skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technology isn't what makes music modern. The points raised in the article go much, much deeper than that. This makes me think of the composer Conlon Nancarrow, who mostly composed for player piano. He was often credited as being a "father of electronic music", which baffled him. As far as he was concerned, he'd never composed a single note for an electronic music. But his music was the earliest attempt at seriously exploiting the ability of machines to play things humans could not play.

But synths and sequencers? They're not "modern". I find it hard to imagine music much more primitive than the boring wub-wub-wub of dubstep or the endless 4/4 oontz of Eurodance.

Serialization and 12-tone, for all their shortcomings, represented serious questioning of how notes should be organized at all. I think they failed because they dehumanized, and humanity is at the heart of music. A conscious disregard for consonance/dissonance isn't the same as choosing the balance of consonance/dissonance. They were interesting intellectual exercises, but as a musician, I think they deserved to die. They're the music of the past now.

Most of the real experimentalism in music I hear these days (and I have some bias here) is in the noise and free improvisation fields. I'm biased because I also play free improvisation. But undermining rhythm and harmony, and focusing on tonal evolution - that's interesting and daring. And that music is done with some seriously analog approach, not computers. Computers are generally very restrictive (although there are exceptions - the people doing million-note sequences are fascinating noise experimenters). One of the best modern music performances I've ever heard was an improvisation of one percussionist, who spent several minutes carefully wadding a piece of cellophane. It was complex, dynamic, exciting, and above all, musical - but it worked by tossing aside virtually every musical convention except "be interesting".
Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950)
Wherein lay the bias that they're trying to capture. Of course, for this question even that nuance isn't caught.
Unfortunately your common sense is in the minority of opinion here. HN is plagued by overeager engineers who endlessly discuss the how without addressing the much more important why.

Why bother having a pet at all if you're not going to personally care for it?
That's a good way to make cats fat and eventually diabetic. On top of free feeding alone causing obesity in a lot of cats, "weight control" cat food is the worst stuff, it's mostly grains (carbs) which a cat -- an obligate carnivore -- doesn't need in its diet at all.
I can't speak for anyone else, but with the cat I used to have, that would've resulted in an empty cat feeder and a very sick cat within an evening. I had to hide absolutely anything even vaguely edible, especially (bizarrely) bread, which the cat adored and which caused it terrible diarrhoea... Not all cats are created equal!
http://howmuchsugar.in

Nice little sugar game for children based on Open Food Facts (http://world.openfoodfacts.org, http://android.openfoodfacts.org and http://ios.openfoodfacts.org )
I'm curious where you're experiencing so much self-checkout. The vast majority of stores I go to have, at most, a single self-checkout lane.

Personally, I think if Amazon Go can follow through on its promise we'll see a drastic reduction in retail employment. The problem with existing self-checkout systems is that they're incredibly clunky and frequently require staff support/intervention. I've literally never had a successful self-checkout where everything worked properly.
> a 10MHz transducer, you will for ex drive it with a 80MHz numeric signal

Nope, they basically use a series of pulses at 10 MHz and rely on the frequency response of the transducer to turn it into a nice wave packet.

Source (look at pulseShape):

http://www.ultrasonix.com/wikisonix/index.php/Texo_Parameter...
A new interview podcast that steps inside the minds of today's brightest. It's fascinating and the host is an incredibly successful entrepreneur.

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-946426071
> a sign that you just aren't very good.

Another attack on users, this time pretty direct. I won't discuss the other points as it's again just shifting blame. The reality is that with Desktop Linux there's nobody taking responsibility that things actually work.
I was agreeing until this point:

> There were no mainstream dynamic programming tools more powerful than awk when NeXT was launched

Maybe I'm missing something, but:

1950s: Lisp and Fortran

1972: Prolog

1977: Bourne shell and Icon

1978: C shell

1979: REXX

1980: Smalltalk-80 (on Macs, even!)

1983: Korn shell

1983: C++

1987: Perl 1.0

1988: Modula-3, and NeXT computer is launched
No. Pretty much the entire big island is a cattle ranch. However beef is expensive in Hawaii because due to state law, cattle must be sent out of state to the abbatoir before it hits your plate. Ranching on Maui probably seeks to take advantage of the infrastructure already available because of operations on the big island.
I've used it. I wasn't super impressed with the features around grouping accounts so that you can match a group with a feature toggle. As I recall, it was mostly regexes, rather then a long running group system. I'm guessing a big infusion of money will help with this.
> Kudos to Quinn for never giving up.

Kudos to the cat for never giving up. My cat is clever and stubborn but this cat is downright devious.
I think different tasks are (more) suitable to different interfaces.

CLIs are great when the space of actions you could perform is large (to nigh uncountable), but the range of subjects is small (the file paths, etc are known). Since you know the subjects, a programming language like `sh` is the most concise way to express a complex action.

