skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humans will hear the impact > 20kHz frequency has on the lower frequencies, not the 30kHz frequency itself. That's been proven a million times.
You weren't just believing things. The difference between 44khz and 96khz sample rate is very noticable even with mediocre audio equipment. It's an overstatement to refer to the situation as a "hi-fi case". 16/24 bits however makes no difference at all except on the size of the material.
My hat's off to this guy for the work he did, and indeed, finding a CPU is quite the accomplishment.

That said - what is it about the hardware manufacturers that makes them relatively immune to this sort of thing? Is it formal verification and rigid engineering process? Is it that they spend so much money developing these things that they better do them right, god dammit?

Sometimes I think that the whole industry would be much better off if everyone up the stack was held to these kinds of standards. If that were the case though, where would we be? We'd have rock solid systems, but how sophisticated would they be? Would UNIX exist? What about (a more bulletproof and less feature complete) Java?
I use it occasionally for word finding, like a friend who wanted a clever .me domain I pointed to: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=words+ending+in+me

Also, you can use that same idea to cheat at Scrabble (or any variant), though I would never condone such a thing ;)
> For example, the human hear will hear a 30kHz frequency if it's fundamental is 10kHz.

No. It won't.
Some songs when released as a single have Acapella and Instrumental versions of them as well. There are also compilations with only acapellas and compilations with only instrumental versions of the songs.

And when you have them, just use something in the like of Ableton Live and that will be it. I think that that's what you mean right?

It will be a great idea to have tracks released as several `layers` so that the user can choose which of them to play and which not, for example the bass/beats layer, layer with melodies, layer with the percussions, layer with the vocals of course, but that sounds like semi-studio production.
This split between "democracy" and "constitutional republic" is something being pushed more and more, but it's really a fantasy peddled by some US-based politicos with vested interests in devaluing the concept of democracy and making you accept the fact that you should be happy without it.

A "constitutional republic" is something defined by a set of laws with certain specific elements in common: having a constitution and being a republic (which is also quite a loose term, used to define "anything that is not a monarchy" -- Iran is also a constitutional republic, for example, albeit a theocratic one).

A "democracy" is not a comparable entity. Can you please point out any country who defines itself, in official terms, as a "Democracy"? Even classic Athens didn't call itself such a thing. This is because democracy is not a set of laws: it's a declaration of principles, an abstract utopia of where your laws should come from (i.e. "the people"), traditionally associated with some sort of voting system. On the formal level, there is no clear definition of a complete form of government called a "democracy"; it's commonly assumed such a thing involves some sort of voting rights (better if universal), but that's about it. The term is used to indicate the utopic state where government is carried out "by the people" in its totality. There has been no such perfect government throughout history and probably there never will be, but it's an utopia from which real forms of government can find justification and inspiration.

You can compare a "constitutional republic" to a "constitutional monarchy" or an "absolute monarchy": they are all specific forms of government with very specific common formal traits. A "democracy" is a completely different concept. You live in a constitutional republic based on democratic principles, i.e. a democracy... albeit a flawed one, like all of them are. You should strive to make your republic as genuinely democratic as possible, not renounce your rights "because after all we've never been a democracy".
Post build and deployment, it's essentially free money you are making off the app. You don't have to deal with distribution, maintaining the network, or anything else really. Granted I would love more of it and apple makes a killing off of developers even if they don't deploy a successful app, but it's a whole new marketplace they created.
> Harmonics are never exactly double, triple the fundamental. Those would be mostly inaudible. But you get the idea.

Actually, they are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonics
It is worth as much as the execution put behind it.
Boot2Gecko for HTML5 Developers: Mozilla Interview
Happy Science Coding
How Great Bosses Motivate Employees
> There's a reason attorneys are the only profession that get paid to research the very subject they're supposed to be experts in.

Isn't this true for any research professor/scientist, regardless of field? Why do you consider it to be unique to lawyers?
What You Need to Know About Using Hashtags on Twitter
Having a rough day? Watch the penguins at SeaWorld live
Interesting post. But the most interesting part is Shoplocket, I'm a big HN lurker, I can't help but think you guys should talk to Sahil Lavingia of Gumroad!
I feel you but networking is probably the most overlooked strategy with first-time entrepreneurs. Party and startup events are a great way to meet seasoned professionals.
There are two reasons I don't think this will happen:

1. People would use the tracks to create custom remixes which they would then distribute. What happens when a remix becomes more popular than the original track? Artists generally have to pay other artists to remix their songs (usually via royalties).

2. Creativity. When an artist creates something they want you to hear it the way it was intended. Allowing you to remix it however you like takes away a lot of the creative control from the artist.
It's also quite easy to spot the url using firebug or chrome's developer tools and the "network" tab.

