skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If your mastering is done competently, you really aren't going to be able to hear it in a realistic scenario. Which is why:

"Talking about dynamic range completely misses the point."

isn't really sensible. It's the use of dynamic range that decides how much useful resolution you have when quantizing a signal. This is really why higher bit depths on record and mixing are useful - they let you be sloppier with the inputs without losing much information before you've had a chance to work with it. It still doesn't gain you anything fundamental but it does mean if you got the levels a bit wrong you can salvage it. Higher bit rates here are excellent.

There is nothing magic about 24 bits here. Record something with 48 bits but set up your equipment all screwy so your only actually using the first 8 bits... and you've got an effectively 8 bit recording.

In real world applications the codec is giving you trouble with the low amplitude stuff, not the quantizer. Not that in realistic situations your equipment is likely to be able to generate this cleanly anyway.

"24-bit doesn't need tricks like dither - because it does the job properly in the first place."

No. Dither isn't a trick, it is a fundamental approach to quantization error at any depth.

On playback, the issue goes the other way around. If you've mastered things correctly you'll be using the available dynamic range of the output in such a way that the information content of your signal is well represented. This is sufficient at CD rates for all practical listening scenarios.
Re: their small business 'loans' -- with the caveat that I am not an expert:

The "loan" distinction is important not for semantic reasons but practical one -- they are offering small businesses cash advances. These are different from loans because they are not secured. There are no assets put up as collateral. However Square believes they can do this better than other services because they can effectively secure the advance by taking a piece of each card swipe at the merchant's point of sale system. But if the business goes under, Square has no claim on any assets.

I don't totally understand why/when merchant cash advances work, but I believe that adequately captures the 'how'.
It was a number of things.

The company was very proud of "teamwork". There were "teams" everywhere. Every employee was expected to be on at least 3. As a senior engineer, I was on 5, not including the actual project team I was assigned to. Things like "data architecture team" and "API review team" and "future engineering team" or "testing web services team". These teams would meet at least once a month, often weekly.

In spite of, or, more likely, because of, all these teams existing, there was actually very little team work. Lots of turf wars and internal politics.

The review process was silly. Your manager gave you 5 goals and you had to come up with 3 goals for each team you were on. You had to select two peers to rate you on your 5 goals, as well as 2 members from each team for your team goals. So, basically, you just did horse trading to give each other 5-star reviews ('hey, I'll give you all fives if you give me all fives, cool?'). This consumed an insane amount of time. Even though I was only there for 3 months, I had to go through this process twice.

Management was also completely ham fisted. They wanted to improve QA. So they gave notice to everyone in QA and told them they could reapply for their jobs. They literally made them all clean out their desks and then come in the next day with resumes in hand to interview. As if they had never worked there. Anyone not "rehired" by the end of the week was given severance.

There were some positives. They had on-site day care and a decent (for the time) vacation package. They also had a liberal education reimbursement plan that only had a 1 year lock-in.
They changed it because people were using them as likes rather than favourites.

I originally used them as "favourites" (for links that I was interested in but didn't have time to read now) but others didn't. Twitter catered for the majority and made the list of your favourites harder to get at and started putting things you favourite into other people's timelines.

Whilst I preferred how it was originally it is clear to me that this change was motivated by how the community at large used the feature.
I have a 2.3GHz dual core PowerMac11,2 running FreeBSD 10.2 PPC64 on a ZFS root. My machine has 8GB of RAM and works brilliantly.

I tried all flavours of PPC linux and none of them worked particularly well. FreeBSD 10.x had the advantage of 64 bit support and the nvidia 6600LE works acceptably with the open source drivers.

I highly recommend FreeBSD 10.x PPC64 to anyone with a G5 PowerMac who wants to run a modern OS.
How quaint that $300 Million put you in the "top 100 richest Americans" in 1986. Today, #100 has $5 billion.
Actually that confirms the point; the old building was clearly state of the art for the time, and the new building is a cheap rush like student dorms sometimes are.
Can I heart this?

