skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Will any [big] company pay for a "Open Decision Process Tool"
I have a simple idea, I want your feedback on. This idea will be more applicable to a company with >100 employees. The idea is simple.

* Company can have a companyname.decision.com, which will work with SSO (Single Sign On) - Should help with privacy and security.

* It will have two views - Admin and Users

* Admin can add a decision, remove a decision, get reports, comments

* Users can see all the open decision - Provide input and comments. Have a clear picture of the inclination of a decision(e:g: how many people agree that pets can be allowed in side company.)

At the end of the day decision making will owned by Management, but still makes the process transparent.

I'll be charging for the tool.

That's pretty much it. Your feedback is welcome.

P.S: I am re-posting this.
How stupid are banner ads?
Interesting link provided by Wolfram, and funded by his company: http://www.computerbasedmath.org/
How is it frightening?
The launch page is light on details. Currently, it looks like your service will register me for the free/cheapest plan at these services (possibly negotiating a smaller tier than is public), all for $10/mo. I'm not sure why I'd use StartupPacks instead of just registering for my own free/cheap accounts at the services I need. You might want to put that reason on the launch page.
Specifically, I'm collecting barometer readings from Android devices - I currently receive about 10,000 measurements per day. I've been planning on monitizing by providing better short-term prediction using nowcasting techniques with radar imagery combined with the barometer network.

This seems like it could work to me, as there are other startups working on the nowcasting idea (Dark Sky, for one) and I haven't found anyone with a similar custom-built barometer network yet.

Does this sound like a plausible strategy to you? I've had only minimal advice from meteorologists/atmospheric scientists (though I'm starting to make some contacts) so I'd appreciate any advice you can give.
This:

Yes, but the effects of interference patterns between multiple ultrasonic frequencies is the same, and definitely does affect the audible spectrum

has nothing to do with this:

This is why we must filter the square wave that comes out of a DAC

The only reason that square waves "must" be filtered is to reduce the potential of damaging tweeters. If you want to record a square wave with the purpose of later reproducing the square wave, than you don't want to filter it - once you filter it, it's no longer a square wave.
I would love some comments with voting so that you can see the most "valid" reason the code in question is bad.
AirSpace - An absolutely awesome HTML5 game
Pennsylvania, which you can tell from their area code. It doesn't look like traffic pumping.
I tried calling the number from Google Voice but it couldn't complete the call. I get maybe one ring before it disconnects. Anyone else having this issue?
They're at our datacenter in Pennsylvania. We get paid from termination (like freeconferencecall.com).

We're not traffic pumping or anything--it's a legitimate conferencing service.
I mostly agree with the article in the context of distribution of a final mix. However, the article ignores one glaringly obvious reason to distribute in 24/192 format: to allow the listener to be a participant in the creative process, enabling better results for amateur musician listeners who want to sample or remix the audio or for DJs to get better results when altering the tempo for beat matching one track with another, etc. Of course, if you're going to do that, you might as well distribute in a multi-track format instead to maximize flexibility for the end user (Want to sing karaoke? Just turn off the lead vocal track for playback).
They've changed hands so many times between AT&T, Lucent, Alcatel and Alcatel-Lucent that they're long gone. I think Alcatel-Lucent said they were basically disbanding the sliver of Bell Labs that was left around the 2007 time frame.
Google voice blocks our exchange numbers in Pennsylvania for some reason :( We're currently expanding into multiple datacenters--so we'll have new exchange numbers shortly. But it seems that our 610-XXX numbers are all blocked by Google.
Mmm loves me some inappropriate downvotes.
> Clearly your opinions differ from the majority of the web community.

> Why do you think we now have document.querySelectorAll?

This is called "argumentum ad populum" (appeal to popularity). The advent of jQuery caused clueless "developers" (along with library authors) to beg for "native" selectors. QS(A) is the result. They were never needed in the first place.

> Why? ie5.5 is 12 years old.

