b1daly

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by b1daly 14y ago
It's funny, I've come to think of the HN community as being the most skeptical and contrarian of all internet forums. (Jokingly, to the point that if someone posted a blog about how Hitler was evil, there would be an a reliable proportion o
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by b1daly 14y ago
It made me reflect on how different people are. If someone like Mr. Sivers has found a way for himself to be happy and productive, more power to him. CD Baby alone has done a huge amount for others.
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by b1daly 14y ago
I totally get the annoyance of previous paid users. But man, the irrational nature of human psychology around price and paying for things beggars disbelief. For anyone that owns an iPhone 99¢ is truly a pittance. People's feelings about wha
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by b1daly 14y ago
There are at least two major areas of music composition which the algorythmic attempts fall vastly short of humans. One is that real music composition is never done where the timbres are separated from the composition. Classically notated m
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by b1daly 14y ago
Just checked it out, very interesting concept. But from what I heard the music doesn't seem to be evolving much!
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by b1daly 14y ago
The comments criticizing the protagonist are somewhat churlish. If someone shares painful emotions with the a comment like "how could they know my pain," he is demonstrating that he has some awareness that his emotions include self pity, t
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by b1daly 14y ago
I think there is a connection between the sort of hand-waving, know nothing-ism of Republican political messaging and this tech fiasco. That kind of thing might work in the soft field of persuasion, but is pretty useless in creating a compl
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by b1daly 14y ago
Aside from the technical argument about whether predatory pricing really exists there is another aspect of "race to the bottom" that is at least worth a thought. Ironically, Torvald's post and the Engadget article both have an assumption th
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by b1daly 14y ago
The big problem for the successful incumbent in these innovators dilemma scenarios is that most innovations fail. Most of the upstart challengers will fail. To risk for dominant position for the sake of a long shit chance a second life as u
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by b1daly 14y ago
Personally I'm thrilled when people use my product. I've never thought of the term user having a negative connotation when referring to software users. Is that really a vestige of hacker culture? Dorsey's post gives me an uneasy feeling. Be
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by b1daly 14y ago
In what sense are the labels a leaching industry given that they put up a major proportion of the resources to produce the "content?" Spotify is a straight up middle man, what value do they really add?
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by b1daly 14y ago
This being Hacker News there are of course some apparently well reasoned dissents from the OP point. It strikes me as the stone cold truth. "Nobody wants to read your shit." That's just how it is as a default state. He's obviously suggestin
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by b1daly 14y ago
Apple's attempts at making "seamless" user experiences can be frustrating, especially on edge cases. For example, in Garageband instruments are stored in special files down a ways in a directory tree in Application Support. It happens that
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by b1daly 14y ago
In my reading of the Reddit thread I did not take away that patent examiner just gets to decide that something seems obvious. Instead, the reasoning seems to be that if no prior art for an invention exists, it could therefor not have been o
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by b1daly 14y ago
Banks have a primary role in money creation, which is essential for society. This is the justification for regulation. Because left to their own devices, banks and financial entities are very likely to be the locus of various scams, ponzi s
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by b1daly 14y ago
@tptacek, don't you think this point about Apple and the iPod (as well as early Youtube behavior) have some bearing on this case? Obviously Apple knew for a long time that the vast majority of music on mp3 players was copied, probably illeg
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by b1daly 14y ago
As I remember, the economic concept of "efficiency" has a pretty narrow meaning: The market for a commodity will reach an equilbrium at the most efficient state if prices are allowed to change freely (a free market). An efficient outcome is
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by b1daly 14y ago
I work with audio and music, and at various times have needed which software platform I was going to use. DAW software is very time consuming to learn, and there are all sorts of platform "lock in" effects. Also network effects to consider.
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by b1daly 14y ago
He was talking about undertaking large activities (war for example) that would kill hundreds of thousands of people could be tolerated politically by a populace in a way that a single murder might cause an outrage. The large numbers make th
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by b1daly 14y ago
Well I think Stalin summed up the perils of totally ignoring anecdotes pretty well: "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic." This topic sort of came up the other day in the thread about the girl losing the iPad software she nee
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by b1daly 14y ago
This thread made me think of this New Yorker article on the "Decline Effect" which is describes a tendency for the results of scientific experiments (in particular those based on statistical methods) to weaken as experiments are repeated. A
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by b1daly 14y ago
Well I got both those questions right by following the heuristic that the most obvious answer off the top of my head would not be the answer. To my mind on any test that was supposed to be hard the appearance of any obvious an answer trigge
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by b1daly 14y ago
This analysis misses the forest for the trees: modern pop music is all about stylistic and sonic innovation. Musical forms tend to evolve along certain parameters while holding others constant. In jazz and classic there has (historically) b
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by b1daly 14y ago
I made a not to serious attempt to implement GTD, but I got stuck on the granularity of "next action." I don't remember quite why this was, but as I was attempting to write my lists I would get stuck on something like this. (I'm a music pro
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by b1daly 14y ago
Attempts to store wealth through currency or other assets are attempts to claim a future share of societies output. Since by definition you are asserting a claim into a scenario in which you might not even be present, there is an inherent t
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by b1daly 14y ago
What I think many programmers miss with "visual design" is that the mere "pixels" are the user interface. They are one the most important parts of an app. Done right they should make an app both easier to learn and more efficient to use. Co
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by b1daly 14y ago
A lot of good points, just a couple I thought of: Software is written to control hardware. In the end that's all a user can use. Computers are a new category of machine, they are super complex, easily reconfigurable general purpose machines
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by b1daly 14y ago
In the US most carriers just require you to get one of the plans. The pricing on the plans is independent of which phone you get. So it makes comparing the subsidized prices of the phone an "Apple" to apples thing!
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by b1daly 14y ago
The term record "label" is an interesting anachronism, pointing back to the label on a physical record. We'll see how long it lasts as a business category. As others have pointed out, labels are far more than a middleman. To market music as
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by b1daly 14y ago
Your kind of begging the question here. When media was mostly physical, you did have many if those rights you describe. The problem is networked digital devices make large scale (unauthorized) copying and distribution cheap, trivial, and un

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