Most sites (tumblr, turntable.fm, etc) use flash to stream the music, and require a call to a url which then creates a public s3 link which is fed to the flash player via js api.

tumblr also appends a quaint little parameter called "plead" to the end of their music urls.

?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
Corruption, Lies, and Death Threats: The Man Who Pretended to Invent Email
In Zimbabwe, Residents Of Harare Can Tweet For A Cab
A recent x86 processor model has at least 20 "errata" that they'll tell you about; in the last decade they must have had hundreds. But most of them are just worked around so they don't affect you.
Thanks for the feedback @Detrus! I plan on adding a "Run" functionality that can be used before "Saving"/"Pasting". As for editing, that might come down the line if I add something like BrowserID for signing up/in.
I know a bit of sound engineering, waves and so..
I totally agree with the title and the first 60 lines of article, and I add my POV:
1. Most of the people doesn't care,
2. What apple did is just about marketing,
3. Most of the people who says that care is pretending,
4. Zeppelin still rock the shit in a poor quality mono mp3 recorded by a drunk guy in the audience of a concert in 73.
This story is inspiring, but the business they've started, http://shoplocket.com, is even more interesting -- it looks like it can take a lot of the hassle out of selling products and services on the web. They currently only support PayPal as a payment provider, but as the article mentions, they're working on other options.

One thing I think can be improved: The company's logo doesn't have any high-tech items in it (except maybe a CD, which is a bit dated), so it might not appear relevant to somebody who's interested in selling software or computers or e-books rather than makeup and lingerie.
> Having an "overkill" sample rate lets you seamlessly
> sync things easier without anyone noticing.

You can get the same theoretical benefit by oversampling on playback. And a lot of audio equipment does just that.

> 192kHz ... also means more granular timing for the
> start and stop of transients.

Not really, for two reasons -- unless you're talking about glitch music, transients are unlikely to ever be so sudden that the difference between 0.03ms and 0.005ms could possibly matter.
> I find your claims are unsubstantiated and would require some evidence to be convincing.

It's been 3+ years since Python 3.0 has been released, and, while I agree that there's no "substantiated evidence" for its demise, some of us who witnessed the whole Zope2 to Zope3 "transition" know that in the end "evidence" doesn't count at all. What count are actual smart people, lots of them preferably, building cool and useful things with the new tool.
I think Hacker News strikes people as negative because a wide diversity of opinions occur here. Like all online communities it is self-selected, but in this case only really along one criteria--coding. All the other bases for affiliating with other people (politics, ideology, opinion, location) can vary widely.

Whereas, social network communities like Twitter and Facebook are self-selecting along any number of criteria--political, personal, ideological, local, employer, etc. As a result, I bet most people don't see as much diversity of opinion through their personal social networks as they do in single-issue dedicated online communities like HN.

So, I'm not surprised that this author found a more positive response from Twitter, than he did from Hacker News. The people following him on Twitter are already people who have affirmatively chosen to hear what he has to say. The people here have not, so they are more likely to argue, point out flaws, etc.

That can come across as negativity, sure--but is it? Is disagreement or challenge such a bad thing?

Personally speaking, I think that one result of highly personalized social media networks is that it leads to segregation from opposing opinions or very different points of view. The result is, seemingly, less tolerance for those opinions or points of view.
Show HN: AngelHack Project - ConfessionCall.com
Everyone has deep dark secrets. Now you can share them, anonymously over the phone or via voice plugin, and have the world absolve or condemn you.

This was built by a distributed team of three in 30 hours this weekend at AngelHack in SF, with all the coding done by HN user ivanstojic, with design work by Ed Lea in England, and some random contributions by my non-technical self in San Francisco.

Would love to hear what you all think, and even better what terrible secret you need to get off your chest.
So right. I am so glad you wrote this.
.."Enterprise" you should probably be aware is generally not considered to be praise...
Why?
I can name a lot of products which I use daily which are developed in an "enterprise" fashion
The ears distinguish directional audio in part from timing differences in what hits each ear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization cites http://web.archive.org/web/20100410235208/http://www.cs.ucc.... that suggests the brain is sensitive to timing differences between ears as low as 10 microseconds, or 0.01ms.
I didn't know about the solution you mention at the time I wrote the post. I'm reading up on it now and I think it's actually going to end up being the official solution so it's a good flag:

https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/06a3a8a458e70c1b6531ac...
Couldn't agree more with you! 192kHz is overkill as a "final" format.

16 bits is very limiting for music with lots of dynamics (ie: classical). Very quiet sounds sound quite bad at 16 bits, but since most pop music has about 6-12db of dynamic range, it doesn't make much of a difference.

