skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want to know the real reason for this, it's because normal cell calls still have to go over POTS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service) on the backend, which typically uses 8-bit mu-law companding of audio at 8kHz. This compresses the typical frequency range for phone calls to 300-3000Hz, which is a lot smaller than the real range of human hearing, although it covers the range used by human speech so it was considered totally acceptable before unreliable wireless packeting became the typical last leg.

VoIP, FaceTime, Skype and other IP-only technologies can use much better audio codecs, going all the way up to CD quality audio (44kHz, 16bit). This makes a huge difference when there is background noise and clipping and less than optimal transmission conditions.

(Source: I used to work for an IVR company.)
I'm not sure if the QuickCheck people have explored these ideas, perhaps they'll chime in.
The blockchain is nothing. It's just a database with some transactions which have a hash of the previous blocks... it's just a simple database in and of itself, no better than an ordinary (centralised) database.

The cool part is that it's decentralised, and you can only do that with bitcoin, or some equivalent decentralised value token (call it a currency if you want, doesn't matter but there has to be a token with value).

Big finance has very silly ideas about a bitcoinless blockchain. No other POW or equivalent protocol has a value token anywhere near the size of bitcoin, and thereby nowhere near the security. The blockchain is nothing without bitcoin, until it is usurped and there's zero indication of that happening.

There are lots of 'internal' blockchain ideas floating around right now, i.e. not decentralised, proprietary 'blockchains', which are really just ordinary centralised databases which have nothing to do with the concept 'blockchain' at all and are not novel in any way and have been around for many, many years, and Big Finance is eating that stuff up. It's nonsense really.
You should look into put options. They're how you short a stock without a massive downside. If the stock goes down you win, if the stock goes up you lose nothing, and all it costs is a small up front premium.
Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change
I hope this isn't an acquihire. Would be a shame if they shut down the k-cup business.
> Leftist politicians have blocked this at several points

What was the rationale? It seems like a leftist issue to me.
I don't know much about Mailbox, but I was an enthusiastic Carousel user . . . until Google released Photos. With Google Drive integration (both up and down), way better search, easy sharing (without requiring a recipient Google account), and photo editing, I dropped Carousel like a rock. I suspect I wasn't the only one.
Are these examples "shibboleths"?
How mobile browsers work: the old Android browser graphics architecture
Known by whom? Several members of my family work at Walmart, and they really don't have anything bad to say about it.
"But as we deepened our focus on collaboration, we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email."

We beg to differ. We built a new email client around the very idea that it could fix team collaboration: https://missiveapp.com

The thing is… with Sparrow, Mailbox and countless others before, it is getting really hard for a team like us to convince people to invest their time into our new product. People are increasingly worried that we will just fold/sell in the coming months and that their time will be lost.

Establishing credibility in the email space is hard and takes time, there is no shortcut, announcements like this one doesn't help us.
How to Make Employees Feel Like They Own Their Work
Why are Dell and EMC considered part of the semiconductor industry?
Despite all the bugs and the short-falls of the Mac app update, it had the best snooze feature that I've come to live by in my email workflow. It looks like Polymail is an evolved Mailbox (with a eerily similar design/features) and Nylas N1 has a lot of potential as well.
I used Acompli and now I use Outlook.

My favorite tiny detail is that I can tune the notifications to push only unread counts to the icon badge and only for the "focused" inbox. That means I can avoid constant push notices for email yet still be able to glance down when I want to and see if I have any unread emails that are actual human communications.
If your WiFi were getting stomped by LTE-U, would it help to get a high-power AP from Ubiquiti etc? If so, maybe prices of such APs would drop as volume increased. Also, maybe WiFi AP software could be tweaked to compete better with LTE-U.
Would be great if they Dropbox opensourced Mailbox's codebase. I don't want to have to go back to apple mail...
> Minor correction: Not 10 years after you leave, but for 10 years after walking into a US embassy and relinquishing citizenship

What specifically are you guys referring to? I can't find any reference to a 10-year tax obligation after renouncing US citizenshp. Is this part of the post 2008 expatriation tax?
Here is the link to the Qualcomm docs (LTE forum).
http://www.lteuforum.org/documents.html
The interesting one I think is the SDL coexistence one. The good news is it is restricted to the 5Ghz band which is the lesser used. It does interoperate with the DCF backoff so in theory would be no worse than any other AP, but it is understandable why it would make people nervous.
Peet's bought up a bunch of Caribou locations in our area. My father has been holding his breath, waiting to perhaps finally be able to get a decent espresso (or coffee).

