skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And, most importantly to me, since it’s the question I can find the least solid information on: why do we take for granted that one note with twice the frequency of another note sounds so similar that we call both notes by the same name? I have a pretty good understanding of other details of music theory, but I’ve never gotten a straight answer on why (and indeed to what extent) octave equivalence exists.

I don't know what the true answer is, but I'd consider the overtones. Vibrating strings produce overtones whose frequencies are multiples of the fundamental. So the first overtone is twice the frequency; an octave higher. When you play that note an octave higher, you're again producing overtones that perfectly line up with the overtones that were produced by the lower octave (if we just ignore the effect of string stiffness). So it's like the same note, only missing the fundamental frequency and odd multiples of it.

This is also why the feedback from a heavily overdriven guitar amp (which emphasizes overtones) can morph the sound to the same note at a higher octave. It's simply a matter of letting the fundamental frequency grow quiet in comparison to the powerful overtones which are further amplified by feedback. I don't know if that can ever produce a different note; I don't think it could. That would require actual change in frequencies.

Different notes, by comparison, produce overtones that only sometimes (or never) line up with the overtones of another note. I'm not sure but I think that also explains why some notes together sound dissonant while other combinations make good chords. If you're trying to transcribe a piece of music by analyzing its spectrogram (which I do because my ear isn't very good), you'll find that the notes that are usually hard to tell apart are the ones that harmonize well and have overtones that line up.
I'm an avid retro-enthusiast and have an extensive collection of computers, going back to the 70's. I've also kept every computer I've ever owned personally.

This year I'll be doing a retro-exhibit at the MQ in Vienna, putting the machines up and getting them running for folks to interact with and explore. The idea is to show people that, in fact - old computers never die, their users do!

The key thing is that, even if you don't have a use for that old computer - there are a hundred million other human beings out there that might, and to some of them it'll be just as useful as it was the day it was taken out of the box and turned on for the first time. Consumerism requires participation in the fallacy that 'old things have no use' - but as we can see from the resurgence in interest around the retro- scene, this is just a lie.

One of the things that has made this so interesting to me is the experience of having to set up each machine, again, with all its requisite tools. As a developer, to me this of course means having assemblers, editors, compilers, and so on - and it is quite a challenge. But once its up and running, there is no greater joy than hacking on an old machine, with no Internet and only the tools in front of me. It has been one of the coping mechanisms I use to get over the pain, suffering and misery of modern software development, where it seems every month some kid has re-invented the tools we old folks discarded years ago, and for it to become fashionable such that there is no choice, to be current, than to keep up with the rat race of compilers and libraries and editors and frameworks, oh my ..

If you've still got an old machine somewhere, do yourself a favour and get it set up again. It can really help with developer funk.
Qanon Book Still in the Amazon Top
Hi, I am Bob, and I fully endorse this message. See also point three in yesterday's meeting minutes.
Of course the optical cable won't transfer 100W of power, so we're back to needing two types of cable (power delivery USB-C and non-power-delivery USB-C).

I guess technically you could make a USB-C cable that transfers signals optically and has high-gauge wire for power, but that sounds unwieldly and expensive.
Apple Music is almost the same cost and has almost everything I want to listen to.
This world is really wild. Some people stay in big lines to buy pair and then resell it. Hope it's really worth it.
Why is China refusing to stop the flow of fentanyl?
And much, if not most if it will not be from Apple hardware IIRC. Apple is obliged to recycle old electronics, not just its own.
Two ways of looking at it. Many see it as a betrayal of Google's ideals. They left in 2010 because there was a breach in gmail originating from government affiliates and consequently endangering customers. Also, it the west this was perceived as a stand against human rights issues in China. So now a reentry looks like they are backtracking from that stance.

On the other hand, as you say, a purely pragmatic view is that it wouldn't make the situation worse if they offer a censored search engine, because that's the only thing (most) Chinese users get now anyway.
If you raise prices until only the amount of people left wiling to buy matches the limited supply of the shoes then sure you've married supply and demand in a textbook sense, but you've removed the fever-pitch generated by everyone clamouring for the shoes at a price point just attainable to a larger audience that will rarely buy them. The pandemonium caused is a driver of the demand.
Outdoor Tech’s Chips ski helmet speakers are a hot mess of security flaws
Market opportunity: A USB-stick-shaped device that, when you plug it into a USB-C port, probes the port and lights up LEDs to show the port's capabilities.

[x] 5 Gbps
[x] 10 Gbps
[ ] 20 Gbps

[ ] Power Delivery

[x] DisplayPort Alternate Mode

And so on.
I've used an official Apple USB-C charger, an Amazon USB-C charger, and my Anker battery pack combined with an official Apple cable, an Amazon cable, and one of those "keyring" USB-C cables to charge the Switch and none of them caused any problems.

