc.

One detractor did allow for Verdana when rendering fine-print/legalese at very small font sizes--as long as it was unlikely to be printed.

After my former employer had a successful exit, I spent a few months helping to integrate with the new parent company. Once that was done to satisfaction, though, all but four members of our tech department were laid off--including me. I used the bonus payout, my severance and some investment success to finance my own startup...

My first product is meant to help businesses with eCommerce stores (particularly those powered by WooCommerce for now) keep track of inventory counts and locations:

https://stime.tech/yoink/

This reminds me of the inspiration for the name of Taleb's "green lumber fallacy". From Wikipedia:

The term green lumber refers to a story by authors Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan in their book What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars, where a trader made a fortune trading lumber he thought was literally "green" rather than fresh cut.[26] "This gets at the idea that a supposed understanding of an investment rationale, a narrative or a theoretical model is unhelpful in practical trading."[27]

The protagonist makes a big discovery. He remarks that a fellow named Joe Siegel, one of the most successful traders in a commodity called "green lumber," actually thought that it was lumber painted green (rather than freshly cut lumber, called green because it had not been dried). And he made it his profession to trade the stuff! Meanwhile the narrator was into grand intellectual theories and narratives of what caused the price of commodities to move, and went bust. It is not just that the successful expert on lumber was ignorant of central matters like the designation "green." He also knew things about lumber that nonexperts think are unimportant. People we call ignorant might not be ignorant. The fact is that predicting the order flow in lumber and the usual narrative had little to do with the details one would assume from the outside are important. People who do things in the field are not subjected to a set exam; they are selected in the most nonnarrative manner—nice arguments don’t make much difference.[25]

For screen-cap/video instructions, I also try to take a little extra time* but towards making it concise/brief.

* If the instructions are worth making, more time will be spent viewing them than producing them.

I try to get the whole video in one take to save editing but I'll do multiple takes to try to get it right/succinct. I consider the first one a draft/rehearsal (though if it works out, great!).

This still doesn't take very long (even when using a small area of the screen to save file size), and viewers should find it easy to pause or back up a few seconds.

This is all for step by step style instructions rather than heavy conceptual teaching, though.

Also, for documentation it sometimes works even better to make a looping, animated GIF of a single step and then inline that with a text description.

Using the opus codec (as Cleanfeed does) could potentially help with limited bandwidth scenarios:

https://opus-codec.org/comparison/

Using a Wacom tablet with:

* A drawing app e.g., OneNote or Sketchbook or Krita

and

* A screen sharing app e.g., join.me

Has worked well for me. What's particularly nice is that you have a saveable, shareable, modifiable artifact when you're done with the remote session.

I'm also a bit surprised that Wiimote whiteboards never really took off: https://youtu.be/5s5EvhHy7eQ

The app seems pretty feasible. There'd probably be some issues with having to periodically resync the timing due to moving microphones or other skews coming in and out of phase but I don't imagine that'd be insurmountable.

The bigger trick would be getting various parties at any given event to help out by first recording and then submitting their data to the same collaboration service. I've seen enough rooms full of techies struggling to get a projector or conference call working to imagine all kinds of headaches with connectivity, app installation, finding the right event reference, etc. If you allow post-event submission, most people would probably forget or not care by the time they got back to their home networks only to be annoyed weeks or months later that they still have a large audio file taking up space on their device.

As more people are posting various captures (just for personal-reasons/vanity, without necessarily going out of their way to prescribe any particular remix), maybe something like PhotoSynth where you crawl the web for media having similar GPS and timestamps could work. Maybe people could be bothered to tag their posts with hashtag #YetAnotherCon2017; then you just have to monitor a couple of the more popular social channels.

When I need 10s of tracks (multiple drum mics, bass, guitars, keyboards, vocal mics, effects, etc.), I prefer to use Cakewalk Sonar. I've also heard good things about Reaper which is pretty inexpensive.

I often end up using Audacity when I'm working on only one or very few tracks (e.g., a video voice over). It works quite nicely for basic edits, trimming, normalizing, etc. without as much clutter (tempo, time signatures, measures, etc.) as some of the more music-oriented packages. With the addition of MIDI tracks, it sounds like Audacity is moving more in that direction but we'll see.

I was actually thinking of it as an extension of the presumption of innocence on behalf of the citizenry and keeping the burden of proof on the government as a check against it's powers. Cops are citizens too but there is some level of surrender of your individual rights e.g., when you join the military. It'd be similar to that.

Another thought is the panopticon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon . You don't necessarily need to stream and record every cop's cam, just randomize it without indicating to the cops who's getting recorded or when.

We just need to establish a legal precept that if the body cam footage isn't there to corroborate the cops' story, we assume the worst and they get held accountable for anything a plaintiff is able to plausibly allege. Under that scenario, most cops would become the biggest advocates for e.g., redundancies, backups and transparency.

Best presentation of your point I've seen:

http://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-nak...

I agree with you that cases of doxxing and/or incitement are different than broadly- or generally- offensive speech and there may be cases where it shouldn't necessarily be protected.

I haven't heard those charges leveled against Milo before but that may not too surprising since I don't follow the news surrounding him too closely.

My friend owns a local outdoor recreation equipment/rental/guide shop. He actually said he'd kill for an app like yours based primarily on location. He and his wife like to go on road trips and seeing which areas have more activities available would help them prioritize where to explore. He cited the maps in the MTB Project mobile app as a baseline interface--the shortcoming with that one being that it's too narrowly focused on biking.

He's also big in the local Chamber of Commerce and said that lots of Chambers are willing to spend money to position their town as outdoor-friendly.

> Labels have invested a heap of cash buying these rights

IP legislation needs to move into the 21st century where we have digital audio workstations and word processors and non-linear editors and many other modern conveniences that have brought the cost of producing and distributing content way way down. We need to send some sort of sunset signal to the labels and comparable organizations that they should stop investing so much in lawyerifying their content because the government is going to severely limit the enforcement of their claims to particular combinations of colors and sounds.

Come to think of it, maybe the enforcement period should be proportional to the development costs. E.g., how many man-hours at minimum wage + amortized equipment costs did it take to record that song? Okay, we'll enforce your copyright for three years. Oh, you spent gajillions producing a AAA-tier video game? You get 10 years.

Someone in another forum commented recently that there should be a new top-line federal agency whose mission is to promote the security of America's information infrastructure. They suggested it should be established as an adversarial check/balance against e.g., the CIA and NSA.

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/839168025517522944

Maybe if they were required by statute to accept anonymous submissions and make FOIA-style responsible disclosures after a reasonably short period of time, they wouldn't end up colluding right away.

I'll try to do both sides justice although I'm sure there are people representing either side that could correct me on many aspects...

I think of 'globalist' as being something of a perjorative/having at least a slight negative connotation. It describes a perspective where all humans are part of a global community/family. You could contrast it with 'nationalism' (which has it's own negative connotations--the two sides provide derision against each other) in which nations should be independent and sovereign.

Critics of globalism argue that it centralizes too much control, planning, finances and government, leaving locals with less autonomy. Nationalists are not fans of e.g., the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, etc.

Critics of nationalism argue that international cooperation brings many benefits and that nationalists are merely racist or xenophobic. It's harder to list organizations that globalists are not a fan of because most nations have at least one nationalist movement. Brexit would be a good example in the Anglosphere.