Instead, the location sat empty for more than a year. Now, the wraps just came off -- and it's a Dunkin Donuts.

So... Not too fond of Peet's, now. And acquiring Keurig doesn't help.

It's looking like Peet's is primarily a money game, now. Fortunately, a good local independent has finally opened -- near to me, but something of a drive for Dad.
Hitler's only two failings were genocide on an ethnic group and going on a land war against Russia in winter. If the new one doesn't try to kill off European citizens and doesn't declare war on Russia, I fail to see the problem. The current crop of politicians will never solve our problems and say what you want about him, but Hitler got things done.
The cultural cities usually were exempted from destruction. See the siege of Leningrad (with targets being hospitals or bazaars but not bridges or other cultural artifacts, when it would have been easy to rake the ground all over) or the avoidance to target Kyoto (when almost every city over 30k people all around Japan having been bombed at one time or another).
It shows how different of a time it is with the whole crowd laughing along. Are there other videos of HST this young? He seemed even sharper back then, or not stoned.

edit: you edited in the same sentiment as my first sentence
I thought basic income and negative income tax were two different concepts? Isn't negative income tax = minimum guaranteed income?
This was my thought as well. One of the big things all the carriers promote is the speeds of their networks which is directly related to spectrum licenses which is directly related to the amount of capacity these networks have.

Verizon has huge chucks of spectrum licenses already to work with: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Wireless#Radio_frequen...)
And Thomas Paine long before that https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html
Side effect of this is that Mailbox was the first to support out of the box notifications on my Apple Watch + gmail accounts. Apple mail doesn't monitor/push emails from Gmail so you don't get notified on the watch.
Building a professional design tool on the web
I was, but hadn't bought a license before the acquisition, so that part of things got a bit annoying. IIRC there are ads that take up a good amount of space.
Like Namecoin (supported by a separate currency) or Blockstore (uses the Bitcoin blockchain)?

Even if you have a central organizer/bank, you are simply using their currency as the native token. You could use a native token which has external value _if_ you have the authority to issue that token (e.g. a fiat currency if a central bank decided to create their own blockchain), but that doesn't remove the need for the network to have a native token.
I hope this encourages them to kill off the horribly conceived Keurig Kold project, or at least wait until it's ready for prime-time before releasing it.

Some highlights:

* A single-serve soda maker.

* The machine costs $369

* Each 6oz flavor pod costs between $1 and $1.50

* It takes 90-seconds to make a single 6oz drink

* It takes 2-hours to come on and cool down enough to be ready to make a drink.

Even without the cost of the machine itself, you're paying about $0.20/oz of soda (which people say tastes slightly worse than the canned variety), compared to $0.12/oz just buying it by the can. Add the nearly $400 purchase price, the fact that it'd take 6-minutes to "brew" 4-cups for, say, a family, and the gigantic machine on your kitchen counter, and it's hard to imagine why anyone would buy this thing.

Keurig's coffee machines make sense. But at some point during the $200M 6-year development cycle for the Kold, someone should have stepped back and said, "Wait, this is a horrible idea and we should stop."

EDIT: I should add that Coke has invested a total of $2.4 Billion in Keurig (specifically to support the Kold) thus far. They should be doing a dance in the street, since an acquisition is the only way I can imagine them getting that money back.
I believe most people want to do something valuable with their time. But valuable doesn't always translate 1:1 to fungible with money. Raising a child is work. Ministry is work. Volunteering is work. Art is mostly just hard work.

There's this concept throughout American politics, and I don't think it's at all true, that most people are just lazy thieves, and would happily sit on their butts watching reruns all day if they could sponge off others to do it. Of course, no one putting this theory forth thinks it applies to them - they want to work hard for the sheer pride of it.

I do, however, think there's a massive tradeoff of doing a dayjob that you hate to keep a roof over your head, versus doing something you love that won't really generate cash. I'd go farther and say many of the best-paying jobs pay well not because they're high-skilled, but rather because they're low-morality. If you're willing to do unethical things to people, you can make a lot of money, legally.

At any rate, if people want a better than minimum standard of living, they'll get a job. If they have an alternative, they're more likely to do a job they love. And a lot of people would do stuff they love for no "job" at all, if it was a choice.
It would probably be politically untenable to have your voting rights tied to if you are taking the money or not. A modern version of land owners getting to vote and no others.
That doesn't really explain why smartphones (and cell phones in general) sound so much worse than landlines, does it?
Thanks for the link. I had read another rendition of this, but it was heavily flavored with hysteria wusing terms like "helicopter money."

