skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is that you can't know what it sounds like unless they are accurate. Every consumer speaker sounds different in different ways. So, if I bought a pair of mid-range car speakers to mix on, assuming most of my target audience would hear it on their car stereo, and I made it sound good on those speakers...even if everybody only listened on car speakers, odds are good it would still be too hyped or too bassy or too tinny on about half of all speakers. The degree of variance is the problem.

If I mix on a set of accurate studio monitors (and assuming a reasonable level of skill in the area), the sound will be pretty well balanced across any number of speakers. Some will be hyped (smiley curve EQ), some will be bassy, and some will be bright. But a balanced mix will be pretty well-balanced on any set of speakers of reasonable quality. If I mix on speakers that lead me to boost or lower a specific set of frequencies, the speakers that do the opposite will be twice as far off as if I had mixed to a balanced set of speakers.

Everybody here is probably pretty mathematical, so think of a single sine wave at a specific frequency. Say I'm aiming for an amplitude of 1 (units irrelevant). My mixing speaker boosts it by .5, because it's a speaker aimed at guys who like their cars to rattle. So, now I've mixed this sine wave at an amplitude of .66. If someone who likes bright sounding music (and with speakers that drop the bass by .5) listens, my mix now has the bass at .33 (ignoring all the dB math, and the crazy physics of ears/distance/frequencies etc. for the sake of simplicity).

If, on the other hand, I mixed on a speaker that accurately gave me a 1 when I wanted a 1, it'll play at 1.5 on the bass-heavy speakers, and at .5 on the treble-heavy speakers. Smaller differences are better.

Note also that professional studios also tend to include a few sets of speakers. You mix on the "mains" which are usually high quality near-field monitors, and you test on the small and big speakers and possibly a specific set of speakers that matches your target audience. Good engineers also usually live and breathe their projects, and so they'll also listen in the car on the way home and to work in the morning. The main work of mixing, however, always happens on a good, accurate set of monitors. If it doesn't, odds are very good it'll sound like crap on a good portion of speakers.

And to answer this questions specifically:

then shouldn't it sound best when replayed on monitors?

Sure, but how many people have $1000+ speaker/amp combos in their car, iPod, home, etc.? The problem is merely one of making the best mix for the most people. If you know exactly what speakers your customer is using, and those are the only speakers that will be used for playback of your recording, then you would obviously tune your mix for that exact set of speakers. But, that's pretty much never the case. We do the best we can with a complex set of variables.
From the page

SaveIE6.com was put together as an April Fool’s joke by the uptime monitoring service Pingdom. Due to the tremendous interest it has received we have decided to keep this site up and running. Thanks everyone for the great feedback and for enjoying the irony!
I looked into this a bit, and there are tons of conflicting reports on this over the web.

I have a 2007ish 15" MBP, and it dithers/FRC's like a mofo with certain colors in WinXP.
Java Array Type Hints in Clojure
See "developer documentation" at http://modrails.com/development.html
Gates Puts Feynman Lectures Online
It was not found. Daily Express report was fiction:
http://twitter.com/bnjacobs/status/2374782343
Bob Jacobs is NASA Deputy Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs.
I wonder what we're going to do about this in ten years, when the servers have been switched off and everyone has forgotten C&C 4 except a few retrogamers.
Many flash games that I play require an always-on Internet connection.
There's SongBird for OSX which IIRC also supports iPod syncing. In the case of the Pre you can also use it as a USB Mass Storage device to add music. Or Palm could just stop being lazy and offer proper software for their device.
20 Lines or Less #25
Apple advertises it as being able to display millions of colors despite the fact that it really only displays 262,144.

