skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dithering basically raises the noise-floor by trading harmonic distortions for random noise at the cost of the last bit of information (for the uninitiated dithering means you randomly flip the last bit to create a soft truncation.) It's "noise" which isn't technically harmonic distortion but that's kind of splitting hairs isn't it?

I have no patience for articles like this because instead of setting the record straight it just adds more pseudoscience to the mix. Their "experiment" doesn't prove what they claim it proves.

Is 24-bit useful for playback? Yes it is. Do you need it for properly mastered audio? Absolutely not. But there are 10,000 home studios across the country who have music files at 24-bits and a large chunk of those engineers don't know how to master audio. Is a raw 24-bit track better than a poorly mastered 16-bit track? It is to me.

Is 192kHz useful for anything? Probably not. Does it hurt anything? Maybe a little. I would expect a quality music player to go up to 96 anyhow so 192 isn't so bad. Similar reasons as before.

Does this reflect badly on the Pono player? Not really. Over-engineering isn't a bad thing in my book.
Interesting and looks like a very promising replacement to logstash-forwarder. However the # of sweeping changes this implies for to upgrade from logstash-forwarder makes me question whether the upgrade is even worth the trouble. It's also unclear how the changes (namely, the need for an Elasticsearch index template) affects Logstash. Then there's the issue of logbeat not yet offering multiline support. After Kibana 4.x broke backwards compatibility with older version of Logstash and required I recreate all my dashboards I'm a little hesitant to proceed with logbeat.
Progressive Web App: A New Way to Experience Mobile
I think the real deal is to examine the confines of your perspective, not to try and abandon it.

If you notice you are biased, trying really hard not to be will more likely to result lying to oneself than unbiasing oneself.

Best you can do is to learn the signs. And when you can check the boxes look for help. After all, we are all here for each other.

Meanwhile my perspective is incomplete, biased and ugly. But it's mine and I love it.
How gamers are using digital privacy tools to get early access to Fallout 4
Well, there's no modern way of solving what's essentially a misplacement of your limb

It's going to involve pulling and readjusting
VW claimed they could meet the requirements. When they could not they decided not to man up and license BlueTEC[1] or say publicly the requirements were too hard. Instead they cheated.

No politicians at fault here. This is an engineering fail, plain and simple.

[1] http://www.livescience.com/52284-volkswagen-scandal-clean-di...
The idea is that some the time, it's not the book, but just a random small picture of Waldo.

Since you don't know if it's the book under there or not, you don't know if this example is a "control".

The proportion of times that it is the book has to be the same as the odds that you could randomly guess where Waldo is, I think.
From the article, they've already managed to negotiate the price to $490 (through, I assume, a bulk discount).

Some of the testing has already been funded by the state of Detroit (albeit very late) and the federal government.

At $150 per kit it would still cost the group $1.7 million to test every kit. Not to mention that a large part of the expense is projected to be the cost of getting detectives to investigate and arrest based on the results of the tests, which private industry probably can't provide.
I don't own a VW. How will they compensate me for breathing their shit?
HeLi-On – The World's Most Compact Solar Charger
Found a mistake in the docs:

http://tensorflow.org/get_started/basic_usage.md

In the "Variables" example, looks like a variable name got changed but not updated everywhere:

# at the start:
var = tf.Variable(0, name="counter")

# then:
one = tf.constant(1)
new_value = tf.add(state, one)
update = tf.assign(state, new_value)

The variable "state" should be the variable "var", or vice-versa.
"But some skeptics of these types of partnerships say that private citizens already pay taxes and should not be expected to pay for added expenditures that are the responsibility of the government."

Sort of, but no. The entire problem with Detroit is you draw arbitrary lines on the ground, and allow people and capital to flow freely across those lines, but don't allow taxes to flow across those lines.
Little Bites of Cocoa #121: Swiftier Regular Expressions with Regex
While corruption is rampant in China, a low level clerk at a local tax office can't really leverage his position to do much.

