skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is akin to saying "PC manufacturers make $200, Microsoft makes $100 and app developers get $5 on each PC.

I've spent literally thousands of dollars for PC software. Bought a copy of Vegas Pro 11 last night (yes, just for home videos. And to tie into this story, it's because my VP 9 won't work with the latest Quicktime update), and yet another Steam game. It is endless.

On the smartphone, however, people have been acclimated that anything great than $0.99 is too much money. It's bizarre. I'm not agreeing with Bray -- in fact I haven't even read the article -- but it is bizarre seeing all of the people defending the various players in the industry. Apple makes enormous profits. Far more profit than hardware makers have ever historically made.
I agree with the poster 100%. Originally I was very enthusiastic about the site, and happy I had found it, but ultimately I realized that every time I visited or attempted to add my input to a thread, I came away feeling depressed and/or angry.

It's too clubby, it's taken the general disgust that people feel toward the banality of messageboards that deteriorate into meme-ification or juvenile flamewars... and turned that into a kind of snobby elitism that is just as off-putting.

Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous. Only an antisocial or asocial nerd would come up with such a rule and think it was a great idea, and I say that as an antisocial nerd myself.

The system of ranking people by points, insisting that every single post be some giant revelation of wisdom that advances the fortunes of the tech industry and mankind immeasurably, etc. has only exacerbated people's tendency to self-aggrandize, kiss ass, over-analyze minutiae, and constantly try to one-up each other... all cloaked in a brightly colored cheerful passive-aggressive candy coating, of course.

I still cruise the site from time to time because it does have great links (one of the few things left going for it) but there is no way in hell I would consider myself part of the community or welcome. I certainly wouldn't and don't come here any more to ask questions or try to learn anything by exposing any gaps in my knowledge to general ridicule and sneering.

My two cents.
The failure of Harrelson's AMA was in a mismatch of expectations between him/his PR people and the reddit community. Whereas the longstanding tradition on reddit is a back-and-forth dialogue between the users and the OP, with the users deciding which conversations gain prominence, Harrelson/his PR person approached it like a late-night talk show.

Honestly, as harshly as reddit came down on Harrelson for that, it was entirely avoidable with even the most basic preliminary research. It's hard to feel bad for Harrelson, and it's similarly difficult to imagine that savvy PR types would be put off by the response. It's pretty easy to see what leads to a successful AMA, and not particularly difficult to prime your client for it.
I'm pretty sure that #2 isn't true; signal processing folks will be able to phrase this better than I can, but I think that if you have enough information to capture the waveform at a given frequency, you also have enough information to precisely place it in time - phasing errors are more likely due to quantization error, which is about bit depth, not sample rate. No?
hmm I guess FB is not paying up on Patent fees huh..
Let's make things super simple. Let's say you record 4 sine waves at a 192kHz sampling rate: 15kHz, 30kHz, 45kHz and 60kHz. All 4 frequencies will be captured and the 15kHz frequency will sound different to your hear because its harmonics.

If you take this recording and master it for a CD (44.1kHz), you'll effectively get up to ~20kHz (since they're a low pass filter starting at around 16-18kHz). This means that only our first frequency will be captured: 15kHz. It will be exactly the same as if you only recorded 15kHz alone. The harmonics don't modify the fundamental frequency, they just trick the human hear. But when they're gone, they have no effect whatsoever.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: the frequency numbers I used are actually somewhat of a bad example. Harmonics are never exactly double, triple the fundamental. Those would be mostly inaudible. But you get the idea.
no love for 10.6.8, Lion only
This sort of reminds me of a DAM (Digital Asset Management system). I work in the media CMS industry, and most big news organisations carry one + usually some front end integration code. Seems like an obvious direction to take this (though it carries the pain of doing enterprise sales, of course).
Hi - one of the founders of Chute.

You are absolutely right that there are many ways to accomplish basic uploading and hosting. In fact, we've used those same gems time and time again and it was the process of re-building it that seemed problematic. When we started working on mobile, however, most of those things were not as readily available or accessible.

