Matt

The online independent music platform Bandcamp — the single best place to buy digital music, in my humble opinion! — has just laid off 16% of its staff, and announced that it had been sold from Epic Games to Songtradr, a "music licensing, sonic branding, social media, and compliance management" company that handles music "for content" and "monetization." — Read the rest

Midjourney is useful for many things, but this work posted by r/Lozmosis is clearly its killer app. I was wondering why they skipped Ted Cruz but it struck me that the result would be indistinguishable from the man himself.

TL;DR: It takes a lot of time, money, and energy to run your own business, but what if there was a subscription to help you lay the foundation? Take your business to the next level with a lifetime membership to the OWNBN Business Success Toolkit, now on sale for only $79.99. — Read the rest

The editors at the University of Texas Press have been publishing sonically-inspired books about the most fabulously creative and time-splitting musical acts and artists and genre-driven titles. Under the auspices of the American Music Series, books abound about DJ Screw, Kristin Hersh, Merle Haggard, and others, as well as tomes on Black country music, Chicago and Indie Pop, and Hip Hop. — Read the rest

Hey HN!

I just shipped a project I’ve been working on called Maroofy: https://maroofy.com

You can search for any song, and it’ll use the song’s audio to find other similar-sounding music.

Demo: https://twitter.com/subby_tech/status/1621293770779287554

How does it work?

I’ve indexed ~120M+ songs from the iTunes catalog with a custom AI audio model that I built for understanding music.

My model analyzes raw music audio as input and produces embedding vectors as output.

I then store the embedding vectors for all songs into a vector database, and use semantic search to find similar music!

Here are some examples you can try:

Fetish (Selena Gomez feat. Gucci Mane) — https://maroofy.com/songs/1563859943 The Medallion Calls (Pirates of the Caribbean) — https://maroofy.com/songs/1440649752

Hope you like it, and would love to hear any questions/feedback/comments! :D

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635352

Points: 745

# Comments: 425

Phones and other devices managed by the U.S. House may no longer have Tik Tok on them, reports CNN Business, citing a memo sent out by the Office of the Chief Administrator.

Users who install the short-form video app on any House mobile device will be asked to remove the software, according to the notice, which was provided to CNN by the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer.

— Read the rest

I love okra. Any which way. Fried. Pickled. Stewed with tomatoes. Boiled. In gumbo. YUM! As someone who loves okra and who grew up in Louisiana, I was excited to read this article about an okra plant in New Orleans that just won a Guinness World Record. — Read the rest

Here Cool Again restores a large, handsome cheese slicer from 1905, the kind you'd find in a commercial environment—and now destined for a nice cheese bar or deli.

The slicer is made from aluminum, steel, brass and cast iron (a pleasure to restore ).

— Read the rest

From classic role-playing adventures to fun apps that help you pass the time, the world of games is pretty vast these days. That's why becoming a game developer is understandably appealing, as there's lots of room for creativity no matter what genre or platform you're into. — Read the rest

takyon writes:

AMD Launches Ultra-Low-Power Ryzen Embedded APUs: Starting at 6W

While it doesn't get the same attention as their high-profile mobile, desktop, or server CPU offerings, AMD's embedded division is an important fourth platform for the chipmaker. To that end, this week the company is revealing its lowest-power Ryzen processors ever, with a new series of embedded chips that are designed for use in ultra-compact commercial and industrial systems.

The chips in question are the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1102G and the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1305G SoCs. These parts feature a 6 W or a configurable 8 W - 10 W TDP, respectively. Both SoCs feature two Zen cores with or without simultaneous multithreading, AMD Radeon Vega 3 graphics, 1 MB L2 cache, 4 MB L3 cache, a single channel or a dual-channel memory controller, and two 10 GbE ports.

[...] Both ultra-low-power AMD Ryzen Embedded APUs will be available for the next 10 years, meaning availability will stretch all the way till 2030.

AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 Series

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Normal resting heart rate appears to vary widely from person to person: Individual people's averages show long-term consistency, according to de-identified data from wearables worn by 92,457 people:

A person's normal resting heart rate is fairly consistent over time, but may vary from others' by up to 70 beats per minute, according to analysis of the largest dataset of daily resting heart rate ever collected. Giorgio Quer of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 5, 2020 as part of an upcoming PLOS Collection on Digital Health Technology.

A routine visit to the doctor usually involves a measurement of resting heart rate, but such measurements are rarely actionable unless they deviate significantly from a "normal" range established by population-level studies. However, wearables that track heart rate now provide the opportunity to continuously monitor heart rate over time, and identify normal resting heart rates at the individual level.

In the largest study of its kind to date, Quer and colleagues retrospectively analyzed de-identified heart rate data from wearables worn for a median of 320 days by 92,457 people from across the U.S. Nearly 33 million days' worth of heart rate data were collected in total. The researchers used the data to examine variations in resting heart rate for individuals over time, as well as between individuals with different characteristics.

The analysis showed that one person's mean daily resting heart rate may differ by up to 70 beats per minute from another person's normal rate. Taken together, age, sex, body mass index (BMI), and average daily sleep duration accounted for less than 10 percent of the observed variation between individuals.

Journal Reference:
Giorgio Quer, Pishoy Gouda, Michael Galarnyk, Eric J. Topol, Steven R. Steinhubl. Inter- and intraindividual variability in daily resting heart rate and its associations with age, sex, sleep, BMI, and time of year: Retrospective, longitudinal cohort study of 92,457 adults. PLOS ONE, 2020; 15 (2): e0227709 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227709

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With the Prime Minister's Brexit deal failing for the third time to receive Parliament's blessing and the looming possibility of crashing out the EU without a deal, or a snap general election, or a second referendum, or another series of Parliamentary votes, or a general-purpose popular uprising, or alien intervention, the Church of England has a plan: tea parties.