This looks more like a work-around attempt to correct their economy after major commodities slump, Nokia problems, etc. Being in the Euro camp, they are unable to devalue their currency, as a country might normally choose to do...
Well, for someone who's never experienced pain, it's probably more novel than anything else. She has no instinctual understanding of the meaning of pain.

If anything, her ability to experience pain may represent a good thing in her mind. People without pain can do incredible damage to themselves unknowingly, and many have serious injuries from when they were children and hadn't yet trained themselves to be cautious. So, to her, getting to experience pain may represent relief from the stress and vigilance of trying to deliberately protect her body.
But it's unbounded wasteful, why does nobody get that. There is no correlation with proof of work energy spent and actual value of transactions. Even worse, proof of work is almost exponentially getting worse over time.
No company is going to spend $14B to acquire talent.
Don't really understand you sorry.

Gasoline at least gets you from A to B.
Burning cycles is much more wasteful. Bitcoin's proof of work/waste is really something like 'I can prove that it is statistically likely that I wasted a shit-ton of power heating this data centre, doing SHA hashes, trying to find one that has a high number of leading zeros.' That's pretty wasteful IMO.
>Not sure which side I am on

I'll tell you! (It's clear to me what side you're on.) You do really support heavy regulation, and you don't think some guy with a cheap and crappy device in the vicinity should be able to disrupt your cell phone reception, FM radio, the GPS wherever you are trying to figure out your location, or, yes, wifi. Likewise you don't want to have to drive from California to Boston because it's too dangerous to get in an airplane with all the unregulated recreational drones in the airspace. You want the radio spectrum, class A airspace, vehicle and factory emissions, and a bunch of other stuff to be heavily regulated. (What these things have in common I'll leave as an exercise.)

EDIT: this is at -1 but it's true. I'm leaving it. I guarantee that the guy is for heavy regulation and doesn't want me disrupting his cell phone, GPS, or wifi due to crappy devices that do not even give me any benefit but just ignore regulation / or there isn't any. he enjoys the benefits and is for them. I guarantee it.
Exactly. The only realistic way to do it in the short term I think is to have everything fall back to G.711 but they you still end up with multiple codecs which is not idea.
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800 euros per month for a 35 hour work week is illegal.
Per my other comment on this thread, all I can say in response to this is, "Argh!"

Big outfits continue to acquire and... "beat down" the better shops, in our area. Make money, I guess -- but the product invariably seems to suffer.
I'd be interested to know how much the average HN user cares about this. I certainly don't. I'm not even entirely sure how fast my home internet connection is - it's certainly fast enough for me to stream Netflix etc as well as connect to a VPN for working from home. I don't really care about anything else.

(not that my internet connection is always great - it isn't - but that lies with my internet provider, who I have no choice over, so...)
This makes me worry that Dropbox is next.

btsync just became a lot more appealing to me.
The Best Books I Read in 2015
On top of that being an irresponsibly reductionist approach to the downfall of an enormous pre-industrial empire that not only had to defend vast borders but also deal with the economic crippling of having its olive groves in North Africa torched (which take 5 years to bear fruit and were among the biggest sources of Roman revenue), your comment seems to ignore the nature of technology in society today. Advances like self-driving cars could ultimately put entire human industries like trucking and the many towns that support them out of business, even if it makes things much cheaper. Ditto for, say, 3D printing. Would all those unemployed truck drivers and factory workers (not to mention their hairdressers, store clerks, prostitutes, etc.) cause no disruption to society? It is sometimes cheaper to placate people than to let them suffer.
Saudi Arabia is/was an U.S. ally, so a takeover (by U.S.) would have been unnecessary.
Beware One Ring Phone Scam
I can imagine that control of how people spent the money (food stamps versus cash) would be a problem in the US. Programs versus direct payment does tend to show up as an issue.

Look at the ND gaming compact with the tribes. The casino money can go into social service programs but not direct payments. I'll leave it to the reader to figure out how that has gone.
If it was a single infrastructure company, all cell companies could use the same towers. This would remove the competition of when/where you have cellular access due to location.

Number portability is already possible here in the US, and so long as I am not on a contract I can switch without fees.
Another empirical study to counter your first point http://isa-global-dialogue.net/indias-great-experiment-the-t...

Regarding the morality of it, there's a good argument to be had from the position that it's fair compensation for the allocation of property.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
Readings in Database Systems, 5th edition
Sunrise won't be updated anymore
The advise is pretty useless. Complexity often comes from incorrect abstractions, not from language features.

