Very nice, I think I'll use this as my background music when programming. Reminds me of a similar (real life!) thing: The Sea Organon in Zadar, Croatia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtDYTeB5J-8 Skip to 5:00 to listen.
Starting to play sound without user confirmation is a default tab-close. I wont even take the time to look at it. Bonus point for not being flash that hijacks the browser shortcut.
When I come to HN, I usually read all topics on the front page, then open interesting ones in tabs. After opening 10 tabs, I hear music, then I find the culprit, close the tab, do not look back.
Why should I adapt my usage patterns to accommodate the shitty behavior of a few websites? Also, are you sure you are in position to tell other people how to use the web? I certainly don't think I am.
If you are randomly clicking on links on a website like this then you have no justification to describe a website as shitty for doing the one thing it is designed to do.
There's a website called rainymood.com and it does one thing and asking for user confirmation first would be quite silly.
It would be good to have a "click to unmute" option as the default for how a browser handles audio. Click to play works well for Flash plugins, it might be good for audio as well.
I wish for a time disabled extension. Basically turning the browser into an html/css based image renderer. No more animated ads, autoplay audio/video. Heaven.
I'm sure you're joking, but here's a blast from the past (I'd forgotten about it, anyway): you can set `image.animation_mode` to `none` in Firefox for that.
I wasn't even joking, I'd really love to try purely static (beside the old guard <a> <form> elements) webpages and am delighted there's such an option, this is amazing, thanks.
I'm glad it was helpful! In case you're interested in the other hidden switches that you can toggle if you're willing to void your warranty, there's a reference at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entr... . (I'm not sure how up to date it is, though.)
The sound is not particularly intrusive or loud, and you clicked on a link that said "Listen" in the title.
Generally I dislike websites that randomly start playing sound (and follow the same tab-close behaviour), but this was not ill-advertised or unexpected.
As others I had a totally different expectation given the title. I thought it would be a piece about how Wikipedia had some message or lesson that we should listen to. I think the author had no bad intentions and what he build is probably worth looking at. I was just pointing out how a mistake in web design made me completely ignore this website because I felt it violated my control over my computer.
In that case I wonder if we can't solve the problem in the community, e.g. by requiring a [sound] tag in the title or something. I enjoyed this link and there is a risk of people downvoting it for the sound alone that might cause interesting links like it to be removed in the future.
> In that case I wonder if we can't solve the problem in the community, e.g. by requiring a [sound] tag in the title or something. I enjoyed this link and there is a risk of people downvoting it for the sound alone that might cause interesting links like it to be removed in the future.
Solving it in the community can solve the problem of people unwittingly stumbling upon it from here, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem, which is that autoplay is rude. (Surely we've all had the experience of not being able to find the tab from the huge group we just opened that's playing the sound.) It's good if sites see that they get fewer visitors with autoplay than without.
It really should be a browser level setting where you whitelist the sites that are allowed to do it. I don't mind when Youtube does it, but most sites annoy me.
While I agree with the sentiment, in this case all I can say is: You're missing out. I enjoyed the relaxing, ambient-ish sounds combined with tempting links to Wikipedia articles.
I'm not sure there is a good solution to auto-playing. People are fine with it on well-known sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, etc. And most people, when they unwittingly click on a YouTube link, blame the person who made the link, not the site itself. Bizarrely, the target of ire shifts to the site if it's not popular enough.
I just went clicking randomly on Vimeo links and I didn't find a single auto-playing video.
You are right about YouTube and I actually think they should handle visitors that come from outside YouTube differently than visitors from inside the site. In the first case auto-play is annoying in the second it is what is wanted.
The "Listen to Bitcoin" link is broken, but this similar project is just as cool: http://www.bitlisten.com. Not sure if that's what the broken link used to point to.
Those addresses are websocket servers that seem to publish wikipedia changes. The app is just subscribing to the changes by opening a websocket connection to the appropriate server.
How does the 'new user announcement' chord work? And pitching in general?
The new user announcement seems to be on a 7th (always attractive for a short amount of time - mainly minor but not always - I've listened for a short amount of time). The deletes seem to be biased towards a minor chord.
I might have mixed that all up, but the chord seems to show some dependency.
Seems to slow/down animation after a couple hours - very laggy. Closed the tab and audio was still playing for about 40 seconds afterwards - was thinking I'd have to reboot the machine(!)
Is there some way to be cleaning up old circles after X new ones (or X minutes?)
maybe it needs to clean up more aggressively then? or have that be a configurable setting? I was seeing what looked like hundreds of previous circles on my screen.
amazing concept, and the fact that data is generating this music resulting in a mesmerizing effect gives me chills; maybe one day indeed we would listen to bots composing an entire piece on its own!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdDD9ViRZz4
(Tacking on because this is currently the highest comment.)
When I come to HN, I usually read all topics on the front page, then open interesting ones in tabs. After opening 10 tabs, I hear music, then I find the culprit, close the tab, do not look back.
Never play music without user permission.
There's a website called rainymood.com and it does one thing and asking for user confirmation first would be quite silly.
Generally I dislike websites that randomly start playing sound (and follow the same tab-close behaviour), but this was not ill-advertised or unexpected.
HN: should I continue to tag those?
I haven't ever submitted anything with autoplaying audio, but I imagine I'd use [autoplay] or similar.
Solving it in the community can solve the problem of people unwittingly stumbling upon it from here, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem, which is that autoplay is rude. (Surely we've all had the experience of not being able to find the tab from the huge group we just opened that's playing the sound.) It's good if sites see that they get fewer visitors with autoplay than without.
I'm not sure there is a good solution to auto-playing. People are fine with it on well-known sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, etc. And most people, when they unwittingly click on a YouTube link, blame the person who made the link, not the site itself. Bizarrely, the target of ire shifts to the site if it's not popular enough.
(Genuine question, as you stated it as a matter of fact. Not trying to be obtuse or annoying.)
You are right about YouTube and I actually think they should handle visitors that come from outside YouTube differently than visitors from inside the site. In the first case auto-play is annoying in the second it is what is wanted.
In addition, the WikiPedia is so powerful because the green dominates the purple..
I looked at the source but I'm hardly a JS/Web expert.
Seems to be from here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/RCStream
but only found a list of weird addresses: https://github.com/hatnote/listen-to-wikipedia/search?utf8=%...
Looking at their other repos and the addresses you linked to, looks like the project for publishing the changes is at https://github.com/hatnote/wikimon, which is in turn getting changes from an IRC feed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data#IRC_Feeds
The new user announcement seems to be on a 7th (always attractive for a short amount of time - mainly minor but not always - I've listened for a short amount of time). The deletes seem to be biased towards a minor chord.
I might have mixed that all up, but the chord seems to show some dependency.
Or it is just late a night.
Is there some way to be cleaning up old circles after X new ones (or X minutes?)
It already does this, inspect the DOM. The ones that fade away are removed as children of the <svg>.
EDIT: Turns out you need to open TCP port 9000