But it does seem that there were issues - https://bgr.com/2018/04/06/nintendo-switch-charging-cables-w...
Isn't document.visibilityState a read-only property?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/vi...
Best Advice to a Junior Technical Writer
" If not the NSA, someone else will be collecting it."
Correct, that company in the private sector is called Palantir.
The post is all about the need for a decadent nation to 'refresh' itself. It toys with the idea of 'a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves', before concluding that (sadly) mass death and destruction is the answer.

Maybe that doesn't fill a political scientist's checklist for fascism, but you don't need to look very hard to see some unsettling parallels.
Let's be clear about this: we have no idea how often this issue is occuring. From what we're seeing it could be 0.0001% of Apple Laptops failing within 3 years. This just tends to get a lot of attention. If you buy an Acer laptop it'll probably be 10x more likely to break in 3 years, but no one cares because the Acer brand is crap.

This isn't surprising, the likelihood of breakdown is just 1 aspect of choosing to buy a laptop.

There might be 'great' products out there, but my experience is that Windows is a total turd and so even if you could find hardware as good as Apple's your still torturing yourself everyday. There's loads of reasons to make the choice and a tiny % chance of your laptop breaking isn't going to completely convince people not to buy.
Anything with windows is disqualified? To me is the other way around, anything with mac os x is disqualified, immediatelly with no mercy :)
mindset is, too, a technology

Hrm... Would you consider that independent of technical or causal (scientific) knowledge? Is it values, or more than just that?
"Many Chinese"... where did you get this number from?
>Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price?

Depends on two things:

1) One's priorities. Some might view the aggregate (the country) as bigger thing than individual people. Under this view, the importance of the lives (or worse, the importance of having comfortable lives) for a present generation can be deemed worth it to the freedom, prosperity, etc. of generations to come (and to the continuance of the country itself and its state and way of life etc., which in some cases might be totally obliterated by decline, e.g. Rome).

2) The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things.
ECS as meant here though is definitely imperative/functionally structured. Although there is a lot of familial resemblance with other component approaches.
What were those mines producing?
Is eliminating an entire species a good thing?
Are YC's 120 results out?
Translation:

There are two "modes" of operation of this product: "regular" and "SPOT collections".

In regular operation mode, the system will lose concurrent writes and cannot enforce ACID (the classical one) transactions. Your data is however highly available, eventually consistent and copied around the globe for faster access.

With SPOT collections you get ACID transactions but lose the distribution advantages. That is, the system's properties are akin to what you get with a postgres/mysql cluster.

It is an interesting product, but IMHO you should only go there if/when: your users are truly all over the world, and your system (or that part of it) requires few or no ACID transactions (think twice because this is a big one).

PS: This seems to be a "productified" version of the gun [1] database (not that this is a bad thing!). Am I right?

[1] https://github.com/amark/gun
> If you use 64bit serial, you clearly lose 1 bit.

That's not clear to me at all. A 64-bit signed integer can still contain 64 bits of entropy, it just has to be negative 50% of the time.
Congratulations on providing a serverless solution. How do you think CRDT would fare in a tree-structured data model? We went with OT and server architecture because it seemed more reliable. You can read more about our solution here https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-ri....
On my system (Dell XPS running Windows) I have to manually approve new Thunderbolt devices and cables. The driver prompts you to accept or ignore them. I assume this is implemented to prevent DMA attacks.
Keep in mind that this is Azure, the cloud provider with almost certainly the most Windows installs. They try to push all their existing corporate clients to the cloud, and from what I've seen in enterprise environments, they're very successful at that. I do not expect AWS or Google to have anywhere near Azure's numbers of Windows VM's deployed... I wouldn't be surprised it their hosted Windows VM's would be a rounding error compared to MS/Azure's install base.
You should talk to your government then. Nobody is against Google going back to China. It is about Google developing and supporting censorship (tools),
You need one of those to send video, but they could be layered over Thunderbolt / USB4.
Citation needed

Here’s a debunk
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hiv-infected-needle-attack...
>That idea is anti-family, it’s anti-civil-society, and it’s anti-civilization.

As if family is not about loving and preparing your kids for life (and being good citizens etc), but padding their bank accounts so they don't have to work...
There has indeed been a lot of change - the UK in its current form only dates from 1922!

However, the lineage of the what is now the UK does stretch back in places over a thousand years to the creation of Scotland and England as separate unified kingdoms in the 9th & 10th centuries.
No it's not. Digital display makes me costantly aware of my speed. Analog gauge makes me focus on 1cm of length and bunch of nearby numbers to figure out the speed. And for rough estimation I just look outside.
Hacking Ski Helmet Audio
"The process relies on the incredibly short pulses from the laser. These pulses last only a few picoseconds — a picosecond to a second is like a second compared to 30,000 years."

