Hacker News: shahidhussain

New comment by shahidhussain in "The 15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished"

shahidhussain — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:21:14 +0000

Thanks for the note. Yeah, it was almost impossible to find the data without a ton of help. I’m sure things will change again as bot internet usage overwhelms human usage — maybe more silos, maybe more bot only interfaces. Interesting times!

New comment by shahidhussain in "The 15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished"

shahidhussain — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:06:43 +0000

Author here. I bought this CD in 2011 and spent 15 years failing to find out who made it. The band charted at #47 on the UK Independent Singles Chart in June 2006, so it was a real, professionally made, commercially distributed record, and I couldn't find anything online: no credits, no fingerprint match, no company registration for the label, nothing on streaming.

Part of the answer turned out to be that their website was Flash, so it was never meaningfully indexed, and their MySpace was never mirrored. A band can be entirely findable in 2006 and entirely gone by 2026 depending on which technologies they happened to pick.

It was eventually solved by searching on the producer's credits rather than the band's name, and then by two people replying to cold emails. Both the producer and the singer were generous enough to be interviewed, so there's some fresh detail in there about the recording session as well.

The 15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished

shahidhussain — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:06:43 +0000

Article URL: https://shahidhussain.com/writing/search-for-salvage/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49959280

Points: 286

# Comments: 101

Creating a Smart Scale with Tensorflow

shahidhussain — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 22:36:31 +0000

Article URL: https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-a-smart-scale-with-tensorflow-cf62a834b670

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19306334

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by shahidhussain in "Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic"

shahidhussain — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 14:31:27 +0000

It's very good - limited volume though. CPCs are often efficient at low volumes with good targeting.

New comment by shahidhussain in "Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads"

shahidhussain — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 01:32:58 +0000

Why Chrome OS?

New comment by shahidhussain in "Why iOS 6 Just Turned Your iPad 1G Into a Paperweight"

shahidhussain — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:27:16 +0000

Is there anything like whited00r available for these machines? (I installed it on my original iPhone, and it's been a lifesaver.)

New comment by shahidhussain in "Samsung Galaxy S4 due in February"

shahidhussain — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:33:34 +0000

There isn't (yet) a great version of CM10 or any AOSP based rom out for the S3:

http://get.cm/?device=i9300&type=stable

... while the Galaxy Nexus has already gotten its OTA update. Closest I've found is the SuperNexus ROM, but even that's still glitchy.

New comment by shahidhussain in "Nokia Launches Lumia 920: 8MP PureView, NFC, Wireless Charging, Windows Phone 8"

shahidhussain — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:20:15 +0000

I'm going to guess at:

* Let the public markets know there's something good in the pipeline to keep the stock price as a decent level

* Let the distributors / carriers know (+ no worries about leaks)

* In some ways, it's better than the alternative of a leak, where all the marketing messages come from some crappy blurry cam mixed with a bunch of fake images

I agree it's a little risky from the consumer's POV. Bear in mind a couple things though:

* Even for consumers, when it gets released, they feel more positive towards a product they've heard of previously

* It's possible that the interest will be maintained over that period, although this is a stretch for anyone that isn't amazing at marketing.

New comment by shahidhussain in ""Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today"

shahidhussain — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 11:04:10 +0000

Unless you're busy making or avoiding patents, I'd argue that the innovativeness of a feature shouldn't be a factor unless it works better than the normal solution.

New comment by shahidhussain in "The end of Samsung mobile"

shahidhussain — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:50:14 +0000

"If I were Samsung's CEO or on its Board of Directors, I'd suggest dumping the mobile unit and focusing on consumer tech in televisions, home appliances and cameras and hope to God that no one sues us over those."

This is probably the dumbest opinion I've read so far on this lawsuit.

New comment by shahidhussain in "A well designed GOVERNMENT website."

shahidhussain — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 22:47:02 +0000

Wow - I disagree that this is well designed. It also looks half finished (lot of links are dead, many others are unclickable when they should be) - I'm guessing this is a work in progress from an agency?

