skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd just like to point out, if you pre-order via steveblank.com (using Amazon) you get charged full price, and pre-order via Amazon gets you a reduced price. I don't know if it will get updated when it ships.

I didn't notice this until I clicked aespinoza's link.
i think what jaylevitt is referencing to is that there is interpolation going on in the dac. that could mean (i'm no dac expert, so not sure) that the dac could guess more granular than the sampling rate would allow the start points (of transient e.g.)

but the question for me is how exact that guessing is.
correct me if i'm wrong but, that interpolation happens twice: when recording by the adc and on playback by the dac.

so a lot of that whole discussion (yeah, finally something about acousticts :) depends on how accurate interpolation works in adcs and dacs.
In a way, yes, though I would argue that implicit in "scientist" or "research professor" is the idea that they are searching for unknowns. The professional world is thought of very differently.

If you went into an architect's office and he told you he'd need $4000 to research whether gravity applies to the building you want him to build, you'd scoff. If you went to an accountant to ask whether you can take a certain deduction and he said he needed $4000 to look it up, you'd think he was either incompetent or a fraudster. But this is accepted (and necessary) in the legal world.
People who read HN tend to be better coders than those who don't. Fizzbuzz exists because it is needed.
I agree with you that the default should be changed. And note that any application developer can in fact require attr_accessible globally, across all models, with one line of configuration.

The point of my post was not to give Rails a pass, and I apologize for misleading if it came off that way. Rather, I was trying to clarify the situation for those who are less familiar with Rails. The discussions surrounding this issue (including Homakov's own words) seem to erroneously suggest that Homakov discovered a previously unknown vulnerability in Rails. I was merely clarifying that he instead found a vulnerability in a specific Rails app.

Now, it's a matter of opinion as to whether the Rails default should be called a "vulnerability." I say yes, but reasonable people can disagree. What's clear, though, is that no previously unknown vulnerabilities in the framework have been revealed.
For Fanvibe (YC S'10) we looked at a variety of sports stats providers, including TSN, Stats, and SportsDirect (who we used). These are the guys that license all the structured data to ESPN and others. No matter who you work with, its pretty painful to use this data and their schemas. And they all make you sign paying contracts before you can play with the data.

We used services like Superfeedr to grab a variety of RSS feeds, including ESPN's, to grab headlines.

ESPN, CBS Sports, the Yahoo Fantasy Football API are all middlemen when it comes to sports. The only thing they own is original video content (talking heads, not highlights) and their headlines & articles. Don't look to them for the solution. Its a big step forward for an organization like ESPN to do this, but its going to be much slower than the speed of tech-focused companies that are the usual on HN.

From my experience, better to build around ESPN and others than to try to work with them to push innovation forward.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Fanvibe, and also used to work at ESPN.
Alternative Python Mustache Templating
Confnow - Painless 24/7 Free Conference Calls
@nullc: of course you're right, and the commenter you're replying to does not understand the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. Which is a shame, because the article specifically addressed this point.

These discussions of audio standards always get sidetracked by people who don't understand or believe this result. (Have to admit, the result is surprising).

I think there may be problems with the argument in TFA, which is based exclusively on standard linear systems theory.

Of course, the ear and some of its perceptual components may be significantly nonlinear, and thus not covered by the frequency response graphs of TFA.

These graphs assume linear systems, in which you put two frequencies in, and the same frequencies pop out in scaled form. Nonlinear systems can produce new frequencies in response, and this possibility is not discussed in TFA. Probably these effects are quite minor, but may be audible to some listeners on some equipment for some choices of source material.
MyFord Touch software update being mailed to US users this week
People from a musical, non-signals background tend to use 'harmonics' as a synonym for 'overtones' or 'partial tones', which is where the confusion arises, I suspect.

There's a measure -- inharmonicity[1] -- of how far the actual overtones of a particular instrument differ from their theoretical fundamental multiples.