Internet Explorer's Quirks Mode (which still exists in IE 9) is a simulation of IE 5. It's useful for testing against IE's old box model.
my long time favorite http://proteys.info/404/

btw wasn't there somewhere a blog with cool 404 pages?
Another Mini-ITX all-in-one from ECS
Maybe his "contempt for the web" comment is referring to the traditional hyperlink-based Web 1.0 model. Every time I try to view a tweet, I get redirected to https://twitter.com/?_twitter_noscript=1
The Promise of Customized Enterprise App Stores for Health Care
Nice catch.

It would be interesting if he has accidentally triggered a backdoor, such as mentioned in this post.

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/trusting-h...
A lot can happen after you don't get in. My good buddy Jon has a positive story with Storenvy after not getting into YC. (similar space too)
That's because they focussed on the most likely end-user experience:

>While Motown shortened song to fit into radio time, the company also produced records specifically with car radio audio quality in mind. Motown recording engineers set up car speakers in the studio so that they could simulate and perfect how a song would sound emanating from a car radio

- what's the point of engineering things to a set of conditions virtually none of your target audience possesses?

http://web.wm.edu/amst/370/2005/sp3/machinery_marketing.htm
That's true. It's kind of the Monster Cable model. BTW, I'm not saying that marketing and whatnot should deceive less technical consumers and trick them into spending more money than they should (which is basically what Moster Cable does). But when you explain to technical people why something like 24/192 isn't better (other people in this thread have pointed out, this isn't totally accurate in the first place), and they understand what you're saying but still prefer it, by all means, let them buy it.
One way of actively looking for compiler bugs is using a tool like Csmith[1]. Another is to compile some known-difficult code (e.g. Libav[2]) with various combinations of (optimisation) flags until the test suite fails. Most of the bugs I've found were during routine testing of Libav.

While I don't consider missed optimisations bugs as such, they are easy to find. Simply compile some non-trivial function and look at the output. There's usually something that could be done better, especially if some exotic instruction can be used.

[1] http://embed.cs.utah.edu/csmith/
[2] http://libav.org/
Obviously, I am not claiming infinite detail. There is going to be a limit based on the grain and the size of the film (35mm, Super, IMAX). 65mm film shot is going to be of higher quality than what digital is capable of today.

While I have no doubt that digital will eventually catch up and surpass film, there inevitably is going to be a transition period where quality films were recorded (let's just say at 2k) where the input is constrained and extrapolation be the only available option.

4k is the current state of the art. It will not be so forever and because it's recorded at 4k, we can't go back and extract more dynamic range due to the limitation of the sensor. Whereas you can go back, redigitize an IMAX film (say Chronos shot in 1985) that is in good condition and get way more info than something shot on 4k yesterday.

TL;DR IMO input still absolutely matters. 35mm is not the upper limit. We went through this with photography and am now doing the same with video/film.

EDIT: After thinking more about it, here's a more extreme example. I purchased a Kodak DC20 back in the 90s (early adopter yay!), even if the camera had decent glass, there's no way I can go back to an image captured by that camera and magically get the equivalent of 22mp 5D camera by resampling. If I had used a film camera, I can get a much improved scan.

EDIT2: Here's a good example. Slumdog Millionaire was mostly shot on a SI-2K which recorded at 2k. You can't go back and get 4k output on the digital portions. So generations later, we will be stuck enjoying an Academy Award winning film at that level of quality.

http://www.siliconimaging.com/DigitalCinema/News/PR_01_31_09...
If I do not have any appointments all weekend you are going to poll my location from 8pm friday till 6am monday for no reason all?
Why the cloud isn't for your startup
Some of the people in this thread need to think carefully about why it is they think what they do about some of these issues. Lumping all women together into an anti-sexually free, prudish bunch is horribly insulting.

