thirteenfingers

MusicBrainz is great. I stumbled upon it about a year ago while trying to figure out how various open-source desktop music apps populate track info... and was delighted to find that some random Internet stranger had helpfully catalogued all my youtube videos years prior!

That was seven years later. Maybe the problem is that Google stopped reading what Google wrote.

I also started getting that yesterday, but curiously I was still able to watch videos after closing the popup (without turning off my ad blocker).

And I literally just dropped my album this afternoon. I don't know whether I should be worried now.

I personally agree about the whole point of Lego being free form building - and I still have some Lego magazines from the days when that was explicitly encouraged by Lego - but you need kits and instructions to get to the point where you can do free form building. It's like composing music, you're going to have a very difficult time of it if you don't first study a whole lot of existing, well-constructed music.

What I don't understand (speaking of Vimeo) is why doesn't YouTube offer a plan where individual content creators can choose to pay a monthly fee to keep ads off of their own videos for all viewers. Speaking for myself I would happily pay for that.

Me! First Christmas at my new (fully remote) job on an SRE team and I'm on call through most of this coming week. Not complaining though, I actually asked for this stretch, due to awkward timing with other commitments during other weeks. Fortunately there are other members of the team I can reach if I need them, and family live nearby. I'm just thankful to be gainfully employed.

It's pretty quiet at the moment and I'm actually kind of jealous that I'm not facing the kind of excitement you are... I guess I should be careful what I wish for lol.

Merry Christmas all!

Obligatory Matthias Wandel video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHOx39xJack

I'm taking the Solutions Architect exam. Arguably I should have waited until I had a few more months hands-on experience, but I kind of felt like jumping off the deep end.

Procrastinating on studying for my AWS certification next week. I was unemployed for several months of this year and knowledge of AWS or any of the major cloud providers was the most glaring hole on my resume. Happily, my new employer pays for AWS training for all of its employees, so that hole is being filled... except, as always, it's way more fun reading HN than studying :/

@rachelbythebay's HN spoof is still my personal favorite: https://rachelbythebay.com/fun/hrand/

IIRC the system Bach was pushing wasn't actually equal temperament, but "well temperament" which was some sort of compromise between equal temperament and having pure fifths everywhere. The result was that all twelve keys sounded acceptable, but some keys had purer fifths or thirds than others. Some musicians/scholars say that Bach composed the different preludes and fugues specifically to use the resulting different characters of the different keys to the best possible advantage. I can't speak to this personally, I keep my piano at equal temperament ;)

(Big fan of your videos btw)

Over the years I've gone from Ubuntu to Debian to Slackware and back to Debian. I took a chance on Slackware for a few years precisely so that I could force myself to understand *nix from the bottom up. Unfortunately I didn't have nearly as much free time (or patience) as I needed to get the most out of the experience, and having to deal with missing dependencies turned out to be too much overhead for just getting anything else done. I'd definitely recommend it for folks who enjoy (and have the time for) getting their hands dirty.

Indeed. Just last week there was a whole thread here on HN about the problems with toxicity detectors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066720 I'm not sure if this is the system youtube is using, but it would certainly align with my experience where people have left innocuous comments on my videos that disappear a couple hours later - comments such as "this music is beautiful, damn" where the only thing I can think of, short of that user's entire account getting deactivated, is that the word "damn" tripped some sort of toxicity flag.

I hate bullies as much as the next person on HN, but I'm deeply unsettled by youtube's recent efforts in the direction of manufacturing consent.

I'm actually in a very similar situation - in fact I'm trying to go on unpaid leave as a preemptive measure. I would happily undertake other mitigation measures, including working remote, biweekly testing, masking etc., and my (extremely supportive) boss has been trying to pull off some alternative arrangement for me, but he's not the one who decides these policies.

Between stuffing non-monetized videos with ads, the dislike button thing, and capricious censorship, I'm seriously looking into self-hosting[0] my video and streamed content. Disregarding the difficulty of maintaining a following outside of the big platforms, do any of you HNers have experience with hosting your own video and streaming sites? What software do you use?

[0] I could also just switch platforms, but I have similar problems with all the big platforms. Vimeo is a potential paid option, but their streaming plans are a bit out of my budget.

