4 ms·
Ask YC: What music do you listen to when hacking?
What music, if any, do you listen to when hacking? Do you find it helps you concentrate or is it just a distraction?
- ejs 19y agoAll kinds, the only time I avoid music and keep silence is when I have to do reading/writing stuff. Probably the same reason I find reading and writing to be more of a chore and coding/designing more enjoyable.
- Electro 19y agoGo for instrumental music, it doesn't activate the part of your verbal part of your brain. Essentially to hear singing (or talking) your brain mimics it, however when you're trying to read/write you've got two processes and only one processor to put it through. You can struggle through, but not nearly as well as running them solo. Also, just go onto TPB or usenet and download some Beethoven or Wagner. It's 100% legal, no copyrights exist on them and even if they did they're so old it'd be void anyway. Even the BBC offered them up for free at some point, they were surprisingly good quality too. I learnt this a long time ago when I was working doing reviews. When you spend 10 hours writing reviews, you need something to listen to or you're going to start shooting kids and spearing dogs for making the slightest noise.
- vanekl 19y agoWhat also works is recorded rain sounds, and James Horner (A Beautiful Mind soundtrack). Loud enough to drown out the talking, but doesn't interfere with the thought process.
- Electro 19y agoI heard whale song, and ocean sounds now thinking of it, is supposedly good, however I've never bothered to try it. I'll have to find somewhere to get it that doesn't charge $20, it'd be cheaper to go to the ocean myself.
- xirium 19y agoDup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61831 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61831 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99936 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99936
- yummyfajitas 19y agoIt's a dup, but I think lots of people don't mind that. I for one don't mind seeing this pop up every few weeks if people suggest new songs. Toward that end, here is some music I haven't seen mentioned here before. List of Demands, and Black Stacy, both by Saul Williams (see also http://niggytardust.com/ http://niggytardust.com/, which many here may have heard of). He's on tour right now, if any want to see him live. http://youtube.com/watch?v=l1llNYAlYrc http://youtube.com/watch?v=l1llNYAlYrc http://youtube.com/watch?v=kRsgavuG4sg&feature=related http://youtube.com/watch?v=kRsgavuG4sg&feature=related
- doubleplus 19y agoTrance! http://s-torm.com/forum/dload.php?action=category&cat_id=15 http://s-torm.com/forum/dload.php?action=category&cat_id...
- michaelr 19y agoASOT, nice, I listen to that as well :-)
- doubleplus 19y agoCheck out the DL section of that site... lots of radio mixes by Above & Beyond, Ferry Corsten, Paul van Dyk, Tiesto, et al.
- maximilian 19y agoDigitally Imported radio (di.fm) is a great trance channel. I used to subscribe for $5/month to get their higher quality feed, which was worth it when I had good headphones. I spent a lot of hours in the library coding and doing math listening to di.fm. They have other great channels like "chillout" and "house" which are also good for coding. Chillout is, well, chiller and good for relaxed coding sessions and house is a bit more funky and less "poo tsh poo tsh poo tsh poo tsh" like trance can get (and can get annoying). ASOT++ btw. I listen to it every week. You can d/l it on most torrent sites, which isn't even as illegal as d/ling other music. Its like taping the radio and giving it to your friend. And this radio doesn't have commercials. Plus trance style music lives on a different plane of business than the rest of the industry they way I see it - which is a whole different tangent I'll not go down.
- Kaizyn 19y agodi.fm used to be good; then they grew bigger and started charging (about the same time their music selection quality started to decline). These days I'll listen to MrsFudge Streaming Radio, which has the best music voting system I've seen: http://gurba.sytes.net http://gurba.sytes.net Alternately, there's Proton radio: http://www.protonradio.com/ http://www.protonradio.com/
- 19y ago
- kajecounterhack 19y agoThe Feel Good Initiative http://thefeelgood.com/ http://thefeelgood.com/ Found it here on YC, actually.
