skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The purpose of a high-end audio system is to create music that is indistinguishable from live sound."

That's your idea of the purpose, and it's my idea of the purpose. But is it just me, or is there a lot of people at the "higher end" actually putting together an analog system that introduces distortion that they like, or sounds good to them, rather than reliably relaying the signal?

What some people call "flat" and "lifeless", I call "free of analog distortion". I've been in real concerts with no electronic gizmos to be found (orchestras and such), and if I close my eyes, it sounds more like a (good) CD than a vinyl record.

(At least, on old CDs from the mid-1990s. Clipping's another story entirely, of course. Digital could and should be better, and perhaps the argument would be over, had digital not simply given up entirely on acoustic accuracy...)

Despite the loaded and leading nature of my question, I'm serious about the question above. Does that sound right to anyone else?
I wouldn't count on it. Internally Google uses Perforce for version control (and IIRC git for some public-facing things), and it's been noted that Google's Python style rules and procedures are quite different from Guido's (their style guide actually goes against PEP 8 -- easy way to spot open-source contributions from Googlers, though).
When you say live music, I assume you mean true, unamplified live music, such as a symphony playing in an acoustically perfect concert hall? That's true that we're not quite there (there will be no <20 hertz standing waves in my living room), but for those of us that listen to music designed to be amplified, such as rock music, a high end audio system regularly beats poorly mixed rock concerts.

Where does your 20% measure come from? I would think speakers with appropriately high end source (reel to reel tape?) versus a symphony, both in a concert hall, would be indistinguishable in a double blind test more than 20% of the time to the above-average audiophile. Has this ever been done?
Really Disappointed with MIT Cutting Sports
I recently read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. It tracks the story of of a few people through there time in the entry level jobs at Microsoft to there experiences in a Silicon Valley start up predotcom bubble. A very fun read.
I get like that, I really am impressionable. For example after watching a few zombie movies (the new ones with fast zombies, think 28 Days/Weeks later) I hear shouting & screaming on a main shopping street the first thing that comes to my mind is zombie outbreak, get ready to run.

I read The Complete Alien Omnibus, and when I would wake up at night to go to the bathroom I'd see shapes moving on the wall.

So, when I read about cryptography and the weakest link is the human part I automatically think torture. I know the chances of me or anyone I know being brought in for "questioning" is immeasurably slim but... it would quell my anxiety if I was prepared for such an eventuality, I mean I've already got a zombie plan, which works(I hope) equally well for any kind of viral outbreak.

Plain old paranoia I guess.
Nokia 5800 Theme: Dark Star
Founder Institute - anyone attended?
Hope this is not sacrilegious to ask to rate the service of a competitor - but has anyone attended Founder Institute? (link below). How do you rate their service? They are also some sort of incubator, though little diff from YC. (if you do, I would like to learn more, pls send me an email from my profile).
Yeah. Doesn't this guy want a million dollars? That's what annoyed me about the gizmodo article -- the audiophile's claims about better AC cables making a difference, etc. are all easily tested.

I did notice one thing of interest in the photos: The guy had some sound dampening foam on a wall behind some components. Let's say I wanted to spend $10K on good sound in a room. Would I be better off buying $10K in components, or $5K in components and $5K in the services of an acoustician to fix up my room to have better acoustic qualities? Or, for that matter, are there any medical interventions that would improve my hearing? [Just kidding...sorta]
link: http://www.founderinstitute.com/
Interesting I also really enjoyed BC and was disappointed with Diamond Age, it held me to a point and then lost me completely. Judging comments here and elsewhere I'm starting to think that if you are a fan of one then you probably won't be a fan of the other.
"Bazaar tries to be simple, but they currently have so many different repository formats and supported workflows that everything is a mess."

Quoted.

That's the #1 reason I've switched to mercurial two years ago: a simple model that perfectly fits into my mind.

I realized something was wrong with bzr when I created a mindmap to understand its model and its commands... and that was two years ago, I don't even want to try and imagine how that mindmap would look today.
Fdsffs
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I'm glad he pointed out that you should label foods "healthier" rather than "healthy". Even Broccoli may have down sides (goitrogenic): http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=george&dbid=47

Also we don't know if the goitrogens are rendered inert by cooking. I'm suspicious they're not. After heating and processing remain several foods still remain goitrogenic.

But for the most part, of course "Eat your broccoli." is good advice.
Summary:
(1) Some people become wrapped around the axle of their own pride.

(2) To be understandable to most everyone, communicate in pictures and not in abstractions.
If your startup succeeds, do you use the resulting web traffic to promote your earlier failed startups?
Or do you trust that your failed startups were evaluated fairly and just give up on them?