Programmers can build very complicated systems using the simplest languages available.
Amex deal with Apple shows unfair advantage: MasterCard
Since you're European, I just wanted to tweak you on Mazak v Trumpf. :)

Again, not telling you how to run your business, but I think you may face a large number of unhappy customers because of poor understanding of how laser cutting actually works. I hope someone is manually reviewing parts before you make them, because it would be bad overall if a LaserGist customer's one-off bad part path caused issues on your other parts, presumably for more regular, high volume clients.

Really, good luck! I just may order something in the near future. Ships by Christmas?
What's your end goal with this? Surely it must be getting acquired by one of the big email providers.
> There's this concept throughout American politics, and I don't think it's at all true, that most people are just lazy thieves, and would happily sit on their butts watching reruns all day if they could sponge off others to do it. Of course, no one putting this theory forth thinks it applies to them - they want to work hard for the sheer pride of it.

What people will tell you about other people is much more reliable than what they'll tell you about themselves.
I have quite a bit of networking knowledge and also used to work at an ISP for several years. Back then I wouldn't have used any router that didn't run my custom OpenWRT built with QoS settings, etc.

But times have changed: On my old ADSL line QoS made a huge difference due to congestion (and the large buffer sizes). SSH was nearly unusable while uploading a file. My current Comcast line is so fast that I don't experience any issues due to congestion - so how would I benefit from QoS?

Another difference is that in the past consumer-level hardware was just unreliable: I remember an old Netgear router that just crashed if there were too many concurrent TCP connections, as its NAT table would overflow. I haven't seen those issues in a long time now.
It's all just part of the curve of slow bitcoin adoption.

First, bitcoin was completely unknown.

Then, bitcoin was outright laughed at (some HN commenters are still at this stage of evolution).

Next, people jumped on "blockchain" as a sort-of gateway drug, using it in sentences which amount to: "Well, computers are useless. But the Internet, the Internet is where the real power comes from!".

Eventually, we will come full circle and people will realize that you cannot have a blockchain without bitcoin (or a close analog), which is what the bitcoin fanatics were saying right from the start.
December Security Release Summary – Node.js
Nitpick: "If you delete the application from your phone, your data is gone for good" is the worst possible way to phrase what is otherwise an excellent feature :-)
If you divide the U.S. Annual Budget by the population you get about $4,000 person.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=U.S.+Population+%2F+U.S...

This means that every American who doesn't pay at least $4,000 in Federal Income Taxes is receiving money from the Government.
> Can someone point me to what exactly did police officers do wrong in this story?

Preparing to draw their guns was probably the first thing. If you want to make someone afraid for their life, prepare the tool you can use to end it.

The second is probably the corralling of the gentleman by multiple officers.

We know that Police officers are told that their primary goal is to "get home at night". We know that they regarded this gentleman as a threat; his intelligent handling of the situation when frightened for his life is probably the one thing that saved him. "May I reach for my id" instead of just grabbing for it. Removing his hands from his pockets... it's not hard to see how this could have gone very, very wrong.
We're two totally different projects. We focus on a lot of stuff in addition to privacy (like great design).
Whoops you've got me there. Yes for that example, the grep alternative is not very elegant. Anyways I wasn't making an argument against composition, just particular types of composition (such as useless use of cat, parsing ls, grepping ps) for which there are side-effects or there is a simpler or more appropriate alternative.
...and then get shutdown?
What would stop you from not paying ?
Computer Literacy in a “Post-PC World”
It depends on where you want to move towards. If you want to move into ETL, BI architecture then BI is the way to go.
Ask HN: How would you convince someone to hire you without your resume?
> If you can be sure your tenants will pay rent then you will want them at your building.

And this would be true, if the basic income program provided a way for your landlord to receive your basic income on your behalf, garnish it, and turn it over to you. I've never heard that proposed, and don't expect to.
Exactly - it's occasionally done by hand. I think the mods do a fantastic job, but this is one place where HN could be seriously improved. There are, on occasion, just so many duplicates, there is a real need (in my mind) for a proper method to clump/cluster them.

The submissions about Finland's 800 Euro basic income is another example - there are 12 or more submissions of that story, with more than one discussion.

There are more.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10690754.
It's the combination of wireless packets dropping and the audio having to be degraded to 8bit/8kHz to pass between carriers that really brings on the terrible. It's kind of like TCP over TCP [1] -- works well enough a lot of the time, but when it fails, it fails badly because of how the two layers aren't really built for each other.

[1]: http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html
The article gives this as an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime#Examples

To live or to die,
I ask myself this.
Because people would have more money.
If you upvote a story, it will be saved on your profile page under the "saved stories" link.
what, pray tell, is a "wrong part" of history?