This post is spot on.
‘Our Guitars Are Our Kalashnikovs’: The Musicians Who Helped Save Mali
Here's an example of a shoddy building from over a century ago that, through a historical quirk, is still around: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/san-francisco-shack-startin...

Yeah, the dorm in the linked article is totally better than that building. So while there are good buildings from that era, let's not kid ourselves, there were also a lot of horrible buildings that are rightfully no longer around. I would be willing to bet that the average quality of new construction is better now than it was then. If nothing else, the pervasive use of aluminum/vinyl siding and tar-asphalt shingle roofs yields buildings that better withstand the elements that old-style painted wood.
It doesn't surprise me that the author disabled comments, although it is a shame. I'm not educated enough in economics to think critically about this, and I'd love to see peoples' responses to her, especially Rand Paul's.

edit: I don't normally link out to Reddit, but there are ample comments about this over there: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/3rciwp/damn_rig...
Oh, interesting. I looked up recent IPOs on Nasdaq and ones from last month have options now. First Data (FDC) has been trading only 3 weeks and has options. But really low volume and ridiculous spreads. RACE has been trading only 3 weeks for less time and has more options. Perhaps they are exceptional due to their size?

Not that this would help with FB a whole lot since it'd have dropped a fair amount by the time you could buy options.
In my own little ad-hoc micro benchmark it is. That's why I suspected that there was copying going on, but there could be so many other reasons for it that it was probably a pointless exercise in the first place.

[Edit] And I mean relatively slow (4x the C++ code), not absysmally slow. Not a big deal.
I'm getting really tired of this argument because it's both wrongheaded, ignorant, and will not die.

Why can't you follow the experts in that field via their site or their online communities?

What's easier, entering your email address into every random person's website, or just clicking "follow" on their name on one website so you get notified when they post?

This sounds like the web service version of the "less space than a nomad" comment. Other people have different use cases, you know?

The depth of which they would go into their chosen subject would be much more enlightening, surely.

We've got this thing called hyperlinks - A headline and a URL easily fits in 140 characters. Of course nobody's reading academic papers on http://twitter.com, nor does anyone expect them to.

How much depth can a conversation that only allows 140 characters per response relay?

How much needs to be?

Twitter is not a primary communications medium - we have email for that. It's not meant to be a primary news medium, we have blogs for that. However, it serves very well as a pointer to those things. It's a centralized pub/sub notification system.

And if you want to have a "conversation" with someone on Twitter, you've got direct messages, which are not subject to the character limit.
> Japan is a leading nation in many ways - not just technologically, but also socially and both in the good and bad aspects

I lived in Japan. Most expats (granted, not engineers) are in agreement that Japan feels like 2050 for technology but 1950 socially.

There is zero PC-sensibility, zilch, doesn't exist in their culture. It's also a man's society, women are expected to give up their careers after marriage. Race is deeply ingrained in their world view in a way that would anger PC-conscious Americans.

There is also zero culture of accepting integration from people who are not Japanese by blood. Go to your Japanese girlfriend's family's get together and listen to them mention how the Japanese are a superior race to Westerners (maybe that was a fluke but I doubt it from swapping stories). Mention that it's relatively accepted that the Japanese descended from the Koreans and watch how people react.

Listen to seemingly progressive 20-something at bars talk about how Chinese people are unclean.

After all, they believed their political leader was divine until the end of WWII and they built an empire based on their hierarchy of races up until the end of WWII, much like NSDAP's 'project' but without receiving the same kind of international backlash (a wave of pacifism yes, but backlash for the racial elements not so much).

They have a culture of friendliness towards foreigners which is awesome, unlike say China, so you don't fully see this side of Japan until you live there.

