HN is particularly notorious for armchair aviation experts. I am an aerospace engineer having worked in airworthiness & certification as well as maintenance/repair/overhaul on multiple different aircraft types both fixed and rotary. I mention this only to establish my bona fides as someone who knows their shit:
The comments here during the 737 MAX MCAS thing were fucking wild. So many randoms spitting out confidently incorrect nonsense.
I've worked on several engine families engine certification, I can't read threads about aviation on HN because my brain hurts too much from people who know nothing posting like they are experts nonstop.
It actually causes me stress because a) I need to prevent myself from posting corrections and b) from knowing that these people are everywhere and are posting fud about trains or something
That’s all forums in a nut shell. Any time you read about something you’re not personally familiar with it’s “look at all these people who know what they’re talking about… “, as soon as it’s something you are personally familiar with it’s “wtf are these people on about?!”
“Gell-Mann Amnesia“ - usually applied to media when experts scoff at stories they know to be sometimes woefully inaccurate but still accept all the other pages as gospel.
HN is notorious for armchair <insert-topic> experts for <insert-topic> you actually know, outside of software, computing/computing-adjacent electronic hardware and startups. “Fucking wild” “confidently incorrect nonsense” is likely the norm on most fringe topics, judging by the few I know about.
Quite so. When it first took off, I took no end of flames and downvotes for suggesting that WebGPU is a terrible idea. HTML and the browser were originally conceived to render documents, not serve as a bastardized application distribution platform.
The only arguments I've ever heard in favor of wasm/webgpu were that using native graphics/GUI toolkit APIs are a pain. That's definitely true, because I've written stuff with gtk and it sucks, but that doesn't mean we should just shovel an entire tech stack into the browser.
Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. I'm tired of these BigCos shitting everything up.
So, I kind of agree, but I don't know what a better solution looks like.
Is it really better for users to download and run straight up executables with no security model? We tried that in the 90s and 2000s and it was pretty bad. We can have OSes introduce a security model, like Android and iOS do. But then what about desktop Linux users like myself? Am I just to be excluded because I don't use a popular (and proprietary) operating system?
Okay, we can invent a standard, cross platform app distribution mechanism with a security model. And that's... exactly what web browsers are. In the end it seems like the least-bad solution to me. I quite like that I can run GPU accelerated programs without the dev having to put in special effort to support my Linux distro.
>Is it really better for users to download and run straight up executables with no security model?
Yes. Unambiguously, a system where the only code that runs is code that you explicitly run is more secure. Social engineering and basic tricks of telling someone an app does A while it really does B are not solved on the web, because social engineering cannot be solved. In the supposed safe gardens of app stores, apps do exactly that all the time and are not well moderated. Apple's supposed moderation approved a "Lastpass" password manager app that was not made by the actual Lastpass company. If that can get through, then anything can get through.
Meanwhile, the webapp solution is for any site you visit to be able to download and execute whatever they want, rather than whatever you want, and most sites also set a third party to have the ability to download and run whatever they want, and Google wants that system to have as much control over your local hardware as the OS does, so how is this better at all? It's strictly worse. The web security model is worthless. It depends on random third parties you have no affiliation with to not get hacked themselves, and not make stupid choices.
It's fine to just not have "Web bluetooth" actually. 800 "Partners" just don't need to be able to access that.
What is the "Security Model" of the web, that every random person willing to pay a few cents for an advertisement should be able to run code on your machine without your authorization? That anyone should be able to target individuals for RCE through advertising infrastructure?
> Unambiguously, a system where the only code that runs is code that you explicitly run is more secure.
I don't think so? If I want to run a 3D modeling program and I download their executable and run it, it has access to everything on my system. All my local files, open access to my network connection, whatever's going on with my internal network, etc. If they want to read all my files and upload them, they can just do that. This is not true for web applications.
Programs that run in a browser are sandboxed and only have access to what web standards say they have access to. They can open a file select dialog to get a file from my machine with my permission, but they don't just have access to all of my files like a local program does. Web standards developers put a lot of effort into finding a balance between security and capabilities for new web APIs.