I always thought the sweet spot would be 96-24. But the truth is, the market wants smaller and portable digital files, not higher quality music. Anything MP3 encoded will sound significantly worse than a CD anyways.
So, similar to Transloadit, then? (http://transloadit.com/)
If You’re Still Whining About AT&T’s Data Throttling, You’re Part Of The Problem
44100 is not a bad sampling rate, but it necessitates very sharp aliasing filters,

When you're talking about recording, sure, but in terms of storage and playback, we solved that problem 20 years ago with oversampling.
Nicely done! The site looks great, and it's a good inspiration to see the "Life after Rejection", as it were.

Are you going to apply to YC again this cycle, or are you too far down the chain now?
Unless you are a dj or producer and would like to sample or time stretch the tracks.
That's why Beaport offers a wav download option, that many djs/producers prefer.
Note the lack of citation
If you're not going to hear the frequency, then there's no reason to record it, so I don't see what you're objection is.
To the best of my knowledge, the only reason SSL could cause a problem is if you are specifying the protocol (http:// vs https://). The best way to handle this is to use a protocol-relative URL like "//ajax.googleapis.com/mylibrary". The browser will then infer the correct protocol.
Is it formal verification and rigid engineering process? Is it that they spend so much money developing these things that they better do them right, god dammit?

All of the above- with the minor correction that it's not about money spent developing per se. Producing silicon masks is obscenely expensive, so catching a bug before tape-out vs. after tape-out can be a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, think of it as "you better get it right the first time, god dammit"
That reminds me how (it was said) that Cray Research never spent anything on advertising. They just produced the fastest supercomputers of their time, and the rest took care of itself.
Regarding remixing. Artists usually don't "pay" each other, but return the favor - if it's the right term to say. E.g. artist A remixes a song of artist B and artist B in turn does the same for artist A. Or if they are all on the same record label artist A does a remix for artist B and later B makes a collaboration with A. I've noticed this in electronica/edm music artists at least.

And another important remark: some artists are flattered when someone asks them to make a remix for their song. (Imagine you're an artist and your idol asks you to make a remix of his song.)
No. This really is not the case. The article _specifically_ addresses this misconception.

The signal reproduced from your 44.1kHz sampled digital input is not a stair-step like some broken waveform editor might display: On output it goes through a matched reconstruction filter (which may, in fact, be digital and involve an oversampled DAC or it could be analog though those are harder to build without compromise). After the reconstruction filter the output is _EXACT_, assuming the input only contained energy below the nyquist (well, and was sufficiently far away from the reconstruction lowpass).

So even a 5khz sine wave is reproduced perfectly with 44.1kHz sampling.
>When open source communities figured out blogging they started to setup planets

Although my interest in open source was very high when one of the early planets, Debian Planet, started, I never found Debian Planet or any other open-source planet worthwhile.

>Apache's policy to this day is that any member of the community can syndicate the entire contents of their blog or a specific tagged feed of their blog to the planet. It's the individuals decision how much of themselves they want to share. Mozilla had a nearly identical debate and came to the exact same conclusion

This policy has been tried many times, but has never resulted in a blog, feed or form of public online discourse I want to follow.
Introducing Rubeque.com, an interactive learning site for Ruby
>That's been proven a million times.

Then you should be able to provide at least one citation.
Are you behind a proxy server?

In Chrome, do you have the Developer toolbar, if so, Toolbar, Information, View Response Headers, what is the Content-type? Firefox has similar tools, HeaderSpy will also do it. If the content type is wrong as you suggested in an earlier post, it would indicate a problem between you and tumblr.com. If the response is valid, it would suggest a problem, perhaps with an extension (though, if it happens across multiple browsers, that is unlikely).

curl -I https://www.tumblr.com/ (or some url that has just given you problems) - Is the content type correct on that?

Do you have anything in your hosts file that might be overriding their IPs?

Disable gzip compression in your browser, try again. I know that some versions of Firefox and Chrome had issues with gzip - preferring deflate and tumblr appears to be sending gzip. Though, those issues were fixed in recent (last few months) versions of both.

Also, what IP address or addresses does your machine believe belong to www.tumblr.com?
Does off-the-shelf machine learning need a better benchmark?
I don't think I understand how it could sound different to my ear. My understanding is that my ear doesn't have the sensory equipment to detect signals above ~20kHz - this is what I was told at university, and a decent trawl of the web suggests this is still true. If there is any sound that is in the range 20Hz-20kHz then why doesn't the microphone pick it up?

Or am I wrong, and the ear is able to detect frequencies above 20kHz?
> They know it's easy to get so they just put it right there in the API for you to use.

