skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Actually, the author made a different argument: That the removal of the higher frequencies in PTSN PCM combined with the low frequency of modern cellphone background noise made for something much harder to understand.

The author certainly made the case you say, which I don't disagree with. However, they also invoke the "analogue sounds better" myth. Regarding analogue:

> At first, telephone audio was entirely analogue, such that the signal of your voice and your interlocutor’s would be sent directly over the copper wire. The human ear can hear frequencies up to about 20 kHz, but for bandwidth considerations, the channel was restricted to a narrow frequency range called the voice band, between 300 and 3,400 Hz. It was a reasonable choice when the purpose of phones—to transmit and receive normal human speech—was taken into account.

Regarding digital:

> In order to digitally switch calls, the PSTN became subject to sampling, the process of converting a continuous signal to a discrete one... Since the voice band required only 4 kHz of bandwidth, a sampling rate of 8 kHz (that is, 8,000 samples per second) was established by Bell Labs engineers for a voice digitization method.

This choice of frequency is later criticised as too narrow; yet the analogue signal was even narrower! Even ignoring the issues of error correction, etc. this goes completely against the author's claim that "they’ve become much crappier phones... partly because of the nature of the apparatus we used to refer to as the "telephone"...".

>> Saying that the digital protocol is "permanent" is basically a lie; [...it is far easier to upgrade... than the analogue protocols the author is implicitly comparing to.]
>
> The author also did a spectacular job dealing with this in an understandable way too, talking about how it's baked into so much of the infrastructure.

I've added a little more context to that quote: the existing digital infrastructure may be difficult to upgrade, but the previous analogue networks would be harder. Hence it's misleading to make claims like this when arguing that modern phones are "much crappier" than what came before.

In fact, I disagree that digital phone infrastructure is difficult to upgrade. With a few taps on a digital phone (e.g. running Android) a non-technical user can download a program like Skype, over their digital phone network, install it and be making calls over that network in a matter of minutes. A more technical user can use WebRTC to tunnel any protocols they like, at whatever bandwidth they like, recorded with whichever equipment they like, in whatever location they like, all on top of the existing infrastructure. Those are digital phone calls just as much as any standards-body-approved, nationally-implemented, monopoly-owned operator's offerings.
OK, I'll bite: this is a terrible idea and I believe has no chance of success.
It doesn't look like that tested LuaJIT. The JIT part or the faster interpreter.
What? How can you get a cert for a domain you don't control?
Spack has, to some degree, a compromise between the language and system package management sides of things. Languages in Spack can specify how their extensions should be activated/deactivated within the installation, and modules like numpy can ‘extend’ the language packages. So, you can plug and play with different python modules. I haven’t looked at how Go does language extensions, but it would be interesting to see if this can be mapped to Go, Lua, etc.

[2] http://software.llnl.gov/spack/basic_usage.html#extensions-p...

[3] http://software.llnl.gov/spack/packaging_guide.html#extensio...
Are there any open source projects for computational chemistry?
I used Gists quite a lot for a while, then things like the TIL post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11068902) and http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/talks/junkcode.pdf made me realise that a lot of things are better off in full Git repos.

Maybe that says more about the Gist UI than anything else. I still think there's a chance for a Git-backed OneNote clone to really take off - if you hid Git away for normal users it would be really powerful.

I think some concept of scratch/temporary repositories might be better than a Gist-style thing, but Gist with a better UI might work too.
I'd say a legal vote is one that is filled out in accordance with the instructions on a legal ballot. From what you're saying, I suspect that's what Scalia meant. If the machine misreads such properly filled-out ballots, that is certainly a problem and a recount would be justified.
Mathematica vs. Python (2013)
Guessing on the low end is very difficult, I would make a terrible statistician (or politician?).
Pure code can (unfortunately) throw exceptions, e.g.:

Prelude> head []
*** Exception: Prelude.head: empty list
That's what Herb Sutter argues in his Almost Always Auto post, but I would disagree:

1. The IDE cannot deduce the type within templates, and more code is moving to templates (e.g. generic lambdas in C++14)

2. Code is often read outside of IDEs: code review, search engines, etc.

3. Should C++ become a language that requires an IDE to work effectively, like Java? Probably not.
Is it possible to live life without internal conflict?

Is it possible to examine the root of what we consider a vice so that we have to suppress the urge with pure willpower which is going to run out sooner or later.
The FBI Wants $38 More Million to Buy Encryption-Breaking Technology
Too much memory usage, the website has crashed my computer.
Pro Social Incentives in Software Teams
> Personally, while I've always preferred liberal legislatures, I do actually prefer conservative Justices. I want the Supreme Court to set a high Constitutional bar for a law to pass muster.