> What is the "Security Model" of the web
Unlike locally running programs, web applications don't have access to everything on the system by default. Interactions with the local system are intermediated by the browser. Usually the user has to approve access, or there are limitations on what types of access a web app can have.
If you head into your Firefox settings and select "Permissions and data", you can see what kinds of things given websites are allowed to access. Usually when they first try to use one of those APIs, the browser will pop up some kind of browser-level dialog asking the user for permission to perform that type of action (eg "access local devices" or "show notifications"). These are all examples of the web app security model (and there's a whole lot more that is not as user-facing).
Local applications on the other hand, do not have any kind of security model. The 3D modeling program I downloaded can just package up all of my files and upload them to their server, completely silently. That's way worse than what web applications can do!
> It's fine to just not have "Web bluetooth" actually. 800 "Partners" just don't need to be able to access that.
People don't want documents. Almost everything useful you do on the web is some form of interactive app from a simple forum with no JS to Figma or 3D games.
I think we need to go the other way, all in on apps. The browser only has to expose permission based I/O, WebGPU and a way to build a11y semantic trees. Globally cached libraries can handle everything else. That would reduce the attack surface and core complexity while making the platform more flexible. HTML can run as a legacy layer on top.
Yeah in the end I probably agree on WebGPU, I haven't really seen a single use of it, except for running shader code examples in browser, which might as well be replaced by a looping video.
For WASM though, I do not agree at all! It's genuinely a great system for high performance browser code. So much stuff I use now had WASM as the backbone, and I even started applying it outside of the browser in some of my architecture. I wish we had way more enthusiasm behind things like WASM, and way less for something like WebUSB.
Hey you’re right, we should gladly accept every decision the big corps make. They know best, after all. We should probably lick their boots too, in gratitude for their benevolence.
The application delivery thing was done as far back as Netscape threatening to relegate Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers" so Web-whatever is simply another step in that direction. Like I said, if you purists want just document delivery, you can use links or w3m or maybe Gemini.
Some kind of market forces kept Netscape in check back then. Now they aren't.
Like, Tesco would prefer that my operating system was a roast chicken, Baowu Group would prefer it was made of steel, Berghain would prefer that it had to queue for hours to possibly get in, and Jagex would prefer it was an in-game GUI within RuneScape. None of those companies got their way, what makes Netscape special?
The point is that browsers have been made and funded by BigCo, and treated as app delivery platforms at least for the last 20 years. Netscape, Microsoft, Apple, Google (for Mozilla and then Chrome). The last non BigCo mainstream(?) browser was probably Opera.
It's silly to complain now about BigCo, WebGPU, and ignore the past 20 years of history. The WWW has not been about document delivery only for the last 20 years. Instead of tiring themselves out complaining about the Web and modern browsers, they can use something else.
Suffers from the same problem that all music theory texts seem unable to avoid: they require the reader to simply accept a bunch of random facts to memorize with no context.
Example: memorize the major scale as a series of whole and half steps but we won’t provide you with any context or motivation for why this is so.
Similar: in a major scale all notes are played and none are skipped or repeated. Except if your scale goes D–E–F#–G, in which case you skip F. The only way for this to be correct is apparently we consider F and F# to be the same note for purposes of scales even though this directly contradicts a previous section.
I was expecting a “21st century” music theory reference to have an emphasis on building intuition. Music theorists are apparently allergic to good pedagogy.
There is a part near the beginning where he derives the diatonic scale from first principles. (There is a sequel as well, and a book if you prefer to read it in book form)
But note that Sethares's work assumes the Plomp and Levelt curve is correct, which is only approximately true. In practice there is also "higher order beating", which causes additional dissonance at ratios close to small integer ratios. This means the most accurate model of dissonance combines Sethares's approach with ratio complexity as in just intonation. This is backed by listening tests:
Note also that there's a strong cultural/training component to dissonance perception. To minimize this you should ignore the preferences of musicians and only ask untrained listeners.