- karthikv 19y agoI think this has been discussed a couple of times here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61831 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61831 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99936 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99936
- sjh 19y agoAs new users sign up to HN, and older submissions drop down the list, it's the sort of question which is apt to come up a couple of times.
- jamesbritt 19y agoCan one get an RSS feed for specific topics here? (I looked but did not see a way.) It's a feature on Reddit, and being able to subscribe to something such as listings of books, music, etc. would be handy. Then if someone wants to pose the question again they can refer to the initial posting and ask people to add their comments there.
- cstejerean 19y agoYes, and it's the kind of thing searching was invented for. But for some reason HN refuses to provide a way to search posts and comments (no, having to go to Google and search news.ycombinator.com is not decent search. Google doesn't take into consideration how long ago a post was, how many comments it had and how many votes it received, all information I think is useful for determining relevance of the results).
- staticshock 19y agohttp://www.searchyc.com http://www.searchyc.com
- nonrecursive 19y agoLately: Moby, Kenna, Cee-lo, goodie mob, david bowie, prodigy
- kuratkull 19y agoMusic when coding is a MUST! Preferably a band you love/like.
- sjh 19y agoWhen I was still working in an office, I found listening to film scores, in particular, very helpful in shutting out the noise of the office.
- brent 19y agoI'll second that. My suggestions are: American Beauty, Atonement, Braveheart, Gladiator, Lord of the Rings I II III, Meet Joe Black, Requiem for a Dream, The Last Samurai, and There Will Be Blood.
- sjh 19y agoThe soundtracks to Batman Begins and the Battlestar Galactica mini-series are not dissimilar to that for There Will Be Blood (which I've just been to see).
- zenlinux 19y agoMaybe someone should create a Hacker News (or hacking music) group on last.fm? My hacking music preferences: http://www.last.fm/user/zenlinux/ http://www.last.fm/user/zenlinux/
- tjr 19y agoMostly instrumental music, primarily some type of jazz or classical. If I am in a noisy working environment, then I keep the music going pretty much constantly, to block out extraneous noise. In general, the more quiet and peaceful my environment is, the less music I listen to while working.
- dazzawazza 19y agoI tend to listen to something from the death metal genre http://www.newmetalarmy.com/band/unleashed http://www.newmetalarmy.com/band/unleashed or maybe in the thrash genre http://www.newmetalarmy.com/band/evile http://www.newmetalarmy.com/band/evile
- ivankirigin 19y agoNIN - a downward spiral. Daft Punk - Alive. Timbaland. Kraftwerk, Chemical Brothers, Radiohead.
- knv 19y agoBrian Eno - Music For Airports
- thomasswift 19y agobassdrive.com, itunes -> radio -> electronic -> bassdrive ...
- jamesbritt 19y agoIt varies, though it tends to be noisy repetitive semi-drone electronic-ish stuff. Lately I'm liking Holy Fuck. (Though I dug up some Hawkwind, too, for some odd reason.)
- ken 19y agoSometimes, music with lyrics in the language I'm learning. I don't understand most of it, but my ear gets better at picking out words, and properly-conjugated phrases start to sound natural to me, even if I don't know what they mean yet. But that's only when I feel I need to be pulled along. Once I get into flow, I don't see or hear anything except what I'm doing. My music will end and I won't notice until 2 hours later when I come up for air. In "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister are even more explicit: if programmers need to put on headphones to drown out ambient noise, they're using up the very creativity they're being paid so much for.
- tlrobinson 19y ago"Sometimes, music with lyrics in the language I'm learning" I assume you don't mean programming language? If that's what you did mean, where can I get music with lyrics in Python, Lisp, etc?
- Hexstream 19y agohttp://www.songworm.com/lyrics/songworm-parody/EternalFlame.html http://www.songworm.com/lyrics/songworm-parody/EternalFlame....
