robbyking

I moderate a reddit community with ~200k users, and if I didn't use strict filtering along with a slew of Automoderator rules I'd spend half of my day removing spam, shitposts, and submissions that break our posting rules. A few posts a day get caught by mistake, but it's a lot easier to free those posts than it is to remove the dozens of bad ones that would have made it through otherwise. I think it's at least plausible that the same type of thing happens at a site-wide level.

I think this is the main thing most music fans (and young musicians) are forgetting: historically, musicians have never made money off of album sales, labels have. Musicians make the bulk of their money from touring and merchandise.

Steve Albini does a good job of breaking it down here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music.

FTFA:

> For the average band, a $250,000 advance (in 1993 dollars) is distributed like this:

> Record company: $710,000

> Producer: $90,000

> Manager: $51,000

> Studio: $52,500

> Previous label: $50,000

> Agent: $7,500

> Lawyer: $12,000

> Band member net income each: $4,031.25

Completely off topic, but I love stumbling upon old articles by John Siracusa.

A while ago there was a post on Reddit about something similar, and there wasn't even any "hacking" going on; the video feeds were just unsecured.

Using Google, someone search for a proprietary video protocol (IIRC) and found tons of video streams that weren't even password protected. Some in schools, some in warehouses, and some just on the street as part of neighborhood surveillance. I think I have the link saved, I'll look for it.

I agree 100%! One of the reasons I moved to Athens was I wanted to live in a creative community in a part of the country I had never lived before. Now that I'm a parent I can't until we can travel again so my 4yo can experience some other cultures, here and abroad. There's too much tribalism, and when it comes down to it most of us want the same things[1]

What's funny is when we moved, we actually considered Asheville, too, but decided to go a little bigger. When we lived in Athens it was rare we'd visit Asheville and not run in to someone we knew, or saw that a friend's band from Athens was playing. There is (or was, at least) a lot of reciprocity between the two music scenes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX5MHNvjw7o#t=6m36s

Absolutely. I'm in my 40's, and not only was buying cannabis a little sketchy when I was younger, but you literally had no idea what you were getting: indica, sativa, percentage of THC, percentage of CBD, etc. It was all just a total crapshoot.

> As if our traffic didn't qualify us as the LA of the East.

I lived in Athens, GA for almost a decade, and when my wife and decided to move to a bigger city, this was a major factor in us deciding not to move to Atlanta. We're really big on biking and public transportation, and at the time it didn't feel like Atlanta was an option because of this.

That said, I miss Georgia a lot. I don't think people who live in other states realize how cool Athens and Atlanta are.

5 or 6 years ago I was talking to coworker about password managers, and they told me how much they liked 1Password. I decided to give it a shot, and after a week or so decided to switch permanently and delete my LastPass account.

When I told them that I had made the switch, they laughed told me they had done the same: they tried LastPass and decided to delete their 1Password account!

Personal preference is funny like that.

That same year I was working at a mom and pop musical instruments store, and in our hallway we had a photo of Chick standing behind a keyboard with his pants unbuttoned.

As a 17-year-old who didn’t know anything about jazz, and I asked the owner what the story was behind the photo, and he said, “Robby, when you’re a legend you don’t have to button your pants.”

I recently started listening to the Command_Line Heroes podcast, and I was surprised to learn to what extent Microsoft had become involved in open source. I haven't been a daily Linux user since the era of Microsoft's FUD campaign against it, and it was really nice to see that that thinking left the company with Balmer.

The HN Guidelines[1] say "It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." They may not be following the intent of the rule, but it looks like they are following the rule as it's written.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Anything that I haven't kept practicing is almost gone.

I think that's true of any method of learning. I once took a class on a proprietary audio visual language, and a year of so later my manager asked me to write some control software using that language, and I basically had to start from scratch.

On the other hand, I took Stanford's first MOOC Swift Class, and have been using Swift as my primary language ever since.

I love the quote from him where he says "languages are mere tools for building and combining parts of software." I think a lot of new developers get hung up on Language A vs. Language B (or OS A vs. OS B), so I hope this helps them realize that the languages are just tools you have in your toolbox, and that they should be open to switching between (and learning new) languages as needed.

I understand why they didn't -- when it comes to new technologies, most end users can only imagine extensions of what they already have, not entirely new paradigms. (Just look at the technology predictions from the 1960s!)

