HN user

parkersweb

534 karma
Posts6
Comments155
View on HN

I once worked with a guy mixing TV programmes and live DVDs; I knew he’d been a studio engineer at one point in his career. We were re-arranging our studios one day and as I picked up a pair of NS-10s he casually said “I mixed ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ on those…”

Bit puzzled by some of the station data. This train:

https://www.map.signalbox.io/?train=202607066710114&location...

is a train from Cambridge to Kings Cross - and in the side panel it shows it as calling at the new Cambridge South station. But Cambridge South isn't shown on the map. That's kinda understandable (because it opened a week ago), but Cambridge North (which opened in 2017) also isn't shown on the map. Neither are offered in any of the auto-complete dropdowns?

I'm wondering if the station data a static dataset which hasn't been updated in a long time?

Quite. Or differences in the box-model, appending weird symbols to CSS to target specific browsers, adding zoom:1, praying you didn’t have to support IE6….

I was chatting to a therapist friend the other day about EMDR [0] therapy. In short it’s often used in treating PTSD through alternating eye movement, but also alternating sound in headphones or tapping the body on alternating sides.

The theory is that it helps connect the left and right halves of the brain to allow trauma to be processed emotionally.

I’ve been wondering since if that’s why walking / running helps with creative processing?

[0] https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-therapy/types-of-therapy/eye-mo...

Gah - you’re right - but given that I don’t use personal copilot - but I do manage an organisation that gives copilot to some of our developers AND I was sent an email this evening making no mention at all of business copilot being excluded it could definitely have been communicated better…

Yes - not impressed at all that this is opt-in default for business users. We have a policy in place with clients that code we write for them won’t be used in AI training - so expecting us to opt out isn’t an acceptable approach for a business relationship where the expectation is security and privacy.

I’ve done a bunch of testing over the years including a similar test of ‘can people hear mp3 compression’ as well as comparison of mp3 variable bit rate qualities.

In practice, on average playback equipment (by which I mean decent hifi) in an average listening environment most people can’t tell the difference.

But… I’ve also done blind testing with a top mastering engineer on studio speakers and he was able to identifying 48 vs 192 reliably.

Mastering quality was ruined by the battle for perceived loudness. So masters with decent degrees of dynamic range is definitely helpful.

Love this! One piece of UI feedback - on mobile particularly I often found it very difficult to access the departure timetable once I'd arrived at a station. I walked to Bercy Seine in Paris (so I could try and find a bus out) - but even when I had arrived I couldn't trigger the departure timetable....

One of the best constraints of the TV show is the limited budget (along with the lack of mobile phone). It's frequently the case that teams panic spend in order stay ahead, but are hurt by those decisions later in the race.

Over the series people have also developed strategies within those constraints - so it's quite frequent to see teams earning money in the penultimate leg and taking the time hit in order to splash out in the final leg.

It's a great show if you're able to get hold of it.

I like that idea in concept - I’ve often felt similarly about budgeting apps. Many of them feel targeted either at low income / high debt people (who need strict control to manage their way out), or at people who have a strong interest in optimising their finances.

I’m trying to find a middle ground though I think. I’m not strongly acquisitive - but want to be sensible about my finances. There needs to be a purpose to tracking and allocating - so I’d want intelligent prompting (e.g “you could easily move £x to a higher rate account each month and maintain a balance that will meet your outgoings”), as well as answering my own queries. I’ve seen that promise in other products - but it’s nearly always in a free product that uses those prompts to sell you financial products. I’d personally much rather pay for impartiality.

GB Renewables Map 6 months ago

This has just had a major update to include other renewables (eg hydro, solar) as well as non-renewable energy sources (gas).

It’s also added grid boundaries and cabling recently - and I think there’s also wind roses planned?

My one UI wish - the energy sources filters are currently displayed as options on the map - rather than controls for the entire UI - which meant I missed them entirely at first. Would be great if they could be given more prominence.

I suspect this may be driven by subscription consequences. In the UK consumer rights mean that you're able to cancel a subscription commitment if the offering is materially changed. I used this in the past when Adobe withdrew a product to cancel an annual license I no longer needed mid-term.

Making a zombie product probably has a lower impact on their revenues.

I also spent quite a bit of time with some quite well known mastering engineers in a former career - many of them talked about the pressure to produce "loud" masters for CD, but how they were given much more creative freedom for vinyl releases.

Hearing the two masters side by side on some incredible speakers really gave me an appreciation for how different 'versions' of an album can transform the experience of the music.

Through work I once got into conversation with the guy who did the re-mastering into 96kHz of the ABBA back catalogue. Up until that point CD re-releases of their material was apparently all converted from the cassette masters where they'd massively exaggerated the HF to compensate for the fact that cassette had a notoriously terrible HF response...

I’ve been using on a personal side project - but found that LLMs seem to be permanently confused over how to interact with pocketbase - to the point where I’ve even tried creating a Claude Skill to try and reduce the confusion.

Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?

On the music side, the current trend for vinyl has been a really great thing for my teenage kids. My eldest (who according to Spotify listens to about 130k mins of music a year) has really discovered an appreciation for the arc of an album when he has to spend the time loading up a disc.