Nice bit of exposition.
Do you have a link to the HDMI converter you were using? I still have a 128k +2 which would love to try and test out again sometime.
My first thought is to short condom manufacturers but when I think about it most of them are one of many many brands of a conglomerate.
Show HN: Add Syntax Highlighting to Golang.org
I only got to play with one during summer holidays in Spain since my uncle had one. I remember being very surprised about the microdrives.
The study [1] didn't "show" what you say. It claimed there was a bias towards female
applicants.

To support this claim the study pointed out that the percentage of male
applicants _out of all male_ applicants that were granted admission was lower
than the percentage for female applicants, for all (examined) departments.

However, according to the study, there were 8442 male applicants and 4321
female applicants. So while a larger proportion of female applicants were
granted admission, it still meant that many fewer women were addmitted.

To clarify, a higher proportion of a smaller number can still be a smaller
number. 5% of 1000 is 50, 10% of 100 is 10.

Imagine we split a pie in 10 pieces, you keep 8 and I keep 2. I eat my 2, you
eat 4 of your 8 and then you accuse me of hogging the pie because I ate 100%
of my share while you ate only half of yours.

That is what the study actually showed happenned with admissions in Berkeley.

_________________________

[1] Sex Bias in Graduate Admissions: Data from Berkeley

https://homepage.stat.uiowa.edu/~mbognar/1030/Bickel-Berkele...
Spotify is producing their own music. Those recommended playlist of piano music, chill, or whatever general theme with artists that you have never heard about? That is because it has been produced by them is only available there.

Probably not at the same scale as Netflix and the sources on how common it actually is seems limited, but interesting nonetheless.

Edit, apparently Spotify has refuted this. Imo, it would make sense for Spotify to do this, so not sure what to think https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/13/are-spoti...
minutephysics had a nice video about the mathematics that go behind piano tuning too.

"Why It's Impossible to Tune a Piano"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4
Its sad that so many companies require you to kick up a stink on social media before they will acknowledge your complaint.

Movistar and Vodafone in Spain have both been like that with me.
The cables absolutely do fray but the flex neck you are referencing clearly is a strain reliever, just one that was designed with a lot more focus on aesthetics than function. I do sympathize with hating the cables because I used to go though one myself about every 18 months or so until my work laptop was replaced with one that charges over USB-C. However, I still feel like the original basis for this thread is a hyperbolic claim and I think it's pretty fair to respond by pointing that out.
It is not that westerners come from a different set of base assumptions, it is that western society has moved past those base assumptions. Western monarchies were divine rights, people died fighting against those viewpoints.

It is not an assumed superiority. We learn the lesson through our history, whether this lesson is right or wrong. We too had traditions of divine right, holistic medicine, censorship and similar, but those were replaced by current "Western" values. Censorship is seen as an unnecessary, oppressive weakness that we do not want to contribute to.
TB3 is only limited to 50cm for passive cables. Active cables can be longer.
That’s the usual explanation I read, but I don’t fully buy it. Yes, two notes an octave apart have lots of overtones in common. But that’s true of two notes a perfect fifth apart as well. Or even better, two notes an octave and a fifth apart.
Other architectures have solved this problem (excessive TLB misses) by allowing for larger page sizes than 4KiB. Using larger page sizes seems like a much superior solution because you can have arbitrary numbers of larger pages while this only allows for one global segment to be used at a time.
Or even better, why not auction them? This way you get a perfect price for each pair.
As a sarcasm that's a good summary. If you actually mean it, that's another story...
Ask HN: Stable but Slow Browsers?
Hey HN!

I want a browser that is: slow, sluggish but sturdy.

All the addictive activities that I have: Facebook, YouTube and Instagram will go on this browser. On my normal browser I'll log myself out, or perhaps create a fake account in order to make it slightly more difficult to relog back in on my actual account.

By doing this I hope to make myself more productive. My go to browser for this used to be Firefox, but unfortunately the browser's speed has improved and it feels too pleasant.

I know this reads a bit like satire and that's part of the fun, but I'm actually serious. I know this approach works for me and I'm pretty sure it will work for other people too (e.g. as evidenced by Chrome plugins such as News Feed Eradicator).
You’re clearly wrong. It’s only America where people are cured. The NHS has death panels to get rid of people they don’t like.

/sarcasm
>Interesting point. One thing that speaks for the relative harmlessness of hereditary wealth is, what happens when it gets passed on to an insane/idiotic/psychopathic heir. In these cases, it normally gets rapidly redistributed, as the heir wastes their fortune.

We are past that now. Now we have advisors, funds, elite accountants, and all kinds of dead easy ways to invest and keep huge wealth long term, for even the most inane person. Plus those people are not accountable to anyone. It's not like a hated heir of a royal who has to tread lightly anymore, lest the senate or the people take them down...