That said, we're much more focused on the workflow that is required to make those photos useful. For example, if you're a publisher, you may need to have rights cleared, captions, user information collected, and even moderation before any user-generated content is "usable" to you.

We're happy to help anyone get their prototype running and hopefully offer enough value on top that they won't ever want to leave.
I have a related question, though at a more micro scale: how early should we submit our application for the summer 2012 class?

The application page says that "Groups that submit early have a significant advantage because we have more time to read their applications." It also says we can edit and resubmit as often as we like. Based on this, we'd be inclined to submit as soon as we've completed all parts of the application to our own minimum standard of satisfaction, then update as needed.

However, I've seen pg say in another HN thread that YC does not reread applications when they are resubmitted, "so submit when you're ready for us to read it the only time we'll read it."

I perceive the trade-off to be that the earlier we submit, the more time YC partners have to read our application and engage with us, but the less time we have to improve the application itself before submitting (better demo, more up-to-date answers, etc). Do pg and the alumni have any advice on this question?

I realize the answer may end up being "you will need to evaluate that tradeoff and decide for yourself."
You could not use Twitter. I don't think it's as much of a piece of social infrastructure as Gmail or Facebook (at least not yet).

You could also access it via a third-party app, this reducing their monetization options and network visibility.
Ask HN: how can I convince my company to incubate me (and spin me off)?
On my spare time, I’m developing a web application which is used by my department. Based on my guts, market knowledge and a few “problem interviews” with peers in other companies, there appears to be a demand for this application outside my company.

I’ve discussed the matter with my boss and he would be interested in pushing this further, i.e. free half of my time to finalise the development and, if all goes well, release me at the end of the year to start my company.

We're somehow in stealth mode (e.g. IT is not necessarily happy with this home grown application, but they fortunately have bigger fishes to fry at the moment), but I'm thinking about asking my company to incubate me and then do a spin-off .
At this stage, I’d like to obtain time (my time), acces to some internal expertise (e.g. legal, IT Security, marketing…) and why not some seed funding (but I have other options there).

Some context: I’m a Procurement director at a Global Fortune 500 in Europe (we’re in the services industry). The application I’m developing covers the needs of a distributed Procurement/Sourcing department (currently: 100+ users in 17 countries). As in a lot of services companies, Procurement is not exactly strategic, so it's neither a threat nor an opportunity. On the other hand, entrepreneurship is clearly a value of the company. I have a rather direct access to members of the executive committee (and the support of my boss).

I've identified a few reasons why my company would accept to incubate me (living the values of the company, giving it access to a tool it needs at a very preferred price, and possibly some shares in the spun-off company)… But I'm struggling to see if this is compelling enough, or if there could be more in this incubation for the company.

Do you have any experience with intrapreneurship / spin offs? What other benefits I could advertise to convince them to incubate me? Any pitfall I should be aware of (besides IP — I'm already working on this one)?

Thanks for your help!
P.
Canadian Music Industry Wants Subscriber Disclosure Without a Court Order
The ad network for Australian creative professionals.
> Both GTK and QT are available on OS X

For very, very low values of "available", especially when it comes to GTK. If you're going to release a GTK application for OSX, you can just step the release part entirely.
A Bluetooth 4.0, pressure-sensitive pen for iOS
This is a much more polite response than what I had in mind. Better this way I guess :)
It's interesting how with significantly worse (or at the very least, comparable) complexity to manage, and uniformly horrific costs for repairing production bugs, the ASIC design industry and Intel/AMD in particular have managed to scrape by with something like <20 bugs between them in the past decade.

Perhaps we need to incentivize software developers with fear of execution, or something.
From this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy#Technocracy_movemen...

The idea of currency based on energy units is quite intriguing. It makes me wonder how our world would change.
From the article, here's a good excerpt of what Chute does.

[Chute] handles the entire backend environment for uploading, processing, authenticating, resizing, and serving images.