If you want to attack "brogrammers" because their attitude annoys you, or you don't like their style (which I completely agree with. I personally find the style completely obnoxious) that's one thing. Those of you attacking them because they like sex, women, porn, naked parties, etc. - please stop to think about who and what you are painting with that wide, wide brush. I can assure you that the women I know in the BDSM, poly, swinger, sex club, goth/industrial, alt porn and other largely sex-positive communities would be offended not only by your generalizations that women do not like these things, but offended /at your offense./ Additionally, many of those women are not only in those communities, but some of them happen to be systems admins, developers, and hold other technical positions.

Please do not conflate "prudish people" with "women." The above mentioned communities will thank you.
> Are you arguing that the analog output of a (filtered, idealized) DAC would look different depending on whether the dac was running at 44.1kHz vs 192kHz?

No. I'm arguing this: take a 44.1kHz signal and upsample it to 192. It's the same signal, same bandwidth and everything. Duplicate the stream and add a 1 sample delay to one of the channels. When you hit play, that delay would be there. If you downsampled the 44.1kHz signals after applying the delay to one of the channels, you would almost hear the same thing. The difference is that you could not detect the difference between the signals until after a few samples. With the 192kHz stream it would be unambiguous after 2.

Remember, Nyquist-Shannon holds if you have an infinite number of samples. If your ears could look into the future then what you say is perfectly correct, but they need time to collect enough samples to identify any timing discrepancies.
Interview: UofPeople Founder Shai Reshef On His P2P Learning Experiment
Yup, if you're in the H1B queue for a green card, you have to restart the whole process if you switch employers. Been there, done that, not cool.
I wouldn't call 20% "similar" to 50%, but it is still a significant number.
Does it work for Chrome (using 17.0.963.65 Mac)? Using It seems to just break the individual song page and does not affect songs within the /dashboard. 1-2 of the reviews seem to share my experience. I have it queued up as answer to a question a user had here

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20868/hide-commen...
Let me know if we can help get you started, we can add you in !
Leading Transformation and Captivating Communities (leading change - ebook)
Grandparent post only mentioned 3 companies out of literally thousands in the valley, 1 of which only has a couple thousand employees and is privately held. "Not too many" companies operate at Yahoo scale is a true statement still.

I would also add to the parent post that many Yahoo employees are financially successful, having been through earlier stages. They aren't fresh grads looking for salary bumps or the target demographic to cash in on an IPO (since they already went through one, or have greatly profited from options since being hired at Yahoo).

That being said, most of the 'good' people I know of (key word being know of) have left Yahoo for the other big internet companies or startups. They also seem to have hired a lot of 'media' type people in the recent past, not necessarily tech people.
> Doesn't that completely negate his conclusion, that there is no point to distributing 24/192 music? If people want to pay for 24/192, and even he just admitted that they will legitimately enjoy it more, how can you conclude there is no point?

Ultimately, sure. The world is full of products and services which only add value in this weak sense.

If the same wine tastes better if it's priced higher, then it still tastes better. But I think it's only honest that the consumer be aware that the increased utility from being priced higher is due solely to the fact of it being priced higher. Beyond that, I don't care.

One thing we can all agree on is that music is much more enjoyable if you think you're listening to it through good equipment or from a good source. Ultimately it's only the `thinking' part that matters. So I would make two points:

1. One point he's making is that playing audio sampled at 192khz through regular equipement actively distorts the music in negative ways. So now if you know this now you should enjoy that music _less_.

2. If you're adept metacognition (maybe that's not the right word), you'll realize a) you can get most of the enjoyment by buying equipment that's `pretty decent', and then not worry about it too much. b) you're probably fooling yourself by spending so much time/money worrying about having the best equipment, so you're probably not getting the maximum utility from the experience anyway. Or maybe it's the experience of trying to get the best equipment it self that's enjoyable, not necessarily the increased audio fidelity.
Great guide! Was a good refresher for me and I could probably add to it (which probably means I've done too much research).

Now back to hacking on our alpha.
New Zealand Cycling
Meet Cheetah, Boston Dynamics' Fast Running Robot
I don't understand why anyone gets down on 24-bit consumer audio.