Also, getting into business in China a couple decades ago (upto mid 90s) were quite easy, and coal business is one of the more lucrative ones, thanks to the lack of regulations and local competition.
There is another angle here; that Slack is the standard and HipChat (which predates Slack by a bit) is the challenger.
I would imagine that the margin on a 150 dollar toothpaste is quite a bit more than a 6 dollar toothpaste. It's possible that the margin makes up for the smaller number of sales.
> The concept of tensor has linear algebra operations associated with it while multidimensional array is just a programming term without any attached Math operations.

But that's the precise problem. The multidimensional arrays that programmers call "tensors" do not generally have the operations defined on them that you would expect from a tensor, such as index contraction, tensor products, or differentiation. At the same time, a tensor is different from an array, just like a number is different from its decimal representation. These distinctions are important when you want to change the basis, a very useful and frequent operation for both tensors and numbers.

Then again, this battle was already fought and lost for vectors, which programmers specialised to mean "arrays" instead of meaning "elements of a linear space".
>and people will choose to engage with one or the other based on personal preferences.

Thank you for this comment and the distinction between Sport and Immersion. I love the story mode and do not enjoy multiplayer matches.
I didn't bother with the test, because the 16 bit version of the audio clip sounds bad. It has some of the qualities of a demo that had been recorded with a casette-based four-tracker.

16/44.1 can reproduce a shimmeringly deep, richly textured audio experience. A valid 16/8 test will take a sample of that sort: a great sounding 16 clip, converted down to 8.

This article is a veiled ad hominem, which says that Neil Young is wrong about audio because he once recorded some music that sounds like shit. The underlying fallacy is the idea that whenever some artist promotes higher sample rates or wider sample sizes, we should arbitrarily criticize that claim based on some poor example of their own music, rather than using science.
Not sure why this was downvoted... It is easy to prove to yourself. Here is some R:

#p=Prob(tails), n=# Coins, q=Prob(heads), Npop=# times to repeat

p=.5; n=5; q=1-p; Npop=1000

#Flip one Coin 100x and find first tails (probability of getting one mutation)

OneCoin=function() which(sample(0:1,100, prob=c(q,p), replace=T)==1)[1]

#Flip n coins and find last one to turn up tails (probability of accumulating n mutations)

OneSet=function() max(replicate(n,OneCoin()))

#Repeat Npop times, like different people in a population

res=replicate(Npop,OneSet())

hist(res, breaks=Npop/20)
Also reminiscent of skip-lists
I realize the jostling going on, but I personally appreciate that I can tell from the order of names who to contact with inquiries.
CIG is not making the game YOU want, they are doing exactly what Blizzard does. Making the game THEY THINK YOU WANT. Sure there was a list of stretch goals and what not up on the kickstarter site, but they are not obligated to check all the boxes. I haven't been following closely, but I'm sure there are some boxes that have already been written off (at least internally).
I had the same diagnosis 20 years ago. And I had the old-fashioned treatment for it: oral surgery to expose the tooth, metal braces, canine winched into place by means of weekly tightenings over several months. Glad to hear things are beginning to improve.
9 years ago, using tables for layout was already considered a bad practice. Yet here we are...
This is amazing news. I wonder if this can be extended to treat osteoporosis.
> Property rights in this strange absolutist never-to-be-violated interpretation

I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice that. It may be a cultural thing, I don't see such strong opinions in my country very often.
Yes. Going public has never done anything good for any company. Once going public, it's all about quarterly reports and pleasing a few hedge funds.
"Fluorescent label material gets your attention 75% faster than standard stickers."

I wonder if they were double-blind tests.
They might eventually send your information to a debt collection service.