It's hard to give up on failed startups in cases where a lot of effort was involved and/or you still think your idea is quite clever/novel.

Perhaps people impressed with your successful startup might look at your previous attempts more seriously.
Whoa, wait. Which services are you saying directly benefit that individual?
I especially like the point about you become like the people you hang around with.
I am actually the exact opposite.
Help - Getting started with coding web apps
I am sure you get this often so I apologize. I want to get into coding my own web applications. I know html, css, and have taken some stabs at learning php. My problem is that all of the tutorials are so abstract and I don't see how I can apply some of the basic stuff. So my question is: What programming language should I be learning to write solid web apps and where could I find some resources for beginners that help me apply the basics.

This newbie appreciates the help.
Look into the protocol for OTR:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging

It is used for plausible deniability in a secure IM conversation, but I don't see any reason it couldn't be applied to email.
If you have some money to spend and you really care about the sound^, you'll get the most bang for your buck by going to a professional music store and buying the kind of gear used in studios. Strangely (or not), you'll be hard put to find singe channel/speaker cables costing more than $50 in any recording studio unless it's in a huge room needing a long run.

I know nothing about your home of course, but when it comes to speakers you basically want them to be heavy and have big woofers. Many studio monitor speakers are powered, with an amp built into the speaker cabinet. In practice, this usually gives better results than a separate amplifier. Mackie Truth monitors will fill an average room and are very accurate for about $1000. At the higher end, Genelec and ADAM are considered the truly desirable names to have. I particularly love the sound (and look) of KRK speakers. If using a subwoofer, 18 inches is fine. More is for reinforcement, not fidelity.

Buy good stands which you can fill with sand to damp vibrations. Speakers should be around the same height as your head in the room's sweet spot, and basically form a triangle with your head as the third point. The bigger the sweet spot, the better the speaker. You must have carpet; a bare wood floor defeats the purpose.

Nor do I know what gear you own, but prefer things which offer 'balanced outputs' - they reject interference and electrical noise far better. If you like records, get a technics SL1200 turntable and an Ortofon needle, for about $1500 altogether. If it's good enough for the world's best DJs, it's good enough for you. CD players from Marantz or Denon are excellent. Ask in the store about your mixing/source selection options, or we'll be here all day :-)

^ First, ask yourself honestly if looks matter. I love the look of studio gear, but that's because of my background as a sound engineer. Not everyone shares my utilitarian sensibility.
"What programming language should I be learning ..."
Well working over a problem is best way to learn and understand. Instead of aiming to learning a programming language or something more, try applying the knowledge you already have and come up with a small web-app that does something (anything! small or big). As you walk this path of learning by doing, you will learn a lot more than you might think you've learned after reading a book.
Keep a tap on good tutorials and inspirational articles - try shmashingmagazine, nettuts, psdtuts, thinkvitamin... etc

After done with say, PHP also try getting a taste of MVC, try CodeIgnitor...

I notice no mention of MySQL or other databases mentioned by you.... do learn them too, after all you would be playing around with data :) presenting it in different ways.
You're looking at a harder life. But that doesn't necessarily mean a bad one.

The path forces you to take responsibility earlier. You have to take the initiative in your life. You have to educate yourself. And your pretty much destined for entrepreneurship. But some in fields people will be more willing to hire you.

You have to prove yourself through informal means. Without those pieces of paper you limit your options. But that fine if you know what you want to do.

You're a pathbreaker and you'll have the same challenges that any pathbreaker would.

I have diploma (barely got it) but not college. I'm doing fine.

I could write an essay. In fact I will. But the situation you're in and the decision you will make certainly isn't all downside with no up. There are pros and cons to each side.
Draw a floorplan/make photos. Go to Guitar Center and say you have a home recording studio and you need some acoustic foam and some bass traps (for the corners). Depends on your room, but $500 will buy you a lot of foam.

Basically you want to break up the standing waves between parallel reflective surfaces. Hardwood floors are the worst culprit, along with windows. A sofa helps a lot. So do big heavy wall hangings if you're into that.

Lastly, don't put your speakers in the corners or right back against the wall. It makes them sound boomy and results in muddy bass. The same is true if they're too near the floor. Also, try soundonsound.com for tips on acoustic improvement. Learn your room first: if you can make cheap speakers sound better then so will the pricey ones.

Spend most of the money on speakers. If you absolutely must have control over the tone color via an equalizer, Manley is a good choice.
Ask HN:  Where to find good free fonts?
The site Mark Pilgrim linked to in his Fuck the Foundries article had just about fuck-all on it, and you have to click through from the main listings to see the fonts, which seems like an idiotic design choice for a fonts aggregation site.

