skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The explanation of the origin of major scale in the article is pure voodoo. Minor third is not a simple fraction - is that the reason to exclude it from the scale? How do you explain minor scale then? Maybe it should be excluded, too?

Here're my thoughts on the subject.

For some reason no one can explain, Western music settled on a system of 12 tones with equal temperament, This system emerged as a result of long evolution of Western music, and experimentally proven to be very rich in possibilities.

Scales used in Western music (of which jazz is a part of) are built on two simple principles: 1) interval between adjacent notes of the scale is either tone or semitone 2) there's no two semitones in a row.

It's easy to check that all scales that satisfy these 2 rules are:

major scale and its modes (7-note scales; 7 modes)

melodic minor scale and its modes (7-note scales; 7 modes)

diminished scale and its modes (8-note scales; 2 modes)

whole-tone scale (6-note scale, single mode).

(Whole tone scale is not used very often, except by T.Monk)

But even after we "explain" scales, we need to figure out how to use them, what their role is, what the properties of each mode are. There's no hard science behind this, the properties just "emerge", and you have to experience them - theorizing is not of much help, math formulas don't explain anything, just lead to confusion.

In short: you have to play AND think; thinking alone won't help. It's an experimental subject.

Edit: forgot to say: scale is a very useful notion, but in some contexts, it's more convenient to think in terms of triads and interpolation. I know this all sounds hand-wavy, and it is! Unfortunately, without piano, it's impossible to to illustrate what it all means. The subject doesn't easily lend itself to verbalization.
I think Microsoft should take some initiatives to help bring more of these projects into the .NET ecosystem. C# is a fantastic language, and is generally missing out on a lot of this ML stuff.

(Although maybe it conflicts with their desire to profit from it?)
I never brought up inputs and outputs, though, you did, and ultimately I feel it's kind of a strawman of my position.

A brain is made out of billions of neurons, each of which has its own inputs and outputs, and so does each part of each neuron, down to the atomic level. Every physical entity is a kind of IO machine, so in a sense, any physical definition I may give of qualia will reduce to IO patterns. That is, however, missing the bigger picture, which is the structure of the system: how the information flows within it, and how certain conditions modify that flow. That's where the meat is.

In my mind, consciousness and qualia are structural properties. When experiencing a qualia, the information flows in a particular way in your brain, like a mode of operation, and that's what the qualia is.

I think of it this way: you experience "anger" when your brain is put in an "anger mode", which taints everything it sees or does -- anger is not an "input" or an "output", it is a "mode" that your whole brain is in. It makes you "different", although not in a way that makes you lose your sense of self (well, usually). And in a lesser way, when you see red, your brain enters a "red mode", when you eat nougat it is put in a "nougat mode", and when you think about red or nougat your brain also enters a "recall" version of red or nougat mode that has similar properties.

So what happens is that your brain can enter billions of subtly different "modes" that correspond to different stimuli (real or not). Each of these "modes" makes you think a bit differently, in a way that's adapted to the stimuli you received. These are the "experiences" it can have: they are not inputs or outputs, they are ways of thinking, triggered by stimuli or memories or sometimes random noise.

I guess I would say a qualia is a bit like a protein fold, it's a functional reconfiguration.
Not to mention security, backups, upgrading all the software used, supporting new technologies as they're made avail, sdks across many platforms, etc. the $5/mo hides the true costs of development and ops
You can use Time Machine to automatically back up your MacBook to the Time Capsule, and as .../MobileSync/Backup/ will obviously be a part of that backup, your iPod backups will come along for the ride as well.
It's arguable that people are actually choosing fewer hours by working part time.

Part time work has shot up as a percentage of all work. In Australia it has gone from 1/10 to 1/4 of work from 1966 to 2007. Most other countries are similar. AU numbers in the link.

http://www.pc.gov.au/research/supporting/part-time-employmen...

Before people point out that people would actually like to work more it's worth quoting the link that this goes both ways:

"Since the early 1990s, 20-25 per cent of female part time workers and 30-35 per cent of male part time workers have indicated a preference to work more hours. At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that two full time workers want to move to part time work for every part time worker who wants to move to full time work."
> 1. Why do we like pieces when played forward but not backward or inverted?

Why do we like text when read forward, but not backward or inverted?

There are, of course, works that are palindromic or otherwise written to be read/heard backwards, but most of the time that kind of global transformation tends to ruin the "spelling"/"narrative".

> 2. Why do certain sounds evoke certain emotions?

Just like text, evoking emotions needs some sort of narrative. A story isn't a single fact or statement (or a single sound); it's about how those facts (or sounds) flow or change.

In music you might hear a brief bit of new melody that foreshadows something big later in the song. A clear rhythm or melody might be repeated to get the listener to follow along only to have it cut short at a key moment to deny the obvious resolution (similar to a melodrama that suddenly reveals a new twist in the plot as a cliffhanger).