GUIs are better in the exact opposite case: when you have a constrained set of actions to perform, but a large number of subjects they may be performed on. In that case, the problem isn't expressing the action, it's picking which subjects to act on (pick these lines to commit, oh except let me edit that one, put that one aside, ok back to the commit i'm staging...).

Many complex tools like VCSes contain both kinds of situations. I think sometimes a CLI is more appropriate, and sometimes a GUI is, depending on the context. IMO a fully mature VCS should make it as easy to invoke a gui for complex tasks as it is to do them from the command line.
Not really to the article's point at all, but when I think of "the music of the future", I think of the extended funk experiments of the 1970s. 40 years ago, Miles Davis' band sounded like music from 40 years in the future. It still sounds like music from 40 years in the future. And he wasn't alone... Parliament/Funkadelic, Fela Kuti, and others were working with these deep, deep funk grooves that ran forever and sounded completely timeless - the most primitive drums and percussion sharing equal billing with wah-inflected guitars and synthesizers. It was and is amazing music.
The fact that you're downvoted for common sense is alarming.

HN is supposed to be a place for smart people.
Glasgow Airport Has a Robot That Sings Christmas Carols to Travelers
Nothing, if you're in a perfect waterfall environment. But requirements are never perfectly frozen, or even perfectly clear. You always run into things where you have to go back and find out what they really wanted. And the requirements always change to some degree.

And being able to resolve issues faster, and respond faster to changes, is valuable to the business.
I use both
Although I'm quite familiar with git on the command line, I'm using git mostly through magit[1] for Emacs. It's a very functional and discoverable user interface.

[1]: https://magit.vc/
Show HN: Screen-info, native node module to query OS for displays info
Actually there are plenty! Search for 'multi laptop charger' or 'universal' or keywords that imply interchangeability. Like this randomly picked unit [1], they typically come with a voltage selector and a variety of plugs that can be switched out to fit a particular socket.

Potential problems with these devices are manyfold. They won't be specialized to deliver a particular amperage [2]; the voltage selector means additional moving parts that can fail, and mainstream brands usually don't play in this space, so the quality can run the gamut from decent to sketchy to hazardous.

[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6RP37N67... [2] http://lifehacker.com/pay-attention-to-charger-amperage-to-j...
I don't think most state income taxes are that burdensome. My state's is 3%, so on a $100,000 salary not considering any deductions, the difference would only be $3,000 between my state and a non-income tax state. If you were making $200,000, it would still only be $6,000. Neither amount is peanuts, I realize, but it's not the difference between good and meh either.
Kotlin 1.1-M04 is here
Interesting ideas wrapped up in painfully obfuscated academic references (obviously not intended for this audience).

THE FOURTH DEVELOPMENT [of new music], which is in many ways the most interesting, [is] namely the replacement of tones by sounds, and musical by acoustical hearing. Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer and their immediate successors awoke composers and audiences to the many new sounds, some of them produced electronically, that could enter the space of music without destroying its intrinsic order. These experiments are not what I have in mind when referring to the replacement of tones by sounds and musical by acoustical hearing. I am thinking of a more general transition, from Tonkunst to Klangkunst, to use the German expressions – a transition of deep philosophical significance, between two ways of hearing, and two responses to what is heard.

The author is arguing that we've moved from lyrical experimentation with tones, to serialization (complete lyrical structure of tones, probably commonly known as musical theory), and now to the avant garde of replacing tones (chords, progressions, structure) with recorded/processed sounds. Sounds (presumably) lack the melodic/harmonic qualities such as notes played together in a classical scale or progression.

This leads to: The experience of ‘next,’ and the inevitability of the next, has been chased away. In a concert devoted to music of this kind the audience can know that the piece is ended only because the performers are putting down their instruments.

Naturally we can fill in the blanks if we hear 75% of a chord progression, but with sounds, we have no idea what is coming next. They're disjointed.

I'm not sure what the author's conclusion is, but this seems to be as close to a summary as he gives: It seems to me that, if there is, now, to be a music of the future it will, in that way, belong with the music of the past.

Personally, if I hear a bunch of sounds that my brain can't connect together, and that don't please me or move me, I would have trouble calling that acoustical experience "music".
Alternatively, send a probe that generates LOX and liquid methane from water ice and CO2 on Mars using solar power to create the fuel needed for ascent.
By that logic, no company would be the source of any original development, because that means that they are the last stop in the liability chain. Free software could, therefore, be treated the same as in-house developed software.
Are Robots the “New Entrepreneur” like this piece is arguing?
What I found (I wrote a pretty large open source project and receive hundreds of emails every day about it) is that most people are only willing to contribute to open source to the extent that it scratches their itch. They feel that their obligation ends as soon as the code is written, and the maintenance of their code falls on you.