...for example, you’re running a popular website and you want all of your users to be able to have profile images, you can sign up for Chute and paste a few lines of code into your application, and that’s it. Users will then be able to upload images to Chute’s servers, where they will be cropped, resized, etc. according to your specifications, before being served onto your site.

That's pretty useful!
Great job tracking down a hardware bug! That must be really exciting, and you get your name in the AMD errata I assume?

One of my comp sci professors found a bug in an Intel chip and got his name in the errata. I think that gives you +100 to nerd credibility :)
There is no point with going over 16 bits, but there is definitely a point with going over 44.1khz, as it allows you to actually reproduce waveforms more accurately than 44.1khz. Try reproducing f.e. a sinewave accurately over 4-5khz with a sample rate of just 44.1khz - it cannot be done, and at this point we haven't even taken into account the issue of varying slew-rate characteristics of the thousands or so different DAC output stages in use in personal audio equipment.

44.1khz gives too much aliasing distortion, but 192khz is quite the overkill. Ideally, digital audio could sit on 16 bits of depth sampled at 96khz.
DARPA’s Cheetah Robot Will Stab You With Its Pointy Legs
The Twilio reference is more a nod to how effective Twilio has been at making voice accessible to developers.

It's more an analogy and definitely not the ideal, most precise way to describe what we do.

We're much more likely to consider ourselves akin to Heroku as we offer infrastructure and connections to services that make deploying and running super simple. Not to say that Twilio doesn't accomplish the same for tons of folks.
Yeah, when I find myself drifting towards the 'maybe it is a bug in the compiler/OS/debugger' territory I know it is time to take a break from the debugging as it is rarely true[1]. Nice to see it occasionally happens :)

[1] I work on Visual Studio so I have found compiler/debugger bugs as I am generally using 'in development' bits, but far more often than not the bug turns out to be mine and mine alone :)
Finding Your Book Interrupted ... By the Tablet You Read It On
If that was the case, would it mean that self-determination hasn't been expressed, or that its expression didn't reach the intended goal of those who expressed it?
I'm not. And I don't like following those links through. I wasn't aware it was because of caching - I just saw slow.
Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society
I have only twice thought one of my problems was due to a compiler bug, and I was right one of those times (and that was because my company was stuck with a 4-year old version of the compiler; The bug had already been fixed in the latest version.)
I used to go to Cambodia & Malaysia to get 2+1 months visas.
What place in Thailand are you going?
I am using the barometers in the galaxy nexus and the other phones. We have a couple thousand users submitting to pressureNET (free on the Android market) so far. Expanding as fast as we can!
We're definitely working in that direction as part of our launch. As you mentioned, there's some specialization required for publishers, even more so for large ones.

User-generated content has definitely posed new challenges for them and we're working to package the platform in a way that makes it a lot easier.
I can admit that I misread the article when it comes to hearing limits. I was reacting to my perception as an audio engineer that a lot of people dismiss the importance of that frequency range.
A person can not hear a 22kHz tone doesn't mean he can not hear a sound that contains 22kHz components. For example, a square wave contains lots of high frequency harmonics, the more higher frequency harmonics it have, the "squarer" the square wave gets. An ideal square wave forms ideal "0" "1" states. A person's ear might not be able to hear a 22Khz sine wave tone, but he might be able to sense the steepness of "0" "1" state.
You will need to evaluate that tradeoff and decide for yourself.
TUAW Daily iPad App: A better alternative to the built-in iPod
Drone crashes into SWAT team tank during police test near Houston
Using Facebook Messenger to bypass your employer’s Facebook.com domain block?
really no one ? :(
iPhone developers maybe ?
Get one of the original Pentiums :)

But really, I have only ever experienced one bug in a compiler (that I hadn't written) but it was such an odd experience, like the patient having Lupus.
Young, not small, businesses create jobs (and value)
Would you like to post double-blind test results?
What I would love to have is: independent instrument/vocals tracks along with a default recommended "mix". The default mix would be used for normal playback and independent tracks would be great for custom mix / karaoke etc.