It's the story you tell that matters, and it takes a skilled composer to put sounds together to make a song emotionally evocative. The song that is mostly a 16 bar loop probably sounds boring (but not always!), while the song that introduces the same 16 bars and then plays with variations of it to create an initial conflict, rising action, and a climax is probably a lot more interesting. An obvious example might be Mozart playing Salieri's march in Amadeus[1]. It's not just that he embellished the simple march; Mozart adds a lot of variations that culminate at a comic ending.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5n0pkNpDWY
I think that entire conversation has been spoiled by the organized abrahamic religions. More often than not when we say "religious" or "believe in god" we are referring to the concepts described by these religions in overly vague and at the same time overly specific terms. Do I believe that wine turns into Jesus blood, humans lived with dinosaurs, some guy talked to god who appeared as a burning bush or anything like that? Hell no! To me those stories are en par with fairy tales and all somewhere on the spectrum between opposing things we know as a fact and things that are so incredibly unlikely that they aren't any more worth thinking about than anything I might just make up or read in a sci-fi novel. In fact I think that it's scary that there are people who actually believe that those things are true. So in almost all conversations I will identify myself as a vehement atheist.

At the same time I have no idea if there aren't incredibly powerful beings somewhere that have the power to create whole universes that many would describe as gods. I also don't exclude the possibility that the universe is sentient or maybe even mankind or the entire earth is a sentient organism of some kind. Maybe the entire universe is a giant computer or simulation run by some more advanced beings. If those things were true they probably could be compared to religions believes. However, I have trouble calling myself agnostic. I think that that theoretically would make me agnostic. However, I have a hard time calling myself that because I am so repulsed by the naive fairy tales commonly associated with religion.

At the same time I also don't think it's worth devoting much effort to thinking about these things, since they are questions that tend to make no predictions that we can proof or disproof. I find it disturbing that society approves so much of asking childish questions like "where do we come from?", "where will we go?", etc. It's obviously just a mental rabbit hole and there are no real answers to these questions and anyone who claims to have answers to these is a liar or a fool. Unfortunately the big religions claim to have these answers. To me that makes any nuanced discussion about "religion" almost impossible with most people including myself, since I first and foremost want to distance myself from fairy tales.

Edit: Typo "there" -> "they" + clarification.
When we have discordant sound (e.g. a collection of plucked strings where the fundamental frequency ratios are not in nice simple ratios, so that none of the overtones align), there’s a great deal of complexity to the sound, and you get interference patterns between them, similar to moiré patterns in images.

This causes “musical tension”.

Some types of discord are mild, and cause a bit of mild annoyance or “sadness” in the sound. Other types are aggressive and cause serious anxiety.

When you return most of the sounds to be in harmony, that tension is relieved. This causes a more positive emotional response. The greater the former tension, the more satisfying the release.

Imagine you’re in a crowd of applauding people, each clapping at a different rate, so that the sound is like a cacophony. Your brain can’t make out any pattern except a wave of sound. Now imagine the people start clapping in rhythmic unison, with some kind of structure. Suddenly your brain can make sense of the pattern.
I remember doing AI work in 2005-2007 (genetic programming and similar things) and one of the hardest thing back then was that good quality training data sets were really hard to come by. I can second the idea that data makes a huge difference, and there's tons of it today.
This is because our impotent tech elite have failed to even solve the first issue they've organized to solve, housing!

We should ask for new elites, it's always been ok to ask for new elites when they've failed. They literally installed a foreign elite everywhere they went who did not know the local population and always brought negative externalities with them.

The tech elite managed a feat that not even the financial elite have, they managed to get the locals to hate them everywhere they've moved in!
I just use emacs + org mode -> org-publish to generate my site [1] from org-mode with some customizations; it's been the most flexible and fun way to build a site I've had across all my attempts so far, particularly given that I can go meta and also publish the htmlized raw org files at the same time [2].

[1] Publishing config: http://explog.in/config.html
[2] Org Source: http://explog.in/config.org.html
Those qualities aren't universal in people and as such what you are describing is more of a study of culture than musical theory. You would probably enjoy a music appreciation course, and possibly one taught by a philosophical professor.
>there is a tension between Greenwald's monolithic indictment of WaPost and the ideal of journalistic integrity, where an individual journalist can freely publish an informed opinion without outside influence, including from the paper hierarchy.

You think so? I disagree - I don't see such a problem with Greenwald's indictment of the post. The editorial column was written by the Post's editorial board--not an individual journalist as you wrote.
Chrome is the most used web browser
As you point out, she doesn't know she is ill; you (and we as a society) have the clarity to recognize it and help.

