I have a .me address and I've been totally happy with it. My domain is my initials (same as my HN username - nlh) and I love that my email is just nlh @ nlh . me -- it's actually shorter and better than any .com I could reasonably come up with or purchase.
There is confusion maybe 10% of the time - it's fine. Most of the confused people think I mean "me.com", but it hasn't been a real issue.
Honestly the more confusing thing for most people is that my initials are "nlh" and they are used to the National Hockey League (nhl) and that often ends up getting confused.
But again, all of these are minor. I love my .me domain and email address and am very happy to keep it for life.
(PS / side story: The .com I wanted for many years was "noah.com" because that was my tongue-in-cheek nickname among friends since I was an early internet adopter tech nerd. The domain was owned by a guy who had a 1990s-style single page homepage with no content other than a single link to a photo album -- that lived in stasis for years - easily throgh the mid/late 2010s. I would ping him every few years and ask if he was ready to sell it yet and he always demurred. Then recently I checked and it appears to have been sold to a fintech company. I guess they made him an offer he couldn't refuse!)
re: side story: Our name is fairly unique (at least for me, I've only met one or two others around my age with our name). The past decade, and especially what feels like the past five years, have been very jarring now that I hear the name elsewhere - I always react, even when I don't recognize the voice. It's invariably some 5-11 year old being called on. I assume people with more common names don't have this reaction. What's been your experience with having a name which was extremely uncommon for us but is now one of the most popular names?
Definitely odd! I grew up my whole life with 0-1 other Noahs around (usually 1 other around -- it was weird we always were in pairs). It is weird how suddenly everyone loves the name. I guess our parents were ahead of the trend! :)
It is mind-blowing that this happens but I suppose totally logical too. Scammers are out to extract money from people and companies by any method possible, so in the world of remote-only work, it's just another extraction angle for them I suppose.
I think everyone who spent time computing in the 80s & 90s has at least one tale of woe relating to forgetting to save or crashing before a save or tripping over a power plug, etc.
In retrospect it seems pretty wild that users were expected to actuate an explicit “save” command and that word processors didn’t just handle this automatically.
I’m sure there were real reasons - I was never involved in DOS or Windows programming but I presume it had to do with the slowness of saving to disk (and that a background auto-save wasn’t technically possible?). Or did we just not yet collectively have enough experience to know that auto saving was something critical to writers…?
Imagine the entire machine coming to a halt, ignoring input, and making grinding noises for 5-10 seconds. That's what saving a small file was like in the floppy disk era. If that was happening randomly while you're trying to type something, you'd go crazy.
Apart from the lack of sophistication regarding background saving, the two main reasons were
a) writing to disk was inherently dangerous: file systems of the time were not robust, so anything going wrong while updating metadata (in particular) could trash not just your file but the whole filesystem. Floppies were slow and machines were crashier, making the whole operation riskier; and
b) using floppies reduces their lifespan because the disk physically rubs against both the read/write heads and the internal padding of its casing, so typically they were only accessed as part of an explicit user request.
Saving did take time, but multitasking was a rarity, as was multithreading. Machines only had so much spare cpu and ram, too.
I'd expect autosave to prevent typing, which would bogart the workflow. I can envision doing quick incremental saves, maybe, but then you'd probably get jittery behaviour.
If we're talking mid 80s, something like the c64 would need assembly to handle anything like that I'd think.
I remember writing a BBS in basic, and just typing for an afternoon and running out of ram. I had to create separate modules for the up/download area, the message board, file transfer, and so on, all loaded off of... there was a commodore 1M floppy drive I used.
Given that Mr. Carter received a special disk with which he retrieved the lost material, it seems more like he accidentally deleted it, rather than just failing to save it.
You have inspired more questions about incremental saves: speed was an obvious issue with personal computers, but was it implemented on any minis or mainframes? These were multiuser systems (i.e. multitasking), so they could do background disk I/O. Also, would it be a possibility on some personal computers? For example: 8-bit Commodore computers had their own CPU and could operate indepedently from the computer, while the 6809 was famous for being sophisticated enough to support multitasking (e.g. OS-9). Even less sophistcated machines could do I/O in the background if the disk controller signalled the completion of a read/write operation via interrupts.
