skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're thinking about absolute range of a human system. Yes, I can look into shadows and my iris will imperceptibly dilate. Similarly, the stapedius muscle can dampen input to the oval window. So you can appreciate a wide dynamic range. But instantaneously, your retina is only good for about 7-8 EV steps. Modern imaging sensors deliver well over 10 EV, some deliver more than 14. Depending on which format you save to, you could be throwing away half the information! So, much like a artist should record 24/192, a photographer should be saving to RAW. But no monitor or film or the human eye will ever capture all that range in one instant. So, especially for temporal media, like audio and video, that space can be scoped down in the interest of space saving without any perceptible loss.
Why would my choice be standing next to a smoker vs standing next to a vaper? In my day-to-day life, none of my family, friends, nor co-workers smoke or vape around me at all.
Nice work!

This is definitely a nice alternative to TodoMVC. I like that it's not cluttered w/ obscure frameworks, and the code for each is pretty simple to digest, yet it surprisingly covers a lot of ground (ajax, routing, recursive views).

You should consider re-submitting with a "Show HN" tag.
I have mixed feelings about it. But I fully agree all music should be uncompressed by default.

The good thing about compression is that it allows you to save your hearing quite a bit. Some music have dramatic parts that get super loud, which can have awesome emotional response; but it does take a toll on your hearing, unless you are in a very silent environment or have fantastic headphone insulation (I have none) -- so compression actually allows me to hear everything the music has to offer. I also use compression tool on my soundcard to play most games, specially FPSes that have incredibly loud bangs and yet you need to hear footsteps and quiet environmental noises -- with a compressor that's possible without blowing up your ears.
The way I'd look at it is that they had the chance to scale their business through Starbucks and the massive influx of money through the system was a major dud for them. That might be terms specific to the Starbucks deal, but ultimately that level of scale didn't help.

And at a numbers perspective, their revenue rose 54% last year, but so did their losses ($104m -> $154m). If their losses track their revenue growth percentage-wise, then scaling does them no good.
Garry has been incredibly impactful to us, even after we graduated YC. Can't wait to see what's next!

Enjoy your time abroad, Garry.
> Henry Ford himself is ... a known anti-Semite

Agreed; he's not my favorite person at all and made an awful call by supporting Hitler. But ...

> It hardly takes a leap to look at the abysmal performance of planes built by Ford and suspect that management there was particularly … lackadaisical in their pursuit of quality.

Things like that alarm me; it's a proven method for condemning the innocent and unpopular. We can form hypothetical links between many events - Billy is a mean person and disliked Joe, Joe's been murdered, so hang Billy; or, every morning the rooster crows and then the sun rises, therfore the rooster is doing it - but most will be false. We need evidence to differentiate truth from imagination.

From the Amazon page, Publisher's Weekly seems to think less of the book (though Kirkus likes it):

Although Wallace (Who Killed Kurt Cobain?) is a recipient of Rolling Stone's Award for Investigative Journalism and appears to have done much primary research, he delivers a highly speculative rehash of material handled much better in A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh, Robert Lacey's Ford: The Man and the Machine and such seminal studies as Charles Higham's American Swastika. Wallace tries and fails to sensationalize well-known facts about the parochial American fifth column of the late 1930s and early '40s, a bungling movement of which Ford and Lindbergh were among the most public faces. Wallace sees a conspiracy in what he presents as Ford's pro-Nazi partnership with Lindbergh: a dark and powerful alliance designed to hinder the Allies at every turn. In fact, the two men were far more naive than effectual in their attempts to prop up American isolationism before Pearl Harbor. And Lindbergh, who counted Harry Guggenheim among his closest friends, found Ford's hatred of Jews repugnant. Once war was declared, both Lindbergh and Ford helped the Allied effort. Lindbergh helped develop the Corsair and later, as a "civilian observer," flew more than 25 combat missions over the South Pacific. At the same time, Ford (with Lindbergh's help, and after a few false starts) became the leading manufacturer of the B-24 bomber. Were Ford and Lindbergh half-witted dupes of Nazi propaganda before the war? Undoubtedly. Were they Nazi agents either before or after the start of hostilities? Wallace fails to make the case.
I think trust is a bigger deal in the R community than say Ruby. With a gem you can tell pretty quickly if it works or not, and the community has a higher standard of testing.