Hope saving a few hundred dollars is worth the potential hit to your credit score.
Here is my take on dithering, with online demos : http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php (still 8-bit though, because at 16-bit, it is barely noticeable, and it won't serve educational purposes very well)
Could we have had 8-bit audio of that quality back in the Soundblaster days assuming the computer behind it was capable of processing it?
I, for one, do not provide dates on my resume. I state the length of time I was at a particular job, descriptions, and my title, but never dates. It seems irrelevant.
This brings back memories of similar collegiate petty scams. There was a year where I was working evenings and commuting to college during the day in my barely-running Cavalier. Money was not abundant. Thankfully, even though the distant parking lots charged us commuters quite a bit for day passes, they used a system with "hang tags" that you put on your mirror.

Each tag had a row of 12 "bubbles" and another grid of 31 "bubbles" covered with the silvered scratch-off stuff you find on lottery scratch tickets. To use one of these daily tags you would scratch off the bubble corresponding to the month and date you were parking.

I soon realized that the parking attendants weren't very observant and between that and the windshield, you could use one of those silver paint pens to "refill" in the bubbles after they had been scratched, use a fine-tipped Sharpie to draw the number back on the re-silvered bubble, and scratch off the next day.

Can't remember how long I did this and I seem to remember eventually getting a ticket but it was right around when my car finally died and the year was almost over. Either way, I could usually get a week or so out of those daily passes before a stray mark or penmanship error would ruin a tag and I'd have to start a new one. I'm pretty sure I got at least $50-100 worth of parking out of my little scam though.

Not proud but hey...I managed to graduate and not starve so, bonus!
"7/10 not significantly better than random" :(
Could you point to an example of an audio clip with the characteristics you're describing? Or an album with such sound? I'd love to experience it.
The age of solar power
Trap Queen Violin Cover
Hopefully there would be a class action lawsuit that will bankrupt WV.
> “It’s a treaty that structures everything forever – and we can’t get out of it.”

> he noted treaties like this one set rules that must be followed forever

But a few lines further down:

> A country can withdraw any time, on six months’ notice.

I'm confused; which is it?
I wonder if quick checkups are any less profitable per unit time than doing fillings. Not much in the way of materials required, and you can get a good throughput, with each visit likely to be of predictable duration.

(My teeth are in good shape, and my average dentist visit takes all of 15 minutes: check teeth for basic soundness, scrape off tartar, remove tea stains from upper incisors. Still costs me £55.)

There is also orthodontic work.
I think this actually demonstrates a common mistake people make in thinking about video games. There's room for a lot more diversity in experience, and talking about them as a single type of art is sort of like lumping together films and novels. They run the full spectrum between tight text-based interactive fiction with two boolean decisions in the whole work, and Minecraft. Generalizing games as a special case of interaction design works for a subset, but certainly not the entire medium.

As a more personal counter example: There have been many games where I have hated the mechanics and continued playing for the story or art, and I know many people who are the same way.
Man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it. (As opposed to man who says it should not be done.)

The "should" question boils down to, "How much harm can we morally inflict on some individual(s) in order to benefit others?"

Torture is the extreme end of the "harm" spectrum, but when we vote in favor of government benefits or taxes, we vote to harm some in order to benefit others.

Individuals and societies differ in how much harm is allowable and in how much benefit justifies a given amount or type of harm.
I paid for something at Walgreens with my iPhone today via ApplePay, and a middle aged woman stopped me and asked why the cashier just let me go. The idea of paying for something with a cell phone was not within her ability to comprehend. That it was safer than using a swiped credit card was so far beyond the pale that I think it gave her vapors.
10/10 but perhaps my sensing method would be considered cheating : the underlying noise throughout the whole track was noticeably more dithery/glitchy in one set of clips than the others, so I presumed that identified the 8-bit clips.
Speakers are tinny laptop speakers which I think probably overemphasised the effect.
I find this about basically every Wikipedia article on a math topic. They are very precise - but basically completely useless for learning anything about the topic.
At that rate, the entire software industry is just a facet of an elaborate real estate gamble.
Canada is finally ending its war on science
Honestly a System That Seems to Work in Forex. “CinderFX KeyStone PRO”
Let me translate that.

