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thirteenfingers | 1 year ago | on: MusicBrainz: An open music encyclopedia

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!

thirteenfingers | 2 years ago | on: LEGO Building Instructions

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.

thirteenfingers | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who else is working/on call over Christmas?

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!

thirteenfingers | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What Are You Doing?

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.

thirteenfingers | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What Are You Doing?

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 :/

thirteenfingers | 3 years ago | on: Why 12 notes in Western music?

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)

thirteenfingers | 4 years ago | on: Slackware 15.0

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.

thirteenfingers | 4 years ago | on: YouTube ranks “wholesome and funny” comments higher?

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.

thirteenfingers | 4 years ago | on: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

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.

thirteenfingers | 4 years ago | on: YouTube takes down independent court livestreams

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.

thirteenfingers | 4 years ago | on: Finland Divided: The Finnish Civil War 1918

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?

thirteenfingers | 4 years ago | on: CSX 8888 Runaway Investigation (2001)

"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?

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