We recently had a long discussion about this. I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought [1] but for other people it is a distraction from understanding basic stuff like “this is a minor scale”. See here for the long discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541888
[1] I understand ancient scales were 3-limit instead of 5-limit scales, and that modern equal temperament has thirds which significantly deviate from 5:4 and 6:5, but once polyphony became a thing, 5-limit temperament made a lot more sense because they reduce beating.
Man that top comment is such a combination of "sneering to show off" and completely wrong that I'm shocked I'm not on reddit.
Recommending The Jazz Theory Book to someone starting from scratch, especially someone self studying, is like recommending CLRS or TAOCP to someone who asks "I'm curious about learning the basics of algorithms and data structures, any good books for self study?" And of course that happens all the time too. Chapter 1 is "here's what intervals like major 3rd and perfect fifths are", Chapter 2 is "here's the major scale and all its diatonic modes and ii-V-I progressions", Chapter 3 is "here's how you might use the Phyrigian mode to play over a Sus flat-9 chord" (pg 48).
Recommending Schoenberg and Messiaen as steps to get a sufficient surface of topics covered for "music theory" is performance art in its own regard. Bravo!
Yeah, that guy tried to argue that Grade 5 ABRSM [1] is “very basic”. Like, excuse me no. “Very basic” is knowing the notes in a major key, and knowing the I IV V chord progression, as well as a basic 4/4 rhythm (8th note hi hats, quarter note kick drum, snare on alternating quarter notes).
I IV V chord progressions and major scales are basic enough I can explain them in a 400 word post from first principles (where no music theory exists except the assertion that the human ear finds the pitch ratios of 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5 pleasing to the ear, that the human ear wants at least three notes in a chord, and that the human ear wants at least three chords in a progression).
Those books get very complicated very quickly, and cover music that only a relatively few people actually listen to. It was pure gatekeeping, and I’m disappointed people pointing that out were voted down. Not a good moment for Hacker News. It would be like me recommending Lisp or Forth for one’s first programming language.
Having not really used these grading systems growing up, ABRSM is odd to me in general. Has a very very low ceiling for difficulty, at least for piano. I never really know what is appropriate for what grades, especially given that the UK grading system covers MUCH more complex material.
But yes, it takes an amazing amount of arrogance to look at a simple exploration of music theory from first principles and respond with "this isn't music theory"
> I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought
Ah, well, that makes sense. I come from the "music theory is a quintessentially rigid, British-Schoolroom-coded subject that emphasizes rote memorization over actual understanding" school of thought. The musical equivalent to Americans requiring their children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before they can even understand what the words mean.
The student seeking to build their understanding asks: why is the order of sharps FCGDAEB? Why is the mode with a sharp 4th note the Lydian mode?
Music theory responds: Because fuck you, that's why.
> The student seeking to build their understanding asks: why is the order of sharps FCGDAEB? Why is the mode with a sharp 4th note the Lydian mode?
> Music theory responds: Because fuck you, that's why.
Those are questions that music theory will eventually answer. However knowing the answer to them is not very useful for anything music and so ends up being uninteresting even though when you ask it seems interesting. I can derive the order of sharps - or at least I think I can (I know my circle of fifths) - but realistically the isn't useful for anything and so I won't bother.
Which is to say music education is mostly focused on making good music, and generally keeps building on that. Theory should be learned as it is useful, and I think works best when every point you learn results in the lightbulb "so that is why I do X all the time"
Some subjects are hard. Music notation is mathematical notation that is optimized for ease of consumption by notation experts. It is not optimized for learning.
Same with many activities. Pedagogy and real-world use are different goals. Result is a confusing and horrible learning curve.
My background is a field most would consider "hard", so I'm no stranger to jargon or dense notation optimized for real-world use. So, I don't buy the excuse that you can't have both good pedagogy and usable notation.
Some people are okay with being told "memorize this list of arbitrary factoids" and there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just not one of those people who can pretend that that's good pedagogy.
Even more, my experience as a person raised by and sometimes married to professional music pedegogs and who plays in a lot of professional situations is that the "theory" itself really isn't that hard when we understand the praxis.
I don't think rote memorization is super useful for me as a player- I've heard a lot of analysis that sounds "accurate" but often it doesn't follow my own thoughts and understandings.