With R, many of the packages are for complicated math and stats. That particular package might pass all it's internal tests, but what if they implemented a distribution wrong, or calculated 95% confidence incorrectly? That is when you have to trust the developer personally.
Jay Cutler Says ” Steroids Side Effect Depends on Genetic Make Up”
I still disagree, I think we've just seen the beginning of what social networks will do in this century. Facebook is barely scratching the surface, and there is ample room for disruption. It is inevitable that new ideas will emerge, and they will be embraced.
My WebSummit 2015 experience recap as an Alpha Track startup
Did we buy the WebSummit (WS) tickets based on deceptive marketing? Yes! They were just lying about what an Alpha Track (AT) participant is. Nevertheless it was a unique and great experience.

WS is really huge. There were about 2000+ AT participants and as such you get to present your startup one day long. The other two days you’re „just“ an attendee. The event was really well organized and filled up to the stocks with all kinds of stuff. We were lucky that we (www.jack.chat) had our AT stand on day one because everything is new to everyone, and everybody is excited and curious. We had nonstop traffic at our 40“ wide stand and everybody was really nice and excited for us. It was just an awesome experience! A few investors showed up as well, asked interesting questions, and took notes. Our booth neighbors - Mommy Dearest - were really cool, too, and we hung out after the events and shared insights and experiences.

I attended 3 talks. 2 on main stage and 1 at the code summit. The main stage talks were watched by thousands of people and honestly were just plain boring. The stage was very impressive but the speakers weren’t. The code summit talk by Jon Hodgson on the other hand was really good.
The Night Summit was kind of disappointing because all people went to this one place and it was just heavily overcrowded. But we went to some other places (a taxi driver told us about - btw the irishest Irish ever). And later that night we got to meet the amazing guys from the Startup Van (twitter.com/Startup_van). You really have to check them out!
All in all it was a great trip. Dublin is an amazing city and the WS is a mind-blowing, well organized event. But even to gain the littlest thing out of it we had to work very hard. Don’t be fooled that you can buy a ticket and everything will just falls into place.

PS: we met a guy at breakfast who knows Paddy and the inner circle around him and he told us that everything they are ever talking about is how much money they make.
> If they're based in another country they frequently hold on to their employee's passports so that they become virtual prisoners.

This sounds uncannily like H-1B visas. :(
A simple way to kickstart your career
It's my understanding that 24 bit audio can capture the quieter sounds in greater detail than 16 bit. So say if you EQ out a frequency range in order to "zoom in" on a much quieter range, like the motorcycle vs. whisper, you can hear the whisper in as much detail as a full CD quality recording.

For playback though, I agree that 14 bits are probably enough. Even high quality mastering tape has the equivalent of about 12 bits of dynamic range, which is fine. Many fabled analog pieces of equipment have terrible signal-noise characteristics, but are still valued for other reasons (coloration, distortion etc...)-which is all fine by me.
I think they mean that they're now constructing the final facade (Gloria). Equally, would mean the other three sides are now completely done.

(ps, hi gjm11, jmb29 here)
Just a warning: if you go tonight clubs, concerts or haunted houses - basically anywhere that uses a fog machine - it's literally the same stuff.
A nice bit on that: http://www.pbs.org/thebotanyofdesire/
Foundation for Sites 6 Is in Public Beta
At the end[1] of the talk[2] at 30c3 by Eleanor Saitta and Quinn Norton, "No Neutral Ground in a Burning World", an audience member suggested that people need spend time learning basic historical knowledge about crypto.

It disturbs me that there are books about cryptographic algorithms,
there are books about early days of hacking, but I talk to people
younger than myself who are in their teens and twenties, and from
the people I've talked to there is an astounding lack of awareness
of say, the first crypto war.