[I suspect you already know this. This reply is probably for others' benefit]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inharmonicity
> I'm no sound engineer, but as far as I can tell, the main point of that paper is that some instruments produce harmonics at frequencies greater than 20kHz, not that these frequencies matter to humans. However, section X references other papers that apparently make this claim.

Yes, you're right.

In fact, some of the section X references don't even mention hearing, they talk about "alpha-EEG rhytms" (in this case "listeners explicitly denied that the reproduced sound was affected by the ultra-tweeter") and "bone-conducted ultrasonic hearing" trough the "saccule" ("organ that responds to acceleration and gravity and may be responsible for transduction of sound after destruction of the cochlea").

--

In fact, most of the claims of the article are around the fact that there is energy over 20khz and how it can affect recording process.

This is a well known fact, and this is exactly why engineers filter out sub-sonic and super-sonic frequencies, especially today: stuff that you can't hear (or feel) will just suck your headroom and make you lose the loudness war.
Yes, but if you sample the frequency to create a step wave, then neglect to filter the results, you will end up reproducing tons of high frequencies. That is why we need to filter the output for signals >20KHz...to remove these harmonics that result from reproducing the square wave.

Of course, filters aren't perfect, and result in phase shift and roll-off. So we over-sample the signal to create a signal with a much higher frequency than 20KHz, so that the filtering occurs well outside the audible band, allowing us to filter out all of these harmonics without affecting the desired signal.

Basically, the end result is that by sampling the signal, you are introducing high frequency content that must be removed prior to playback. This high frequency content is one of the reasons old CD players from the 80s and 90s cause "listener fatigue", although I have no sources to back up that last statement.
Then one would be forced to conclude that many instruments have no harmonics at all, which is obviously not what 'harmonic' is referring to in this thread of discussion. Why be pedantic when it's obvious what everyone is talking about?

Anyway, it's not as though mathematical literature requires you to use a term exactly one way. I had a diff eqs textbook that used the word 'harmonic' in exactly the way I used it above when I made reference to diff eqs...
The website was the first thing I noticed as well.. stunning
Jesus, that needs to be a mobile app "Whats above [x] Planes, [x] Satellites [ ] Stars"

That's awesome!
Metro.js - Metro Live Tiles and More for jQuery
>Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous.

The comp.* hierarchy and probably most of the rest of Usenet in 1992 had the ethic that you should not waste a whole message on just a thank-you (thank-yous sent by email were fine, and in 1992, almost every Usenet From field contained a valid email address) or on any other purely social nicety unless perhaps the social nicety's purpose was to conclude or cap off a long series of back-and-forth messages.

Usenet was probably where a good 40 to 50% of thoughtful public discussion happened on the 1992 internet (the other places where much public discussion happened being mailing lists and IRC).
well done.

The internal dialog went something like this:
"hah, cute."
"hmmm.. how do I move"
"crap I just died."
"oh, I've got extra lives.."
"...and now I'm playing games at work."
Any legal system has flaws. But not having a legal system makes it an anarchy, and I would argue that that causes far more violence. The hope behind law is that it will not be violated. The theoretical underpinning of law that I support makes the point that law should reduce total violence.

If you say that violence is not OK, and context shouldn't dictate exemptions, can I believe that you think violence in self defense is wrong? If that is not your position, legal punishments seem to be that abstracted with respect to time, location, and direct facts.
Just as long as you don't do this:

if (someBoolean){
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
And its an Archers of Loaf song, nice!
Also should be noted that a subset of songs have a download url
The Rise of Pinterest and the Fall of the Hippie Male Early Adopters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtones

I don't know about the physics of the speaker itself generating the overtone (in cabinet), but it could certainly resonate a wine glass in the room, for example.
...of course I mean audible. Or spectral? Not aural, anyway. English is not my first language. Sorry.
ahh, i see your point, now. thanks. what do you think about adding engineers (for certain values of engineer) to the list of professions that get paid to do research?
I should point out that after room treatment, my next recommendation tends to be an amplifier with Audyssey MultEQ in-room calibration. I've never heard a listening environment that didn't sound unambiguously better with it enabled.
We got pre-approval for the record.

