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keymasta

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Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:10PM (#50339995)
Article contains the string "hve" which should no doubt be "have"..
Re:Grokipedia offers lessons in how AI can help Wikipedia on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:05PM (#50339909)
Minor edit for the author. Text contains "I’d all cluelessness" which I think is supposed to be "I’d [c]all cluelessness".
Re:Ask HN: How to recover Google auth after phone stolen? on Sunday September 20, 2026 @01:18PM (#49777827)
I am the OP:

Special shout-out to HN-member, luka! After finding me online, he diligently helped me regain access to my account! As of just now I have logged into my gmail account!

So all's well that ends well. It sure helps to know where to find smart and considerate people that can actually help, like on HN. I don't know what I would've done had I not had that option.

Now I just need to verify myself with my brand new phone which is used and there's no info about the previous owner. So now I'm into chapter 2 of my phone adventure. That's a lot better than it was when I made this post!

Re:Ask HN: How to recover Google auth after phone stolen? on Thursday September 17, 2026 @12:53PM (#49743452)
Pretty similar to how my life feels right now.

Ask HN: How to recover Google auth after phone stolen?

As we know, google has been effective at automating a lot of their systems, to the point where it can feel like there isn't any help available from a human. So what is supposed to be the plan when this type of situation happens?Basically I have a situation that after my phone was stolen, I can't get into any of my accounts that are either connected to google, or connected to the phone via 2FA....

( Read More... | 131 comments | 86 points | on HN )
Re:People that worked on the same idea for decades on Friday September 04, 2026 @07:40PM (#49571476)
For scifi: Frank Herbert and his son for the Dune series
Re:Audacity 4.0 on Thursday September 03, 2026 @12:45PM (#49552972)
https://gprotab.net/

This site is a lot like how I remember ultimate guitar, being that you can look up tabs and access them. I hope people keep uploading more tabs because ultimate still has a larger volume

I've had some light-sensitivity issues for as long as a remember. So I always get glasses with transitions. On computer though I've always been using flux [0] since it came out. I know that now a lot of OSes are supporting some kind of night mode, but I really like how there are some different parameters you can adjust in flux. And it's free.

[0] https://justgetflux.com/

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026) on Monday August 10, 2026 @02:06AM (#49239773)
I would be interested to test it. Melodyne also supports something like stem splitting where it can work on a master FWIR. But it would be interesting to see how this fares on non-vocal instruments and how the sound is like, even if it only works on isolated tracks.

I'm also wondering if you've considered some music theory functions like for example highlighting the midi grid along to some scale, which would allow "snap to" (next in key note). If you're curious, I have familiarity with this end of things so feel free to pick my brain.

Two broad categories, verse and prose.

Prose is mostly focused on describing meaning using any words that serve to do so.

Verse is more concerned with structural factors like rhythm, tonality, and structure within syllables, or within types of sound, or parts of speech. Other linguistic devices which look at details beyond the strict meaning of the words, like rhyme or many other factors (you could even use visual spacing for example) can be considered in verse.

Within verse there's the concept of iambs. I think of it as a tuple of two syllables which are said, weak-strong. Pentameter means ten syllables, and iambic means in groups of weak and strong. Most of Shakespeare is written like this. Also English naturally sounds iambic a lot of the time.

Iambic pentameter sounds like this:

  I watched a bird attempt its beak upon
  The end of fake too-moist baguette in vain
  For it was sick of stale McDicks tossed on
  It endlessly maintained its rationed pain

  While others in its bobbing flock for scraps
  Of birds fought for the thrill squawked on and on
  Till cannibals among their kind rejoiced
  To find cousins in mayonnaise so long
Normally you'd also look at rhyme structure if writing a legit Shakespearean sonnet [2] but I fired this one out as in the style of fast food. So this is technically iambic pentameter but not technically a sonnet.

Or like a particular Shakespearean sonnet [0]. Or like any of them, [1]

[0] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnet.I.html

[1] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnets.html

[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/shakespe...