That's bad enough, but Quinn's reply is a simple, easy to understand, damning indictment of the sorry state of the modern software culture:

Can everybody in the room who has some sort of computer science degree
or related degree put up your hand? Keep your hands up. Now, everyone
who read Claude Shannon in school put your hands down.

So all of you are people with CS degrees who didn't read Claude Shannon,
one of the most fundamental voices in everything you do.

Unfortunately, learning from history takes effort, so it's a lot easier to simply cargo-cult programming "knowledge" instead of actually learning about these complex systems.

> economists

They have their own problems with over-reliance on models. Mark Blyth's description of the problem from the perspective from inside the field has quite a few similarities to the problems in programming.

> models

On the subject of over-reliance on models - especially overly-complicated, buzzword-compliant models that cover up a total lack of actual research, innovation, or really anything worthwhile at all - I want to suggest listening[4] to the wonderful Tom Lehrer talk about Sociology.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE#t=2367

[2] http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burn...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWbkPezgtU

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So#t=37
Ben Bernanke on Nature of Fed Communications
TvOSBrowser: TvOS Web Browser
You are moving the goal posts here quite a bit. Do I think that facebook will forever be a giant, without question? Of course not. What I disagree with is that all it takes is a good idea.

I believe that the more likely course of action, as others have stated, is facebook will make mistakes which will be capitalized upon. Large organizations gain cruft, slow down, choose the wrong direction. Many things can happen.
No, compression doesn't force the music to be more simplistic. It enables simplistic music to sound fuller.

Anyone that has mixed 120+ tracks for a single "modern rock" song with a compressor at the end would tell you so.
Or better just disable `smoothscroll.js` across all domains.

It's named that 9/10 times - including this site.
Hey guess what, that's the wrong definition!

Nice attempt to be a smartass though.
Everyone’s Son
Agreed -- although I see it as a complement to TodoMVC rather than an alternative. Very useful!
Fuel represents 25-30% of most airline's OPEX, while capital (planes) is something like 15%. I would suggest this means we are actually doing pretty well. In a hypothetical ideal market, an airline would directly convert consumables to travel with zero other expenses. This is the most efficient (in the market sense) an airline could be.

As for "if we mastered air travel, we could remove fuel from the equation"- I don't think that's true. Jets are already 20-40% efficient[1], so even with a perfect plane we could only quarter to halve fuel requirements.

[1]: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?idp=9...
I rip to FLAC, not because I think it sounds better, but simply because if some newer better codec comes along in the future that will let me compress my songs on my smartphone even smaller (Opus?) I don't want to have to get my CDs out again. I can just transcode from the FLAC files.
Don't forget also that gov.uk is actually pointing at Fastly, a CDN, headquarted in San Francisco.
Because digital filters have few of the practical
limitations of an analog filter, we can complete the
anti-aliasing process with greater efficiency and
precision digitally. The very high rate raw digital
signal passes through a digital anti-aliasing filter,
which has no trouble fitting a transition band into a
tight space.

I always thought digital anti-aliasing filters were
creatures from a fairy-tale world. Much talked about
but no one has ever seen one.

My understanding: If you have a an analog filter of a given steepness the only way to further reduce aliasing effects digitally is oversampling. Or less steep (cheaper) analog filter plus oversampling is the same as steeper (more) expensive analog filter. People tend to say digital anti-aliasing filters when they really mean oversampling.

"24/192 music downloads make no sense" seems to be a thoroughly researched and carefully written article. It explains oversampling very well, possible confusion with digital filtering (anti-aliasing or not) is out of question. But then it goes on to talk about digital anti-aliasing filters, which makes me afraid I could be wrong.

Do digital anti-aliasing filters exist?
There are no inter-modulation products in the sense rplst8 expects. The interaction of waves of 1000Hz and 1001Hz doesn't produce 1Hz waves in linear media.