In fact they offered reimbursement for us printing Pg marketing materials but the costs were minimal and we didn't adequately separate the two areas, so we declined.
Stephen Wolfram on the Khan Academy
This is why America is broke
If that is true, surely in your up thread example of recording a triangle, the "impact on lower then 20kHz frequencies" would already have happened during the recording process in between the triangle and the microphone, and would have been captured perfectly on recording equipment that's proven capable of capturing everything below 20kHz? So we'd "hear" the effect as part of the recording instead of requiring it to happen in our listening room…
Are they talking about "beat frequency" type effects?
How Running A Business Is Like Playing A Video Game
Seth expands on his thoughts in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKArupEBE6Y

Now in all seriousness, of course the focus should be on product. But having a ton of relationships to leverage doesn't hurt if the end goal is the success of the business. (and I love that video!)
you just made my evening, please add 'fb share' button! ;)
First, if you can "hear the steepness" you really can hear higher frequencies, but I assume you meant "maybe you can hear higher frequencies but not higher frequency _tones_"...

People have suggested this. It's been tested in rigorous double blind tests— involving both real music signals as well as special test tones (Linked from the article). The tests were unable to show that people could hear the ultrasonics. Moreover, there isn't any physiological basis to expect people to be able to. You can't expect a stronger result than that.

Common 48KHz audio already goes a bit beyond what adults are known to be able to hear, so you've already got some headroom for "but what if a few people hear better than anyone the researchers have been able to find!".
A fairly normal room is pretty awful these days, particularly with the trend towards timber flooring and sparse furnishing.
"Build products, not hype."

Not that I disagree with anything said, but it is really easy to put your head down and build good products that eventually fail because no one knew about them. Just a thought.
Yes, but our ears only hear 20Hz-20KHz. So, according to Nyquist theory, you can recreate the entire signal that the human ear hears by recording those sonic artifacts that result from interference between supersonic harmonics.

So while it's true that the human ear can't hear well above ~18KHz, and the interference between high order harmonics are audible, it's also true that a properly recorded signal, sampled at 44.1KHz, oversampled, and filtered, can reproduce the exact signal the human ear is capable of hearing. At least according to theory.

The human ear is capable of detecting sound pressure as well as sound intensity, and while playback of the interference between harmonics can be reproduced faithfully in the sound intensity realm, the sound pressure levels will differ, and it is theorized that people may be able to tell the difference between the two. However, as far as I am aware, nobody has been able to demonstrate this reliably in practice.
Probably. I should have left it at "it's not the recording format" and not nominated a limiting factor.

I'd take the bathroom, given that my singing voice sounds less worse there! :-)
The $100 Startup (new book)
Approxy promises instant gaming gratification with "cloudpaging" tech
How to avoid issuing preference stock
Sure, moving up from 16bit recording was an improvement, but having done engineering for a company listed above for over a decade, I can tell you that we went 24bit/192kHz because of market demand, not for any real technical reasons. We thought it was fairly unnecessary ourselves. It was also kind of an arms race with other companies, much like the megapixel arms race for digital cameras.
Audio tweaker with hacker leanings but without carpentry skills? Start your engines: http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net/
It would make no difference at all.
Clickable - http://repp.herokuapp.com
As an integrated circuit designer I can say that a lot of hardware is somewhat less complex than the software world. At the chip level anyway.

In the hardware world at the chip level, the environment is fairly rigid. A designer has a pretty good idea of what the environment is going to be for their chip. Linux is designed to operate in all sorts of environments: multiple cpu architectures, multiple versions of those architectures, the myriad peripherals, and all the other software that is going to run on linux.

