skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comparing music complexity with audio data compressibility sounds like a big stretch. Music made of random notes doesn't sound anything like random noise, and a simple lullaby where the instument would be a random noise flute would still be hard to compress.

Compressing midi files would probably have been nore useful, and I doubt classical music would have topped the charts.
I sign up for news letters and add interesting articles i come across to Pocket, and then I read those while commuting to work. I'm trying to wake up at least one hour earlier in the morning and do another hour after work, but that's not always possible.
Yep, that's him! Thanks for the links -- I had lost track of him and hadn't seen his blog.
Woah! You're coming from the right direction I guess, but..

Yes, we can very much cheer for people living off $1.25 to be living off $2.50 now. The numbers might look stupid if you're living in luxury, but it quite literally means going to bed with a full stomach instead of going to bed hungry. It's a far bigger change for them and their lives than for your income to be increased by 10x (assuming $100k to $1m).

If you're all about increasing the well-being of the most people possible on the planet, then it is something to cheer for. Having that increase to $5 might be the biggest humanitarian change for the future that we could cheer for too.
Snapchat, written down 25% by Fidelity ($31 -> $23)

Unfortunately that's probably not the correct way to estimate Snapchat's value based on Fidelity's assessment. Since Fidelity probably has a liquidation preference—and a recent one, at that—the implied new valuation of the company is much lower.

Depending, of course, on a whole bunch of details about the investment and Fidelity's assessment that I personally don't know.
Yeah. I've asked for the terms and never got them. What are the preferences / rights / caps / etc. of the preferred stock holders? You can never get this information. Common stock holders are last in line.

This information should be available for all stock and option holders, including employees.
>If the standard library's string functions are slow, can you not say that the language is not very fast at string manipulations?

No, because it might still be an implementation issue.

One needs to understand why the string functions are slow, what is causing it.

Is the language semantic, the algorithm being used, the internal data representation,...?

> I am pretty sure most people would say that.

The ones without background in compiler design, surely yes.

Also the point of standards is exactly to avoid compiler driven development and foster competition between implementations thus leading to a better language eco-system.
> IIRC Rust has a similarly confusing memory model

In fact I believe that at a fundamental level Rust is forced to more-or-less adopt C11's memory model thanks to its usage of LLVM, though, as you say, Rust's concurrency safety mechanisms mean that the theoretical soundness issues that apply to C11 are toothless in Rust.
As much fun as the black MIDI is, you should also check out the music of Conlon Nancarrow, who was mentioned prominently at the beginning of the article. Unlike black MIDI, which tends strongly to the metronomic behavior of drum machines and modern computerized music, Nancarrow's music swings. His heart wasn't in 8 bit video game sounds, but rather in 20th century avant-garde classical and jazz.

The closest tonal reference for most people would be certain kinds of soundtrack music, especially older mystery movies and kaiju films from Japan. But it's more musically interesting, and more human, than the relatively simplistic sounds of black MIDI.

Dig it, man.
It looks like a bug.

We've merged the comments from the other thread to here. A side-effect is that a couple of comments have timestamps older than their parent—the author of the parent comment posted it twice, and we moved the older replies to the newer post.
You forgot about "Amazon Prime Day", July 15...
Still easy to see on Github itself.
The silly candy bar phone I had 12 years ago had a dedicated flashlight with a physical button. I think a bigger part of the explanation is that the camera feature race led to leds being in every phone.
Facebook Aims Its AI at the Game No Computer Can
I use Xcode and visual studio daily.

Things I like about Xcode:

- the OpenGL debugger and profiler are top notch

- clang is a great compiler

Things I dislike:

- it's incredibly unstable. I've had it crash 8 times within an hour.

- I can't do a find-in-files without freezing the ide for 30 minutes. (Visual studio can handle the same code base in seconds)

- a lot of ui design decisions are "different" for seemingly no reason. Most devs can jump between vs/IntelliJ/eclipse easily, but almost every Xcode design decision is just weird. Like why do compile errors show up where my file navigator is supposed to be? Why are important tabs just shown with tiny incomprehensible flat icons? It's all arbitrary, but it seems like every ide has settled on conventions that Xcode breaks to no obvious advantage
The Weird World of Brain Hacking
Pretty much every router/modem people have at home does NAT, and does so for UDP, TCP, ICMP and some do GRE and that's it. And they're not getting updated to NAT any new protocol directly over IP that people come up with.
Have you ever considered making a PCB of the thing and making it available to others? Hell, I wonder if it'd even be possible to make an expansion model for old 6502 machines using this technique.