One question that I, as a non-Finn who has had more than a passing interest in Finnish history, have never seen a compelling answer to is how reconciliation was ultimately achieved after the civil war. The accounts I've read refer in very general terms to both sides making compromises after having been simply exhausted by it all.

Can any of you provide some details? Multiple viewpoints if possible?

"The air hoses between the locomotive and the cars were not connected, as is normal during this kind of switching operation. The air brakes on the cars were therefore inoperative."

This part confuses me. I was under the impression that modern train air brakes are fail-safe, i.e. pressure will release the brakes, no pressure will result in them being applied, so that the cars couldn't be moved in the first place without the air hoses between locomotive and cars being connected. Can someone with a better understanding of rail operation help me out here?

Who said it had to be writing code? If finding joy in work is unrealistic, then take up a musical instrument, build a model railroad, write short stories, or something totally unrelated. (I've been a full-time code monkey by day and musician by night for going on six years, and I'm still finding other hobbies to dabble in.)

@jacquesm's efforts in this direction may interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889

This.

Fellow pianist-with-smallish-hands here. The string players' paradigm of having differently-sized instruments as one grows up works well because they carry their instruments with them. Pianists are cursed with having to play whatever instrument we find on location (unless you bring your own electronic keyboard everywhere, which isn't a bad idea if it's practically possible). Differences in stiffness/tone quality/whatever are annoying enough to deal with already, and differently-sized keys is going to be a whole 'nother league of confusing. I'd personally rather be stuck with the same standard for key sizes everywhere at the expense of not being able to play all the repertoire I'd like.

Examples? Happy to be proven wrong on this.

Speaking for myself, I would be willing to pay YouTube to opt out of ads. I post mostly classical music videos, which are totally ruined if video advertisements are inserted in the middle. (Granted, YouTube doesn't seem to do that to classical music videos quite as much as it used to.)

I'm already paying Vimeo for a low-budget data plan, and I only continue to use YouTube as my main platform because of the extra exposure.

If you're referring to in-video ads, then no.

At present, if you choose not to monetize a video, no ads get shown unless a third part makes a copyright claim on your video.

I'm not quite sure about the situation with ads that show up in the corner of the page - those are unobtrusive enough that I'm used to mentally tuning them out.

Oh man. I posted here about this before, but almost exactly four years ago a friend and I put on a concert of our own favorite Tom Lehrer songs to great enthusiasm. By what must be total coincidence, just a few days ago I had posted some videos of that concert to youtube, keeping my fingers crossed they wouldn't get copystriked... and now I wake up to this. I knew of his permissive attitude toward copyright, but I wasn't expecting him to make it official.

Mr. Lehrer, thank you for brightening our lives.

This bit in particular resonated with me, as someone who's had problems with nervousness giving piano recitals:

I have a psychological approach to nerves as well. We have to consider the so-called importance of our little place in the world. This Beethoven performance is unlikely to be of any significance in three hundred years—and in three thousand years, not at all.

It’s like standing on a different planet and looking down; let go and lose yourself. At the same time, we have to realize that the smallest gesture has enormous implications.

Man what an extraordinary guy. I love reading about people like Mr. Edquist who kind of live in the shadow of great artists like GG and make their art possible, especially when dealing with such artists requires a bit of head-butting.

Highly recommend the author's book "A Romance On Three Legs", which she mentions in the article.

Ms. Delaney has also written a full-length book, "Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem", which I haven't read all the way through but which appears to be a more thorough treatment of the material covered in this article.

(Disclaimer: personally acquainted with the author.)

There's no shame in moving back in with your parents, as long as they and you get along, and as long as you keep making something of yourself. I lived with my parents for seven and a half years after getting my bachelor's degree. The first two and half of those years I did music freelance, after which I landed my current full-time job in IT (but I've kept up the music too). I saved up a bunch and then a few months ago, shortly before turning 31, I bought a house.

I'd like to boast that it was very careful and farsighted financial planning on my part, but it really wasn't. I'm just good enough at appreciating the living moment that I didn't feel the same urge to move out that my peers felt.

What are some of the UX problems you're thinking of? Personally I've been pretty happy with it so far. (My main point of comparison is Sibelius, which I used until I went all-Linux three or four years ago.)