Hacker News: dweymouth

New comment by dweymouth in "Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server"

dweymouth — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 15:40:27 +0000

OpenSubsonic (https://opensubsonic.netlify.app) is the closest. It's a collaborative effort to extend and modernize the Subsonic API, which had become a sort of de-facto standard API. Navidrome, Gonic, LMS (Lightweight Music Server, not Lyrion/Logitech), and other servers implement the API, and Supersonic, Symfonium, and other clients consume it. (And it's backward compatible with the original Subsonic, so older Subsonic clients will work, just not support all the new features that have been added.

New comment by dweymouth in "Centuries of milk marketing warped the way we think about dairy and nutrition"

dweymouth — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 01:44:17 +0000

Why is that relevant to their argument?

New comment by dweymouth in "Show HN: Spot – Simple, cross-platform, reactive desktop GUI toolkit for Go"

dweymouth — Sat, 25 May 2024 14:36:23 +0000

This is exactly how the data binding APIs in Fyne (another Go GUI toolkit) work. And it's also an optional feature, so if you want to handle things by registering callbacks and calling setters yourself you can do that too.

New comment by dweymouth in "Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets"

dweymouth — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 21:01:41 +0000

If you're a news site and you want Google to have a link like "News on Inflation", then just give your article the title "Unpacking the latest inflation data" and save the actual info for the article itself. A lot of internet publishers have already figured this out and it's why you see titles like "These 3 states have the most affordable homes" that just entice you to click on the link.

New comment by dweymouth in "Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses"

dweymouth — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 17:56:30 +0000

But in this case with slow speed, it's the massive (literally) amount of mass of the cargo ship that gives it an un-intuitively large amount of energy.

New comment by dweymouth in "Cat parasite linked to mental illness, schizophrenia"

dweymouth — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 16:52:40 +0000

Not to mention that eating undercooked meat is a bigger infection risk than living with a pet cat, especially an indoor-only cat.

New comment by dweymouth in "Smart drugs reduce quality of effort, and slow decision-making"

dweymouth — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 23:28:40 +0000

I drink coffee every morning and have for pretty much my entire adult life. People might be better off for it because coffee in moderation is healthy and has various bioactive compounds in addition to caffeine that can reduce risk of some diseases... but I don't think the caffeine itself has any cognitive benefits for me at all compared to if I were to never drink coffee. It's just an addiction I'm completely adapted to, and skipping a morning coffee just means I'm a bit extra tired and sluggish through the day. Maybe dopaminergic stimulants are different, especially for people with true ADHD, and they can maintain an effect over time even at a dosage plateau.

New comment by dweymouth in "Navidrome: Open-Source Software to enjoy your music collection from anywhere"

dweymouth — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 16:51:48 +0000

Have you tried my client (github.com/dweymouth/supersonic)? I started this for a similar reason last year - I'm curious to hear your feedback, and if you were interested in contributing I'd love some more help!

New comment by dweymouth in "Brains on Drugs: How tinkering with consciousness became a societal sin"

dweymouth — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 21:53:26 +0000

Ironically, the two main legal drugs (excluding caffeine) - tobacco and alcohol - have some of the worst long term effects. Others can have long term effects though, like MDMA is somewhat neurotoxic but not to a degree that matters with infrequent acute use, but it becomes very relevant if someone were to use it regularly.

New comment by dweymouth in "Brains on Drugs: How tinkering with consciousness became a societal sin"

dweymouth — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 21:48:48 +0000

Speaking technically, methanol isn't produced during distillation, it's concentrated. Since it boils at a lower point than ethanol, it disproportionately comes out in the "heads" of a distillation run. The source wine/beer/mash already has all the methanol in it, it's just it's not a problem when present in the small quantities in a non-distilled drink, alongside with a much greater amount of ethanol. (Ethanol can actually act as an antidote to methanol since your body processes it first and can then excrete much of the methanol unmetabolized)

New comment by dweymouth in "Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts"

dweymouth — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 23:05:32 +0000

https://squabbles.io is the best alternative I've seen. The Fediverse is a cool idea in theory but I think at this point in time it's not ready for primetime. It's too complicated for casual users to figure out, plus federation invites drama all of its own - e.g. Beehaw, a major Lemmy instance, has defederated with lemmy.world

New comment by dweymouth in "Octopuses, crabs and lobsters recognised as sentient beings under UK law (2021)"

dweymouth — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:40:06 +0000

Animals devour to survive. Humans (in first world countries at least) don't need to do that. We eat meat because we like it, not because we need to. And we have the choice to do otherwise. In fact, plant based alternatives are healthier for us (look up the China study), and for the planet (most Amazon deforestation is to grow cattle feed). There is no need for most of us to eat any animal products at all.