It's very clever. Thank you.
If we're going to be super pedantic, the Common Lisp spec actually defines code as:

"code n. 1. Trad. any representation of actions to be performed, whether conceptual or as an actual object, such as forms, lambda expressions, objects of type function, text in a source file, or instruction sequences in a compiled file. This is a generic term; the specific nature of the representation depends on its context. "

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/26_glo...
Or you put it in late november and call it "Black Friday" or "Cyber Monday"
That's kind of the point though. Options are (at least intended to be) compensation for a lower than market salary and a risk that the company might go bust. At the point that you're raising a Series E round you are going to be paying market salaries and have enough cash that the chance of going out of business is very low. At this point you'd expect options to behave more like RSUs in a public company where the reward is for creating value as opposed to being a payoff for taking risk or investing your time.
Shopify is a great Canadian success story.

However their stock is currently taking a beating. It has lost 21% on the TSX over the past month.
I'm strongly against going down the rabbit hole of implementing something like this. I often encounter the situation where configuration files become complex and it would be a nice-to-have thing to embed logic in them. But then you start slow, maybe add conditions, then function calls, then loops, then variables and soon you have implemented your own Turing complete language by accident, spending countless hours re-inventing the wheel.

The demonstrated approach IMHO leads to situations where N implementations share the same code, like the "atNight" function he shows. So each new feature requires synchronous changes to N codebases.

I would probably opt to rather embed a "real" scripting language lika Lua or Groovy (or today, maybe even some JS dialect), provide it the spec object, the seasons and countries and be done with it. I instantly gain a ton of features, existing documentation for end users and no endless river of "please add condition X to the config language" tickets.
Try PhpStorm if that's really the only thing keeping you on Windows.
> the opportunity cost of "not selling out" has skyrocketed to unsustainable levels

That's phrased perfectly, and exactly what I came here to say. For the 'marginal careerist', one with just enough opportunity to get ahead, but not enough to float by (e.g., possessing rich relatives) there isn't an easy choice. Staying ahead of a changing job market, increasing barriers to entry (credentialism and other funnel-narrowing HR filters), ageism, and the knowledge that the tattered safety net isn't going to help them very much if they fall out means they won't necessarily have the luxury of saying 'no' to every dubious opportunity presented to them.

It's no longer just about winning the rat race. For many of today's rats, it's now about staying on the ship at all.

The original article is one of those feel-good articles that I want to agree with. It's earnest and idealistic, and brings up several important points. For those who are able to do what Mr. Kickstarter is able to do (to make those socially responsible choices that maximize for self-interest AND social good [i.e, enlightened self-interest] instead of maximizing for selfishness) that's actually all great and beneficial. I like it. Many of his observations, too, are spot on. His recommendation however, that tells people to 'do that' reveals a lack of perspective on the actual lived experience of many people functioning within the modern reality. Collective action problems can't be solved by individuals, nor by socially conscious companies (as nice as those may be.)
Node-foreman does use environment variables.

The usefulness of the tool (vs just straight env vars) is mostly in its ability to:

1) start multiple processes at once during local dev, much like a process manager can on a platform like Heroku or a compose file can in Docker. For instance, I'm working on a system now that uses `web`, `game`, and `sms` processes - which can all be started together via `nf start`, and then when one crashes during development the whole system spins down.

2) inject env vars into a local app via `.env` files (similar to your config.json example)
They aren't making any profits (loss of $4.7 million last quarter). Revenue does not equal profit.
It's hard to define "perks worth $X"; in particular, the value of those perks is higher than the amount the employer spends on them. Not least of which because everyone else has them too, and thus everyone knows that.

> As for whether I'd actually keep working, I'm not sure. I might take a break from employment for a bit, but I'd probably come back to somewhere like where I am. I have a great team, a great environment, and I'm working on something socially meaningful.

Exactly. I might adjust my working hours, or take a leave of absence, but I can't see myself quitting. I don't want to live a life of leisure; I want to have an impact.
I know, that's why I linked to an article written by scientists that understand that, with hundreds of references to actual studies. The article goes into a lot of depth about what they mean by heritability, what genes are involved and how they are involved, what studies have led to these conclusions, etc.

The section titled "Intelligence brings (some) genetics to ‘social’ epidemiology" addresses your concerns about environmental factors.

I don't think it's very controversial to say genes contribute to intelligence. Genes contribute to everything, how could they not affect intelligence? This isn't eugenics, nobody is saying we should (or could) use this information to selectively breed humans, and nobody is saying intelligence can be correlated to race.
That's a fair point, assuming you hold strong on getting your market salary. Obviously the company is going to hold strong on their "OMG we're giving you gold" stance, but if nothing else there's at least a lot more wiggle-room on salary.
American's 2014 GDP is 17.4 trillion dollars.