I really do love Japan, I have zero ill will towards the country or it's people, but it's simply wrong to claim it's socially progressive in almost any way by Western standards.
You can't weigh things with Imperial units because they are British units of volume. You weigh things with avoirdupois units.
> a trusted initial accumulator that can ruin the anonymity for everyone forever

This is false: even if somebody compromises the initial setup (which, if implemented using the proposed MPC protocol, would require compromising every single participant; compromising n-1 parties doesn't do anything), the system continues to enjoy the same zero-knowledge guarantees. Compromised setup or not, in Zerocash the anonymity set is all participants of the system.
The mounting height is only relevant for "bucket" style urinals. "Trough" style are less hostile to tall users, and "piss-on-wall" style urinals are equally accessible to all males.

Splashback is too often ignored by urinal manufacturers. The angles of surfaces should direct all streams and all splashes toward the drain. When you have a perfectly flat back, the user has to stand further away, which enables direct drip onto the floor or aim-related scattering.

The "piss-on-wall" urinal with recessed floor drain is the... golden standard.

Really, the design constraints for female-use urinals are far more challenging. I have no hope that existing manufacturers can get close to correct there as long as every men's room I see outside of a sports stadium has "bucket" style urinals, mounted at the wrong height, with no thought to splashback or occupancy etiquette.
Put FreeBSD 10.x on it if you want a modern OS with great G5 support.
"Favorite" sounds like a bookmark, but it behaved like a Facebook "like".

But the fact that its name sounded like a bookmark means lots of people used it that way anyway.
I went to a security con a couple of years ago where one speaker pointed out that security recommendations come so thick and fast, that not even security professionals bother following many of them - and these are the people who both understand the issues and are motivated by them.
People can -- and do -- use "favorites" (or "likes" or "upvotes") for all kinds of reasons in all kinds of environments and there is no stopping that.

(I sometimes use them as "read receipts" because I am excessively social and this causes me serious problems online. Faving something tells the person who wrote it that I saw it without me having to actually talk to them. This reconciles my need to communicate with my need to reduce the degree to which my chattiness routinely used to make me the center of some shitshow for reasons beyond my ability to fathom.)
Cache Directory Tagging Standard (2004)
>Anything can be psychologically addictive with habitual use and what one might call an "addictive personality". Video games, work, porn, caffeine, bacon & eggs, all the same. Some of those things even have support groups, pills, patches, etc.

>Nicotine is addictive on a scale far beyond that. Comparing caffeine and nicotine is like comparing nerf and 9mm.

You seems to have nor knowledge nor direct experience to talk from. Video games, HN/FB/email checking and nicotine - all cause neurotransmitter release. That's what makes them addictive. And video games or the Internet related activities seem to release more of the neurotransmitter (dopamine) and as result much more addictive than nicotine. People quit nicotine (i stopped smoking 13 years ago after a decade of enjoying pack-a-day and i think all this "nicotine addiction" is almost non-existent thing, a scarecrow elephant that tobacco companies inflated out of a small fly to scare people from quitting) while people can't quit video games or the other Internet related activities once they got hooked up on it, ie. once the addiction got developed by establishing stimuli->dopamine reward cycle in the brain for that specific stimuli like the video game or HN comments.
Report: LasVegas.com Deal Valued at Nearly $90M
I don't have one. Password authentication is SO last decade.
To anyone who might argue that the resume-building bidder has taken food off the plates of other contractors, consider this: thanks to the low bidder, the government can now afford to process that data, build that resume, pay the low bidder, and give money away to the other bidders for free.
> Or what about hashtags. This is a brilliant concept invented by Chris Messina, which allowed people to group tweets from many different people into a single collection.

Yeah, IRC channels never existed. I think I lost a few IQ points on this article.

Are bookmarks really not a thing anymore? Is such basic browser functionality, such as back buttons and bookmarks passé today? I mean, I guess we all collectively forgot IRC ever existed. Or Usenet. Or RSS. Why not forget bookmarks exist as well. Oh right. None of that can be monetized.