So where can one find these alleged just-as-good or even nearly-as-good free fonts? Googling "free fonts" is like visiting Internet Archive pages.
better to have two, the ability to disassociate oneself from work from time to time can be a blessing.
But the Baroque cycle is a prequel of sorts to Cryptonomicon, its worth slogging past the first 2/3 of the first book, it gets very good after that.
The Next Killer App is to Twitter as 1-2-3 was to Visicalc
The point I was making was that despite newspapers facing little or no local competition from other traditional newspapers they are still struggling financially.
compare to the half dozen failed attempts by microsoft and other big co's to solve this problem
Being 21 I'd say the last point about 'Give the big middle finger to the good or bad opinion of others' is really solid advice. Every time I tell a parent/relative/family friend that I'm working for myself after I graduate I get this blank stare and then a "why don't you work for Google or something?"

I guess in ten years I'll have to reflect and see how all this outrageous risk turns out.
Call for comments on most stressful decisions of your startup experience
I tend to use Dafont.com. It's free, fast and works really well.
One could always add a random length of random bytes to the message so the size comparison method doesn't work.

This assumes that real ciphertext is indistinguishable from random data without the key.
Werkzeug 0.5 released
Interesting! My school, RPI, tends to do whatever MIT does about ten years after they do it. Right now we're in the process of building a $100M athletic village. As far as I can tell it's so we can get alumni to notice us more and donate. In ten years are we going to regret that decision?
Yeah, the "warmth" of analog recordings is just another word for "pleasing aural distortion," not unlike applying some blur and raising the brightness on photos for glamour shots.
I'm not sure that's correct. Are you scaling down the cost to build it or to design it? Does the cost to design per transitor count decrease with Moore's law?

With better software for verification that can scale in complexity as chips get cheaper & more powerful, I wouldn't be surprised if design costs did decrease with Moore's Law. But it might not be so straight forward.
i thought 3des was still used in ATMs? my (limited) understanding was that its weakness was balanced by its otherwise maturity...and that a potential hacker had very little time in which to make the crack and make use of it
Szasz on the Turing Tragedy
PHP is a good start to take a stab at web dev. The fact that many web hosts support it also means that hosting is cheaper for you go out and try something.

Since you are starting out I would suggest you to write a couple of small webapps before you go for the one you are into. I do this for every new language I learn and it's helped me a lot. Just reading thru a tutorial totally different from doing it and getting first-hand experience, especially if you are going to work with Python and Ruby for webapps.

I had a odd but great experience when I first learnt PHP, that was around 4yrs ago. Every time I did something, I found there was a better way to do it and the PHP documentation on the website is great (and the comments for every page on the docs)

And also learn Object Oriented stuff in PHP. Learn to use classes and objects. This opens up a whoile new shelf of resources for you. Coz then you can start using classes that others have created for specific tasks. phpclasses.org has a pretty huge database of classes. Also as you go, just get started with using an MVC. Use CakePHP (I use it and its good) or CodeIgniter or Kohana (as many here suggest often).

I suggested PHP coz it also saves you the pain of learning how to deploy your app. For PHP it's pretty straight forward, just upload the files and it works. Good for starters.

P.S: Don't listen to me. Just do it your own way. Coz that's what you'll do anyway. It's never possible to follow suggestions/rules, like a sworn monk. And that's how you'll enjoy learning :P
I enjoyed both Baroque cycle and Anathem, they build slowly but I like the long-term immersion and intricacy.
These are all good points. There is something else though that's kind of amazing about the page. It got a whole bunch of people who make the decision on what hosting platform to use to talk about it and link to it. They somehow turned a pricing page into viral marketing.

Plus it furthers their brand amongst the HN crowd that they have their act together and are worthy of trusting your application to.
check smashingmagazine.com for entries
Real DJs Code Live
i wonder if amazon will stay on the "wholesale" side of this equation or eventually move into the retail side...seems gdrive or whatever it is google is planning might upset the amazon/N-front-ends racket
Speaking from experience with risk-taking in terms of starting one's own business: do it, it's worth it. The major potential pitfall along the way is too much stress. It's dangerous because it can lead you down the wrong path. I've found that even if you're business doesn't grow as fast as you want you'll learn really valuable lessons and be in a great position to do other things as long as you're not over-stressed.
What developer goes through the effort of building something only to drop it when it becomes popular? You're asking Google to insure you against a very unlikely problem. Nevermind the legal/PR issues that would be raised if Google's hijacked someone's code/data/site.
Whatever you do, be careful. You can catch some nasty viruses looking for free fonts if you're not careful.
I wish I had a reference handy, but I've skimmed Stereophile magazine in the past --- I remember reading that the people this article writes about have adamantly refused to perform double-blind tests on their swapping of $1000 speaker cables for $4000 cables.
A Practical Computer Program that Diagnoses Diseases in Actu
Wow I guess you CAN fix these problems by just throwing enough resources at it and doing it consistently.
BetterWorldBooks Recent Growth - Is Altruism a competative edge against Amazon?
Vernor Vinge: True Names (short story), A Deepness in the Sky, Rainbow's End