Re:The Cost of a Closure in C on Thursday December 11, 2025 @07:52AM (#46230773)
It's a post about Man or Boy... and the only typo is... the word _son_. Pretty sure it's supposed to be "on"
Whereas when played separately it would be an referred to as an arpeggio. But in harmony we might still refer to it as a chord, as in saying, arpeggiate the C# minor (chord) to start moonlight sonata.

This might better be described as arpeggiating C#m second inversion or even C#m/G# in the right over C# in the left...

This is getting possibly-weird but you could call it an arpeggiation of G#sus4(#5)/C#

As per my knowledge, and as per Britannica, a chord actually uses three or more notes. A two note structure is called a diad, which implies a bit of confusion in the term "power chord" (written as 5, as in G5, which == G D == 1 5).. as it is not by definition a chord but a diad.

This may be a pedantic clarification, but that is the definition

I find it's a really scary idea to go to a third-world country like USA! - Or, it seems like a third-world country when you're from a developed country.

Unfortunately I'm type 1 diabetic which is either a death sentence there, or you are rich. But then I also accidentally broke my collarbone this summer. And I had this weird throat infection.

As a type 1 diabetic I have had to go to the ER numerous times in my life, and as traumatising as that experience can be, I can't imagine the feeling of also being financially ruined for the pleasure of not dying.

It's weird, I know plenty of people who avoid going to the doctor because it's annoying to wait for over an hour.. but I could see that for an American you might just NEVER go. I guess it's like, ok someone in the family is sick, and we're not rich, so we will sacrifice them to the sun gods. Or I guess you go into indentured servitude? There are people for whom $100k is made very very slowly.

I just do not get it! I guess these things add up properly if you are very wealthy, but people here think that it's the function of the society to make sure you can have basic things like medical treatment. Of course it's not perfect here... try going to the dentist for example. Then you're almost in the USA. Somehow it's not considered medical. A long session could run you over $500 or more.

I have compassion for all the USAians out there! If I was USAian and planning to have a child.. I guess I would consider just going to a civilized country for a while, like... I don't know, Rwanda or Ghana or somewhere that can afford people to be alive(?). In seriousness though (as those countries are very far) you could just go North or South. It's closer. If you go to Canada, a lot of times you wouldn't even need to present ID.. you could just.. get treated right there by walking into a hospital, being triaged, and then waiting (admittedly for maybe almost a day).

Always bring fun things to the hospital if you aren't literally bleeding out all over the place, because you'll be in the waiting room for 12 hours if you're in a big city.

But when it's over you're alive and about as rich as you were before. Seems like a good societal deal to me. I'm scared of being trapped somewhere like the US honestly. It's a nightmare scenario. Although I'm sure it's pretty great if you're a billionaire with slaves and so on... but someone has to incur that cost (the slaves from the lower castes).

Re:Steam Machine on Friday November 14, 2025 @03:00AM (#45924840)
Playstation half-diminished, a.k.a Playstation mi7(b5)/"minor seven flat five"
Re:Sued by Nintendo on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @04:34AM (#45885583)
Red/Blue/Yellow did in fact have breeding
Re:Beets: The music geek's media organizer on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @03:55AM (#45885351)
It seems like many people online say that there is no perceptible difference between e.g, 320kb/s mp3 and "flac" (which usually means CD-quality 44.1kHz 16-bit). Often sources say something about there being no way it sounds different and then talk about the Nyquist theorem [0].

Personally I don't get it as for me, there is a clear difference not only between mp3 vs. CD, but even between different bitrates beyond that. Maybe I'm not typical as I've been usually listening to stuff through studio monitors and also usually through a recording interface which handles 192kHz and >24-bit.

Definitely I noticed on certain systems you aren't going to notice a difference as the system itself is the bottleneck (i.e, bluetooth). In my experience though if you use the right driver, so ASIO or WASAPI in Windows (or anything in Mac and Linux nowadays), I can tell the difference instantly on recordings I know well.