Specifically because CD-quality 16/44 audio has midrange distortion present during complex passages that is completely eliminated and non-present in 24/96 sources.

Listen to "Us and Them" off a 16/44 CD version of the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. When it kicks into the chorus, it becomes totally distorted and everything in the midrange bleeds into each other. It's a mess.

Then, try listening to the 24/96 Immersion box set copy or a vinyl-sourced 24/96 rip and you'll find it's gone. When the song gets complex and loud, everything remains totally clear, each instrument stands on it's own, it doesn't become an awful distorted jumble.

You could argue that it's just the quality of the master that makes the difference; but if you take a copy of the original transcoded to 16/44 and compare it again with the 24/96 copy you can hear the same effect.

Why would anyone argue against high-resolution audio anyway? Sure, most everyone will probably just continue downloading 16/44 MP3s, but at least give us the option to have 24bit FLACs of the stuff we really like. Please and thank you.
Seriously!!! When is this launching?
Australia's largest phone retailer pwned
Can someone explain what I can do with this thing? Can I use it to backup all my files and make a dropbox sorta thing? I don't understand.
Did you know, gmail's entire web app is 1.66 megs once fully loaded? Users visit it many times every day and they've still optimized the hell out of it. Same goes for many other well built web apps. Twitter has been getting away with sloppy engineering since their inception and yet they continue to give others engineering advice.
I think it offers you the paid tier of each SAAS app. If Basecamp and Shopify is involved it would be way more expensive then 10$ a month. Plus Dropbox!
I looked at your blog and saw that you are in Kingston. There are techies here too, so you might not even have to travel much :)
I replied to a specific comment, not to the article. In particular, nescafe said this was "an OK intro to pre-POSIX bourne shell scripting". I took this to mean that he would provide POSIX-endorsed suggestions. The double brackets, at least, are not "post-POSIX".
> Giving up that control is a big step and, I think, an unnecessary one.

Why do you need that control? Someone creating something new with your work, doesn't seem to damage your work in any way.
That's cute. Obviously you've never recorded a rock band while riding the pre to compensate for 16bit's terrible noise floor and horribly limited headroom. You've never had the joy of ruining a perfectly good take because of that wonderful sound it makes when the volume spikes into digital distortion despite compressing the wazoo out of the input source. Glorious sound, digital distortion. Run a dentist drill through an old Speak & Spell and you'd just about have it.

You've never rented an expensive tube EQ during a mix to cover up 16bit's grating harshness from 10k to 15k. Or tried like mad to make the bass drum sound like a freaking bass drum and not a pie pan slamming against the back of a plastic trash can. And yes, we had good mics and pres, all standard studio stuff. Decent, not brilliant, converters, but it was the 16bit that was the problem. Getting those 20bit XTs for the first time was like walking into the Promised Land.

Sure, there's lots of marketing ploys out there, lots of snake oil. Moving up from 16 bit was not one of them.
Where do people go to find introverted, seasoned professionals? I'm going to guess the next Woz won't be at those parties.
Reverb now offering full Unreal Engine 3 dev kits to indie developers
The problem is one of terminology. But ignoring that issue doesn't make it go away.

People talk about "coding" or "programming" or "software engineering" as if such simple terms can encompass the huge range of complexities involved.

Coding is on the same scale as, say, carpentry. One might say "I learned carpentry over the weekend" and it would be obvious that what was meant was "I learned some small amount of wood working over the weekend" rather than "I became a master carpenter over the weekend".
Facebook Messenger For Windows Desktop Chat Client Launches After Leaking
Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. Sorry if the sarcasm didn't quite carry.

I know these things can and do happen. I've come across one or two of these strange ones before, but too often I've seen people jump to the conclusion that someone / something else was to blame. Without any other real evidence other than that they have exhausted their shallow back of talent.
How changing the structure of the web changes PageRank
It works for me on Chrome/Mac, but now that you say it, perhaps I found a different one when I quickly re-googled for this comment - sorry for that.