I'm asking because it is also possible that such features weren't implemented because the weren't thought of or because the defied contemporary expectations.
If you're sitting in front of the keyboard, inputting instructions and running the resulting programs, yes you are still a coder. You're just move another layer up on the stack.
The same type of argument has been made for decades -- when coders wrote in ASM, folks would ask "are you still a coder when you use that fancy C to make all that low-level ASM obsolete?". Etc etc.
Limiting this to work only with folks who have MIDI keyboards attached to their machines probably cuts your audience down by 99.9999%. Especially here on hacker news.
I think you’re going to find it tough going to get any real feedback with that requirement. You might find better luck launching in a community of folks who are more likely to meet your hardware requirements.
I disagree. I believe it is a good idea to focus in your "customer" and ignore the rest.
This is the best advice I was given. People are always asking for you to unfocus and disperse.
Most people that is serious about learning chords have a MIDI device. It will make your life way harder to add non MIDI devices and the people that will use it are not really that committed. MIDI devices are so cheap today that anyone that wants one could get one.
BTW I have several MIDI devices because I create my own games too.
I agree with you functionality wise, but a video showing it in use would be a good idea so those of us away from our midi devices can at least see it in action.
Just got my MPK61 hooked up this week… I’ll have to give it a try.
The set of people that have MIDI capable keyboards and want to improve musically is vanishingly small compared to those without, true, but it’s clearly a lucrative market if you do it right: there are tons of (music) keyboard classes out there online.
And a lot of the hardware and software are pricey enough that I imagine ads could be pretty lucrative too.
Thanks for you feedback. It is really valuable for me. Actually, my main idea when I started this project was helping to remember the chords and common progressions on a real keyboard. Like making a muscle memory, so personally prefer to keep it for MIDI devices, but helping users there to find a virtual MIDI device could be also a good idea.
I have a MIDI keyboard and an interest in learning, but it's not hooked up to my computer most of the time.
But if this is strictly for learning fingering and not for identifying chords by ear, I guess it's reasonable to require a keyboard. Otherwise you can't use it anyway.
Related question: Some people are suggesting keyboards that are only MIDI controllers; but that doesn't seem sufficient, because in that instance where will the sounds come from? Are there default sounds that will be triggered if you hook up a controller-only keyboard?
A super-brief spin through Amazon doesn't show anything like that. And <= $30 is within the 'impulse buy' range, so I'm very interested to know more, if you're up for sharing :)
Akai LPK 25 is like $50 brand new, so is LPD 8 if you're more interested in pads (MPK Mini gives you both for $100 new). There's cheaper options out there, but that's the cheapest I know from a well-established brand.
Even if you have no interest in music, get one. MIDI is super easy to read, you can DIY something like an Elgato Stream Deck for a third of the price, physical volume knobs included. It's up there with a Raspberry Pi for the coolest cheap gadget.
okay, but.. any path to connecting this to phone mics so that it can function anywhere? whats the state of the art in tone and chord recognition models?
The waveform produced by sounding a note on most physical instruments will often not exhibit a peak, or will not exhibit the strongest peak, on the note being sounded. Rather, most instruments will instead produce harmonic overtones and our brains fill in the gap of the pitch that’s intended to be sounded.
You can still absolutely deduce the fundamental with great accuracy via an FFT, but the approach is a bit more involved. The relevant research area here is called ‘fundamental frequency estimation’.
For an example of this, you can see this app I built that lets you give keyboard and mouse inputs via playing notes on a bass guitar, which are recognized over the microphone: https://github.com/codyd51/offkeyboard
If you have a guitar handy, you can try out the live mode on https://www.fretboardfly.com . It works and people use it: Using your acoustic guitar to play the fretboard learning game via the mic.
I think this is a bit of a naive take. First off I agree 100% that their employees are not deserving of death so let's get that out of the way here. I'm not trying to argue that murder here is justified.
But the take that purchasing insurance is a simple two-party agreement of willing participants who have options to go elsewhere is just purely naive. This is not a simple financial product like buying life insurance or car insurance or fire insurance for your house where you go shopping and buy or don't buy.