Most music did not get released in ultra HD but some things are available in 96kHz and beyond. I recommend checking out Radiohead, Bob Marley, or Pink Floyd in ultra-HD ( >= 48kHz, >= 24-bit) as there have been releases. I have found Bob Marley - Legend in 192kHz 24-bit and it sounds incredible. You can hear each individual member of the percussion section.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist-Shannon_sampling_theor...

Re:The Qweremin on Monday September 01, 2025 @12:25AM (#45089440)
This is super cool! I would love to see the specific mapping of keys that were used which were said to be inspired by the accordion. Even though that's a way less interesting detail than the way that the spoon picks up the distances and the "bit banging" used to achieve 8-bit precision on the modulation from two 4-bit connections.

Sounds pretty swell!

I wonder if the spoon controller could be adapted to send modulation parameters to arbitrary instruments via a midi port. I would buy a spoon modulator if it was reasonably priced. It would be a great add-on to a piano style keyboard without pitch bend or mod wheel etc

Re:Open models by OpenAI on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @02:49PM (#44816034)
Tried my personal benchmark on the gpt-oss:20b: What is the second mode of Phyrgian Dominant?

My first impression is that this model thinks for a _long_ time. It proposes ideas and then says, "no wait, it's actually..." and then starts the same process again. It will go in loops examining different ideas as it struggles to understand the basic process for calculating notes. It seems to struggle with the septatonic note -> Set notation (semitone positions), as many humans (and AIs) do. As I write this it's been going at about 3tok/s for about 25 minutes. If it finishes while I type this up I will post the final answer.

EDIT: it's still thinking and I posted what it had thought about [1]

I did glance at its thinking output just now and I noticed this excerpt where it *finally* got really close to the answer, mentioning the right name once (despite using the wrong numbers in the set notation, which should be: 0,3,4,6,7,9,10:

  Check "Lydian #2": 0,2,3,5,7,9,10. Not ours.
The correct answers as given by my music theory tool [0], which uses traditional algorithms, in terms of names would be: Mela Kosalam, Lydian ♯2, Raga Kuksumakaram/Kusumakaram, Bycrian.

Its notes are: 1 ♯2 3 ♯4 5 6 7

I find looking up lesser known changes and asking for a mode is a good experiment. First I can see if an LLM has developed a way to reason about numbers geometrically as is the case with music.

And by posting about it, I can test how fast AIs might memorize the answer from a random comment on the internet, as I can just use a different change if I find that this post was eventually regurgitated.

After letting ollama run for a while, I'm post what it was thinking about in case anybody's interested. [1]

Also copilot.microsoft.com's wrong answer: [2], and chatgpt.com [3]

I do think that there may be an issue where I did it wrong because after trying the new ollama gui I noticed it's using a context length of 4k tokens, which it might be blowing way past. Another test might be to try the question with a higher context length, but at the same time, it seems like if this question can't be figured out in less time than that, that it will never have enough time...

[0] https://edrihan.neocities.org/changedex (bad UX on mobile! - and in general ;)). won't fix, will make new site soon)

[1] https://pastebin.com/wESXHwE1

[2] https://pastebin.com/XHD4ARTF

[3] https://pastebin.com/ptMiNbq7

Re:Open models by OpenAI on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @02:49PM (#44816027)
Tried my personal benchmark on the gpt-oss:20b: What is the second mode of Phyrgian Dominant?

My first impression is that this model thinks for a _long_ time. It proposes ideas and then says, "no wait, it's actually..." and then starts the same process again. It will go in loops examining different ideas as it struggles to understand the basic process for calculating notes. It seems to struggle with the septatonic note -> Set notation (semitone positions), as many humans do. As I write this it's been going at about 3tok/s for about 25 minutes. If it finishes while I type this up I will post the final answer.

I did glance at its thinking output just now and I noticed this excerpt where it finally got really close to the answer, giving the right name (despite using the wrong numbers in the set notation, which should be: 0,3,4,6,7,9,10:

  Check "Lydian #2": 0,2,3,5,7,9,10. Not ours.
The correct answers as given by my music theory tool [0], which uses traditional algorithms, in terms of names would be: Mela Kosalam, Lydian ♯2, Raga Kuksumakaram/Kusumakaram, Bycrian.

