skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, just a small side-note: I'll likely be citing Proxino in my thesis, so you're still building a citation count :P
Quick question - does startup chile accept companies with only a single founder?
Here’s Why the Government Thinks It Can Kill You Overseas
" … when the most under-performing component of most people's sound equipment also has the lowest-hanging fruit:"

And I was _so_ sure the next sentence was going to be something like:

"No, do not have any suggestions that will make your sound equipment make Justin Bieber sound better…"
Here are some more details about this particular bug: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/commits/2011-12/msg...
We actually use Stripe for our own invoicing right now. We may be based in Toronto, but we're with Silicon Valley Bank. I'm in SF right now and was just visiting the Stripe office this morning. Interesting things to come, I promise :)
That's exactly what I had in mind for running tests, I think you're definitely on the right track. Great work!
Apple’s Next iPad Will Be Dubbed iPad HD, Not iPad 3
A small feedback on the demo video on shoplocket.com - I admit it is beautifully produced, but it spends more time on explaining what ShopLocket is not, rather than what it is.. The "what it is not" part could easily come in the copy IMHO. Also, what simonw said - I immediately looked around for a demo of the widget but couldn't find one..
You might be surprised how much of a difference EQ can make. As an experiment I once used 12 bands of parametric EQ to adjust the speakers in a cheap, old LCD monitor. Sure, you're not going to get any better bass response than before, but stereo imaging (nonexistent before EQ, perfect phantom localization after), spectral balance, clarity, distortion (due to not exciting resonances in the monitor), etc. were significantly improved. Most people could have added an EQ'd subwoofer to those tinny LCD speakers and been completely satisfied.

One of the many things EQ can't fix, of course, is room reflections, which can be helped by room treatments and speakers with a directivity better suited to the room.
how about adding comments?
I've been thinking about this for at least a year. Good ideas tend to be invented simultaneously... good luck with Bounce, looks awesome (apart from the battery draining GPS usage)
TestFlight Acquired By Burstly, Launches TestFlight Live
That is interesting. If you buy through amazon, I wouldn't worry too much because of the Pre-order Guarantee:

"Pre-order Price Guarantee! Order now and if the Amazon.com price decreases between your order time and the end of the day of the release date, you'll receive the lowest price."
Both good suggestions! Thanks for your time!
Indeed, but if there were non-linearies in the ear (there are many, of course) which allowed detection of ultrasonics (less likely, because the first stage of the ear is impressively linear) you'd expect them to show up in the actual listening tests.

The TFA does at least make this the-proof-is-in-the-pudding point somewhere in its depths. :)
Thanks! There are indeed many similarities to the problems we're tackling and those Gumroad is tackling. I have a lot of respect for what they have built.
Which startups still have affiliate programs?
The fact that affiliate programs are fast disappearing from the 'credible startup' world is food for thought for this type of marketing. But I want to find out which startups still offer an affiliate program?
Scratch Markup Language
Recording music is supposed to be a snapshot (with room for interpretation) of the composition at play.

Trying to record an edge case like this is the same as recording in a room with bad acoustics. So you end up with some weird (but not faithful) representation of the sound which is a snapshot of the microphone's characteristics and directionality of the ultrasonic tones. It's not reasonable to assume any microphone will behave exactly like a human ear. Even if you could, you're going to have to mimic the tiny random movements a normal person would make listening to a sound, movements which would definitely impact the perception of the sound, because microphones are much more stationary than any human would be.

The "different sounding" argument two posts above is silly, because sound is almost never that monochromatic, and if it is, it's usually boring. Also I don't understand how missing out on an odd order harmonic would be a bad thing :) The reality is none of these arguments are based in a reality of what people would hear, and because of that, the arguments aren't practical.

In reality, 20 bits at 48kHz (or 64kHz) would be more than acceptable for even the most discerning of ears and probably the most practical in terms of space and fidelity, but it'd be a weird format to distribute in.
If you like that, try http://morewords.com.
I was once in a small, treated room working with some rather large PA speakers. I was curious how far my hearing range actually extended, and did something very unwise: I played a 20kHz tone and very briefly ramped the volume up and down. I definitely heard it, but I also induced quite a lot of pain. I learned two lessons: 1. my threshold of hearing at 20kHz is near or above the threshold of pain, and 2. don't do that ever again.
Word of caution from a soon-to-be-30-year-old who had built up a runway at 28: Ignore the runway. Get to ramen profitable ASAP.
The problem they had with the "oil" was not the oil, but the engine itself.

The engines had a coating applied to the cylinder walls that (theoretically) reduce frinction. Turns out the coating was a bad decision (it wasn't throughly tested (see a pattern?)), and they rolled back to their old way of building engines (which was pretty good).

I do think the 10k is not a problem with Mobil 1 synthetic. I've used that oil for about 15k on my own cars without complications.