In the United States, there are just no other choices. You get health insurance as part of your employement (typically), which is insane on the face of it. The government (basically) does not provide health as a service, even though it would seem that health is as fundamental a service as it gets.
Health Insurance companies are for-profit entities whose absolute incentives are to maximize financial return to their shareholders, not maximize health in their policyholders. And whether they say it explicitly or not, the way you maximize financial return as an insurance company is take in more money than you pay out. And in situations where you have some amount of leeway over whether to pay out or not, the way you do that is try to pay out as little as possible and deny claims as much as possible. That's just pure logic.
This is not "did your house burn down" or "did you car crash" or "did you die" binary type of stuff with typical insurance. This is nuanced decision-making, all with an overarching goal is maximizing financial return and minimizing claims paid. Period.
While a specific person at a health insurance company may not be evil, and while the business itself may not be evil, the net result of the entire end-to-end system can absolutely be quite evil.
Again, the default state of the world is "no insurance or free healthcare at all". You absolutely have a choice – to not buy health insurance and always pay for your own healthcare costs.
The result of health insurance is that people who could otherwise not afford to pay their own healthcare costs frequently can (but not always, when claims are denied). In turn, people who are healthy (and lucky) subsidize those less fortunate than themselves. This is not evil, this is good. This is something humans have invented to make us stronger as a collective.
You can argue that a society should do more to proactively provide healthcare so that you don't need a private health insurance system, but that doesn't then make the private system bad.
I have to say, I've been reading your replies here (and your big reply in the just thread) and I'm super super impressed with your dedication to this project. I can tell just in how you write, the volume of responses in this thread, and your tone that this is a real passion project and you're deeply serious about this. I love seeing this. Thanks for your dedication!
I think this comment is being too dismissive/negative/bitter.
There is truth here -- yes, OP is likely out of his depth a bit. Yes, he's likely to be seen as a "cost center" rather than an asset. Yes there's internal pressure to deliver at a level higher than experience.
But none of those are reasons to flee.
OP: I think you would be wiser to enjoy this situation, learn as much as possible, deliver as best you can, BUT be fully aware that you could be nixed at any moment and do NOT take it personally if/when that happens.
Another thing to do, on the other end of the spectrum, is not get "stuck" at this company. You might find yourself extremely successful there! But there is a natural limit to how much you'll be able to learn/grow as a solo operator at a non-tech company.
Use the time you have to learn as best you can and pivot to a role at a proper eng-focused org where you can get the mentorship you want (assuming you want that!). Find another gig before you have time to learn bad habits or get too stuck in your ways.
2 years at this company will likely be great for you and be an asset to your overall career. 10 years will likely not.
Heh. My roommate (in NYC) at the time was involved-enough in this that one of the actual "devices" appeared in our apartment a few weeks later and surreptitiously remained for many years, fully working in its Lite-brite/LED glory.
It made for an excellent conversation piece for those that knew, and a weird piece of LED art for those that didn't.
Edit: I found pictures! Sorry they were shot on a potatocam (2008 era) but here she is:
I'm not really sure what's weird. Programming is a skill -- it can be used for fun, for work, for your benefit, and/or for others' benefit.
The union does not want to work for their employer at the moment because they don't believe they're being treated fairly and not working is one of the only points of leverage a worker has. So they're using that leverage.
Why would that prevent them from working on a fun game or project to help further their cause?
There is confusion maybe 10% of the time - it's fine. Most of the confused people think I mean "me.com", but it hasn't been a real issue.
Honestly the more confusing thing for most people is that my initials are "nlh" and they are used to the National Hockey League (nhl) and that often ends up getting confused.
But again, all of these are minor. I love my .me domain and email address and am very happy to keep it for life.
(PS / side story: The .com I wanted for many years was "noah.com" because that was my tongue-in-cheek nickname among friends since I was an early internet adopter tech nerd. The domain was owned by a guy who had a 1990s-style single page homepage with no content other than a single link to a photo album -- that lived in stasis for years - easily throgh the mid/late 2010s. I would ping him every few years and ask if he was ready to sell it yet and he always demurred. Then recently I checked and it appears to have been sold to a fintech company. I guess they made him an offer he couldn't refuse!)