Let's clarify the meaning of "conservative". It could mean a judge who interprets the law strictly, or it could mean a judge who uses his position for partisan conservative purposes.

I think Scalia was the latter.
I think there is a difference between utility driven social media like LinkedIn or Nextdoor (and to an extent messaging apps like WhatsApp if you consider that social media) and apps like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram which are less utility driven and more entertainment driven.

Of course, one can derive utility from the entertainment driven apps, but it's often disproportionate to the gravity of the entertainment and naval gazing that they are optimized for.

Go on LinkedIn or Nextdoor and you see much less of this type of naval gazing. People might be trying to find a job, gain insight into an org, keep their resume updated, with LinkedIn. Or they might be trying to find a babysitter, sell an item, or offer a service/recommendation to their neighbors on Nextdoor. Yes, both platforms have their flaws, but at the end of the day they are indeed driven by and based around a utility rather than naval gazing.

But those too, you have to be careful with in how you use them. I'm not quite sure where I was going with this comment, but I wanted to point out that a distinction and difference does exist between types of social media.
When Einstein Was Wrong
I have little reason to believe NTDF9's characterization of the encounter. Neither do you. These are just random internet opinions, keep that in mind. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11085463
"objectively unclear, like the infamous butterfly ballot"

I saw a reproduction of this ballot in the newspaper at the time and I remember wondering what the problem was supposed to be. It seemed perfectly clear, but journalists were jumping on the bandwagon of calling it confusing.
The problem with Mrs Clinton is that she is an anti-feminist. She went viciously against the women who have been speaking against her husband, she supported legislation that disproportionately affected women when in Senate, and she never gave two hoots about women's issues abroad when she was the secretary of state.

Being a woman is her only redeeming quality, and she's not doing a very good job of that either.
I am having trouble figuring out how in the world they can make the numbers work.

- The lowest possible rates I've seen for personal loans are ~9%.

- From the article: over 50 years the "cumulative divorce rate of ever-married women approached 40 percent".
- 22% of divorces are caused by financial dificulty (https://www.institutedfa.com/Leading-Causes-Divorce/), so assume there is no money to get back there.

So for an investor to think giving out this type of loan is better than a standard personal loan the minimum rates they could offer would be 9 / .6 (stay married) / .8 (already bankrupt) = ~18.75%.

And there are all kind of unfavorable terms in this loan:

- it's a bullet loan so there is no incremental income stream (at least until the divorce)

- you have to track people's marital status to see when loans are due

So for the best qualified people you have to charge ~18.75% to come close to breaking even on the returns from a normal personal loan at which point you start having to worry about usury laws that cap the interest that can be charged.

Maybe their algorithm is just going to select for couples with high credit rating that they think will get divorced soon. But once it becomes known that getting approved for one of these loans is a strong signal of getting divorced it seems like people would shy away from them.
From a process standpoint, merge-request is probably more accurate, but I've always thought pull-request captured the hearts and minds of developers because it better represents how the requester feels about the request.

"Pull request" communicates "I just did a bunch of work, please recognize it and me." "Merge request" communicates "I just did something that is going to make your life hard, please do a bunch of work on my behalf." The later may be more accurate but the former is more emotionally satisfying to the dev making the request.

Edit: reducing verbosity
A lot of abuse victims do not want to advertise the fact that they have been abused for a lot of reasons (stigma, Stockholm like syndrome of not wanting to cause problems to their ex, believing that the abuse their fault) and will divorce without officially saying that it's due to abuse.

Abusive relationships do not only create physical injuries but also psychological injuries and when someone decides to leave an abusive relationship and divorce, it's not necessarily easy for them to come to terms with what happened.
sagemathcloud.org lets teachers, students and others use sagemath without having to install anything.
> why does Go need a package manager

Because a language is nothing without an ecosystem of libraries. These libraries need to be version-ed and dependencies between these libs need to be resolved.

> Go didn't support shared libraries until very recently

It still doesn't.

> If I want to install a Go program without compiling it, I just use my favorite package management tool-- the cp command.

That's not the issue at end here. If i'm a developer and I need to publish an open source project, i'm not going to publish it with all its dependencies. I need a mechanism to manage them, that's what a package manager is for.

Go has an half baked on, go get. It can fetch dependencies but it cannot tell between versions of the dependencies.

It's interesting to note that a lot of Go developers are actually against a separate package manager.
Supreme Court Justice Scalia Dies
> There's a precedent to replace 'like with like'

I've never heard of that and have reason to think otherwise: Presidents see the Supreme Court appointments as a chance to leave their mark on the judiciary. Could you provide some evidence?
Well, we're using TFS git, where you aren't forking repos on the origins, but for familiarity's sake MS calls the code-review process of merging a feature branch into dev a "pull request".
Another key point: the Democrats didn't say going into the nomination that no matter who Bush nominates they will reject. They were prepared to debate and decide on the nomination based on the merits of the nominee, not a blanket statement saying "we will not agree to anything, ever" - which is how the GOP has behaved during the Obama administration.
Best reads from this week
Have some extra cash? Help make your life easier
My FB news feed is almost as good as Twitter.