Is this too unrealistic to expect? Has something like this been tried before?
Or maybe there's nothing wrong with my logic. Maybe there are other forces at play that, when all mixed together, result in companies sometimes seeking cost reductions, and sometimes not seeking cost reductions.

Parent was looking for an example to explain a possible situation, not a dynamic that the entire world must obey at all times.
And their encoding is generally pretty bad, unless you the master you upload is already 128 kbyte/s. Even wavs are affected :(

http://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/qhrcw/soundcl...
In some ways, I like this better that dailywtf.com as it is like reading Dilbert vs watching "The office". Great work!
MMS would be very cool - we support web services, email, mobile and would love to add MMS.

I'm sure we'd use Twilio to accomplish it as well :)
+100 nerd cred indeed. That's something that trumps any normal bug.
>Same goes for 16/24 bit, however, the difference between 16 and 24 bit is actually audible.

This [1] (widely accepted in the scientific audio community) study's conclusions disagree with your assertion.

>44100 is not a bad sampling rate, but it necessitates very sharp aliasing filters, which are audibly bad.

This is not the 1980s, hardware has progressed beyond that point. Modern (i.e. anything from 1995 onwards) DACs do not suffer from aliasing problems. Also see [1]

>That bit about intermodulation distortion is complete bogus. He talks about problems when resampling high-fs audio data.

I did not notice that in the article. It talks about IMD in the context of the analog chain and the transducers following the DAC, and it's possible that high frequencies can increase it.

[1] http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14195
Same goes for 16/24 bit, however, the difference between 16 and 24 bit is actually audible

No, the difference is not audible at all. At 16 bits of depth on a normal low-level audio signal (~0.3 volts), we're talking about less than 0.000005 volts per amplitude step. This difference gets lost in the THD already at the DAC in your audio output stage. Then it gets lost again in the amplifier. And again in the cable to your speakers or headphones. And then it gets lost again in the speaker elements. What survives in a normal low-level audio signal is about 14 bits of resolution.

44100 is not a bad sampling rate, but it necessitates very sharp aliasing filters, which are audibly bad. A bit more headroom is well needed there.

44.1khz IS a bad sampling rate for accurately reproducing anything except a triangle wave or square wave above 5khz.
If I saw something with my own eyes, but didn't capture a video recording of it, I could argue that I have knowledge but not proof.
Why does the title here on HN say "for free" ?
humans are particularly sensitive to jitter.

Humans are sensitive to jitter, but jitter isn't a major problem with modern digital electronics and reclocking strategies. This ArsT thread hashed out these issues a couple of months ago: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1164451...
First Reactions to Mari0
Well if it works for you, then more power to you.

For me, I'm not here or on any other message board to "get shit done"... if I am getting shit done then I'm not surfing the Internet, by definition. I come to sites like this to learn stuff, find cool links, run across things I had never heard of or thought of before, and hopefully have interesting conversations. I really detest the constant pressure of having to self-censor and edit what I say with a view to making sure it's "useful"... whatever the definition of useful is.

It's funny that after a long hiatus I do a drive by here and this thread is on the front page.

Also the point thing sucks, frankly. Whether you want to or not, you start keeping track of your points, wondering what you could do to get more, feeling jealous of others who have way more than you, etc. Human nature I suppose. It also sucks to call it some bullshit euphemistic name like "karma", which obscures what it really is, which is a social ranking system.

I would say that 4chan and YouTube comments are at one extreme, and Hacker News sits squarely at the opposite extreme. Neither appeal.
Pretty slick, but you should set the text non-selectable via CSS so that when you click and drag around to shoot, you don't end up highlighting the 404 text.
How to Combine Email and Social Media
Not usually. However, I do sometimes make explicit comparisons to False or None if I can end up with both, and the behaviour differs depending on what I have.

It's probably not the best idea to be doing that, but it's not tripped me up yet ;-)
Playing Devil's Advocate...