If folks are playing, that raises questions about "why this here" and it's nice to have vocabulary for to understand. But I see a lot of folks (there are several in this thread) who think that is a bit backwards- that somehow folks could start with an abstract rule set and learn much. If that's the view on what is happening then I agree that "teaching theory is impossibly hard".
But if learning to play comes before the theory about why we play what we play the situation is a lot easier.
Almost all the theory I have comes from applying the stuff from "theory" books to what I do.
I learned what a secondary dominant sounds like by learning I should stay in an A chord instead of an Am in the turn around in G major blues songs long before I got the concept of what that C# might do to the local tonicity of the tune from whatever theory book.
And I think that's a reasonable way to learn: start playing whatever, try to pick up something you can read for (I read double bass and clarinet pretty well) take up a lot of piano (weather you read it or not), play a bunch with musicians, and eventually the arbitrary facts about your practice sort themselves out.
As I said in a different comment: every point in music theory should result in a "so that is why I already am doing [point]". Well maybe there is a use for "hmm, that is interesting, I wonder how [some song] would sound if I did [new point]." However abstract theory isn't useful for putting together good music. It can help understanding why music is great, and it can help polish good music into great.
Can't spell classical without "class". If you like classical music and don't find at least parts of the culture obnoxious and elitist, I'd worry for you.
Indeed, in the typical progression, a music student is a fluent reader by the time they take a theory course. Reading was probably part of their entrance audition.
Maybe their needs to be a “music theory for engineers” like we have “physics for poets.”
Yes, this is what has always blocked me from learning even basic music theory.
I get that maybe it's just the way it is, perhaps the underlying logic is so complex that it would be counterproductive to present it up front. I'm not saying that the theory should adapt to my pet peeves. But I'm very prone to learn things by understanding first principles and building from there. Having to memorize scales where suddenly you need to skip keys or use black keys without much apparent logic is a real deterrent for me considering it's something I learn as a hobby.
This is also the reason why I like algebra, calculus, etc. but dislike statistics... in algebra or calculus you start from first principles and work up from there understanding everything. In statistics (at least the way I was taught) you are shown the formula for the probability density of the Gaussian distribution and need to accept it as an act of faith.
> But I'm very prone to learn things by understanding first principles and building from there.
I'm the same but never had an issue with music theory, because I came to it backwards from just playing. I learned to play by having fun with the instrument, and then the theory I learned afterwards felt like just being given names for the things that had become obvious through playing. What I'm saying is it will click if you let the music be your first principle.
The problem is that understanding everything from first principles is often the longest and least efficient road to learning the things that are actually useful.
Psychoacoustics is interesting, but it's not something that really helps you become a better musician for at least a couple of _decades_ of your journey. For the vast majority of students, it's a complete waste of time.
It's extremely unlikely that you learnt algebra or calculus from first principles, either. You started from the other end, learning the tools and skills to put it to good use, and then dove deeper with those tools already under your belt. Musicianship is no different.
what you seem to look for is a book about psychoacoustics. but even on that level you'll just have to accept that for some unknown reason humans consider certain pitch ratios as pleasant and even those that sound unpleasant have their place to express dissonance and tension and it's culturally dependent also. eventually there will be first attempts at a general music theory of which the western key based frameworks are special cases.
I don't know your background but I've talked about music theory with a lot of non-musicians who tend to have the same complaints. A lot of what you describe I learned when I was like 5. I don't really think about it anymore, it is second nature on any instrument I play. Even if I don't know the instrument, if you show me how the notes work I can play any scale without really putting any thought into it. This is supposed to be a college level text book. Likely, if you have to think that much about how a major scale works you probably don't have an adequate background to study this. It's not that someone can't but it'll obviously be more work.
These sort of traditional music courses are designed around understanding western classical music. There are some scientific reasons for the way things are but they weren't developed by scientists. This sort of music theory will 100% help build an intuition into western, mostly classical but not exclusively classical, music.
If you want to know why the major scale is the way it is, go take math classes, a few physics courses will likely help as well, probably by the time you're in graduate school you'll understand it and can explain it better than 99% of musician. It'll help you in no way in creating music.