How? There is an easy solution to being inundated with things you don't want to see. Unfollow anyone who regularly posts things you don't want to see. I've done this. I've unfollowed pretty much everyone on Facebook, except for a few people / groups. I also hide posts that I don't like, but come from people I still want to hear from (I've heard this gets fed into FB's ranking algo for you).

Now my feed is mostly interesting news stories / interesting commentary / educational content / conversations on Facebook groups related to my interests. My FB news feed is actually better than Twitter now, albeit with 30x less content. Tangentially, this is why I appreciate the Twitter algorithm change.

Now I spend less than 20 minutes a day on Facebook. I don't get why people feel the need to delete the account altogether.
Kasich and Rubio are in my "preferred" tier.

Bush and Cruz are in my "hold my nose and vote" tier.

Carson isn't presidential material IMO.
He will nominate quickly and, because the Senate is allowed to, they will slow roll and then block the nomination.

This isn't the first time this has happened. The Supreme Court will function just fine with 8 justices.

Blame John Adams!
"there are people I think are terrible"

Yes, your own history say you think "49% of [laywers] are terrible" and 'The most useful shorthand is "all recruiters are terrible"', believe 'The TSA is obviously terrible' and say the US supported a 'terrible Pakastani dictator'.

Here's a cut-and-dry piece by Richard A. Posner titled "The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia". Some of the choice quotes are: "OMITTING CONTRARY evidence turns out to be Scalia and Garner’s favorite rhetorical device", "Scalia and Garner are capable of reveling in absurdity", and "most professional historians reject the historical analysis in Scalia’s opinion".

For one of many given examples of incoherence, while Scalia says he is a textual originalist, "the eighteenth-century concept of freedom of speech was much narrower than the modern concept, and burning cloth is not a modern technological innovation", so why did he vote "to hold a federal statute forbidding the burning of the American flag unconstitutional"? As Posner writes, "an understanding of free speech that embraces flag burning is exceedingly unoriginalist. It is the product of freewheeling Supreme Court decisions within the last century."

Here's an op-ed by Erwin Chemerinsky titled "Justice Scalia: Why he's a bad influence" which starts "Justice Antonin Scalia is setting a terrible example for young lawyers. Ignore, for now, his jurisprudence, his famously strict originalism; it's his tone that's the problem." Other parts include "Such mockery does not amount to a legal argument; it's nothing more than an attack on the author's writing technique. A litigator who compared an opponent's brief to a fortune cookie likely would be, and should be, sanctioned by the court." and "Scalia's browbeating is childish, even vain; like a harshly negative book critic, he revels in his own turns of phrase. And his attitude, just like his legal theory, affects the profession as a whole."

I feel more well-informed by both pieces.
He really does need to back up that second assertion.
Oh, I see. I thought I was missing something. That was lame of him.
What this article ignores is that in practice one must read the source code to understand the function. You can be reasonably certain that the Python function doesn't harm your grandmother that way. I understand that strong functional programming is going to catch type errors at compile time and force constraints on the values in your program but it's quite rare that I've encountered a type error in a Python program.

What I most often encounter are logic errors. We don't write formal specifications for safety-critical code often enough. Your program will still have errors of this kind if you don't think clearly enough before you start writing code.

There are nice things strong, static typing of the functional variety offers certainly -- but it's not a hammer that is particularly useful at cutting boards. There are plenty of cases where a dynamic type system is good enough or even ideal.
Discussion on front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11095841
Navel. Sorry, you did it twice. Bellybuttons, not warships.

Edit: also, I've never heard of Nextdoor. Craigslist w Higher-granularity of location?
The way I see it the firmware has been implemented incorrectly - I don't think there's anything in the spec but shouldn't clearing all values == a reset to default, not a non-booting device?
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, despite the thoughtful responses (with which I also agree in some ways).

Writing should be clear, well-organized, and purposeful. Writing that is not, is not. Quality is self-evident.

It's not particularly worth spending a great deal of time criticizing, but it is an entirely valid point. I took very little of value from reading this in full. I say that as a product designer myself; I agree with some of the points, and a lot of what was said was correct (a lot seemed to be conjecture or just plain wrong as well...), but it just didn't come together to anything meaningful.
The Senate can prevent recess appointments by not recessing.
I tend to agree with you that "pull request" is the term everyone uses, and that the ship has sailed. Even when using GitLab, most people I know still use that term anyway... just like how in the southern U.S., every soda is called "Coke" even if it's a Pepsi.