New comment by dweymouth in "How to pack a stereo signal in one record groove"

dweymouth — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 21:31:35 +0000

Hmm that's a good point, that you can use the ultrasonic bandwidth of the LP, which is useless for analog audio, to increase the bitrate. I'd say it's a bit generous to give an LP a bandwidth of 50 kHz, especially in the inner tracks though. I think what I was getting at would apply where the bandwidth of the analog signal you want to encode is as wide as the bandwidth of your media though. Take compact cassettes, let's say they have a bandwidth of 18 kHz and a dynamic range of 60 dB. If you want to encode an arbitrary audio signal with a bandwidth of 18 kHz and with 60 dB dynamic range, you could only do that in the usual analog way. But if you wanted to encode a digital telephone signal (say at 8 kHz bandwidth, 30 dB dynamic range) maybe you could use the 18 kHz cassette bandwidth to encode that signal digitally.

New comment by dweymouth in "Apple Music Classical"

dweymouth — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 20:51:50 +0000

That's when it's used as a "bit crusher" effect by converting to 10/12 bit samples by simple truncation, rather than dithering (randomized rounding up or down to the nearest quantization value, with P(round_up) = the relative closeness of the sample to the upper quantization value).

With dithering, the only difference a smaller bit depth makes is a higher noise floor, with the noise being just background white noise (like tape hiss). With most pop music a 10 bit depth with dithering would likely not be audibly worse, since pop music is usually compressed into like the top 10dB of the dynamic range.

New comment by dweymouth in "How to pack a stereo signal in one record groove"

dweymouth — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 20:39:34 +0000

Broadcast NTSC did actually modulate the color signal into a "comb-shaped" frequency spectrum that was overlaid onto the complimentary "comb-shaped" spectrum of the B+W signal, because they didn't want to have to re-allocate higher broadcast channel bandwidths to be able to support color (and therefore have fewer channels available). The comb-shaped nature of the spectrum is an artifact of the discrete lines the picture signal is made up of, and the pause between each line when the electron beam reset itself and prepared to draw the next line. The fact they were able to figure out how to do color in the same bandwidth in a backward-compatible way is actually kind of insane, and I've seen it mentioned somewhere as one of the, if not THE most impressive engineering achievements of the 20th century.

New comment by dweymouth in "How to pack a stereo signal in one record groove"

dweymouth — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 20:26:05 +0000

> Could it handle CD-quality FLAC audio?

I doubt it, since CD-quality audio is already objectively better (for human hearing) than analog audio on LPs. The only thing LPs are better at, sound quality wise, is extension into the ultrasonic range of 20-30+ kHz (which we can't hear anyway) but the SNR and distortion metrics are much worse in the ultrasonic band than the audible range.

I'm not sure if this is a named principle, but it seems intuitively obvious to me that on any particular encoding medium (magnetic tape, vinyl groove, etc.), you can encode "more" data in an analog way than digital, since with digital encoding you need to be able to make distinct symbols onto the medium, and represent any signal fluctuation with a series of such symbols; whereas with analog encoding a tiny fluctuation in what's recorded to the medium can correspond to a tiny fluctuation in the signal. Of course the tradeoff is that digital data is much more immune to distortion from imperfections in the medium.

If the same track width and pit sizes on CDs were used to encode audio in an analog way like LaserDisc does video (the continuous distance between pits being modulated by the signal), no doubt it could encode well into the ultrasonic range and surround audio channels via modulating them into different frequency bands. But it would have its own characteristic "surface noise" and "pops and clicks" just like vinyl.

New comment by dweymouth in "Apple Music Classical"

dweymouth — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 20:49:29 +0000

192kHz/24bit is definitely overkill but I wouldn't call 16/44 overkill; I'd say it's just about perfect and the engineers who decided on that standard when the CD came to market knew what they were doing.

The frequency range of human hearing does cover all the way to 20 kHz, and maybe a tiny bit beyond especially for kids and teenagers. That says 40kHz minimum sampling rate, 44.1 is enough to cover the full range, give a tiny bit for the antialiasing filter rolloff band, and the exact number was chosen IIRC because it fit well into repurposing existing 80s video recorders for digital audio.

The dynamic range of human hearing from threshold of audibility to threshold of pain is slightly wider than the theoretical 96 dB of 16-bit audio, but with dithering the effective dynamic range can be > 105 dB. Of course most popular music only uses a tiny bit of that range, but movies and even classical full-orchestral music can use 60 dB and beyond, for which 10 bits wouldn't be adequate.

Show HN: Supersonic: a desktop client for Subsonic music servers built with Go

dweymouth — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 18:00:01 +0000

For the past several months I've been working on a new cross-platform desktop client for self-hosted Subsonic music servers. The second alpha release was just published yesterday! Built with Go and the Fyne UI toolkit, and using libmpv as an audio backend, Supersonic supports high quality gapless playback of pretty much every audio format, and is fast and lightweight on resources. It also features infinite scrolling through albums.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35211478

Points: 7

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