So from a maintainer perspective, you have to act like people's contributions are your contributions. You have to evaluate the code as if you have to maintain it later, you have to understand the circumstances surrounding it, etc. You have to be aware of everyone's concerns at the same time and make sure you don't end up messing up other people's use cases without good reason. And more often than not PRs reflect a "selfishness" of sorts wherein it solves their problem but breaks the general case.

In four separate occasions, people tried to take control of my github organization and npm repos by complaining to github and npm support, because they disagreed with the trajectory of the project. Some people seem to have no respect for OSS.
I agree with every word of this article and after 25yrs experience as a developer I have all similar experiences. Being a computer programmer is about the same as being a 'writer' (book author), and no one expects an author to sit with other authors in a special building to be able to write. With modern technology, and the wastefulness of time and energy spent commuting, there is just no longer any reason for a programmer to not be able to work remote. I mean even if all you are considering is gasoline use and pollution savings, even that alone is enough of a reason for society to say let developers work at home. There's just no downside to it.

I have been working at home for the past year, and I don't think there's any way i'd ever accept another non-remote job again. In any large city you're gonna be sitting in traffic a total of 10hrs a week. That's insanity. That's well over one full work day. With a web-cam you can still have face to face meetings. The only thing that I find missing occasionally is the use of a whiteboard, but that is a very minor thing. Having a whiteboard is not a good trade-off for 10hrs spent in traffic. Not even close. Of course in 10yrs VR will totally make it irrelevant where someone's physical location is, but i think even the basic webcams we have today already does as well.
Sorry, minced my words there. Of course there's no such thing as an illegal refugee.
The report also comes out against UBI.
Typically, the advice given in such contexts is to disclose concerns to your lawyer in the context of seeking legal advice. In the US (though this differs in some other countries) this makes it "attorney-client privileged" and thus protected from most kinds of legal discovery.

So the company is not saying, "Don't raise concerns about illegality." They're saying, "Don't raise them to your manager, but instead to the legal team."

Large companies tend to set up internal processes for such complaints to ensure that they go to the right people (i.e. your manager is probably not the right person anyway) and that they remain legally privileged when possible.

Based on the news reports (and not the content of the suit), it seems to me the filer is not aware of what is common (and frankly not worrisome) behavior at large companies. People get fired for leaking product details; legal discussions should happen with lawyers; companies commonly have contracts prohibiting discussion of wages but those contracts are usually unenforceable because in the US labor relations regulations actually protect such actions from retribution.
Instead of depending on the charity of others, why not seek financial independence?

As a (presumably) well-paid tech worker, it's really very achievable. Most engineers could do it in under a decade if they tried.
Sketch to Code – Uber App in less than 90 seconds
Goldman Sachs Will Pay $120M to Settle Benchmark Manipulation Case
Beef is very plentiful on Hawaii - there is a large amount of history about the paniolos, basically cattle ranchers on the Big Island and Maui. Parker Ranch, on the big island, is a huge supplier of beef. http://parkerranch.com/
Postgres.app 2.0
Obviously it won't be played on top 40 radio stations, but he is certainly still played on the radio. Besides that aren't we past radio being a critical data point?

His music is on spotify, itunes, youtube, etc with hundreds of millions of listens
What a lot of GM proponents seemingly don't want to admit is that the loop can also be broken when people repeatedly don't reach their goals despite putting in more effort than people who do reach those same goals. I'm not sure conventional educational methods and institutions have a method or mechanism to respond constructively to that situation.
Apply this argument in 1800 and what do you get?
The martian atmosphere does have the benefit of having created much less abrasive dust over the years. Moon dust causes much more wear to moving parts. Mars also has accessible carbon, which the moon does not. The martian atmosphere can supply plants with the CO2 they need, enabling agriculture.
Raymond Chen is the tech writer who has influenced me the most. His blog has really helped me understand how large long-running software projects work (or at least, how they work at Microsoft), and how apparently strange features can come into existence in a sensible way.

One interesting evolution over time is how Windows moved from basically trusting all applications (which they had to do in Windows 3.X anyway, as any badly behaving app could crash the whole system) to treating applications as bad actors.
Dissenting opinion: I owned a Super Feeder before upgrading to the feeder pictured in the original story. My cat was able to produce food from the super feeder continuously, just by lightly smacking the tall column on the top. Perhaps the kibble my cat eats is below the minimum supported size?

The new PetSafe feeder is better: it will produce a little food when kicked, but it will only drop out a bit of the next meal from the top of the ramp; in contrast, the super feeder could drain its entire reservoir through continual knocking. I also find the PetSafe a better machine in other regards (battery operated, much larger reservoir, easier to program a serving by volume).