Churches are being encouraged to host “informal café-style meetings” over the weekend of 30 March “to bring together people of all standpoints and encourage open discussion.” The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Justin Welby and John Sentamu, have today backed newly-commissioned resources to invite people to “get together and chat over a cup of tea and pray for our country and our future”.

Under the slogan “Together”, the packs include specially-chosen Bible passages, prayers and questions designed to prompt conversations. The introductory notes urge participants to have “respect for the integrity of differently held positions, encouraging communities which feel the same about the issues to use their imagination to consider the viewpoints of those who feel differently.”

Photo: AS Food studio / Shutterstock

Three months of research in Antarctica is just the beginning for one Georgia Tech researcher, according to an article shared by schwit1: The waters beneath our planet's ice sheet are fascinating, turning up species few people have ever laid eyes on. But they are not the final target of this chase. Icefin [a 10-foot-long subsea drone] is meant to search for alien life -- a "bug hunt," as some scientists cheerfully call it. It is bound for the icy waters of Jupiter's moon, Europa, possibly as soon as 2030... The new equipment includes sensors to monitor for organics and measure environmental factors like the presence of dissolved oxygen and levels of acidity, all to see if Europa could (in theory) support life in its subterranean seas... The subsea drone is also smarter than its prototype predecessor, and that high-IQ autonomy would be needed on Europa. The probe must not only operate 400 million miles from Earth but also navigate all by itself under alien ice.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an article: Pictures and text often pair nicely together. You have an article about a thing, and the picture illustrates that thing, which in many cases helps you understand the thing better. But on the web, this logic no longer holds, because at some point it was decided that all texts demand a picture. It may be of a tangentially related celeb. It may be a stock photo of a person making a face. It may be a Sony logo, which is just the word SONY. I have been thinking about this for a long time and I think it is stupid. I understand that images -- clicks is industry gospel, but it seems like many publishers have forgotten their sense of pride. If a picture is worth a thousand words, it's hard for me to imagine there'll be much value in the text of an article illustrated by a generic stock image. As with so many problems, social media seems to deserve much of the blame for this. Until the mid-to-late '00s, a publication's homepage played a dominant role in driving people to individual articles. Homepages mostly mimicked the front pages of newspapers, where major stories -- things that warranted investment in original art -- had images. Other stories just got a headline. Over time, the endless space of the internet lowered the standard for which articles needed art, but still, not everything got an image. [...] Even the unflinching belief that people won't read articles if there aren't pictures doesn't hold up to logic. Sure, interesting pictures can attract readers, but most of these images are not interesting. And even if it were slightly better for business, is that really a compromise worth making?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fnord666 forwards this BBC News story:

[UK Home Secretary] Amber Rudd said technology companies were not doing enough to beat "the enemy" on the internet.

Ms Rudd is expected to tell companies that extremists should not be allowed to upload content at all.

"That's what we're really trying to achieve," she told the BBC.

Ms Rudd is meeting with representatives from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and others at a counter-terrorism forum in San Francisco.

Tuesday's summit is the first gathering of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, an organisation set up by the major companies in the wake of recent terror attacks.

[...] Ms Rudd said if the companies did not take it upon themselves to clamp down on the spread of extremist content, new legislation could be introduced.

"None of this material should be online. They need to take ownership over making sure it isn't," Ms Rudd told the BBC.

"It's governments that need to urge them to really take action so that we don't have to go down the road of legislation - and get them to do it on a voluntary but urgent basis.

"Legislation is always an alternative."

Source: Message encryption a problem - Rudd

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Sebastian Gorka is one of the Brietbarters that Trump took with him to the White House, where he serves as "counter-terrorism adviser." He's also a non-metaphorical Nazi. (more…)

The new Panasonic Stain Master machines have an intensive stain-removal mode which is being marketed in India as a curry-stain removal button; it also has other Indian-focused modes, such as one for removing hair oil. They are planning other Stain Masters customized for other Asian markets with stain-removal buttons tailored to their national cuisines and stubbourn stains. (more…)

Paul Holdengraber, host of the New York Public Library's legendary literary interview series, has started a new podcast called "A phone call from Paul," which he has inaugurated with a two-part interview with Neil Gaiman.

I've heard Neil interviewed a lot, and Holdengraber gets into some new and deep territory on literal life and death, birth and art, with some very touching and personal details. It's an excellent beginning to a great new must-hear podcast.

A PHONE CALL FROM PAUL: NEIL GAIMAN

Seelix set out to make an incredible costume that mashed up Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max Fury Road and Princess Peach from the Super Mario franchise -- she succeeded.

She documented her process in a generous post that provides great insight into how you can take on a challenge like this yourself.

ghwas a little out of my depth. I’ve used Worbla in a few projects before, but nothing particularly ornate or complicated.

So, instead of carefully researching, doing small projects, testing out the material, I did what every good Mad Art Labber does: I jumped right into the deep end. And over two weekends, I went from concept to full-armor.

Making Imperator Peachiosa [Seelix/Madartlab]

(via Skepchick)

It was recently argued that universities should ban PowerPoint because it makes students stupid and professors boring. I agree entirely. However, most universities will ignore this good advice because rather than measuring success by how much their students learn, universities measure success with student satisfaction surveys. More »

New comic!
Today's News:

 Exclusive bonus comic at The Nib!

HAPPY NEW YEAR

CUNZ

OH MAN. There's a Lone Wolf boardgame kickstarter. SQUEE.

POW!

From now on, only time travel jokes.

Comrades! Marxist shirts are in stock!