- simianstyle 19y agodaft punk
- pierrebombay 19y agoPhilip Glass is my favorite to listen to while coding. It's prefect for both background music while focusing on a difficult problem and for putting into the foreground when you just need to take a second away from the problem.
- pius 19y agoMostly hip-hop, especially freestyles.
- PStamatiou 19y agotechno/trance. ETN.fm / DI.fm type stuff in iTunes Radio
- caudicus 19y agoBands: Infected Mushroom, Shpongle, Sigur Ros iTunes Radio: Electronic->AH.FM, Ambient->Drone Zone on SomaFM
- mosburger 19y agoBoards of Canada, Thievery Corporation, Morcheeba, Zero 7, Massive Attack, Daft Punk, Kid 606, Royksopp zenlinux's idea of a last.fm group for this is an excellent idea.
- german 19y agoLately I'm listening: Read My Mind - The Killers
- kingnothing 19y agoProgressive trance streamed from ETN.FM.
- tim2 19y agoYeah, progressive trance, dnb, and hard house (I think it's called).
- yters 19y agoI beatbox.
- dskhatri 19y agoPandora's (http://www.pandora.com http://www.pandora.com) is pretty cool to run in the background. I've discovered lots of new music through the site..
- alexsolo 19y agoI listen to a lot of Pandora... but recently, I realized that iTunes has radio stations built in. A really good trance station is Electronic -> ABF Underground.
- treeform 19y agoenya
- christefano 19y agoFor this last project a lot of what I listened to was the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack by Bear McCreary.
- jdavid 19y agopandora FTW! stations i created "rabbit in the moon" "hacker radio" "garbage" "fluke" any other cool strings to create stations off of?
- mickt 19y agoGroove Salad at SomaFm: http://somafm.com/ http://somafm.com/
- srp 19y agoGothic radio on the net. R1Live, darkwave or www.gothicradio.tv. All that screaming behaves almost like white noise for me :-P I once downloaded a recording of heavy rain from a nature site. I found that sound very very conducive to coding :)
- greendestiny 19y agoDevo, Gary Numan, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, Derrick May, Juan Atkins, Drexciya, Dan Curtin.
- edw519 19y agoI prefer to Enjoy the Silence. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7y6A-5uTY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7y6A-5uTY
- mynameishere 19y agoThis question seems to come up once a week. People never get tired of answering it.
- tim2 19y agoIf we don't keep our supply of hacking music fresh then we could all die... I mean, stop hacking as well.
- thorax 19y agoThey Might Be Giants
- nickhac 19y agopsytrance or any kind of hypnotic techno music when programming
- dood 19y agoMostly dubstep recently, since you can just sink into it and get into a nice groove: http://dubstep.fm http://dubstep.fm IDM or drum n bass for occasions where hardcore coding is needed.
- fish 19y agoSpace rock (God is an Astronaut) http://www.last.fm/music/God+Is+an+Astronaut http://www.last.fm/music/God+Is+an+Astronaut and another in the same sort of genre 'Gold Four' http://www.last.fm/music/Au4 http://www.last.fm/music/Au4
- mickt 19y agoThey're on a US tour at the moment. Playing in Boston at the Mid-east on the 19th of March. Great band, a friend in Dublin claims they're the loudest band he's heard in ages.
- wyclif 19y agoJ.S. Bach. Accept no substitutes for true greatness.
- gsheep 19y agoWow, we all have pretty similar tastes. I always listen to something that has a steady beat and fight for my attention, so anything too lyric heavy is out the window. Proton: www.protonradio.com Frisky: http://www.cbs.nu/home/ http://www.cbs.nu/home/ CBS: www.cbs.nu/home/ Radiomagnetic: www.radiomagnetic.com
- mronge 19y agoPaul van Dyk
- CHIEFARCHITECT 19y agoMozart and Bach! Agreed w/ one of the other entries. "Accept no substitutes for true greatness."
- adduc 19y agoThis is definitely a page I'm going to have to come back to. One look through is not enough.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]