A 6-bit display is capable of displaying more than 6 bits of color information, using a technique named temporal dithering. For an example, open this image on a 6-bit display: < http://imgur.com/BeVicl.png >. If the display could only display 262k colors, the squares would look identical.
patting yourself on the back for engaging in behaviors inimical to your continued survival seems stupid. I realize that people with mental disorders don't like being kept around basically as pets (I know this is highly offensive, but examine the emotional structures of families with a disabled member), but this response seems like a baseless self esteem pump.
Several licenses are typically lumped together as BSD-like licenses, especially when comparing to the GPL. How about when the numbers for the BSD, 3-clause BSD, MIT, ISC, etc. are combined? (Counting the GPL is likewise combining GPL v. 2, GPL v. 3, LGPL, etc., I expect.)
Steve Kilts' Advanced FPGA Design is good on tradeoffs between time and space - he works through examples where he optimizes for each.

Chandra Thimmannagari's CPU Design has a chapter on Verilog with many instructive short but nontrivial examples, in a novel compact format.
Oh hi,

His rants and software has had zero impact on me. I don't use Mongrel, Lamson, Rails or any of the shit he punts. Sorry, his rants have had more than zero impact on me. They've had +1 impact because I've had to put up with his rants being posted on HN and voted up by people.

Sorry if the above sounds harsh, but I don't really care about Zed. I don't see him as some contributor to open source stuff that I don't use. I see him as some guy that clogs up my RSS reader. That is all. He's no different to Mike Arrington from where I sit.
I think the idea is that taste can be developed. A musician probably will like the sound best from a monitor, but someone who doesn't pay as much attention to sound has a less nuanced appreciation and taste. Cheaper speakers are often biased to exaggerate the qualities that are appealing to the majority (whose tastes are less refined), hence the scare quotes acknowledging the subjective interpretation of goodness.
No way..... someone tell me that techcrunch is just trolling
"The easiest way to show off your brains is to have had good grades in school. Just put your GPA on your resume and you're done."

Real bad litmus test.

I know lots of people who had a 4.0 who, if you dropped them off in the woods, would have just died.

OTOH, I know lots of others who were brilliant but too bored to care about grades.

Coding a one loop bubble sort in hex blindfolded while juggling eggs, playing 12 games of chess, solving a 100 x 100 sudoku, providing an alternate solution to the 4 color theorem, teleporting tonights winning Powerball numbers, and cooking dinner would be a more applicable barometer.
globalization as free trade is peace.
globalization as cultural imperialism, central planning, and forced socialism/multiculturalism/democracy leads to extremely violent backlashes.
many people in the third world experience the latter, not the former.
free trade is not the US setting up an exploitative relationship with a third world country via offering incentives to that countries ruling class. free trade means there doesn't need to be any treaties, merchants in one country trade with merchants in another without interference, and both sides uphold basic property rights that allow business to flourish.
Can you back up this assertion? Since one person in this topic already said that the 15 inch model does have 8bit and you just say that it doesn't, how am I supposed to believe you?
There are plenty of countries (particularly in the middle east) that will search your laptop for no reason, particularly if you don't fit their idea of what constitutes a laptop user (e.g. you carry two).

FTR I've had my laptop checked in the Americas, Europe, Middle East and AsiaPac.
Maybe Apple wants to license iTunes Sync support in the future to third parties? In that case they would obviously want to restrict who can use it. Personally I think Apple just doesn't want the responsibility of support someone else's device and figured it was better to shut the door on it now instead of waiting. From Palm's perspective it's really puzzling they even did this in the first place. They have an agreement in place with Amazon to sell music through the Pre. Why support iTunes? I would love to see Amazon offer a desktop app for buying/syncing/ripping/playing music that could rival iTunes and create some real competition.
Link to the actual offer: http://groups.google.com/group/erlang-programming/browse_thr...
which is why I think it would only be implementable at the OS level. without universal integration the usefulness drops off too quickly.
True, but the existence of non-www HTTP pages doesn't make the breakage of the rest of the web any better... :)
Please don't post to the Google group, though. Subscribe to the Erlang Questions mailing list at http://www.erlang.org instead.