The internet is fucking doomed. We've moved from the promise of open networks, federated protocols, and decentralization to centralized services, advertising everywhere, and tracking your every movement to sell to the highest bidder. And people are worried Twitter might die. Yeah, it's really so sad they won't live another day to track you or sell you useless shit. Sob story of the eyeball economy, right there folks.
Google Acquires Fly Labs to Join Its Google Photos Team
I can hear insects and buzzing electronic devices, and my partner thinks I'm crazy some times. Thinking I might have golden ears I tested * my range and I could hear up to 18kHz.

* http://onlinetonegenerator.com/hearingtest.html
I'm not clear on what the semantic difference is between favoriting and liking. Publicly doing either carries a connotation of approval, and the function is unchanged.

Is anyone really, actually, demonstrably confused by this change?
Ubuntu already does quite a bit: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features

I'm not well versed enough to understand whether "Just using pie binaries to enable proper ASLR" is included, but the chart does show green against various things mentioning ASLR. It looks like specific packages are built with PIE, too.
You'd need to adjust the numbers by inflation to make a fair comparison though.
More to the point, to have success in software development you need:

- Independently minded people (incompatible with Japanese culture)

- Flatter hierarchy (kind of relates to the previous point, and incompatible with Japanese culture)

For simpler software, this is easier to overcome (Super Mario levels of software complexity, let's say)

Steve Jobs didn't come up with the iPhone. He let people come up with great ideas then filtered them.

In Japan, the structure goes: "What does the boss want?". And if the boss doesn't know, they will go with the most conservative choice possible.

This set up is never going to win prizes.
> Airline customers care about price above all else.

I'm not sure how true this is; airline customers have convenient automated tools for optimizing price that don't provide facilities that easily let them specify and optimize for a balance of price with other factors.

There certainly is a significant preference for minimizing price, but I think that the apparent preference that manifests in the market is a result of the fact that (base ticket) price is unambiguously measurable, clearly and consistently available, and available to optimized by convenient, ubiquitous comparison tools.
Bagno+di+folla+per+i+Moseek+-+X+Factor+2015+|+Sky+Uno
> Most of the "weird" things we associate with Japan as outsiders are usually very practical and sensible solutions to local problems.

Care to elaborate?
The number after the slash in this conversation is 192kHz (sample rate), not 192kbps (compressed bitrate). The "44100Hz PCM audio" you see on your CDA/WAV/FLAC source, before lossy encoding, would be "192000Hz PCM audio" instead. Unlike bitrate, this number does not affect the "quality" of the sound (unless it's really low), but rather acts as a lowpass filter, dropping out the frequencies above 0.5x of it.
Not inside apps though. Mobile adblockers can at least ban iframe'd content, but not promoted tweets.
Survivorship bias and structural integrity aside, I suspect it's all about the cashflow.

The bank was built in 1891. The FDIC wasn't around until 1933. The appearance of wealth and institutional stability was a very important marketing tool to late 19th-century bankers wanting patrons to trust them with their money.

The dorm houses kids fresh out of high school who can't / don't want to live off campus. I'd guess the building is attractive enough to most people to avoid negative attention, and -- as the article indicates -- it obviously isn't swaying money away from Dartmouth, so why bother?
Cannabis does not have medically significant withdrawal symptoms. Some people get headaches (similar to caffeine). Remember, alcohol withdrawal is life-threatening.
So for those of use outside of Google, it's not a "smooth" environment to work in. I wish we have the tools that you have. Are they available outside of Google?
Or even the same engineer years later.
Alright, too many mentions of survival bias and too much skepticism. There're large parts of some cities that are almost exclusively constructed from brick. It might be bias or it might not be.