It seems reasonable to assume that some portion of it will accumulate among the wealthiest class and be inherited. Probably much more than ~0.1%.
> I'm not aware of any countries where there exists a "pure" free market.

Unicorns are also pretty awesome - unfortunately, they seem to suffer from the fatal defect of there not being even a single instance of such a thing in consensual reality.
These news pages have dozens of tracker. All those phone home. Ghostery to the rescue. Block all of them.

Edit: I've just turned off Ghostery and AdBlocker. Ghostery reports that page has at least 39 trackers.
Wow, this is really something. I never really thought about it and assumed that paredit would be as good as it gets. But, this seems to show that is not the case. I really need to check this out.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Yes, even the simplest signage can be beautiful (nice example: https://vimeo.com/126922477; see also http://www.henrysignpainter.com), but creating it requires talent and exercise.
Your post should be submitted here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10545689
3 Things You Must Do Before Building a Referral Program
You might be seeing the final gasps of Google's longstanding and now-reversed anti-GPU stance in TF's initial GPU performance.

NVIDIA support alone will make sure TF knocks it out of the park down the road. IMO it's crazy to consider the first release the final say on TF's GPU performance. Caffe, Torch, and Theano have a huge head start (and lots of pre-existing technical support from NVIDIA).

The biggest limitation I see right now is that their multi-GPU algorithms are really simple and inefficient. That will change I'm sure now that they're getting benchmarked against everyone else.
what is their weissman score?
The aim of cmix is to use as many context mixing models as is necessary to get the best possible compression ratio as an academic exercise. Little attempt was made to make it faster or use less memory. That said, the author recently communicated to me an idea to make it use orders of magnitude less memory. Instead of running all the context models in one pass while storing all their states, one could run each model in a separate pass, so that only the memory for one context model needs to be stored at any point in time. Since the original program was not multithreaded, this does not affect the running time. Unfortunately that requires rewriting the whole thing and he is preoccupied with other projects at the moment.
What distributive effect are you talking about? Almost every free market economy today is an equal opportunity space. And that is only thing that should count.

If people can't even keep their own money earned for themselves, you are just killing the incentive to even earn it at the first place. You seem to suggesting we must periodically make the rich, poor. This kind of equality is more dangerous than inequality. Look up the failure of socialist/communist set ups in past century that will tell you why this is such a bad idea.

The whole scheme over time feels like punishing people for working hard and generating wealth, while remainder free loads on the assumption they are entitled to free money.

What follow next is exodus of smart, hard working people to better countries.
example: Mark Pincus, who is everything wrong with the valley. He skipped the ipo lockup, selling a ton of shares at $13.96, and a bunch more at $12. If you were one of the suckers who worked for him but wasn't let out of the lockup, the best price you ever saw was $6 or so. That said, lay down with dogs, get up with fleas...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/17/us-zynga-lawsuit-r...
You're never addressing anything, only diverting by baiting about Russia and China and how all criticism of the U.S. is unfounded because "What about country X?" and some rants about the Protestant work ethic. That's not an argument, it's tu quoque.

I'm skeptical as to your characterization of Italy, Spain and France. It sounds like you're just observing some macroeconomic forecasts without taking into account societal microfoundations like mobility, legislation and culture. These can make immense differences in ensuring a greater subjective feeling of freedom or a greater real resilience against cyclical factors.
You're saying help small businesses build presence on Shopify?
Right. It is also true that evolution is full of dead ends and failed experiments, and species going nowhere.

Be very careful when you allow a blind mechanism to rule your universe.
ClassPass raises $30M from Google Ventures and others
I noticed that as well. Pretty bad UX, imho. If you accidentally refresh your browser, you're forced to watch the whole thing over again until you get back to the original position prior to the refresh.
Announcing DVM; a Docker client version manager
Ask HN: What's your favorite, mostly unknown book?
high level assembler - exactly!
Native language is an almost perfectly heritable trait, but that does not imply it is genetic.

(However, it is true that saying that genes contribute to intelligence isn't eugenics. Eugenics is a methodology where you attempt to selectively breed humankind by broader intent, rather than by emergent properties of human tendencies. A proposed trait to optimize is often intelligence, but similarly frequently it's attractiveness and things like that. Genetic influence on intelligence is simply a hypothesis whose testing would have consequences on the practice of eugenics.)

------- edit -------
I see your reply to the other comment. I think a quote from the article that makes your point far better is "[...] studies have consistently shown that genetic influence on individual differences in intelligence is substantial." I negligently assumed you were specifically talking about heritability.
So let's say the big thing now is Java (God I hope it's not anymore :) ), companies push colleges to teach Java and how to build a cool Java EE App so they can hire students out of school and have them work right away. Great.