Essentially, what these complaints boil down to would be something similar to someone trying to learn to drive by first learning how an entire car works. It might be interesting to some, but it isn't the point.
I'm starting to read the course at the beginning, and a depressing aversion to explaining why and not only what seems apparent, probably motivated by a desire for brevity and informality that also causes serious defects. For example:
- 1.3 grand staff: "Note that middle C is always clearly notated in either the upper or lower staff and never floats between the two staves." It doesn't tell that the choice of which staff the notes belong to indicates which hand should play them.
- 1.4 accidentals "... are characters that can be placed before notes to raise or lower them." Not to reuse staff locations to distinguish the notes one needs to use.
- 1.5 Enharmonic notes: "When two notes sound the same but are written as two different notes on the staff, the written notes are said to be enharmonic."
This is totally wrong, not merely maddening, but before discussing scales any decent explanation is impossible.
- 3.3 Scale Degree Names: in the middle of chapter 3 (minor scales) because there's no f** definition of what a scale is.
- 6.1 Introduction to Triads: "A triad consists of three notes stacked in consecutive thirds. A triad is also called a chord as well as a harmony. (Harmony also refers to chord progressions.)"
It's sad because many other places benefit from the concise and elegant treatment, for example:
- 5.5 Augmented and Diminished Intervals: "Augmented intervals are one half step larger than perfect or major intervals and diminished intervals are one half step smaller than perfect or minor intervals."
I've been playing music for 20 years, learned and forgotten plenty of music theory. The only way I actually "grok" it, is by re-deriving the whys, but then that slows my learning to a crawl and I begin to forget the earlier lessons.
The memorization doesn't work well for me. I can read music, I can derive scales and chords, but the memorized knowledge of "this chord is technically the same as this one so we'll start calling things other things but it all means the same thing" gets me totally lost.
"Music theory" is not a theory per se, it's mostly a fancy way of saying "rules for notating piano".
In the linked textbook the real actual theory only starts in chapter 33, "Set Theory". (The exposition of the actual theory is pretty bad, though - zero explanation of what consonance/dissonance is, where the 12 notes come from and the reason why our particular scales exist.)
Sure, I knew what they meant. But if they are sloppy with their terminology on the knucklehead stuff then it doesn’t bode well for the esoteric stuff to follow.
My point was not to showcase my confusion, rather to reinforce the fact that music theory texts are just generally low quality, and music theory as a field seems to be okay with that.
but it doesnt say that. you paraphrased the book in a way that makes it look sloppy but it was your paraphrased version which is sloppy. if you read through the book when it defines this stuff, it introduces accidentals as "characters that can be placed before notes to raise or lower them" and then in the section on the major scale it says "All major scales use the notes of the musical alphabet in order; no notes are skipped and no notes occur twice." i dont think this is ambiguous
So, people in Yemen are running full on weapons development programs. Meanwhile 5.6 sol claims it found a vulnerability in one of my side projects but won’t describe the attack chain to me because “we take safety seriously”
People change. A change may or may not be the result of mental illness.
I know many people who have changed greatly for the better because of life experiences or their own choices, and many people who have changed for the worse. We all do it to some extent, though maybe not dramatically or publicly.
Right but that is part of this long rolling episode that started with the WP Engine thing, which is really when he began to act in an unhinged way.
That is really when the sudden shift in his public manner happened. It has been going on that long. He should have stepped back as either Automattic CEO or Wordpress BFDL at least a year ago IMO; the ACF/SCF debacle settled it.
WP and the community around it would have been better for it if he had.
WP was the community's, apparently, not Matt's. Unless it suited him, in which case it was his.
WP was open source, and WP Engine followed the license. What crookery?
Oh, they misrepresented themselves as being WP affiliated, like the claimed "independence" of WP.com (Matt's for profit entity, not the open source app)? Why was one okay not the other?
Let's not discuss that Matt, and Automattic, while pushing press releases saying that WP was forever an unencumbered open source app for the community, that very same day issued WP.com an exclusive, free, unlimited, irrevocable commercial license... didn't tell anyone about that, it came out in the lawsuit.
