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While we're talking about Mingus, don't sleep on his mind-blowing eggnog recipe. I try to make it every year... a beautifully alcoholic act of improvisation: https://www.charlesmingus.com/blog/news/minguss-5-star-raptu...

subparon John Madden has died

“At the end of the game the team with the most points on the board is going to win.”

― john madden

subparon Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

Also quit and hiked the AT back in 2018. Plan was to take a whole year – hike the first half and travel the second, but a month after finishing the trail a unique opportunity came my way through a former colleague and I jumped back in to the working world.

subparon How to train large deep learning models as a startup

How good is their speaker labeling? We've been using the Google API but their diarization has been basically unusable for our application (transcripts of group conversations).

subparon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2021)

Cortico | Backend Engineer | Remote (US) | Full-time | https://cortico.ai

We’re hiring a backend engineer at Cortico, a small distributed non-profit spun out of the MIT Media Lab. Our team is half technologists and half community organizers /facilitation experts. We work with libraries, municipalities, academic institutions, and other non-profits to capture authentic conversation about community members’ lived experience and then amplify those stories with a focus on impacting local policy setting and decision making. If that sounds interesting, more here: https://www.cortico.ai/careers. Questions welcome at dvd[at]cortico.ai.

subparon DIY Book Scanner

Nope. I'm not sure if this is the right way to put it, but we were basically a scanning factory. I think the really sensitive documents got routed elsewhere. Books and folios that had large format foldouts got more specialized, ahem, white glove treatment. Many scanners wore these little textured rubber finger tips: https://rubber_finger_tips.jpg.so/

subparon DIY Book Scanner

A very small chunk, I only lasted a couple months. Most of it was pretty boring, think volume after volume of copyright records or issues of the national stamp collector's magazine. Eventually I started working on some of the contract work they did for other agencies, e.g. declassified FBI case reports. The best was the stuff for the Smithsonian, which often included beautiful naturalist illustrations. I'm not sure how much of that stuff was public domain though.

subparon DIY Book Scanner

My first job out of college was scanning books for the Internet Archive down in the basement of the Library of Congress. Their scanning machines used a foot pedal to raise and lower the glass Platen, so I'd use one hand to flip the page and wiggle the cradle to get things nice and flat and the other would snap the photo. You can get pretty fast after a while, but boy is it mindless. Older books that had been rebound a couple times already were the hardest to work with as you have the least amount of margin. There's a bunch of different sized dowels that we would put under the spine in the cradle so the glass could gain a couple millimeters of margin, just enough to avoid cutting off text. Worst case scenario the book had to be unbound in order to capture. I did get to flip through a lot of cool old illustrated catalogues like this: https://archive.org/details/illustratedcatal00keil/page/14/m...

subparon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

I made a thing the other weekend that returns a "canonical" image for whatever you put in the subdomain, for example: https://welcome.gif.so/ or https://goat.jpg.so/

I use it to quickly put an image of a thing in slack.

subparon Facebook prohibits music or music listening experience on Live

WFMU sold the FMA to Kitsplit in 2018, who in turn sold it to Tribe of Noise in 2019.

subparon Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive

wow, what a way to learn that zombo is dead. RIP zombocom

subparon Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?

Cortico | Full Stack Engineer | Remote (Boston HQ) | Full-time | https://cortico.ai

Cortico is a non-profit tech organization spun out of the MIT Media Lab. We're building hardware and software to amplify under-heard voices in our communities and in the media to improve our understanding of one another. More specifics on the project at https://lvn.org. Come help scale deep listening with our experienced crew of technologists and humanists.

Questions welcome at dvd[at]cortico.ai.

https://jobs.lever.co/cortico

subparon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2020)

Cortico | Full Stack Engineer | Remote (Boston HQ) | Full-time | https://cortico.ai

Questions welcome at dvd[at]cortico.ai.

https://jobs.lever.co/cortico

subparon Have We Hit Peak Podcast?

Oh sure, I had my Best Show phase. Who hasn't these days?

subparon Have We Hit Peak Podcast?

The year was 2011 and I had just moved to DC after finishing undergrad. I couldn't find work in the radio business so instead I got a contract gig through Craigslist with the Internet Archive scanning books in the basement of the Library of Congress. Its dark down there and the work is pretty mechanical. The books themselves are only occasionally interesting.

My iPod Touch could connect to wifi so I started listening to NPR while I scanned. I could do that for two hours or so, but once the segments started repeating I got bored. A friend suggested I listen to Radiolab, so I did. When I'd gone through their catalogue I tried out 99% Invisible. Then academic lectures that had been turned into podcasts. Then audiobooks. Then whatever I could find by searching for "good podcasts." Eventually I got tired of the sound of podcasts (they have a sound) and switched to WFMU and a couple college stations I liked.

I haven't listened to another podcast since. Am I missing something?

subparon Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac

I've been using Swinsian for this. Plays nice with a networked music library and has excellent tag editing. https://swinsian.com/

subparon Lessons from Spotify

For another (less business, more aesthetic) perspective on Spotify's impact on how we listen to and make music, check out: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-muzak-pelly

subparon Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

Love this. Any interest in a merger with the cash machine that is http://subpar.biz/

subparon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2018)

Speakable | Software Engineer (and more) | NYC - New York, NY | Full-time & ONSITE

Speakable is a public benefit corp in Flatiron that’s modernizing charitable giving and civic advocacy on the web. We work with publishers (like The Guardian, Vice, Refinery 29) to place meaningful actions (NGO donations, local volunteering, contact your congressional rep.) directly into relevant news articles. The company is seed stage and female founded. We're looking to hire our first in-house engineer (full stack) to help grow the product and team. More info and other positions (Product Design, Product Management) live here: https://actionbutton.org/careers

For additional info/questions just send a note to jobs@speakable.org.

subparon How to sleep a million years (2013)

Hey, there's a great song about this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSgQiltRqNI

subparon Who Is the Genius Behind Merriam-Webster's Social Media?

"That’s why our Twitter is so good: it’s not a marketing construct, it’s who we really are."

I really wish this mind-set was more common.

subparon Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

Not sure when you switched, but NearlyFreeSpeech works fine with Lets Encrypt and doesn't require opening a ticket with support. https://deletethis.net/dave/2016-11/Let%27s+Encrypt+NearlyFr...

subparon The Facebook Papers, Part 1: The great unbundling

Also a reference to the Financial Times, which was owned by Pearson up until the recent sale to Nikkei.

subparon Ask HN: How do you manage newsletters?

Had the same thought the other day, then found: https://unroll.me/