I have dealt with a similar situation involving a family member. I later regretted not being proactive in intervening before it was too late. Years went by, and plenty of situations arose that could have lead to a serious intervention. Instead, nothing happened. In one instance, criminal charges were pending, but somehow they were dropped.

Of course, there must be a very high bar against forced institutionalization; we don't want to return to the bad old days when people were locked up for all sorts of unjustifiable reasons.
It works well. I can sight read piano well. I do thus because the notation really does make sense; it's very dense, and I can read ahead many measures at a time.

This guy hasn't even figured out what's different between major send minor, or why the equal tempered system is used on keyboard instruments.
iTunes was beautiful up to 10.7. Then they removed the column browser, disabled the Library view, and broke USB sync. I still haven't upgraded, and I'm desperate for another company to step in.
You can't read ahead easily with it. Totally useless.
That's not how inflation works. Gains in productivity (e.g. better technology) aren't wiped out by changes in the nominal value of currency.

Rather, gains in productivity could be countered by increases in the standard of living. But, since the first world standard of living has been "good enough" since the 1950s, the increases in productivity have instead fed the ever-increasing wealth divide in first world nations.
Calling David Graeber a quack is to miss the mark entirely. He's an accomplished author and anthropologist with a critically acclaimed book on the history of debt and economic systems.

He calls those jobs bullshit jobs because he has a (historically informed) vision of an economy that works better without them. He rags on people who write marketing copy, for example, because their job is basically to sell something you otherwise wouldn't buy. It could be argued that, in a more efficient economy, people wouldn't be selling things people don't want to buy. Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit.

It's true that he thinks very differently from you, but that doesn't make him a quack.
When I founded OpenDomain, I wanted to create my own project where I "paid it forward".

If I sold a domain, I felt I would be selling out the original idea.

I know google can afford it - but I did not know it was Google when the broker called me. If i sold it to a squatter, then we would not have the service of Schema.org today
Making account was very smooth and quick. Just username/password/email and Click.. auto login... and you are back to work.
> It completely obscures the relationship between the pitches, though.

It doesn't actually obscure the relationship between the notes -- it makes them clearer. For example, I see the notes C, E, and G on some sheet music, maybe with some accidentals on some of those notes. I know that I'm therefore supposed to play a C triad. Now, there are multiple kinds of triads, but once I know I'm supposed to play a triad, it's easy to use context to pick out which one I need (major, minor, diminished, augmented -- usually one of the first two). If I were supposed to play a C# major triad, though, and the written notes were (C#-F-G#) as opposed to what they should be (C#-E#-G#) then that's confusing because it looks like I should be playing an arpeggiated sus4 of some kind. So the written nature of scales on the staff engenders an understanding of the relationship between the notes. Basically we write things the way we do so that the people reading the music can more efficiently pattern-match.

> C major is identical to A minor, and I don’t understand why we need both.

They're not identical. C major and A minor have the same notes in their respective scales. But we say that a piece is in the key of C major when it resolves to the a C major chord at the end, and we say a piece is in the key of A minor when it resolves to an A minor chord at the end -- an important concept for reasoning about how a piece is supposed to be performed.

> C minor: C D D# F G G# A# C

Eb, Ab, and Bb, not D#, G#, and A#.

> This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever.

It's really not. Keep practicing. It makes sense, I promise.

I hear a lot of people -- usually people who have not been studying music for very long -- insist that the system would be more logical if there were no accidentals and there were 12 notes with distinct names and the staff had a bunch more lines on it. I've never bought it. The notation of music isn't arbitrary, it's informed by experience and it works.
Sounds like...
And is it? ;)

In terminal run vimtutor. The sound will change.

Does anyone know of a similar tutor for sheet music?
Previous related article (tl;dr: many of these are "unsecured" deliberately):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12523455

It might just be my luck, but the first 4 I got were completely empty.
Nobody's mentioned Hexo yet (edit: here), so I will. A while back I reviewed the top 5-6 Node-based SSGs and hexo seemed like the best tradeoff between simple and flexible.

https://hexo.io/

I also wrote up all the stuff I learned migrating and existing Wordpress blog to static:

http://aphall.com/2016/01/migrating-wordpress-to-static/
Since we're shameless pluggin', I have a Jekyll plugin that will display an image gallery from a folder (with a single liquid tag).

https://github.com/callmeed/jekyll-image-set
Grand parent is saying he wants an article that covers the "why does music sound good" part of music theory, something I want too. I think most people have a basic grasp of notes, scales and that a middle C is air oscillating at 440 cycles per second. How can you make something sound good is the interesting part of music theory for me and I still haven't found a good intro to it!
I think it is useful.
I would say if I had to choose between an electric scooter and an electric bike for _commuting_ I'd choose the electric scooter. It's more comfortable, can attain higher speeds and can also have a cargo basket (due to scooter weight, the basket doesn't upset the balance as much) and can carry a passenger too.