Its notes are: 1 ♯2 3 ♯4 5 6 7

I find looking up lesser known changes and asking for a mode is a good experiment. First I can see if an LLM has developed a way to reason about numbers geometrically as is the case with music.

And by posting about it, I can test how fast AIs might memorize the answer from a random comment on the internet, as I can just use a different change if I find that this post was eventually regurgitated.

After letting ollama run for a while, I'm post what it was thinking about in case anybody's interested. [1]

Also copilot.microsoft.com's wrong answer: [2], and chatgpt.com [3]

I do think that there may be an issue where I did it wrong because after trying the new ollama gui I noticed it's using a context length of 4k tokens, which it might be blowing way past. Another test might be to try the question with a higher context length, but at the same time, it seems like if this question can't be figured out in less time than that, that it will never have enough time...

[0] https://edrihan.neocities.org/changedex (bad UX on mobile! - and in general ;)). won't fix, will make new site soon) [1] https://pastebin.com/wESXHwE1 [2] https://pastebin.com/XHD4ARTF [3] https://pastebin.com/ptMiNbq7

Re:I Analyzed Chord Progressions in 680k Songs on Friday April 18, 2025 @12:07AM (#43724916)
Monad Diad Triad Tetrad Pentad Sextad Septad Octad Nontad Dectad Monodectad Didectad/Bidectad (?)

Or,

1 Note/Unison

2 Interval/Diad

>3 Chord

I call them all changes.

And, I agree an interval is essentially a distance. Distance between three points makes no sense as they might very well lay outside of one straight line. Even they are on the same line.. are we measuring the distance between each distance?

It's ambiguous what that might even mean

Re:Guitar chord karaoke with Vamp, Chordino, and FFmpeg on Saturday January 18, 2025 @08:22AM (#42748133)
That particular algorithm doesn't care whether the instruments are guitar or otherwise. There are other algorithms in vamp that would deal with individual notes. But in terms of separating tracks, vamp doesn't do that. There are some new ML-based solutions for this though. So you could separate them and run vamp on those outputs.

But to get the chords I don't think you need to worry about that.

Re:Guitar chord karaoke with Vamp, Chordino, and FFmpeg on Saturday January 18, 2025 @08:18AM (#42748112)
What a cool thread! I like how you put the specifics of your workflow and especially details of the commands you used! Particularly with the vamp commands, because as you say, they are somewhat inscrutably named/documented.

I started dabbling with vamp as well a couple years ago, but lost track of the project as my goals started ballooning. Although the code is still sitting (somewhere), waiting to be resuscitated.

I have had an idea for many years of the utility of having chord analysis further built out such that a functional chart can be made from it. With vamp most of/all the ingredients are there. I think that's probably what chordify.com does, but they clearly haven't solved segmentation or time to musical time, as their charts are terrible. I don't think they are using chordino, and whatever they do use is actually worse.

I got as far as creating a python script which would convert audio files in a directory into different midi files, to start to collect the necessary data to construct a chart.

For your use case, you'd probably just need to quantize the chords to the nearest beat, so you could maybe use:

vamp-aubio_aubiotempo_beats, or vamp-plugins_qm-barbeattracker_bars

and then combine those values with the actual time values that you are getting from chordino.

I'd love to talk about this more, as this is a seemingly niche area. I've only heard about this rarely if at all, so I was happy to read this!

Re:The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python on Sunday September 22, 2024 @05:01PM (#41620048)
I really appreciate the opinion that using args and kwargs is "bad".. It always annoys me when you get them as your parameters.. even worse when you go to declaration and the declaration also contains unlabeled parameters. A lot of wrapper libraries seem to do this. I try to just name every parameter I can. It's so much easier to use this code now that we are using autocomplete in the IDE.
Re:Chromatone – Visual Music Language on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @03:27PM (#41438267)
Not sure why I got down voted but the parent has deleted their post so ok! :D
Re:Chromatone – Visual Music Language on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @02:42PM (#41437778)
I really like the link you provided and have watched it before!