Also, freel free to follow wagerlabs on Twitter, email me or come to #erlang on irc.freenode.net
irrelevant, intellectual property is in the same league as dry water.
I was late for the last meeting because the wheels to my stagecoach didn't fit in the ruts in the road and my horse tripped over a manhole cover.
Value Flows from Abundance
I wish I had known the experts-exchange "hack" before...
The ultimate goal here is to broadcast to hundreds of thousands of clients with minimal latency and on a minimal number of EC2 instances.
Twitter Planning To Be Google-Sized (5,000+ Employees)
Patent: A method for creating exalted video games and virtual realities...
Exactly: it's something people make up on the spot to justify whatever complaint they have with a "pro" product.
1 killing per 100,000 people per year would be closer to a 5 in 10,000 chance of death by violence. Although if you include auto accidents it's probably a lot higher than that.
For server-side, no.

And it seemed like the discussion was about distrubuting client-side apps written in Python using Unladen Swallow.
Think. Rocket launching from the Earth had to bring EVERYTHING up, had to fight six times greater gravity and atmosphere. Now do the calculations.

No, there is no wind on the Moon cause there is no air. So?
Take a rope and swing one end of it. You will see a nice wave going on. You can have waves without the wind.
More like "ha ha only serious p.s. screw you." Check out the quiz. =(
It was irresponsible of Palm to do so. That doesn't mean it isn't user-hostile and slightly evil for Apple to intentionally break syncing with a third-party device.
as the article mentioned, on a laptop.
For me the closest to hacks was this one:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/at_work.html
I hope when Zed is done with Python he will turn to Erlang.
Now THEN will be the time to watch HN front page.
I was recently selected for a random search at Pearson airport in Toronto. Even then, the agent just took out the laptop out of the bag and set it aside. He didn't inspect it at all.
I would not do that :-)
I think that saying that genetically engineered organisms are bad is kind of like saying "chemicals" are bad. "Chemicals" is an incredible broad category as is/will be GMO.
The software itself doesn't work against you, but for people to have a good interface it has to go through a lot of use. (That's why bash, for instance, is so much better as a shell than GIMP is as a picture editor.)
get yourself an outside bookkeeper and another accountant.

That's really a total waste of time and effort, also you will not be maximizing your use of tax breaks and such. I know this is not what you are asking for but some things you are better off outsourcing, this is one of those, same with legal stuff (though a bit of basic knowledge certainly helps).
I would not call relying on a hack to use third party (which is not at all interested to support you) software a solid business practice either.
It's a huge difference if you were planning to constantly push live updates maybe multiple times a day to millions of users. We've seen how fast attacks can spread these days -- especially on social networks like Twitter where users easily fall into a false sense of security because they trust their friends. If Chrome was constantly streaming in either full blown fixes or just some basic attack prevention code like URL=X on DOMAIN=Y then -a href could really cut down on the spread of these attacks. Not a perfect system but much better than ignoring the problem entirely.
frakking hilarious

license wars are so 1997

let's all fight about the subtle difference in our shared ideology

left wing groups have been crippling themselves with this for centuries
Some parts of our site need some maintenance. That's been slowed by the logistics of moving across the country to California. Things will be back to normal soon.
You don't think the market would adjust and return to independent groups, companies, systems that organize just like employee groups with employers? Because health insurance is tied to employment some magical force makes insurance companies just cover people?

In my case at least unemployed people or retired people could still keep their healthcare they have always had. Changing jobs and health care is a big pain that prevents innovation and tying healthcare to employment allows price fixing/inflation.

The arguments you put against not tying it to employment are the same arguments for the current setup. They only hide the cost so that it is inflated.
I remember 16 color systems that could load different palettes of 16 colors each, too. Doesn't make it a >16 color system.
This is correct. It's REE - mod_rails has almost nothing to do with these results.

REE alone halved our response times and our memory usage across our Rails cluster. We're stll on mongrel/nginx.
HN lightened up your comment
Patients don't sue doctors that they like.
"I know lots of people who had a 4.0 who, if you dropped them off in the woods, would have just died." -- It's software development, not the army.