I'd love to see TOS confirming this
German Government Wants Google To Pay To Show News Snippets
Well there is also the aliasing in that resampling. Recording at 192 for shipping at 48 makes more sense than shipping at 44.1 surely? Some audio seems to do 88.1 but rarely 176.2.
The second half of the statement is wrong, but the first half is right. Harmonics in real-world instruments are not usually exact multiples of the fundamental. A simple diffeq model of a rigid oscillator will show you this mathematically.

An extreme example is present on modern pianos, where the high rigidity of the loud, heavy piano strings can cause tuners to stretch the lowest and highest notes as much as a half-semitone so that their harmonics are in tune with the note the next octave down or up. In other words, the first harmonic on the lowest note of a piano can be as much as 1/2 of a note sharp.

And when your oscillator is no longer one-dimensional, most harmonics aren't even close to integer multiples. The harmonics of bells, cymbals and drums are all over the place. That's what gives them their percussive sound. (Edit: some of these modes of vibration aren't harmonics in the linear sense.)
why do you think "This difference gets lost in the THD already at the DAC "? Do you have numbers to back it up? What's the noise floor of DAC? What's the noise floor of an output stage? Do you have the number?
Another "ex audio engineer" here, you can believe or not at your leisure. Many hours spent in high-end recording and mastering environments.

I'm not sure what your background in audio is, but everything he says is correct. High end frequencies well past 15k and up (22.1k actually) are widely acknowledged to influence the lower frequencies and play a huge role in the perception of the quality of a recording. This is an old debate with pros and cons on both sides, but in general you'll find the "Golden Ears" mastering engineers (Stephen Marcussen, Bob Ludwig, etc.) come down on the side of higher sampling rates.

Now, if your original recording was mastered to 16/44.1, then a transfer by way of 24/192 will probably actually hurt the recording. But if you're mastering from an original analog or high-quality digital, in my experience there's no question, higher sampling rates deliver better experiences.
Quite nice! I assume this is using the api? I would be interested to learn a bit more about how this was created. I also like the root of this site (http://erqqvg.com/) - quite an interesting way to watch the front page.
> The article's about distribution, not recording. I don't think anybody disputes the usefulness of higher sampling rates when recording.

Didn't read the article, so commenting out of context, however it needs to be said that in sample-based music genres the distributed music gets used as if it were a recording. Maybe then it could be argued that higher sampling/bit rates should be available, if only for those who are sampling.
I was under the impression that two inaudible high frequency tones could interfere with each other to create an audible interference pattern. (I think known as a "beat frequency").

If this is the case, then all of the arguments in the world about the maximum audible single frequency are irrelevant. Imagine music composed entirely of these beat frequencies and performed with a pair of oscillators between 25kHz and 35kHz. Without higher resolution encoding, it would be audible IRL but the recording would be silence.
An explanation should be required. There are several of these that I find nothing wrong with
I fully understand the sentiment behind this comment since it resonates with how I feel about HN for the most part. However, there's undeniable value in this particular style of a community:

Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous.

As far as I can see, if you have a point or articulation in your "thank you" comment, it's not really frowned upon. But if all you can contribute to the conversation are those two words, isn't that what upvoting is for? I really like that HN threads are much easier/faster to navigate (compared to reddit for example) merely because of the lower number of comments, which stems from the pressure to provide more substance behind them.

I spend over an hour a day on this site, yet have so few comments or submissions; because it costs so much time and effort to put anything in front of a pedantic, productivity/efficiency obsessed audience ready to shred anything to bits and pieces that is less than a throughly fact-checked, carefully constructed argument. I think that's what makes HN worth reading.

For example, I'm about to post about a project I've been working on for a while. I'm sure it'll feel good to hear if people have good things to say about it but the most valuable feedback I'll receive will be from the people who overanalyze things and are highly critical.
Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails has done it several times: http://www.ninremixes.com/multitracks.php

Plenty of other artists have as well, but this is the most high profile example I can think of. I agree it would be great if it happened more often.
1) 48kHz sampling does include headroom.

2) increased sampling rate does not improve timing. This also has been researched in detail (because it sounds like it could possibly be true given that the ears can phase match to much greater granularity than the sample clock). It was found false in practice, and in retrospect, the sampling theorem explains why. The Griesinger link discusses this with illustrations, and provides a bibliography.
The Key To A Unified Brand: A Consistent UI
I know this is slightly tangential but are hi-end DACs really worth it? I have always been amazed how much audiophile DACs cost ($300-1000). The reality is I listen to 320kbps music that was most likely recorded at 44100. DAC technology is not exactly new. So why the price?

Another tangent: To me it seems audio engineering should fix the "woofer". That is it seems subwoofers have terrible distortion.
Open source exchange rates: automated scrapping-to-Github-repo
In other words, your theory is that the superposition principle doesn't hold for sound waves.