If you want to learn more about the engine problems, you might want to ddg the words "mercedes benz nikasil".
Try classifying Quora answers in "Netflix prize"-like big data ML contest
This risk-reward axiom holds true for almost all aspects of business. Lower risk, lower investment == lower return.*

Of the many economies and business environments created throughout history, this system of reward makes for the best so far.

---

(* Not saying app development is without risk or investment. It's just that clearly Apple and AT&T have an order of magnitude larger investment and risk than the average developer).
Great article man. From a newbie, thank you.
What I found weird was how out of all the landmarks around where I lived, it picked up on the biggest, the particular hospital in question.

Maybe the question is a standard one, and I happened to add more meaning to it by dumb luck of where I lived.
Nah. Finding a bug in the dev stack is a sign that you're running on the edge. I've encountered one or two myself. I sent one in and the company wrote back and said "yep, it's a bug, fixed next build".

Now, blaming without reproduction on the dev stack is a sign of a lamer. :-)
Nobody will win, they will be forgotten, just like how everyone forgot about group messaging apps after sxsw 2011
16 bits is not "very limiting" for anything, unless you think your ears themselves are very limiting.

Many things are mastered poorly— recording engineers crushing the dynamics in order to get the loudest possible signals— mostly a problem for pop music, but nothing is immune.

It's been observed that the various 'higher-definition' recordings have less brutal mastering— no doubt owing to the different audience they are marketed to. But this isn't a property of 24-bit vs 16-bit distribution.
we're (serpIQ.com) building an affiliate system this month for our product. Hope to have it online by April 1st.

Not sure what you mean by disappearing from the credible startup world, affiliate programs are a fantastic way to grow your user base, especially for bootstrapped companies.
Microsoft is playing the best Windows 8 hand w/cards it was dealt
I would hope there are more reasons that a particular client app that determines your platform choice.
We Make Pickup Trucks
Down for me still.
UX and Privacy: The Fickle Web
CoffeeXP : Live Coding Snippets with #coffeescript
I think what VBprogrammer meant is that thinking you've found a bug in a compiler / OS / CPU is often a warning sign you're a poor programmer. Often times a beginner will have a bug in their code that is too subtle for them to identify, so they end up attributing it to some external factor. Actually finding a bug in a compiler / OS / CPU is as you suggest likely a sign you're doing something advanced or unusual and therefore are perhaps more knowledgeable than most.
Ok, fair enough. And there are times when you don't want much feedback.

What have you had lately that you liked?
Yes, but the effects of interference patterns between multiple ultrasonic frequencies is the same, and definitely does affect the audible spectrum. This is why we must filter the square wave that comes out of a DAC. And the limitations of filters (phase shifts and roll-off) are why modern CD players oversample the signal--so that the filtering can be performed well beyond the audible spectrum.
Where should the content on this kind of site come from, if not from attorneys? "Contract law hobbyists"?
Twitter Blog: The road to Super Tuesday in Tweets
DBArtisan, while a very good tool, is expensive, and Windows only. It is one of the few remaining reasons I keep a Windows VM.
> I'm not sure how you can even question it.

With evidence.
There's nothing particularly special about it, except for the fact that it just works significantly better than any other RDBMS GUI program I've ever used. The UI is great, it's fast, it's simple to use, and I've never found a feature I needed that it doesn't already have.
The BS is not limited to start-ups. Check out the break-dance troupe kicking off JavaOne. geez: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/07/PS080733.p... (credit: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/07/J1D1)
Such fun work to be doing on Christmas day...
Hmm not sure why, but I cannot seem to see anything on the page.
On the other hand, you've got FPGAs, which bring the software stuff to the hardware guys - and based on my (limited) understanding of the hardware industry, they've improved certain prototyping exercises by an order of magnitude.

Agreed that the rapid development cycles and malleability of the product is part of what's made software great - but my feeling is that maybe we've let that slip a little too much - leading to the bloated, slow, buggy software that everyone runs all the time.
> The harmonics don't modify the fundamental frequency, they just trick the human hear. But when they're gone, they have no effect whatsoever.

This is the part I really do not understand... either my ear CAN pick up those frequencies, maybe the harmonics are "tickling" the little hairs inside my cochlea and ultimately the frequencies I can actually hear were altered in my perception that way - or I can not hear or sense the harmonics and they physically alter the "original" wave that I end up actually hearing.

Either way, pretty much the exact same thing should happen in a studio microphone. Those all do have frequency limitations and AKG, Royer, Rode, Shure, Sennheiser, Audio Tech, what-have-you pretty much all go up to 15kHz or 20kHz according to specs, if I understand them correctly, but not further than that. If it isn't even recorded, those frequencies I also cannot hear can NOT alter my perception so they HAVE to somehow change the frequencies I can hear and are being recorded... on top of that you are making "room" for frequencies up to, say, 60kHz but I very strongly doubt your mics can go even remotely that high.
I would guess that's because some earlier remotes used a higher frequency IR emitter that was in fact touching into the red.