In fact, inane people can even make a great fortune from scratch in this era, what with the various famous-for-being-famous celebrities...
What exactly is a "standard" part in high-end portable computer manufacturing?
Do you say the same thing to women who are on birth control? Or do you believe that gay men, specifically, should be denied the ability to use a second form of protection?
1GB/day 4g for 90 days costs a total of ~$6 in India.
Getting Credit
If Firefox is doing something that's closer to the right thing to do in terms of security, then it's not Firefox that is the problem, but the standard.

It would not be the only Web standard that acts against the users (WebRTC enumeration of IP addresses, canvas fingeprinting, 3rd party cookies, many others come to mind).
Promotion is not centered primarily around productivity, at least not beyond SWE2 or whatever the second engineering level is in a given company. Ability to lead/influence at a scope larger than self is largely disjoint from individual productivity in coding.
This seems to be the original press release from the university website: https://www.hw.ac.uk/about/news/2019/welding-breakthrough-co...
EU regulation makes it impossible to install custom firmware on embedded devices
Referrer data has a lot of non-shady uses and it is really useful. That's why we have GDPR, so we can use referrer data as intended by preventing people from combining data.

Also, I don't think you can equate this with guns.

Try equating it with metal. Yes, you can make it into a gun, but you need to have lot of different things in place before you can use it to do harm.

Referrer data is completely anonymous. If you want to combine it into a profile, you need layers and layers of complexity and other data before you have something you can use it to target users based on their interests. With GDPR, this is illegal without consent anyway so I think you're overreacting.
Have we forgotten lightbulbs, CRTs, and a myriad of other vacuum tubes used to be a thing? They used the alloy 'kovar' for much greater temperature variation tolerance than this new tech was tested for.
>You aren't old enough to have experienced the pre-printing-press real books

That's true. Not sure how it's a counter-argument though.

Pre-printing press books were great as well, and even more important (regarding historical importance, and in terms of the price they'd fetch at an auction today) than printing-press books.

And it would also be true that having no direct experience of them, I'd be not very qualified to compare them to the printing-press books. Which is my point exactly.
I have exactly the opposite experience. I find that USB-A connectors tend to become loose over time, and eventually a mild bump is enough that the device disconnects (even though it looks like it's still 100% plugged in). No such issues with USB-C yet.
Japan probably claims that crown: 660 BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_da...
Tried similar approach several years ago but was unsatisfied with final accuracy results. Pipelining is obvious method to accelerate a sequence of computations, but with respect to SGD it requires some accuracy tolerance because weight updates go out of sync.
HTTPS: //Www.facebook.com/Hakunamatatasolutions/
Revolut Boss apologises for the toxic culture in the past
The Chinese government is uninterested in letting Western companies compete on the same ground as Chinese companies (e.g. any company with a significant market share in China vs their foreign counterparts doing business).

Entering China at the cost of 1) having to hand over personal information wholesale to the Chinese government in compliance with "local laws" (remember not to look at Xinjiang!) and 2) being forced into a losing position against local competitors like Baidu anyway is neither ethically great nor financially prudent.

In any case, Google is acting only in the interest of profit (as a for profit company beholden to shareholders), and painting it as some kind of great privilege for China to be receiving is big-headed on Google's part and a saccharine narrative justifying a purely business decision to make more money.
How does the Reading Progress work? Do you have to update it manually, or does it grab data from somewhere?
Every time someone mentions Micro Men I feel compelled to mention that the original script title was "Syntax Era"
Why Democracies Die:The Reason Privacy Is the Source of Power in the 21st Centur
This is also well studied in Philosophy.

Even not that hard math proofs call on intuition pretty quickly, and I think it’s a legit question to ask when does it basically become empirical proof.

To my understanding maths has a common basis in set theory but set theory itself is just a common basis for maths (ie as opposed to “the truth”), but even so proofs are typically not given via set theory especially if the theorem is complicated.

The idea is that mechanising proof and making it more algorithmic will make it more like what the layman thought proof is , but it at the same time raises the question, what is this all for? Ie maths is what mathematicians do. I think it admits to no clearer a definition. So it’d probably make sense for mathematicians to decide, what precisely is the role of proof?

The author talks about this in addressing computer aided maths and the general recruitment of applied mathematicians to solve problems whilst caring less to advance “the science” whilst doing it. Chomsky spoke a lot about this in criticising the use of probabilistic models in science as ultimately scarcely contributing to causal understanding, which in itself is separate from being able to predict phenomena well. Ie you can do practical things without ever knowing what’s going on under the hood, but science wants to know what’s going on under the hood and so prefers different approaches to its advancement.