Even if it did produce some new frequencies through some non-linearity (which is negligible in most environments afaik), the recording equipment would capture the low frequency waves produced by those interactions. So the only question is whether there are significant non-linearities in our hearing system, and the overwhelming evidence is no again afaik.
Why did you quote the generic 'first aid measures' section? The 'health effects' section is far less alarming:

>Skin: May be absorbed through damaged or abraded skin in harmful amounts. Allergic reactions have been reported. A single prolonged skin exposure is not likely to result in the material being absorbed in harmful amounts. Prolonged contact is essentially non-irritating to skin. Repeated exposures may cause problems. Negative results have consistently been obtained in guinea pigs studies for sensitization. 1,2-Propylene glycol is not considered an occupational skin sensitizer. (CHEMINFO)

>Inhalation: Low hazard for usual industrial handling. Inhalation of a mist of this material may cause respiratory tract irritation. Material has a low vapor pressure at room temperature, so exposure to vapor is not likely.
> Altercations in prison indicate a type of extreme stupidity and/or violence

Your list is incomplete. Altercations also occur when people are stressed. Push most people enough, strip away humanity and agency, and they will lash out.

> because we were too soft on the offenders

Being too hard on prisoners has its own downsides. As this essay demonstrates.

The question is, had we treated Adam Morales, Angel Coronado, and the others more softly, would they still have gone on to the commit crimes that lead them back to prison?

> we can't let these types of offenses continue

There doesn't seem to be much in the way of evidence that the US style of being hard on prisoners has your desired goal of reducing the number of deaths due to drunk driving, as the case of Silvestre Segovia demonstrates.

Therefore, it doesn't seem the hard/soft classification is really relevant.
First para: I mention social network elsewhere. Give me group emails, with everyone replying to everyone else, and give me the ability to see only those emails that people I care about are sending, and give me a limit in the size of an individual emails so they don't get unwieldy, and you will have given me Twitter.

Yupp, text images are a poor way to digitize text. They're way backwards. And twitter has awful, almost non-existent indexing/search. And the bullying/harassment issue is out of hand. I still get utility from following people I follow.

I've been put in this position to defend twitter, and really man, I am not a particularly big twitter fanboy. It's a product that I enjoy using. I don't see a point in converting anyone ( I would, if it were MS vs Gmail argument). If you want to understand, just join in and follow people you aspire to be in conversations with. I follow popular professors, researchers, publications, celebs, etc, and I like it. You might too. That's all I can say.
Define HDR. Almost all displays people have these days are not capable of reproducing the dynamic range that most cameras can capture. Hence why we have colour grading, which is the image equivalent of audio mastering.
Looking for the 140 character summary of the article?
In the photo with Ann Moffat and her daughter is the 'table' that they are sitting at some sort of punch card setup?
In my experience the metal urinals are less splash prone. Perhaps it has something to do with the material itself being hydrophilic?
Except governments are supposed to be accountable to their constituents. Had the government been transparent about what they were doing, there would be no need to blow the whistle in the first place, creating the need for Snowden to collect intelligence on the NSA's spying programs.

EDIT: It's victim blaming.
Ultimately, anybody can choose to stop drinking coffee at any time.

I've seriously attempted to quit intake of caffeine about 6-8 times over the last 2 decades. In each case, I was able to temporarily quit, with withdrawal symptoms being more in the 2-4 week range. However, in each case, a small amount of caffeine at a casual event lead to intake of "normal" (for me) amounts of caffeine immediately. I would love to quit it (as I understand it's health consequences).

As a reference, I would say that I would be in the "heavy users" category with a daily intake of about 750-1000mg.
The instantaneous dynamic range of the human eye is estimated to be less than eight stops. Both film and modern camera sensors can capture much more than that. The reason we're able to adequately perceive scenes with 12+ stops of dynamic range is that our visual system does continuous integration and reconstructs an HDR "mosaic" in real time. HDR photography is required in situations where even the 12-14 stops that a modern sensor is capable of is not enough.

