Yeah that's right. I'm back for Show & Tell.

Tell first: I've been reading Excession by Iain M Banks again. Not because Elon Musk pays superficial lip service to Iain Banks. Not because of peer pressure among posers to read Excession. Because I genuinely identify with some of the characters.

A theme in Excession is: nerds collect things. Gestra collects scale models of sailing ships. Pittance collects warships in stasis. Sleeper Service collects people in stasis. Grey Area collects torture devices.

Another theme in Excession is: nerds are not welcome in the Culture. I mentioned four nerd characters. Three of them leave the galaxy by the end of the story. Grey Area goes a step further and leaves the universe.

Yeah that's right. Too much literary analysis for Hacker News.

Show second: I've been collecting song metadata from Jango Radio. By which I mean I wrote code to collect metadata. It took a few months but I collected metadata for every song and made it searchable. I did it because I was looking for a few specific songs which had become unsearchable on Jango Radio. Without knowing the song IDs I was looking for so I had to grab every song ID and once I started I might as well finish the collection.

Bash and JSON and PHP and SQLite are tech nerd tools. Too technical for Hacker News. We all know Hacker News is named ironically because it's really a marketing site.

Finally: Coding is a worthless activity for nerds like Gestra and Grey Area and just as unprofitable as collecting scale model sailing ships. There's nothing to monetize about some nerd's collection of song metadata. There's nothing about coding to monetize. Marketing is what matters always.

Yeah that's right. Hacker News is not a tech site. Hacker News is a marketing site.

I don't do marketing.