I do think the super feeder is more hackable though, so if you're looking to do metalwork maybe it's the better fit.
Magic plain text syntax is the worst.
The top of a refrigerator is an easily accessible location for a feline.

Additionally, putting any expensive gadget up high above a hard surface is a recipe for disaster.
Other than the bug reproduction instructions it seems like you could train a piece of code to convert requests to a format like this using machine learning. It could save someone from a lot of stress!
(I agree with your point but even solving it this way would provide benefits).
As I said above, most corporations advise employees to raise legal concerns to lawyers. This makes those concerns privileged and ensures the concerns go to people who can, you know, professionally evaluate them.

So I don't think you can reasonably say this is a case of companies not wanting illegality to be disclosed. It's wanting disclosure to take the proper form.

(Indeed, they have a vested interest in proper handling of illegality to ensure that higher-ups are aware of and can mitigate legal risks.)
It depends.

If you're doing development in a dynamic language, just about anything half-modern is more than sufficient. Faster clock speeds matter more than the number of cores (ie, prefer a 3.5GHz dual-core to a 3GHz quad-core).

If you're compiling large code bases, the more cores/cache you can get, the better. (You won't find "the best" in a laptop.)

A lot of AI development requires GPU hardware. Again, you're looking at a desktop workstation for the best results.

RAM - I say get as much as you can afford. (You can always set up a tmpfs for maximum awesomeness when doing IO-bound operations.)

As for SSDs, the measure you care about is random 4k writes at low queue depths (QD <= 4, typically measured in IOPS as opposed to MB/s).

Also consider the importance of human interface devices. If you're not 100% happy with the keyboard, mouse and screen, it's not worth your trouble. Those things have a far greater impact on your productivity than you might realize.
Same here! Magit is brilliant.

Emacs is a somehow heavyweight frontend for a VCS, though. OTOH it can be considered a GUI client (and comes with a nice built-in editor).
As an owner of multiple cats, and fiance to a licensed veterinary technician, this sounds like good and sensible advice for maintaining a cat's health and well-being. We've caught many health issues by noticing changes in feeding, drinking, poo and litter box use. I don't know why you've gotten so many downvotes.
This is very common for predators as they may go several days between kills. They have to eat when they can as there is no guarantee of when the next meal will be. For that matter, it is not unusual for other animals, including humans. I am certain that an evolutionary drive to eat when food is available is a major factor behind rush obesity rates. We evolved with food shortages.
What a thing to downvote someone over though, posting something useful but with a minor mistake like this (not saying you downvoted him of course)
What about in your un-honest opinion?
I saw this exact same sentiment when Optimizely was announced. Now, I cringe when people say they implemented their own A/B system (similar to what you wrote above). If you're running a business you probably need to spend your development efforts elsewhere.
Destruct Conference – Seattle, WA
What are you talking about? Both NASA's and Musk's plans involve return trips.
We recently moved a big piece of code from custom script loading -> requirejs -> webpack. I really couldn't even tell you how we managed to do it. I think it helped that we had a few goals in mind and we set out to find a better solution.

First, the custom js loading was buggy and inefficient so we moved it to requirejs. Then we wanted everything to be bundled into a single file so we figured out r.js. r.js was really slow and we wanted pre-compiled handlebars templates so we moved over to webpack. Now, we keep accidentally writing es2015 and breaking IE11 so it'll probably be time to introduce babel at some point.

It was really no different than any other major refactoring. Fix up the code and then chisel away the error messages one at a time.
That works great until you end up with: https://www.google.com/search?q=tubcat&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&cli...
I believe Marten supports this
This is called "poisoning the well."
What other art forms dictate events as a function of time? Dance, I suppose. I must be missing something obvious. Maybe spoken word slams.

Most other art forms that are performed over a period of time are not a function of time, but a function of dependency. In a play, you say your line after another actor finishes. Even in a movie it's the same way - it's not locked into an actual tempo until the editing process. Exceptions are the films where the music is written first, like Fantasia (this is a sorely ignored medium; I'd love to see a live-action film scored to a pre-written John Williams or Michael Giacchino score; where they have the freedom to pull in actual musical forms).

It's odd to consider music written like this - where snippets of a piece are written in all sorts of conflicting tempos, and then finally assembled during "editing" into something cohesive (although I guess this is how the Norwegian megapop songwriters kind of do this).

I think there's a lot of opportunity for introducing more tempo-based notation into other artforms. What if an internal pulse were introduced into a play? What else could sheet music be applied to if you kept everything except for the instruments and pitches/melody/harmony? Could you rehearse/perform a debate, a game, a dinner party...?
I have a dual 603e-133 BeBox in working condition (not for sale). About 800 of them were produced. I've had mine since 1997.
Yeah. They've got their very sophisticated musical theory that's tied to their very sophisticated philosophy, and it produces music that is absolute garbage.