The statement that frequencies above 20kHz don't matter rests upon the assumption that the ear is linear. If the ear is not linear (I don't know whether it is not not) then frequencies above 20kHz will matter, as the ear will be able to mix higher frequencies down to less than 20kHz. For example, if we have frequencies of 56kHz and 59kHz, the ear MIGHT be able to discern a difference frequency of 3kHz. No doubt this effect could be reproduced by signal with a sampling rate of 44.1KHz, but only if the analogue systems, before the sampling stage, reproduce any non-linearity in the human ear.

Incidentally, you can get speakers that create a localised beam of sound, that the person sitting next to you cannot hear. They work by transmitting frequencies above the audible range. These high frequencies can be beamformed by a relaitively small speaker array, so the sound is localised. They then rely on the non-linearity of the ear (or maybe the air around the ear?) to mix the ultrasonic frequencies down to audible frequencies. I guess there must be non-linearity in the human auditory system!

On the subject of 24-bits my understanding is that 16-bits is adequate, provided the levels (scaling) are set correctly in the recording. What 24-bits delivers is the ability to do a crappy job of the mixing, and still end up with the full dynamic range of the human ear. 24-bits is probably a temporary solution though, as manufacturers will engage in the usual Loudness War [1], and push the signal to the top of the dynamic range. Before long 24-bit audio will be equivalent to 16-bits (since the 8 least significant bits will be unused) and the next big thing will be 32-bit audio.

Having said all that, I'd guess that the speakers will be the limiting factor in most sound systems, not the recording format.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Except that human ears don't directly perceive the waveform, only the frequency decomposition.
However, I've been a member for 5 years and have only 639 karma points. I have no clue if something I share will be wildly upvoted, flagged or just simply ignored- thus I feel unsure if I am actually "welcome" here or not.

Eh, I wouldn't think about the karma thing to much. I have 3001 karma as of this posting, and I still find myself surprised at which of my comments are upvoted, downvoted and/or ignored. I just say what I'm honestly feeling, submit stuff I find interesting, and figure the rest will sort itself out.
Watch Reddit front page votes in real time
For example, the human hear will hear a 30kHz frequency if it's fundamental is 10kHz

You are going to have to provide me with a citation to back that up because that goes against everything I've learned and experience in 17 years of working in acoustics.
I would go as far as to say 'finding' bugs in the Compiler / Optimizer / OS / Hardware is a warning signal of a poor programmer.

Always expect you are doing it wrong. It will so rarely be the case that this expectation is wrong that you can discount it as insignificant.
Skip news entirely and read only (personal) blogs. Define news how you wish. Benefits will ensue.
AB Anything - Quick/dirty split testings (YC mentioned in video)
We actually took those challenges in school :) Lots of fun if you're an audio nerd!
I hadn't considered that option. Thanks for the input!
[edited: I was wrong]
True. We should do that.

Edit: done
Get CPU usage, memory usage, and load stats in the status bar
Other languages to Ruby
Pinterest as an expression of digital materialism | Social Media NZ
I'd love that too... damn, should have put it in the article...

Closest I've found is to take the .mogg files out of the Guitar Hero games and use those to make new mixes. :-)
Quick Reference added.
> Having said all that, I'd guess that the speakers will be the limiting factor in most sound systems, not the recording format.

Yes. And DACs, which normally have filters too.
The ‘Business Analyst’ – ambiguous role for an IT chameleon or generic title?
"Paste" is not an intuitive synonym for "run." If you type or paste some code, you've already pasted. In JSBin it's render. You should just say run.

Also it's always forking, maybe I just want to edit the current without changing the URL.
> In theory, it's true that the human hear can't hear above ~18kHz, but it can hear the influence of the very high pitch harmonics on a lower frequency.

That may well be true. But those mixed-down harmonics that are heard "live" would then be captured by the 16/44 (or whatever) sampling. IOW, the recording captures what you heard. Those upper harmonics have no emergent properties. Their effect is captured.

Bob
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