Hi HN — I'm Stéphane, the maker of BidWix (and myNoise, if that rings a bell).
I'm a sound designer. For years, I've licensed sounds and music to people whose budgets I couldn't see. You send a quote, close the laptop, and spend the next hour wondering: was that embarrassingly low, or did I just kill the deal?
The core problem is simple: when there's no market price — think a logo, a photo license, a domain name — neither side wants to go first. So both bluff, both guess, and the final price often has nothing to do with what would have been fair.
BidWix fixes this with a sealed-bid mechanism. Both sides submit their honest number in secret. If there's overlap, the deal price is the geometric mean of the two — the point where both sides gain by the same proportional factor. If there's no overlap, no deal, no hard feelings.
If the seller's floor is $100 and the buyer's ceiling is $900, the geometric mean gives $300: both sides gained by a factor of 3.
The mechanism is also incentive-compatible: since you only get one shot and never see the other side's number, your best move is to submit your true boundary. Bluffing can only cost you the deal.
It's free, no account needed, and intentionally minimal. Happy to discuss the game theory, the geometric mean choice, or anything else.
Noise cancelling headphones still have a residual noise, that you will hear, because our hearing has an incredible dynamic range. Adding a faint background noise of your choice, to cover that residual noise, is a good idea.
Then, these crafted noises do exist because of the exact nature of the life around you. For many people, the "life around you" is what they want to escape, exactly.
Exactly. Plus, creating your own "audible" comfort zone, is very tricky. A given sound that some people like, e.g. frogs in a nature soundscape, can be the sound other dislike, or are even afraid of. Offering level control over every audible elements in a soundscape is very important, and not available on YouTube.
I am Stephane, the person behind that website/project. I see a lot of people having concerns about the title - Background Sound Canceller - and they are right. That title is not mine, but poster's own.
I describe my project as "Background Noise Generators", or sometimes as as "Non-Distracting Noises and Music".
They are not sound cancellers but sound maskers.
The idea is to create a noise you like, to mask a sound that you don't want to hear. Your colleagues, tinnitus, ... anything.
Because these noise generators are designed to be non-distracting, there is a big chance that your brain will not even hear them after a couple of minutes... but they will keep masking the nuisance you wanted to het rid of in the first place. That is the magic exploited by the project. Create these sonic "focus bubbles".
I did the same thing, a week-ago. The interface may be more spartan; all the efforts have been put in the sounds themselves. These sounds have been carefully designed to put the listener in the focus zone, for those who associate the noise of their office with focus (everyone is different; most people actually want to block open office sounds... but a minority is actually missing them, when their environment is too quiet).
I'm a sound designer. For years, I've licensed sounds and music to people whose budgets I couldn't see. You send a quote, close the laptop, and spend the next hour wondering: was that embarrassingly low, or did I just kill the deal? The core problem is simple: when there's no market price — think a logo, a photo license, a domain name — neither side wants to go first. So both bluff, both guess, and the final price often has nothing to do with what would have been fair.
BidWix fixes this with a sealed-bid mechanism. Both sides submit their honest number in secret. If there's overlap, the deal price is the geometric mean of the two — the point where both sides gain by the same proportional factor. If there's no overlap, no deal, no hard feelings.
If the seller's floor is $100 and the buyer's ceiling is $900, the geometric mean gives $300: both sides gained by a factor of 3.
The mechanism is also incentive-compatible: since you only get one shot and never see the other side's number, your best move is to submit your true boundary. Bluffing can only cost you the deal.
It's free, no account needed, and intentionally minimal. Happy to discuss the game theory, the geometric mean choice, or anything else.