5 years later comes language Foo, and that's the next big thing! Now everybody uses Foo! So now companies want colleges to teach Foo to their students. Great, but what happens to the previous generation? They were only taught how to do Java, not Foo. They never learnt the basics of CS, programming, software, etc. They do Java cause that's what was hot when they were in college.

Plus the mention of bootcamps is bogus to me. I don't think potential CS students go to bootcamps, aren't bootcamps mostly targeting professionals in other fields who want to change path? I've never heard of someone who wanted to go to college for CS and decided to attend a coding bootcamp instead.
yeaaaah. I'm guessing they're a lot more in line with a traditional software company.
They're building tooling that's meant to stand the test of time instead of a ton of assets and scripts that'll be scrapped come release. We're talking about Xcode or Visual Studio.
The team has time to do organized sprints, suites of unit tests, maybe float betas to customers. Lots of goodness.
Umm, every revolution in history is an example of the powerless becoming more powerful. We (in the U.S. at least) are not still subjects of the English Crown, and indeed many people look at the monarchy as a joke these days. If you look at which families are powerful now vs. who was powerful 150 years ago, there's a huge disparity.

I think that when people say "It's impossible for the powerless to become powerful", they really mean "It's very unlikely for me to become powerful", which is statistically true. Powerful people are rare - that's what it means to be powerful - and so no matter how much mobility there is at the top, the odds of any one person making it there are quite slim.
But Buffett does make his capital gains exclusively through Berkshire who absolutely does make money through fancy lawyers and tax loopholes.. See the pointless Burger King / Tim Horton's inversion they shepherded through last year;

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-15/berkshire-...

This isn't productive work on any scale except tax optimization and is only available to massive companies and their teams of lawyers.
Even Famous Female Economists Get No Respect
What argument is there to be had with someone who will not even admit the elimination of the ritual immolation of widows as a salutary benefit of colonial rule? There's clearly no reason involved in such a stance but simply reflexive chauvinism.
A market share without profit is a useless metric Apple has nearly twice the app revenue Google is no where near a monopoly. Billions of cheap throw away devices matter very little. Apple isn't anywhere near a monopoly either.
Ask HN: Resources to learn c# .net
I'm quite familiar with building basic rest services with Java EE / spring but may need to pick up a similar kind of thing using the modern .Net equivalent. I believe the team is using web api and I've created a couple of basic services through tutorials and the scaffolding / wizards. Although I can see what's going on I don't have a knowledge of the c# language although it certainly looks familiar. I'd be interested in a primer on both. It looks like they are using angular for the front end so it looks like I'll have a few things to cover. I know html/css/js and have worked in Web dev for years but it sounds like it may have a big learning curve. Any suggestions for books/online tutorials would be much appreciated.
Moar comments!

If you consider a profit-maximizing corporation a paper-clip maximizing AI, it's a hostile AI that's bad for people.

Then you take a look at Public Benefit Corporation, and what you could say goes on, is that instead of using "profit" as a measurement of success, it's a binary answer to sustainability. If a public benefit operation is profitable, it can continue - but it doesn't matter how profitable it is, because that's not the success criteria.

Another interesting place to think about this is "profit as A/B testing metric". Are user signups really what you want, or do you simply require user signups to sustain, but what you want are, say, user-submitted content?
Downloading is THE problem. Compare to apps, I can easily bookmark website and revisit if I like it, easy to get you a customer.
You don't, and probably for a few reasons. An employee is not seen as being as important to the company as the people with many millions of dollars. "Open up your books or I won't come on board" won't make the company think twice about letting you leave. If a VC with $25m wants to look at the books, the company will at least think about it.

On top of that, the people with millions of dollars can hire much better lawyers and such who can truly analyze a company a lot better than your average employee.
Applies to any entity capable of pooling and growing wealth. People, families, institutions, social groups...

Yes, but not to an absolute degree. Go back and look at a list of the "Fortune 500" (or something equivalent) from, say, 1900. I believe you'll find that most of those companies no longer even exist at all. Likewise if you enumerate a list of the richest people in the world from that era, their grand-children (or great grand children, whatever) aren't necessarily in corresponding positions in the modern "richest people in the world" list.

One thing that the discussions often seem to neglect to consider, is the impact of disruptive (sorry, it's the only word that made sense here) technological change. New technologies come along and create a sort of "upheaval" (something like Schumpeterian "creative destruction") that "resets" things periodically.

There are also "dis-economies" of scale where size works against a firm's ability to grow larger and more profitable.
>consensual reality

That sounds even move elusive than the unicorns
Discussions Around the Stewardship of the IANA Continue Amid Speculation
Money is a medium of exchange. The more you produce the more you exchange value for value. The problem is not money and it has never been. The problem is power. Power to leech and mooch from the producers.

Enter the state.