That's not really the case with hardware at the chip level. We know what chip we are going to be talking to, or what family of chips. And most of those are designed in house, so there can be a lot of give-and-take going on.

It's just not a lot of combinations (compared to software, in my opinion.)

An exception would be memory, which is usually made by a third party. And it's also where you find incompatibilities... some manufacturer's ram doesn't work in macbook pros, etc. That's a bug.

And because the hardware can take a long time to iterate through design->implementation->verification->fabrication->prototype verification, there is a strong force driving designs toward being the simplest possible implementation that accomplishes the goals.

So you have these very well defined blocks of functionality that get pieced together and form a chip. The interfaces between blocks are very rigidly defined, and the amount of functionality in a given block is usually pretty limited.

At the level I work at, design is done in VHDL or Verilog (and now SystemVerilog is becoming a viable option). So that's a limited space. That could possibly be the biggest contributor to "less bugs" in hardware (if that is a true supposition). I get flustered with all the different software programming languages.

A big disadvantage of hardware design is that testing is first done in event based simulation. The tools available for this are pretty awesome, but it's still extremely slow. My last design would take about 100 hours to simulate about 300 ms of hardware time. That's a large part of why the iteration times are so long.

Now, with AMD and Intel, and designing these ridiculously highspeed CPUs, it's a whole different ball of wax. I expect a lot of their design is transistor level, full custom. Maybe they prototype in a higher level language, but you aren't going to 3GHz doing standard cell designs in VHDL.
Ask HN:Software for designing websites
I can code sites in html5 and css3 but my question is how do real world web designers created such beautiful sites that i can see on dribbble. what is the design process and what software should i be using. Im using a mac by the way.
Rest assured, this was rolling around in our heads longer than two weeks ago, and we had no idea a SW team had tried to build something like this.

Not that, that would have changed anything anyway... :)
Stripe only works with businesses in the US (for now at least). They are based in Toronto, Canada.
The "making of Moq" expected out later this year
> Can you see the LED flash when you press a button? No? Not even the tiniest amount?

I used to be able to see it when I was a kid (it looked very faintly red), but I just tried it and couldn't see it at all. That's actually a little bit disturbing.
Edit: Misspoke. Meant people who get shit done, come here. Not that people come here to get shit done.
This is because OS devs (and compiler devs) have suffered them for you. I've run into many x86 bugs, both documented and undocumented. Have you done much assembly?

Usually bugs would involve unlikely sequences of operations or operations in unexpected states. But there have been very serious bugs involving wrong math (Intel Pentium) or cache failures leading to complete crashes (AMD Phenom). These two made it to production and were show-stoppers because OS devs could do very little about them (in the Phenom bug, they could, but with a noticeable performance hit). I don't think I've seen any production CISC chip completely free of bugs. OS devs have to do the testing and the circumventing.

I mean... typically x86 chips have DOZENS of documented bugs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Phenom
This.

I worked out a long time ago, that I enjoy listening to _music_, not HiFi gear.

My advice to people who ask how to make their system sound better? Buy some music you enjoy more…

I can enjoy a wonderful performance of a great tune played through my laptop speakers - much more that I enjoy test tones or gear-demo-tracks through sound gear worth something north of a new car…

(not that I haven't been "that guy" in my past…)
We currently use SWFUpload + ImageMagick + (sometimes) Aviary in our PHP apps. We're using Mailgun for receiving images via email/SMS.

I'd love to replace that with Chute. Checking it out now.
Audio, perhaps like the wine industry, is a vast bastion of confirmation bias and subjectivity, no argument there.

But I know what my ears hear, and IMO there is absolutely a vast different between 44.1 and 192. I'm not sure how you can even question it. Someone else on the thread was saying it's impossible to hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit. I don't even know what to say to that. It's like telling me the glass of Gallo "Table Red" you're drinking is as good as my '75 Lafite. All I can say is "cheers" and just enjoy.
Also nice, but not as interactive:

http://www.ibiblio.org/404/
Other than the fonts looking a bit jagged on Win7/Chrome the design looks amazing.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/511546/pics/shoplocket.JPG
Thanks for the feedback!