Another convenience in the form factor, to add, stopping and starting do not involve dismounting and remounting, just leg down, leg back up --this means fewer riders running lights or stop signs.

So, if something two wheeled would take over, I'd say the electric scooter rather than the electric bicycle. Now, if you are looking to get a workout during your commute, ok, a pedal bike is better, you have not choice but to pedal.
Rogaway has some concerning things to say about IBE here:

http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf

It'd be a tangent, except that Milagro proposes to alter the TLS handshake to accommodate their scheme.
I am a long time WordPress user. I tried a few but didn't like them much. WordPress is the nice middle point of internet publishing. A well designed web, desktop, and mobile interface, themes, plugins, and commenting system. Cost of hosting is a little prohibitive but it works pretty well.

I am currently trying out Hexo which seem to work just time too.
Biggest problem with bike commuting is that bikes don't balance when stopped like cars do. This means you either have to idly stand around at traffic lights (which pedestrians never do, they just go for it), or you have to illegally run the light (which is what everyone except cars do, but you can still get a ticket for it).

Of course, trikes are goofy and don't corner, so there is no real solution here except bike paths designed like interstate highways. One can dream.
The servers on this list allow anonymous logins, which is not the same as being unsecured.
That's generally how it goes with things that cost money
This is cool. When do you plan to have paid plans available?

I'm working on some Jekyll landing pages and I need form options for people.
Not all of them are deliberate.
Indeed. Some more insight is here: http://news.softpedia.com/news/nearly-800-000-ftp-servers-ac...
I believe you're referring to general delivery, known in the rest of the world as poste restante. (Fixed addresses are a fairly modern invention; poste restante used to be the norm before individually delivered mail became the norm.)
There are no conflicts. The latest strategy across the board is to give away everything for free and then run it on the cloud. In that sense microsoft has a lot to gain actually by offering a solution in .net and then making it dead simple to deploy to azure.

Software and hardware are now a commodity and all the big players know it. So the only way to make money is to add value some other way like making it dead simple to deploy tensor flow graphs in gce.
> Nobody's mentioned Hexo yet

Hexo is #2 in the list in the article...?
The big one for Git is Overcommit[1]. The tools that it runs depend on the language, though. Some are community-driven[2], while others are baked into the language.[3]

[1]: https://github.com/brigade/overcommit

[2]: E.g., flake8 for Python: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flake8

[3]: E.g., gofmt for Go: https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/
> Interestingly this can be "anti-DRY"

Which is funny, because as originally coined, it is exactly "DRY".

"Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_repeat_yourself
https://branchable.com/
I use https://nearlyfreespeech.net. Pretty cheap and I leverage modrewrite rules quite a bit (which is why say github pages won't work for me).
Are smartphones really progress? Is true innovation on the wane?
> If your friend prays, obviously they believe there's a reason to do so. The same as if they took vitamin supplements.

Maybe so. Do you know what that reason is? Are you confident in that knowledge? Would you be willing to contradict my friend if he said otherwise?

> But who are we to use the correct terminology to ourselves? Thinking beings. What's it to you?

How is correctness determined? If we are discussing what other people believe, we are not in a position to define it for them. We can do all sorts of other kinds of analysis: understanding how the specific beliefs affect the believer's actions; understanding the impact of those actions on the world; understanding the way those beliefs intersect with and influence other beliefs.

But it is not up to us to assign belief systems to others, even if what we perceive about their beliefs or their actions doesn't conform to our idea of how beliefs work.
Emma Jung and her impossible husband
Fixed up GPU work

I haven't thought about using golang to feed data to a GTX 1080 or similar, but before i do that, i'd like some info on the above, and a quick google shows that there may not be a complete wrapper for the Cuda Driver or Runtime API's like pyCuda.
Another one: https://ikiwiki.info/
Not exactly - your summary misses a few of the points they brought up on how e-bikes make fair replacements for cars in a lot of commuting situations. The article leads off with how the excessive commute made an employee more irritable until he switched to using an e-bike, then how a growing number of Dutchmen are switching to e-bikes and how a growing number of companies are helping with the purchase of e-bikes.

The entire thing is pretty much exactly as the title is asking, though perhaps a little less glorious than "revolutionizing", and more just talking about the practical concerns of more people using e-bikes and how governments are responding.

To weigh in, I think it's a cool initiative with a lot of questions to consider, since I'd largely agree that an electric vehicle is probably a hazard to those with non-electric transportation. Though, at least in the US, I can't imagine normal traffic responding well to the inclusion of e-bikes, even if it would solve transportation needs for a lot of people. I am curious how the insurance looks for it as many years back (8ish maybe?) I looked into getting an e-bike but the insurance increase was prohibitively much.