But - I do want to say that C == green is not arbitrary at all. It is consistent with my calculations, which are consistent with Newton's calculations. Usually I see the colours being assigned to notes as wrong.. but this C == green is consistent with mapping light, using octave equivalence, given by the following:

  f_prime = f * 2 ** (i / 12)
  # Where, 
  # f' is the derived f, (in this case Green {5.66 × 10^14 Hz})
  # f is the reference f (in this case 261.63 Hz)
  # i is the interval in semitones
Let's say that C == 261.63 Hz, and that Green == 5.66 × 10^14 Hz. Using the preceding formula we can make a small (python) program to check whether C == Green.

  light_range_min = 400 * 10 ** 9 # Hz
  light_range_max = 790 * 10 ** 9 # Hz
  C = 261.63 # Hz
  octave = 0
  for octave in range(100): # we are just using a high number here
      f_prime = C * 2 ** (12 * octave / 12)
      if f_prime >= light_range_min:
          octave = octave
          break
  print(f"C in the range of light has f == {f_prime}, which is {f_prime / 10 ** 9} THz. We had to go {octave} octaves up to arrive there")
  # outputs: C in the range of light has f == 561846146826.24, which is 561.84614682624 THz. We had to go 31 octaves up to arrive there
We can look up colour charts like [0] or [1] and find that this frequency is in fact associated with the colour green.

The rest of your commentary seems valid.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum

[1] https://sciencestruck.com/color-spectrum-chart

It could be related but I also want to weigh in here and say this. Hypoglycemia can occur with no relation to the other side of diabetic symptoms, i.e, hyperglycemia. In other words there are people who suffer from hypoglycemia without ever getting high blood sugar, and so they are not "diabetic" which would mean you can have issues from both directions.
As a piano/keyboard player, a lot of musicality is possible on a keyboard. It is possible to learn to modify the technique to better utilise the velocity available to a particular keybed, weighted, or non-weighted. When playing keyboards you are working within a subset of the potential dynamics available to a piano. Though expressivity is lessened, there is still a huge palette once you learn to use less total force and less differentiation in force (dynamics).

I know I can play with high musicality on almost any keyboards with velocity, because I was blessed to have learned to use bad instruments. But, it doesn't compare to the depth of the sound generated by all the moving parts and interactions happening in a real piano. Not only the sounds, but also the sheer weight of the keys.

Most* keyboards/vsts are just triggering a (pitch-shifted, looped) sample at a given note and then doing that for n notes and that doing an additive sum.

That is definitely not what occurs in a piano though. There you have the 3-dimensionality of the physical world, like the way waves are traveling through distance and shape. When sounds' harmonics interact, resonant nodes in overtone sequences can trigger each other to resonance, which can trigger other resonances throughout the tone. Maybe you know the feeling of depressing the sustain/damper pedal while sitting in front of it and giving the instrument a smack (or holding down the keys you are not playing and doing it). Or running your nail or a pick over all the low notes with sustain.. like you are in a cave.

In midi/digital, there's the fact that dynamic is usually gonna be 8-bit. Just because midi did that and it made sense at the time, other keyboards and VSTs mostly follow suit. I'm surprised this gets generally passed over. Obviously there's more than 128 strengths of note in real life.

But all that said I think it's possible to learn keyboards/music theory/songs/playing on a non-weighted keyboard, but false to say that digital/non-weighted is equivalent to acoustic piano. But you only really need that for really dynamic music like Jazz, Classical, Instrumental et al. But it feels so very wrong to play that kind of music on bad keyboards.

* Roland V-Piano, and PianoTeq, as well as many I'm unaware of do in fact use physical/acoustic modeling as opposed to triggering samples, but it has not been predominant even among high-end digital instruments

And then you can see that the bitrate is 2-20x better. I personally get bothered by anything under CD quality (44.1kHz 16-bit) so all these platforms are basically unlistenable for me.

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