It's clear that nowadays buildings are made cheaply. For example the construction of the regular American suburban "stick" house is just the cheapest and the quickest way put up walls and a roof. What you get is something that's badly insulated (both from weather and sound) and just isn't very strong, and the technique is getting traction in other parts of the world too, replacing concrete, beams and brick.
this is the first mention of what.cd outside of the tracker scene i ever saw. funny when you think about it.
More broadly on this subject, I recommend that every software engineer read the book How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand. It's a book about the lifecycle of buildings, design compromises, and how buildings are altered and repurposed over their life. It's a fascinating way to think about software as well.
Well, the solution would be to provide the source of that information that lets you make an informed choice. I, for one, don't really know whether it's worth an extra $5 to fly, say, Delta instead of United from New York to Los Angeles. I don't know where I'd find that information, either.
I've never seen a terminal that didn't have some market selling sandwiches and wraps to go.
Will definitely be missed. Garry is exceptionally kind, sharp, and helpful in an organization full of exceptional, kind and helpful people. Hope to work with you again, but love the decision you're making to spend time with family. Can't go wrong with investing in family time!
Woh, they play with nerf guns at the office! How kewl!
Yes, but for graduating PhD students 175k-225k/year is roughly market (base) rate for people with proven understanding and ability in the most relevant areas (i.e. multiple publications in top conferences like ICML/NIPS/CVPR/ICCV/ICRA/RSS/etc).

Though, a billion dollars will still pay for quite a few of those.
From the article:

"Last year it had a revenue of $1.4 billion, but it's [sic] operational costs was [sic] $1.9 billion"

How on earth could it cost 1.9 Billion to run "Twitter"? 50 WhatsApp engineers and 100 Elixer servers could handle everything. That's just insane. They need to cut costs NOW.
<comment class="snarky;humorous">

Anyone who thinks that hashtags are equivalent in form or function to IRC channels is missing a few IQ points themselves. :)

A hashtag is a way of grouping messages together, not a discrete conversational area with its own topic, access rules, and administrators.

Can I reply back to an RSS feed? No? Then I guess that's not identical either.

Can I access usenet without clunky, ancient software? Is it mobile friendly at all? No? Then I guess that's also not equivalent.
Every office hours session we had with Garry we came away buzzing, the man has an amazing ability to inject raw enthusiasm when you are questioning yourself the most.

I wish him all the best in his future endeavors!
$770,988,654.35 / http://www.calculator.net/inflation-calculator.html?cstartin...
This is a concern for me right now, I have the most experience writing JavaScript for client side web and Cordova but want to get into the backend with go looking like the most sane choice.
Square worth less than it was a year ago, good times may be over for unicorns
In the bay area, a good deal of the restaurants I eat at use square. So do the farmers markets, food trucks, and my coffee shop. I probably personally spend $200 a month through square and $50 through breadcrumb, so there's room to grow.
>I guess the theory is, if you tell people how cheap Ryanair is often enough, they won't check other airlines.

Like Amazon!
You mean sulfate — the sulfur in the volcano oxidizes when it hits air at lava temperatures, if it wasn't oxidized already. That's what I was referring to with "stratospheric acid". It's true that it would be cheaper, but we're talking about the equivalent of one Krakatoa eruption every couple of years, for centuries. Nothing like that has happened since the advent of life on earth, so although it might work and be safe, or it might have unexpected and undesired effects, for example due to sulfuric acid in rain.
Windows 10 and Privacy
There's a fundamental difference between analog and digital, though. On digital you have to stay well away from the limits or you will get extreme artifacts. On analog, you can stomp on the limits, and reconstruct the original signal with filters (analog or digital) after the fact, because tape doesn't simply stop responding, it just responds less as the inputs get more extreme.
No amount of repointing could make the modern joints as even, or as narrow, as the old ones. Though to be fair I don't think the modern builders were even going for that look.
$300 million in 1986 is $750 million in today's dollars.

Still seems like the rate of wealth of the richest 100 has exceeded inflation by 8X... Which is fine, just interesting.
Seeing a business' cash flow should give you great insight into their ability to repay. Just a few of the things you can calculate that a bank can't: microtrends in income, repeat customers (and trends thereof), changes in transaction size as well as volume, etc. Plus it's easier to collect on that loan.