"I have hired dozens of people. Whenever I worked with a co-worker during the hiring process, the co-worker figured they needed every bit of information about the applicant to make sure they wouldn't get in trouble for hiring a dud. I stopped applicants from answering my co-worker's questions a bunch of times when it was personal information that my co-worker was asking, because certain question are illegal to ask during the hiring process."

Am I close?
Regardless of whether or not this test is bunk or not, this person's website has a lot of cool audio samples:

Subwoofer Harmonic Distortion test: http://www.audiocheck.net/testtones_subwooferharmonicdistort...

Polarity test: http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_polaritycheck.php

Practical effects of bit depth: http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php

Headphone Ultimate Test (the binaural audio one is pretty awesome): http://www.audiocheck.net/soundtests_headphones.php
This is true, but without the blood to carry excess heat away your brain would still heat up to the point where its cells would no longer be able to function and you would die (only need in increase of about ~3C).
As I ceded in another comment, dithering trades harmonic distortion for noise.

> In order for it to be even theoretically possible to hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio,

Only for professionally mastered audio which is not a safe assumption in this day and age. If some home engineer recorded a track with too much headroom and you get the 24-bit track you're fine, at 16-bits you have a problem.

I would love a music player where I could play tracks at 88kHz/24-bit because that's what most music is during the mixing process and then an audio engineer can give you the raw version of what they're working with without having to deal with issues of headroom, downsampling and dithering.

24-bit audio doesn't hurt anything other than file size and it has real uses, be it remix culture or just high-quality unmastered music.
What's an example of something you suddenly understood?
When you get a chance, take a look at a photo of an orbitoclast (think ice pick). Hammer it in behind the eye socket, give it a good whack, and swing it around a bit. Walter Freeman, the asshole who invented the device, used to drive around the country in his little van performing lobotomies for $25 a pop. He had a nasty tendency to kill his patients; he even killed one when he stopped to have his photo taken with the pick in the patient's brain and accidentally rammed it in a bit too far. These things, of course, happen when you can't see what you're doing.

http://projects.wsj.com/lobotomyfiles/?ch=two

https://40.media.tumblr.com/995323300444f99ee37ffffaa834cfb1...

http://www.sculptorshop.com/oddities/lobotomy-walter-freeman...
There's so many failures to it. The company apparently thinking the professional scene drives the player base, the company apparently thinking it's responsible for 100% of the balance of the game, not realizing "the meta" plays a huge role towards that end. Because of these Blizzard was way too conservative and the game ended up just not being fun. Once the game is not fun, the player base leaves. Once the player base leaves, the professional scene dies.

The most egregious error might be the company not having a genuine designer in charge of the game, which to me seems like a very corporate-y lack of respect for game design. SC2 as a whole was way too conservative. And this is just on the design side, there was greed and short-sightedness all over the place.
A co-worker recently moved from France to the US after living for decades over there so I'll have to ask his opinion ;)
I had mine removed and opted out of being put under. I get pretty nauseous coming out of general anesthesia.

Local anesthesia and very loud Flogging Molly did the trick for me (and a lot of patience, it took awhile). Didn't really feel anything.
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Confessions of a For-Profit College Inspector
> While corruption is rampant in China, a low level clerk at a local tax office can't really leverage his position to do much.

It depends, sometimes a low level clerk is a gatekeeper to higher level corruption, like a doorman if you wish. If there is not pre-existent relationship you need someone like that to make the initial contact. There is also nepotism, he could be low level, but because his uncle is high up the chain, he is a good conduit for those wanting to pay a bribe to contact, etc, etc.

More examples from a corrupt country. Long time ago, neighbor had a friend at a forensics and paternity testing clinic. He was a low level grunt but was corrupt as heck and was raking in tens of thousands per year both from criminal paying him to "not find evidence" and deadbeat dads and rapists for not finding "paternity" evidence. Talk about scum of the earth...