Greg Egan: Permutation City, Quarantine

(More programmer's fiction than startup fiction.)
I can look back and see a lot of great relationships I made with co-workers "being in the trenches" together. And a perspective you wouldn't necessarily get if you were put in a management position from the get-go.
Googler Defects To Twitter, He Tweets
I like dropbox a lot, but have two problems.

The major one is that their price point just seems too high. $99 a year just isn't a price that I'm willing to pay without seriously considering the value I'm getting. (Then when I consider the value, $99 can buy a pretty big portable hard drive or flash drive. So I buy the drives and just use the free 2 gig Dropbox for synchronizing smaller files.)

On the other hand, I had no problem paying $30/year for Flickr Pro. That's an easy price point, even for a cheap bastard like me.

The minor one is that they don't seem to own dropbox.com. I don't know how that didn't get done before settling on the name, but they gotta get that cleared up.
If anyone is interested in this topic, I expect comments pointing out that Betterworldbooks.com are not on Amazon's radar. This may be growth, but it is still a small piece of the large pie. That is true.

However, I still think it is an example demonstrating something. In many cases (myself included), customers will probably prefer Amazon. After all, they solve the online book buying problem pretty well. You can match them for price, but can't really beat them unless you sell second hand. You probably can't match their delivery times, reliability or efficiencies.

But a strong social good incentive is a possible point of difference.
Great for them. As was said in prior threads and this one, it's a fantastic product that I use on a daily basis.

I even noticed the subtle changes on the web interface some days ago. Nice stuff and looking forward to the P2P system ahead.
I'd tell myself to read Steve Blank's '4 Steps to the Epiphany' and never waste time trying to raise money or build a product nobody wanted to pay for. Would have saved me years of wasted time.

http://www.cafepress.com/kandsranch.58024175

Its not a pay link, I'm just a groupie. This book contains everything I've learned in the last 8 years and then some. Of course, the book wasn't written until I was 25.
Physics and Entrepreneurism (2007)
Just a random question, I'm curious to hear people's opinions. Wouldn't moving to Bolivia for a year, quietly making connections, and figuring out how to smuggle 10kg of the best cocaine back to the US qualify as risk taking according to the article?
Absolutely. In normal times power projects are planned years in advance so there's no reason for short lead times. But if the system was down, people would wind transformers by hand if they had to. It's not that hard.

It does seem lame that the power grid is so close to capacity. Instead of all this smart grid stuff that lets us get from 97% to 98%, let's just add 50% more capacity and have no worries.
I use the success to launch new projects, not earlier failed projects.
Real cyphertext should have less Shannon entropy/higher compressability than random data, I think, unless a one-time pad was used. However, it's fully possible to create semi-random cyphertext to a set entropy, which means all your encrypted transmissions could just be filled with "sparse" or "dense" extra data to balance them out with your chosen "inconspicuous" entropy value.

Then again, I seem to recall that the cyphertext is compressed before encryption in PGP/GPG, likely in order to obviate exactly this problem. Then you would indeed just have to add white noise to the messages until their post-compression, pre-encryption filesizes match, as hopefully the encryption layer won't allow the compression ratio information to leak through.
This is an odd philosophy. When I give up on something, I really give up on it. It is dead to me.

I think it's a symptom of small thinking for your current startup...the one that is succeeding. Why would you distract yourself and your customers and your media coverage from a winner and direct it all back towards a loser?

I'm not saying it's impossible to have left behind something worth pursuing. Maybe you did give up too soon, or maybe you had to choose an expedient path rather than pursuing something harder. I don't know. But, if you have caught a wave, now is not the time to try to scope out other waves. There are always new waves on the horizon, but you'll never get to shore if you don't ride one out.
This is especially interesting in the light that there is now a more concerted effort to get automobiles "on the grid"

Just for starters, see Shai Aggassi's blog

http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/
I love how Wolfram's personality shows through in every sentence. Not an ounce of humility. Maybe a bit off-putting on an emotional level, but it really communicates how strongly he believes in his ideas.
Yes. But would it qualify as 'surround yourself with others you want to be like?' Do you want to be like your typical drug smuggler? Do they have happy endings? ;)