That being said, you can't POSSIBLY be serious that this one piece of nomenclature drove the decision between GitLab Enterprise and GitHub Enterprise. The latter costs roughly 5 times more than the former! Either this is unbridled hyperbole... or else money is no object at your company, and it's weird that you were evaluating GitLab in the first place.
This way one of my takeaways from Curry Howard isomorphism.
> So if you apply for a position at Google and they offer you a job that suits your skill set and background you should not take the job because Google potentially has a list of thousands of people they could replace you with? wat?

Yes, exactly. If it is trivially easy to find thousands of people with your skill set and background, there is something wrong with that skill set and background. You will need to work on it, because these things are an accident waiting to happen.

> a) The company is a sweatshop and burns through junior developers like tissue paper to flame.

Not really. They have a real problem and they cannot readily find someone to solve it. And then you come along. Now the problem may finally get solved. This is how it best works. If not, there is something wrong with the entire situation.

> b) The work you will be doing will be the worst sort of low skill crap work that no one with a half way decent resume and experience wants to do.

If you do not have a pretty much unique selling proposition, you will indeed compete at the bottom of the market. You need the ability to solve a particular type of non-trivial problems and you must preferably have been specializing for years in doing that. People in your field understand what the value proposition is, and there is no need to endlessly debate this with them first.

Google do not use the technology in which I specialize. One day they may, but at the moment, they don't. So, I would never run into them, when occasionally looking for a project (once every 3 - 5 years). The day that Google starts using this technology, they could indeed try to ask me for an interview, but why would I prefer them to the established players? Am I replaceable? Yes, but Google are even more replaceable. I will have done fine for years, before they decided to enter the field too. Who exactly is the one that is replaceable here?
Analysts believe a minimum of 4,000 people accidentally voted for Pat Robertson (in a heavily Jewish, not heavily conservative area, the anti-Semite Robertson got far more votes than polls or expectations). 10,000 ballots were invalidated from double-punching Gore and Robertson. It was a major UI failure.
Weekend musings and initial reflections on SaaStr Annual 2016
They are unaccountable to the political process and appointed for lifetime terms.
I will never forge his episode about warfare technology. He described a thousand warriors coming down a hill with another thousand enemy coming down another hill. He was standing in that valley for the scene.

The new technology was broadswords. Each side hacked the other side into pieces. And then to demonstrate that, he had a side of beef (?) hanging and he hacked it with a broadsword. I will never get that image out of my mind.
I appreciate that there is probably more substance to his beliefs than what is presented here, but reading these preposterous claims without any support made this a really irritating interview to read.
OT: VSO or self hosted? How's that working out for you? I can't use VSO at $EMPLOYER due to BlueCoat doing something very odd to the credentials in the HTTPS request - haven't able to track that down. Note that it also breaks BitBucket - 401/403 no matter what the password is.
I think pjlegato switched to Clojure, where you get pretty much everything you mentioned there too. At least looking at his github commits.
> if they do not reject, their Republican base will revolt and not vote in the upcoming election.

The upcoming election is a general election; they need to appeal to more than their base. In the past year the Republicans in Congress have been trying to shed their obstructionist, irresponsible reputation as the party that shuts down government, holds the solvency of the U.S. hostage, etc.
Unfortunately git is to powerful to handle its UX like that. Users have to understand the model behind it. If you have ever tried to work with teammates, who did not fully get yet how git works, you know what world of pain that is. They have to think like git works, you cannot abstract this away into their understanding of SCM.
POSIX `time` returns time_t. Not sure what `time` function would return a pointer?
But in your description, Facebook is simply the mediating variable, not the cause -- the cause is the unpleasantness generated by your family.
You first push your changes to your branch (on a fork likely) and _then_ create a request for original project to pull from your fork/branch.
Journalism doesn't work like people seem to think it does, and hasn't for a long, long time - if it ever did. Journalists don't research. Most media outlets just get press releases in, or articles from AP, Reuters and other aggregators, and they paraphrase.

This is why you see the same errors across the grid. It's not that they've all done the same poor research - it's that they have done no research, and have simply rehashed for their audience. They outsource their thinking too.

Then of course you have outlets eating each others' messes, and regurgitating "facts" that copy-editors ("journalists") put in to garner appeal to their audience, and the feedback cycle distorts as it goes.

This is how you end up with shit like the "piano man" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Grassl), and much, much worse.
I hate Java.

There is ONE exception, when I decided to mod the game Starsector, setting up the project, and compiling and running while using IntelliJ is far easier than any other Java project I ever had, also no XML anywhere, it so wonderful it ALMOST made me like Java.