These days, the various IR communication protocols have been standardized and virtually all use 920nm, 940nm or 980nm emitters, all of which will be invisible. I mentioned the Apple IR remote specifically because it's a remote most people reading TFA will have, and it's known to be a 980nm emitter.
Techcrunch also covered this, with more details: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/05/heyzap-404/
As someone who found four compiler bugs in three weeks - in a five-nines fault-tolerant OS, yet! - and who found a PostgreSQL optimizer bug within weeks of learning SQL, I think the key to being "that guy" is playing five-whys with every single bug you encounter.

I work with some very talented developers who, when they try something and it doesn't work, try something else. I am fundamentally incapable of that. If it doesn't work, I MUST KNOW WHY. Even if that requires building a debug version of my entire stack, adding all sorts of traces, and wolf-fence debugging until I have a minimal fail case.

It's a real limitation; if I hit an undebuggable brick wall, I have no ability to attack the problem from a different angle. Luckily, there are few things that are fundamentally undebuggable.
What about sound outside 20-20k that affects us via mechanisms other than being directly sensed in the air by our ears? For instance, consider frequencies below 20 Hz that we can feel with our feet as vibrations in the floor, instead of hear with our ears? Or what about the possibility of sound above 20k causing a vibration in something other than our ears, which could have a subharmonic in 20-20k that gets conducted to our ears via bone?

I'd prefer recording technology to err on the side of capturing what we need to reproduce all of that, even if we aren't sure that we need it.
Got to be a Better Way | Scienceray
Are you suggesting I should use Lisp, or that I haven't beat the average, or...?
Yeah I'm sure its all good. I just thought it was funny. I love your product though. Such a great idea. Planning for favicon is always good too :)
Agreed. A lot of pedantry and smartest-person-in-the-room-ism going on here. People around here seem so jaded. Out in the real world (ie not Silicon Valley) a professional programmer graduates from a CS or CIS program, gets a job doing mindless coding somewhere like in a local government building and writes ASP, .NET, or some form of C all day. They get decent at like 3 languages, stagnate, and become dinosaurs. That's why so many systems suck when those guys retire and the new guys come in. I think that sucks and it should be avoided but my point is, what does make you a real coder/programmer/whatever you want to call it? Is it getting paid or is it knowing the ins and outs of the latest cool-new-thing? Because that's what it seems like everyone is getting at. I have a deep respect for everyone here who I know knows far more than I could hope to know but at this moment I'm a little disgusted by how out of touch everyone seems. I'd submit that there is a definition of a "real" coder but unfortunately it cannot be quantified. You know it when you see it. There's a combination of subjective skill, clout, and aloofness that quantifies the kind of real programmer touted around here but in the real world they're a lot like the cheap guys in India that a lot of people like to deride. I didn't know programmers could be such snooty hipsters.
The reason affiliate marketing sometimes backfires is that you can't filter out who's writing about your product and what they're writing. 37Signals stopped taking new affiliates, and instead started a 'Tell-a-friend' program coz these kinds of recommendations are more personal and have better chances of getting looked at favourably. If I could choose, I'd pick a referral program over an affiliate program.
But thanks for listing your product. It's interesting to know who's behind affiliate marketing today.
> two band limited pulse signals with different onset times, no matter how arbitrarily close, will result in different sampled signals.

This is true, but different than what I am arguing. You're saying that a listener over time will be able to tell that the two signals differ. I am saying that a listener will be able to determine this at fractional wavelengths.

It's similar to dithering a high dynamic range signal onto a lower bit depth: more than two samples are required for "evidence" of two different signals, while sampling at a high enough rate will tell you this almost instantly.

Again, I don't know if human ears are able to detect this, just that I haven't seen it addressed in these discussions.
Why a Local Business Needs a Website
To avoid the trouble of digging up the link: http://www.davidgriesinger.com/intermod.ppt

Slides 29-35 address this point.
In past history (which is all I can really speak to): definitely not; in fact, some developers who previously had been selling software for jailbroken devices had ended up on stage with Steve at iPhone events. There have even been cases of well-known-to-Apple developers selling either the same product in both markets, and companies providing similar products (with slightly different functionality) in both markets. For some examples (at least one of which I imagine you will recognize), I will refer you to Qik, uStream, Tap-Tap Revenge, TuneWiki, and YouMail.
I'm not a developer, and this is a major reason I never click on links to tweets any more. Particularly when using a smartphone, I find the long load times of many web pages so annoying that I simply avoid visiting such sites altogether.
I find it hilarious that just in the last few days they've removed register_globals from PHP for good. It seems every language/framework ends up retracing the same set of security/convenience tradeoffs over and over again.
Can't say I'm shocked by that - reading the book "These Guys Have All The Fun" lead me to believe that ESPN is an jockocracy based on power rather than talent.
Almost certainly because it was a different remote control when you were a kid. Some remote controls emit a lot closer to visible light than others.
I thought you were "absolutely frightening that a channel like this even exists"?