So sometimes rank is not proportional to profit from corruption.
Yep, very true. My notes, if you find them inspiring:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tD8H8B4Umfmqf-8uOH2zoR72...

I think the oil derrick idea was a bit crazy (why make the problem harder than it has to be?), but the concept is sound provided that the rockets are fairly inexpensive.

I think the idea of launching to an arbitrary orbit appeals to engineers, but economically it would be more efficient to launch to a common orbit, and use cheap fuel to change orbits later if necessary. Of course, in-space refueling is only in the concept stage (but getting solved!).

To get above 6km/s, the only way I know of would be to use induction tracks (see Lawrence Livermore patent in doc). The original problem with the EM methods was getting high power switches to work repeatably. They used to cost a fortune, and last only for 10s of cycles. However this problem was solved by a completely different industry in the last couple of years (connecting wind power to the grid), and now you can get them cheap on Alibaba.

The major difficulty, actually, would be:
1) Sound pollution (not many places have high mountains, easy industrial access, and no local population).
2) Hypersonic drag (which is quadratic with velocity at that reynolds number). This is half as hard at 6km/s than 8km/s.
>need to announce

Really? Are they announcing, or just being themselves. I guess in a certain way we all "announce" who we want to be perceived as in public.
I was going to dive into Theano. Is this much different than Theano? Or better?
Or vegetarian. Or pet owners. Or gamers.
Yeah I'm also considering shorting this as well. Having worked at a company that ate Atlassian software day and night, every single piece of software they have in their portfolio is a complete ugly mess. For every piece of software they have there's a better alternative that is cheap or free.
Great views. Recommend this hike for the views of Sausalito\Angel Island at the top of Morning Sun, the bridge\city along the way and at the top to Slacker Hill.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.8531329,-122.4934891/37.8...
Somewhere, in some office, it is now.
The Nile Programming Language
For me personally the key words would be "Ignore women, accrue finances."

As much as culture tells us pair bonding is the end all be all, it's not. Outside of college your chances of finding a compatible mate reduce by 10,000% or more. Instead of actively looking and compromising keep up high standards for yourself and any potential mate. Instead of taking dozens and dozens of dates spend that time socializing and spend that money investing. Spend time to learn what you should be investing and don't trust pundits except as a barometer as to what everyone else is doing.

For OP, if you really like this question it's been asked a lot. Check reddit and youtube.
I and a lot of others have been talking about the dispute resolution processes and how they shift power to corporations over and above all sectors of government. In the domain name space they are called Rapid Dispute Resolution Processes (DRRPs) and around, in particular, intellectual property, they are fraught with danger. They allow corporations to overrule national laws around environment, climate, working conditions, you name it.

I hope we can slow this train down enough so that people can understand what is on the table here. At almost 6 thousand pages there are also a lot of devils in the details.
It's perfectly possible that a trade agreement is bad for all the signatory countries and ideal for other third parties that have co-opted the process.

Just saying. I don't know if this is the case.
That's generally par for the course. There's a lot of CPU simulation that happens in RTS engines, like visibility/range testing and simulating hundreds of moving/(semi)autonomous entities, not to mention pathfinding for them. Some RTSes simulate individual projectiles with startling quality. Most of an FPS is GPU work, environments are mostly static (less CPU), and there's some hitbox detection and maybe insane physics thrown in.
Don't worry, once every site is asking users to disable their ad blockers, people will get sick of that and install additional countermeasures. There are already extensions and filtersets to prevent detection and hide these messages, I make sure to enable them for everyone who I install adblock for (usually after removing all the malware they got by clicking ads). It's an unfortunate reality that unless you're fairly tech savvy, ads will not only track you but infect you.

I've given up completely, no request to disable an adblocker is "reasonable" and there's no such thing as an "acceptable ad" anymore.
SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator
This can't be real. I've had a couple root canal procedures done, and even with local anesthesia, sometimes a jolt of pain comes through. It would be impossible to take, I would think.