New comment by shahidhussain in "Are “Let’s Play …Videos” bad for the gaming industry?"

shahidhussain — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:28:47 +0000

I hear where you're coming from, but I think different people just like different things about games, and my bias is towards games that have strong stories. Take Mass Effect an an example - for me personally, the most interesting part of the game is making decisions and seeing how the story progresses as a result. I like to pew-pew the aliens as much as the next guy, but I'm most interested in seeing how character X reacts to action A. I'm not alone - the reason so many people were annoyed about the ending was that they wanted to find out what happens to the characters that they'd grown attached to over the last three games.

Now you're right that they could absolutely release the story of Mass Effect as a (really really long) film, but I like to have choice in how the story progresses, and I don't want to watch lots of different movies with all the choices played out. Having that control makes me feel more engaged in the story than watching it passively.

Not everyone will feel that's worth the price of entry for a game - I do.

New comment by shahidhussain in "Are “Let’s Play …Videos” bad for the gaming industry?"

shahidhussain — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:22:05 +0000

"If a game is so boring and forgettable that watching a Youtube video is an effective replacement, a player who purchases it will not be satisfied with the game."

This I disagree with - the same goes for great games that are heavily story oriented (perhaps something like Alan Wake or Dreamfall). I'm not saying you get the full experience watching the YT video, but I think the OP's point is that you get enough value that the delta from actually playing the game isn't worth $50.

New comment by shahidhussain in "Twitter May Have 500M+ Users But Only 170M Are Active"

shahidhussain — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:53:47 +0000

I agree that's a lot, but we need to bear in mind that active can have a lot of definitions. From the article:

"active in this sense means the number of accounts that were modified over a three-month period, including changes of avatar, subscribing to a new follower or tweeting"

Three months is a long time for activity - monthly / weekly / daily active user metrics are more common. Also, it (apparently) isn't counting a visit as activity, just these actions. That just makes this a weird metric to benchmark against.

New comment by shahidhussain in "Desperation forces Nokia to cut Lumia price in half"

shahidhussain — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 10:52:10 +0000

I'd be pretty surprised if Nokia's marketing team haven't already some some price sensitivity analysis (maybe based on past promotions or variations in pricing across carriers or territories) to determine the expected change in revenue from this line. I would guess that you're right, and this level of price change as presented to the end consumer isn't going to drive sales to any meaningful degree. It's possible though that the promotional effect will have a bigger impact (i.e. some percentage people who haven't heard of or noticed the device before will purchase based on other factors).

Either this, OR some marketing director somewhere needs to be seen to be doing something.

New comment by shahidhussain in "Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant"

shahidhussain — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 16:59:32 +0000

I believe GE does also. If these kind of companies are employing the same system with better results, would this imply that the theory behind stack ranking is not the problem?

New comment by shahidhussain in "Cheddar"

shahidhussain — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 16:54:09 +0000

Any.do not work for you? http://www.any.do/

New comment by shahidhussain in "EU Commissioner Will Simply Ignore Any Rejection Of ACTA By EU Parliament"

shahidhussain — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:39:44 +0000

We discussed this a little on Reddit[1] a while back, some of us fired off emails to our local MEPs on the topic, there was a small demonstration, but frankly we didn't make a loud enough noise to be heard.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/osobb/after_w...

New comment by shahidhussain in "Sonic.net CEO: We Delete User Logs After Two Weeks. Your ISP Should, Too."

shahidhussain — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 15:13:35 +0000

I used Sonic when I lived in SF. Dane himself tweeted back when I mentioned them, and their customer service has been super transparent (you can see on their support page [1] how many calls are on and waiting), extremely honest and helpful, even for a nerd like me.

I have nothing but admiration for these guys.

[1] http://www.sonic.net/support/index.shtml