However, that's neither here nor there because the human eye is not the real bottleneck here. The media we use to display photos are. Printed photographs have approximately six stops of DR; typical monitors have eight. Modern cameras capture much more information than can be displayed, and the raw sensor data must be tone-mapped either by the camera software or in post-processing to produce a viewable image. There is a lot of latitude in deciding how to map 2^14 discrete values of input to a mere 2^8 values of output.
I am not surprised. Majority of tech IPOs in past year are trading below or near IPO prices. The investors in public market have learnt from the past. Most of these companies are coming to public market later when most of the upside has already been squeezed by private investors. Most IPOs come across nothing more than offloading to greater fools. Buying at IPO makes no sense. Wait till prices stabilize after the IPO at actual value (new lows) before buying.
In a similar vein, what government agency has the time or money to actually review every single diagram for a building to be constructed?

It's actually the same problem: an extremely complex object is being constructed, a critical failure within which could leave many people nearby injured or dead.

The solution is actually somewhat ingenious: License a small group of people to go analyze such things, let them organize themselves independently, but require them to sign off on the design. It turns out that with their license and livelihood on the line, enough people aren't willing to sign off on terrible, shoddy crap that the system mostly works.

Perhaps it's time that software grew up and became something closer to a real engineering discipline?
Rooms is an interesting direction. Twitter is part RSS reader, part chat room. It would be nice to follow hashtags on a topic, but then spammers would flood the hashtags with ads.
(LATE EDIT: I now see that your responses were influenced by
cballard's original examples of NSURL and NSString but I wasn't talking about those.)

I was thinking of ASCII/Unicode string types and not the URLString vs SQLString types. Yes, a URLString would be redundant. In C#, the URI data type contains a Utf16 string as a data member but it is not another type of string.

We were talking about different things.

The ASCII/Unicode string data types would be somewhat analogous to int32/int64/float32/float64/Money data types.

The way C# does it is that everything is Utf16 and there is no separate ASCIIString data type for pure ASCII strings. They also don't have pure Utf8 strings. Instead, the UTF16 classes has member "get()/encode()" functions that interpret as ASCII or UTF8. The ASCII/Utf8 data state is transitory. This architectural choice is fine for most apps but if you have 1 gigabyte of ASCII data, it's very memory inefficient to double the memory footprint to 2 GB for Utf16 just to slice & dice strings. If you use byte[] arrays to keep everything as raw ASCII to conserve memory, you don't get any convenient string-like slice & dice functions. The "string type" is lost in a opaque byte[] array.
FCC Won't Force Websites to Honor “Do Not Track” Requests
DevCon1, Blockchain Wedding, and Ether.Camp Update: ConsenSys Weekly Digest
Japan has hardly lost the robot race. Why? Well japanese robotics companies held ~61% of the industrial robot marketshare in 2011[0]. Second, they're a big producer of actuators for robots, so they're in a good position to supply the robotics market. I would not discount korea though, they have a number of companies that produce actuators too.

Actuator companies are something to look out for, because robots are practically made of them.
[0] http://www.statista.com/statistics/257177/global-industrial-...
Opiates get misused for a lot of pain when they're not really suitable for that particular type of pain.

For many people opiates are marginally effective because they were misprescribed.
It also is a useless tone to take when trying to implement UX improvements. Especially if you are new, getting a team on-board with a design change you think is glaringly obvious does not work if you don't follow the basics of how to win friends and influence people.
Garry is a hero. He is extremely nice, very kind, and has more empathy for the founder than anyone I know. Whatever he does next, I wish him happiness and success.
IBM got out of selling ThinkPads long before Apple had any kind of dominance in the high-end laptop market.

Arguably they got out of it because there was no such thing as high-end consumer PC hardware, the margins were low, competition fierce, and they didn't want to play in the low-margin discount market.

Arguably the ThinkPad could have been a success as a high end business laptop. I think under Lenovo's stewardship it has languished and become a typical cheap Asian-manufacturer product of 500 SKUs, all slightly different, with quality on a downward curve.

On the other hand the fate of RIM/Blackberry shows there isn't much of a market for a 'business' device that is separate from a high-end 'consumer' device. The latter wins over the former.