Or that the WP community board was effectively Matt and a friend, and a largely absent third friend.
Crooks, stealing? WP Engine contributed to the OSS app with thousands of developer hours a year - not as many as Matt "felt" they should. And only them, not other WP hosters.
Crooks, stealing? WP Engine donated six digits a year to sponsor and support WP community events, including the one where Matt went on stage and spent 45 minutes slandering them - after disinviting them, and refusing to return their sponsorship or donation. He made WP Engine effectively pay to give him a stage to talk shit about them.
Crooks, stealing? Like Matt taking software packages that WP Engine wrote, doing a search/replace on Copyright, license, authorship, and replacing their entries (with all their accumulated community reviews, ratings, followership and traction) with his wholesale-copied variants?
Matt was unhinged. I think "right to be" is "debatable, at best".
> But I have big hands, and I can't use my iphone 17 now without two hands.
Are you a woman by any chance? I am currently typing this one handed on an iPhone 17 pro (not the pro max) and don’t consider my hands to be particularly large, for a man, but my wife has to two hand her android which is roughly the same size
Keep in mind the dimensions of the iPhone 1 were based on the most comfortable shape and size they could come up with. They weren’t targeting women specifically.
Apple are king of form over function. Have we already forgotten that hack Jony Ive and his fetish for removing usefulness in favor of a few mm of thinness? Or the stupid fucking Touch Bar keyboard?
I still have a touch bar MacBook and the keyboard is unusable now.
The touch bar was not a bad invention. Apple just neglected it and never gave it the software support it deserved. With some proper development it could have been great.
The touch bar was a terrible invention. Apple had no shortage of money to fix the software side, they just recognized that it wasn't a "Pro" feature.
Consider the most basic usage of the touch bar, displaying function keys. The tactile feedback of a physical function row enables most people to touch-type the function keys from home row. For IDEs, NLE/DAW workflows, UNIX terminal setups and cross-platform software, the touch bar had nothing to offer but downsides. And even in apps that supported it, there was no unified mnemonic standard that enabled you to use the touch bar strip without looking away from the monitor and losing sight of your content. Apps that copied the content into the touch bar were even more hilariously cornered into bad UX, displaying a postage stamp-sized status for whatever you're working on.
The common defense of the touch bar says it needed hardware reworks and greenfield HID architectures to succeed. But I think Apple realized it was a totally flawed concept, and iterated on it internally to the point that they realized it was a sunken cost fallacy.
I’m sure I’m not the only programmer that developed a habit of resting my finger on the F5 key at a certain point in my workflow, and then had to unlearn it just because of the stupid touch-bar (Still using my 2019 Intel MBP with stupid touch-bar).
Run through pysdr[0], which I found has the right complexity gradient and the right levels of abstraction for people with technical chops but who aren’t familiar with SDR
No no, not "mods". The phpbb people were always weirdly militant about calling them them MODS, uppercase.
Why, I'm not sure, because it's not an acronym. Eventually they decided to start calling them Extensions, which is probably a more apt term. Or maybe a more APT term.
Exposure to a nuclear blast doesn't necessarily make things radioactive. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not radioactive wastelands. Even in Chernobyl, the other reactors continued to operate for a time after the accident, and nature is thriving.
But, the radiation detector is on the upper surface of the rear fuselage. Hypothetical Beta particles from the ground will strike the underside of the aircraft and not the detector.
I guess in this extremely contrived hypothetical where a Navy helicopter flies through heavily-irradiated dust cloud from a nuclear detonation, yes, the blade alarms might go off spuriously. Well done.
Which will almost certainly be military, because civilian helicopters and staff aren’t equipped or trained for that kind of environment except for perhaps a every couple of years hazmat/mass casualty training.
Generally they are going to airburst to cause maximum damage over an area which means what free neutrons hit are gasses which dispurse pretty quickly. Ground detonation does cause more fallout though.
The comments here during the 737 MAX MCAS thing were fucking wild. So many randoms spitting out confidently incorrect nonsense.
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