"OTOH, I know lots of others who were brilliant but too bored to care about grades." -- Hence the whole second paragraph:

"Of course, that's not the only way to demonstrate your intelligence. I know many incredibly smart people who just didn't do well in school. Maybe it just wasn't their thing, or they were working two jobs and didn't have time, or they dropped out to start their own company. If that's you, then you'll have to show me how bright you are. Do you solve really hard problems on a regular basis at work? Tell me about it. Did you apply to MENSA for the fun of it and get in? Impressive. Hold the record for creating the Sunday crossword puzzle with the fewest black squares? Awesome. Exceptional standardized test scores will even do in a pinch (though that might not be as widely accepted)."

We're just screening applications, not making hiring decisions on the spot. If someone has great grades (and four other positive indicators) but are truly not that smart, we'll find out pretty quickly in the interviews. For people who are really bright but didn't have the grades, the burden is on them to show us how bright they are. If they don't, but pass on the other criteria, then they'll move on to the next stage. It's anything but a litmus test.
I think GPA is a better measure of "I can work inside a system and play by its rules"

Like you I think it's a poor measure of "brains" but you can't get a high GPA and be a total slacker. I know plenty of people who were too bored to care about grades...and also too bored to care about the work assigned to them by a manager at their work.
they're clearly skimping on parts

This is not clear at all. Every manufacturer uses 6-bit displays, even in most if not all high-end models. This has been true for years. They choose to do so because such displays have desirable properties other than color, such as price and lower response times.
Use Your Nintendo Wii Remote Without the Wii to control a PC
Lab Analysts Now Have To Testify In Court About Their Tests
New Cheap Trick album available on 8-track tape
OS X: fink messes with your java classpath
I thought it would be a good idea to install Ant with Fink... I was wrong ...
What Sunk Veoh And Joost? Too Much Cash, Too Soon
Organizational Chart of the House Democrat's Health Plan [pdf]
"There are no words"
Awesome! I'm so glad someone posted this link. I read Chris McDougall's book Born to Run recently and it was really eye opening. As a long time runner I felt that the key to avoiding injuries was good running shoes. The idea that no running shoes was actually the key would never have crossed my mind.

I found some of the statistics in the book to be really interesting. One guy researching bare foot running makes some sort of offer to pay anyone that can produce a single peer reviewed scientific study that shows that running shoes reduce the rate of injuries or make people faster runners. There are none! Think of all the crazy and only moderately applicable studies that have proven even the tiniest of facts while the huge assumption that we need running shoes has gone unproven!
Calif tax officials: Legal pot would rake in $1.4B
If that were true, real-time software would be impossible. (Unless you're talking about the risk of your hardware malfunctioning, I guess.) Practically speaking, max can be useful.
Airport checkpoints are (supposedly) for security. They're trained mainly to look for weapons and explosives. The controversy is over laptop searches at customs and border crossings. Customs is looking for "contraband" which differs by country but may include porn, propaganda, and other "data."
Yeh, it is kinda sad really. A good engineer/software developer's job is to make things work, simplify them, and get out of the way. It is creative but you also painfully remove yourself from style in the software (other than simpicity, minimalism etc).

If you have a creative side sometimes you need to let it out other ways. The backend is very forgetting.

Zed is right, noone really does care who wrote it, they just want it and want it to work.
The Window Farms movement
It isn't really about the shoe, strictly speaking. It's about running form. Good form means you land on the paw of your foot instead of the heal. If you have good form you will have less injuries. landing on the paw of your foot is something that is hard to do when wearing regular running shoes unless you are going faster. All these new sock shoes are doing is making it easier to have good running form since you naturally land on your paws at lower speeds when you are barefoot. this translates into absorbing the force of landing in your ankle muscles instead of slamming your heal into the ground with every stride.
Tell HN: The Grocery Store is Watching You (and it's brilliant)
I just saw this quote in an article here and wanted to highlight it. If I had a blog, I'd have written it up there but I thought it was too interesting not to comment.