When in doubt try google with "soundcloud hide comment script", I think there are 2 or 3 around, one of them definitely works.
I was researching a local sports startup about 10 years ago, but the barrier to entry was so high that it was impossible to even build an MVP without outside funding. Professional sports is an industry that will be dominated by the major outlets for many years to come.
The Word "Douchebag" Seen Through the Lens of Google's Ngram Viewer
Stop refreshing; you have more than a month to get it.
I agree. How many times have you heard of a Google product only after it was announced that were shuttering the service? If Google has this problem, how many other businesses rise and fall without others knowing?

Hype can just as easily destroy a product by setting expectations too high and the product doesn't deliver. Think of how many movies have fallen into this trap?

You have to strike the perfect balance of sparking just enough interest while still delivering something of interest.
How in the world do they have 14,000 employees? I just checked the Yahoo.com site right now, yup still looks the same as it did in 1998 except now it's nicely formatted for an 800px wide monitor. What are all these people doing all day long?
Startup founders send Lego space shuttle with camera into the stratosphere
This is fantastic. Thank you.
I think that's what I meant, but can you explain how that's different from what I described? (serious question, wanting to learn)
If the initial load-up time is slow, then you're probably less likely to click that Twitter link knowing that the initial page-load is always slow.

The warm-cache situation only matters to people that are on Twitter all the time, so this possibly has the effect of keeping existing users happy while raising a barrier to new users (or pushing infrequent users to completely abandon the system).

Secondly, you're only looking at download size (the importance of is really to imply a certain amount of time it takes to download those resources). Since Twitter's JS platform is about doing all of the HTML rendering on the client-side that has to be taken into account (this wasn't a concern in the past when it was mostly done on the server-side). If the page takes 3s ~ 5s to load even with a warm cache and a tiny (size) ajax-request, then it sort of defeats the purpose (unless your purpose is to relieve server-load instead of in-browser load times).
>Well the maker of the Zeppelin NT is the original Eckener entity that created the Zeppelins, so to the extent that a "Zeppelin" is an airship built by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH, the Zeppelin NT is a real Zeppelin.

Well, yes. He said "this is a Zeppelin, not a blimp", which is a lot like saying "this is a Chevy, not a butterfly". A blimp built by Zeppelin would still be a Zeppelin, and Zeppelin builds all sorts of things that aren't related to airships.

The reason I don't think it will scale well is, like a blimp, pressurization of the gas bag is what keeps a hybrid in the proper shape. This means as the size of the airship increases the envelop pressure must also increase to deal with greater external forces, making the lifting gas heavier and therefor less efficient.

The US navy fielded blimps larger than the Hindenburg until the early '60s, but they were never able to get more than about half the Hindenburg's lift capability for this reason.

With a hybrid you still get the benefit of placing engine pods more efficiently and you don't have to worry about the nose collapsing if you go too fast. However, if you were going to go through the trouble and expense of building an 800 ft airship there's no reason to sacrifice that much lift.
Autotrading with pftp was a great way to get banned when I came up in the scene. ssh + standard unix ftp and a screen rotation of ~5-10 sites were the usual trading setup. It's much nicer than FXP, particularly as most top sites only allowed a few logins. You simultaneously mget different files from all affil sites and mput to the rest of your rotation. Chaining with FXP just isn't fast enough.
The Earth is full.
> Toss me that 100k you're bandying about so easily and I'll have it done by May :)

Considering merge with trunk will probably be done shortly after 1.4 I don't think he'll be getting his money's worth ;)
SouthGeek Ramble and Review 31 [11111]: I Only Download Legal Software
Is Microsoft Alienating IT Professionals with Windows 8?
Indeed my first thought was, cool how do I try this out? Then I wasn't sure what to do, is the product in beta? is this merely a landing page for something soon to come? I then tabbed back to HN to check comments for more insight.
wow! this is quite a rare thing...
35mm to 4K digital projection - Cinema Conversion
Living your life without excuses