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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't this Fraunhofer's big insight that led to the development of MP3? Human perception actually is pretty forgiving of perturbations in the Fourier domain.

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You probably mean Karlheinz Brandenburg, the developer of MP3, who worked on psychoacoustics. Not completely off though, as he did the research at a Fraunhofer research institute, which takes its name from Joseph von Fraunhofer, the inventor of the spectroscope.

Does the institute not also claim that work?

Fair enough. But for me, when talking about `having an insight`, I don't imagine a non-human entity doing that. And to be pedantic (talking about Germans doing research, I hope everyone would expect me to be), the institute is called Fraunhofer IIS. `Fraunhofer` would colloquially refer to the society, which is an organization with 76 institutes total. Although, of course, the society will also claim the work...

It's an interesting question, one I hadn't thought of before. But in common language, it sometimes makes sense to credit the institution, others just the individuals. I think may be more based around how much the institution collectively presents itself as the author and speaks on behalf of the project versus the individuals involved. Here is my own general intuition for a few contrasting cases:

Random forests: Ko and Breiman's, not really Bell Labs and UC-Berkeley

Transistors: Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley, not really Bell Labs (thank the Nobel Prize for that)

UNIX: Primarily Bell Labs, but also Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie (this is a hard one)

GPT-n: OpenAI, not really any individual, and I can't seem to even recall any named individual from memory

Bringing the right people together and having the right environment that gives rise to „having an insight“ can be a big part as well.

btw, it is public funded non-profit organisation

In very limited situations. You can move a frequency around (or drop it entirely) if it's being masked by a nearby loud frequency. Otherwise, you would be amazed at the sensitivity of pitch perception.

The easy example of this is playing a slightly out of tune guitar, or a mandolin where the strings in the course aren't matched in pitch perfectly. You can hear it, and it's just a few cents off.

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