But I'm also curious to know why you are frightened to be associated with the channel? Are you associated with the channel?
Michelangelo virus scare: 20 year anniversary
> Is there a way to have a per-month view

Feel free to import the iCal-Feed to your favorite calendar software: http://www.techism.de/feed.ics
Http://pegasuslegend-whatscookin.blogspot.com/2011/04/curts-l... on Twitpic
Michael Jackson’s Entire Music Catalogue Stolen in Sony Music Hack
UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A over at Fluent.io Mail
Me and my brother would sing at each other in certain tones such that we created harmonics in both our ears. It wasn't pleasant, but it was interesting. Regardless, I'd smash my equipment if it made harmonics like that.
Looking at the Android app page, they may have gotten confused because the screenshot has WA in it. That is, it's using your app to input math symbols into WA. That may have triggered a simple policy of "issue takedown for anything that is not ours that has WA in it."
Pizza party or group sex? - Pornhub.com
Anyone have experience with green glue in automotive applications? It's been a long time dream for me to sound proof my 2006 xB
time for a Fantasy Hockey app! Just in time for the end of the season!
You just need to consider more plausible explanations for the difference you are hearing, such as low-quality sample rate conversion on the playback devices you are using, clock jitter that is less audible at 192k than 44.1k, no dithering on the 16-bit output resulting in quantization noise on quiet sounds, etc.

If you're listening to quiet music in a quiet room at high volumes on very low noise equipment, you can hear a difference in the noise floor level between dithered 16-bit and 24-bit, but at that volume level if that music (or movie) also has full-amplitude signals you'll be reaching peaks over 110dB SPL.
Next time my code isn't working as expected, I'm going to shout "cpu bug!" and cite this article.
The counter to this is that good products are - by virtue of being good - products that people use and talk about. Generating hype can accelerate awareness and growth, but only after the product is proven to be good via initial organic growth.
Pandoc does, it converts text from one format to another and it does it superbly...

Nobody was attacking you or your project. They are simply speaking about tools with similar uses.
i work at a J2EE shop. We pivoted recently. We feel like a startup, we engineer like a startup, we work as hard as a startup, but we also have existing client relationships, existing revenue streams funding our pivot, and we already have a team of domain experts and strong engineers.

When I give a talk and my bio says J2EE I'm a bit sheepish, and all the twenty-somethings are like LOL you use java, but that's silly - I work for a better, stronger business than all the little startups[1] emailing me on careers.stackoverflow. And the money is better. And we dodge the whole class of issues that come with taking money[2], like being told by your VC to collect and sell personal information.

That's why I'm still here. I believe in this business, and when interviewees ask the founder about the business model, the answer isn't "freemium" - its how we've been paid to contract a product for a huge client but retain IP rights so we can reinvest the profit to productize something that the entire industry wants. and we have assets (domain experts, software, client relationships, functional sales team) that a startup doesn't have - there are tremendous barriers for competition to overcome. we're halfway through this, and it's working, and when you look at it you're like, duh, of course its working.

[1] i don't want to pick on anyone, and there are a few awesome startups out there that I'd love to work for, and maybe yours is in this set, and maybe i'm not good enough for the ones in this set. What I do see is that the startups emailing me seem to need a decent rails guy to build their commodity webapp. rails apps are important, and i'm sure they have all sorts of challenges which i'm not aware of, but they aren't particularly interesting, to me. J2EE on a good team is about building out < http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsPayrollHard >, which is in a whole new class of scale/complexity that is, well, the type of hard which causes languages like Clojure and Scala to exist.
[2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3107-99-problems-but-money-ai...

edit: i'm getting lots of voting activity in both directions, it surprises me that this is controversial, i'd love to hear criticism.
Hi Katherine,

The two objections seem fairly easy to overcome with time and money. Is it possible to be amenable to change in the interview process or is that considered a cop out to PG and the people involved?
Well done and congrats. Glad we nabbed you for a visit to New Zealand before you got lost in work again. Good luck in your new job.
The funnier part is that its actually distributed via github. Sorry not the troll food you were looking for.
Dive Into Mark ~ A mirror of Mark Pilgrim's GitHub
Hard for me to say without being in their heads exactly what other problems they might have seen. Can only really comment on the feedback we were given.
That's nice, but much more importantly, here's the script to hide these awful track-comments by default: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/98339

Soundcloud is actually a fun site when the browser is not constantly bogged down and the screen not constantly flashing with 200 popups.