> It's one thing if I trade my personal sales habits to a grocery store chain in exchange for a percentage off the final sale. That's a choice I'm making, consciously and knowingly. (By this point, if you haven't figured that out, you're just deliberately hiding from the fact.)

I just did some thinking on the discount cards that are common at grocery stores, at least in America and England (not sure about elsewhere). It doesn't just track your personal shopping history, it also tracks when you buy things on sale - so they can see who exactly changes goods to a more premium version at what discounts, etc. Really brilliant stuff - when you offer "premium cookies" at $2 off, do people add them that wouldn't otherwise? Do they drop the cheap, normal cookies in favor of premium? Do premium buyers stock up, then buy less next time?

With some good analytics/datamining/statistically minded people, a grocery could make some intelligent guesses on how gross and net profit would change by offering sales. Maybe they'd even see that offering a certain discount on only one day of the week would do well! Wow...

Quote really got me thinking, wanted to share my thoughts with the rest of us here. I know the Tell HN isn't standard operating procedure, but I was totally intrigued and felt compelled to share this.
Except for the fact that most people like to run on paved surfaces where you're going to rip up your feet and get a nail in your toe if you run bare foot. Running bare foot basically limits you to grassy areas in parks that are not also frequented by heroine users.
>It was one of those things you just never wanted to touch again...

Not in my experience, but regardless, for those of use that were there in the beginning (think Rails on FastCGI), Mongrel was one HELL of a nice stop gap.

Thanks Zed.
Diseasome: explore the relationships between disease genes
1.0e5 is a lot more interesting than 1.0e2 :P
At the minimum, it's faulty marketing on Apple's product. They shouldn't state that it supports millions of colors when it actually doesn't. Just like the CRT monitors that are 17" but only 15" viewable... sometimes that stuff doesn't change until someone files a lawsuit.
The engineers at Grumman went to extraordinary lengths to trim weight from the Lunar Module so that its single ascent engine could boost it from the lunar surface. The book Moon Lander by chief engineer Thomas J. Kelly tells the story.

The flag was extended by a wire along the top.
I didn't say they were the same thing, or that 6-bit displays were not 6-bit displays.
Without dithering, 6 bit LCDs produce 191 colors. 8 bit LCDs produce 767 colors. If you want more than 767 colors you will be using dithering.

I think where people get confused here is the naive dithering where a group of 3 pixels (one of each color) are logically grouped together gives your the 252k and 16m numbers, but there is no reason that is the only desirable solution.

Consider sub-pixel rendering of typography. This abandons the traditional groups of 3 pixels and uses alternatives to gain better horizontal spatial resolution. Consider a white, lowercase 'L'. Depending where it appears on my screen it could either be a single white pixel under the naive "groups of three" dithering, or a yellow pixel next to a blue pixel. The catch is that unless I show you the borders of the screen you can't tell which it is.

Fortunately, I have a brand new 15" MacBook Pro under my fingers. Tonight when it gets dark I'll take a picture of a gradient, enlarge it beyond the capabilities of my eyes, and we will have an answer about what Apple does.
It'd be beneficial to everyone if you would voice some specific complaints again Tim. I know a lot of people around here don't like him, but I've never seen a criticism longer than "Pff. Tim Ferriss is a load of crap."
The article has some reasonable complaints against him, but I'm interested in why the opinion around HN is the way it is.
Google did actually file a patent based around floating data centers. There is an article on it here : http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9937
Sounds like that figure only includes the revenue from sales taxes and retail fees. What about the savings from not having to enforce existing pot laws (not sure how much this is really a big deal in CA), and the increase in jobs and economic activity for all the agriculture and distribution businesses that would jump into the market. I'm guessing the overall economic impact on the state would be huge...like creating several Googles overnight.