A/B testing is best suited for determining user preference between existing designs, not new ones.

The name -- and service -- feels very reminiscent of GrooveShark.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooveshark, for the youngins.)

I agree; I wouldn’t say “humans” are the problem, but “cultures that value capitalism more than human life.”

I'm lucky that before Covid I was able to walk to work so I was never bound by traffic or transportation schedules, but I definitely have friends and coworkers who "miss their bus" so they'll get home after their kids are down.

(For those of you without kids, a lot of pre-schoolers go to bed at 7.)

I know we're drifting further and further away from the subject of the original article, but when I quit drinking I threw myself into music pretty hard. I had a nightly practice routine that I did to a metronome's ever increasing tempo, until one day I realized I had just traded one obsession for another and was starting to resent playing my guitar.

Once I recognized the pattern it was easy to break, so when I find myself working longer hours or getting too emotionally involved in my work I take a step back and try to figure out why I'm behaving in this manner in hopes of preventing future burn out.

Exactly. I wear a single AirPod when going on runs, walks, and on my cycling trainer, and the difference is night and day; I don't know why it's so frustrating to have an earbud ripped out of your ear, but it is.

My AirPods are one of the few things that if I were to lose I'd buy again immediately.

> I've lived the majority of my life (mid 30s now) waiting for "my time".

As expected, becoming a father cost me a lot of free time, but when I started working from home I lost my commute (usually walking, sometimes biking) and that was the one that really stung.

It was only a half hour or so each way, but I used that time to catch up with friends, listen to podcasts or music, or just let my mind wander. Now I have to really make an effort to carve out "me time," and with the Covid time tax it's really difficult.

I agree 100%. While it does take me a day or two to set up a new Mac, 99% of that time is downloading IDEs and configuring them the bizarro way I like them configured.

I'm curious, how many people got the reference to the first Burning Man, held on Ocean Beach in 1986?

I love this analogy! I'm a moderator of r/mtb, and creators have gone as far as to ask me why people aren't interacting with their content. I usually send a short reply about how the community responds to certain types of content, but your post does a good job of explaining why.

I think I'm going to borrow your bar analogy next time I have to warn a fledgling YouTuber about spamming.

I've been trying to get a lobste.rs invite for years! It's a tough community to get into. I hadn't heard of Tildes before, but it looks cool, too.

Reddit reached Eternal September a while ago, so the key is to find small (yet active) communities whose content doesn't make it to r/all. I moderate a cycling community there, but we're really strict about what type of content gets posted. It sucks that we as a mod team have to do that, but if we don't our community gets overrun with memes, image macros, and rage comics.

I grew up in an extremely remote part of Southern California and for years there were rumors of "land banking" investments being made by Asian investors. This was back in the 90's, so it was extremely difficult to verify these types of rumors.

Fast forward 15 years and an article pops in their local paper (I had long since moved away), and it turns out it was true!

From the Daily Press [1]:

> Lured by the prospect of massive transportation projects that could skyrocket land values, the Victor Valley has become a jewel for foreign and domestic investors looking to make a fortune in a practice called land banking. In land banking, investors buy raw land and hold onto it until the value goes up because of inflation or development.

For those who aren't familiar with the area, it's a remote and extremely low-income, low-education area of California. Anyone making investments in property there is looking for them to pay off a generation or two from now.

[1] https://www.vvdailypress.com/article/20121001/BUSINESS/31001...

That was my first thought, too. The student who "hacked" Sarah Palin's email account (he reset her password by answering her security questions using publicly available information) was convicted of a felony and spent a year and a day in jail.

I did that, too, until I realized I tap the back of my phone when I'm thinking.

I think I'm the only person who likes iOS's reachability gesture. The only annoying thing about it is sometimes it will trigger touchUpInside for buttons along the bottom of the screen, navigating me away from the screen I was on.

In my experience, the woodworking community is extremely friendly to newcomers. Find some online tutorials, building something small to get used to using your tools, then ask away!

I read an article about executive directors salaries at non-profits, and the gist of it was that good executive directors are expensive because they bring more money into the org; would you rather 90% of $1m go towards your cause, or 50% of $10m?

This doesn't seem to be the case with Mozilla, though. They somehow have the worst of both worlds: inflated executive salaries and a loss in revenue.