Can I get the address that was giving Bounce trouble? We'll take a look.
> If only it were as easy as `gem install pg`.

It is with MacRuby, but that's a whole different set of problems :)
Rich & co. have historically been more interested in being correct than being popular, especially at the early stages. I would expect to see more components show up fairly quickly, but not before they're ready for use.
That's very cool, but it requires pretty high-intensity ultrasound to be noticeable. I doubt that will be the case with ordinary music.
Great feedback. We'll definitely look at posting one ASAP! :)
UploadCare http://uploadcare.com is another startup in this area.
I'm writing this from win8 on laptop right now. After 3 days of using it I'm finding it very usable. I spend most of my time on the desktop but I have the metro remote desktop pinned on the left and I'm watching my build go by. Switching back and forth is easy and nice. When I need to run a new app I just hit Win then type whatever I want: Win->"notepad" boom, notpad pops up. It actually feels faster than the start menu in win7 too. You just have to get a little more keyboard-centric and not rely on the mouse for everything, though you can still put your mouse in the corners and get all the menus you need.
Thank you so much for the awesome feedback! Can't wait for you to try us out. I'll admit we had a bit of fun picking the products for the wallpaper, adding in some more practical/digital goods is a good suggestion.
That article describes hetrodyning which happens because ultrasonic frequencies at high amplitudes interacts nonlinearly with air. You are not going to see that effect with sound waves generated near the audible spectrum, and normal loudspeakers are going to generate ultrasonic sound waves.
Corroborates a piece posted a few days ago on HN: http://al3x.net/2012/02/29/how-not-to-sell-software-in-2012....

Point #2 on the list: "Don’t make it hard for me to try your software. If I can’t play with a trial version or sandbox immediately, I’m moving on."

Another piece of constructive criticism: promotional codes. I can't find the article now, but it argued lucidly that promotional codes are an obstacle to user sign-up: they prompt people away from the page to search for a discount/benefit instead of engaging a user immediately in the service. If the Shoplocket author is lurking about - might be worth setting up A/B testing to figure out whether the Beta Promo code is worth placing so prominently on the front page.

Other than that, looks great. Embedding seems like a smarter way to get connected with your audience than a stand-alone store. Best of luck!
There's at least three companies doing that in London alone (one's a weather agency the other two are startups)
The deal is just that you're getting older. Your ears just don't work as well as a 12year old's. Neither do anybody else's your age (within the bounds of typical human variation - probably well over 95% of use _never_ heard 22kHz, not matter _how_ "young" our ears were).
Ethan, just to clarify... When you say you're not enrolled in your Ph.D programme anymore, I'm assuming you're saying you dropped out.

I'm doing an M.Sc. right now, and it's been seriously delayed because of my own entrepreneurial endeavours; my funding ran out a long time ago, so the parachute kind of... disappeared on me. More to the point, my thesis has changed from being my fallback to a mental burden that I keep thinking about but never manage to find the time to finish.

I'd be curious to hear more about your experience. Did you find that your Ph.D was keeping you from investing your whole heart into Proxino? Or that it was too much of a distraction to try to do both at the same time?

I think I'm going to finish mine, because it's sooo close and I've managed to find, for the last few weeks anyway, a few hours a day to push it towards the finish line. But it has definitely been an impediment to the business; likewise, the business has been a huge drain on the thesis :)

I'd really like to hear more about your experience though!
Not somewhat unusual. A one of a kind specimen.

If you test this and hear something, it's almost certainly because the ultrasonic signal is being distorted by your amplifier and speakers and you're hearing distortion products that are ending up at frequencies you can hear.
Thanks! Things are moving pretty quickly but I think we're likely going to apply again. YC is just such a great opportunity, its worth a shot.