skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can see it as keeping a master tape, so any subsequent copy (=lossy encoding) won't degrade the quality too far.

Yes, the concept is not what's at question here. What's at question is how many people actually are inclined to ever care about something like this, and the answer is almost nobody. Very few people care to reencode their audio files.

> Why so? Is it some kind of stereotype that Apple customers don't care about quality of music or can't be audiophiles?

Why do you leap to the worst possible assumption about everything Apple? You seem to have an extremely strong bias here.

Most Apple customers probably buy their music from the iTunes Music Store and don't ever think about reencoding it, because there's no point. Similarly, most people who buy music from other stores get it already encoded in a lossy format appropriate for listening to. Far and away the biggest reason to be reencoding is when ripping music from an audio CD, and iTunes already supports that. Once ripped, there's no reason to go about reencoding it again, as we've already long since passed the point where people can discern a difference.

The only really legitimate reason to be caring about this sort of thing is when you're doing professional audio work (as opposed to mucking about with music for personal listening), and people who are doing professional audio work aren't using iTunes for this work anyway so that's pretty irrelevant.

> Adding FLAC support in their QuickTime framework is trivial.

That's absurdly naive. It would be practically criminal negligence for Apple to download the latest libFLAC and drop it into the OS they ship to millions of customers without spending significant engineering resources reviewing the code. Then there's the ongoing maintenance burden, of dealing with upstream changes, local bugfixes, and just plain integration with the rest of the QuickTime stack. And if iTunes supports it, then iPhones and iPads really ought to support it if it's at all possible, and that's a really large engineering effort to do so in a way that's power-efficient, if that's even possible (given the lack of hardware support for it).

And that's just what comes to mind off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more that would be involved as well.

And for what? What would you gain from having iTunes support FLAC? You should be transcoding into some other format already for actual use in listening, because there's no point in carrying around large lossless files for personal listening, especially if you use any mobile devices (or laptops). You don't need iTunes to support FLAC just to transcode it, you already have options there, and as long as you aren't transcoding to Ogg Vorbis then your resulting file should work in iTunes (and on iPhones and iPads).
It sure seems like that. Maybe a cantenna or similar at worst.
Court agrees that Google’s search results qualify as free speech
A fun paper, but it neglected to explain its means of modularization. I had to read the language implementation to discover the 'require' keyword used to import functions.

Projects like Mercury (http://mercurylang.org/) are also covering similar space.
In case you needed another reason to promote diversity in tech…
Curious to know what percentage of White men felt it was important:
"Unsurprisingly, women and minority groups value diversity most, with 72 percent of women, 89 percent of African Americans, 80 percent of Asians, and 70 percent of Latinos calling it an important factor. Interestingly, military veterans were also among those most likely to value diversity at 65 percent."

And this is just embarrassing:
" 'Many people that I’ve interacted within the tech space, particularly white men, never really talked to a black woman before. Never held a conversation. It’s shocking.' In other words, if you’re the only black woman at a company full of white men, communication may be a bit strained."
It would be cool if bitcoins seized in one crime would be compensating bitcoins stolen in another crime: Mt.Gox ..
My immediate thought was about this interesting sounding book [1]

http://www.amazon.com/Surreptitious-Software-Obfuscation-Wat...
That "Focus Tools" chrome extension looks like it could potentially help me from getting distracted. Disqualified!
I learned just how far Uber will go to silence journalists and attack women
No Best Practices (2005)
Hmm, yeah. That's some pretty interesting insights though! Thanks for sharing. Then it wasn't the foam, it's probably that their ears got irritated from that plastic housing - I've learned a LOT about designing for the ear these past months and that shape is not ergonomic, haha!
So, you came out pretty strongly for strong typing. But you didn't include anything about creating new types. Did you not want to focus on that in this article or...?
You should do one in SF next. I found this 2.74 times more amusing than most hackathon post mortems.
Hmm, I do use it quite often - haven't had anyone call me out on it before though. Will note, thanks
Writing your code in PHP, no matter how good of a programmer you are, makes it more likely that your natural level of mistakes will insert security issues into the code, especially when compared to a language with even basic features like static typing. I'm not saying this as some idiot who thinks PHP is bullshit and for noobs, I've worked on pretty large sites using PHP and I have a pretty deep understanding of it.

Everyone likes to say security is mission critical, but for the vast majority of people it really isn't. And for those people the development speed advantage, massive developer market, libraries etc. you get working in Ruby or PHP are well worth it.

Everything is tradeoffs, and it seems to me that in writing voting software deployability, development speed etc., are not nearly as mission critical as security.
Interesting thought on how the lower frequencies that make it through mask out that frequency spectrum.
Pfft, missing the Geoport pod.
If you forget to charge, the earplugs will automatically turn off the noise masking early to make sure it has enough juice to still sound the alarm in the morning.
Like any good hacker I got tired of other solutions that didn't quite match my needs and made my own dropbox-like backup/sync using only rsync, ssh and encfs.

https://github.com/avdd/rsyncsync

Not polished, but it's working for me.

- only runs on machines I control
- server requirement is only rsync, ssh and coreutils
- basic conflict detection
- encfs --reverse to encrypt locally, store remotely
- history is rsnapshot-style hard links
- inspect history using sshfs
- can purge old history

shell aliases showing how I use it are in my config repository

encfs isn't ideal but it's the only thing that does the job. Ideally I'd use something that didn't leak so much, but it doesn't exist.
So this dude siphons off of the military industrial complex to feed both his addictions and his narcissism? Count me out.
> And for over than a decade "couldn't find resources" to support FLAC which is actually used unlike ALAC.

Are you really this uninformed, or do you just like to make things up when the facts don't go your way?

ALAC was created for the purpose of streaming audio between Apple devices. I believe it was first used to stream audio to an AirPort Express (which has audio output, so you can plug a speaker into it and stream music from iTunes to that speaker). I assume it's still used for that purpose, but it's also used for the more general category of streaming audio over AirPlay. Given that, I would wager that ALAC is used many orders of magnitude more than FLAC is, even if it's not directly exposed to the end user.
I wish I knew about this. I wrote a file server that serves your webroot directory over League of Legends chat. Any time you request a file that is more than a few bytes, your chat gets flooded with base64 strings... The extraslow web.
The noise masking we do allows you to mask out the breathing/bodily sounds you make
No, he's just really good at doing drugs
Where is the "Intellectual Babes Calendar" I'd like to buy this...
I'd accept both singular and plural. At least redirect one to the other.
Its an argument for being conservative in your design philosophy.
For some people this is a fair tradeoff for "free" wifi.
Some people do like the silicone tree design earplugs more than the foam. It varies. We are considering providing some of those as a stretch goal!

Yeah, the variations of ears is definitely the hardest challenge in our product
well,try out the hcons/hnil stuff in https://github.com/cartazio/HetList/blob/master/HetList.hs
and give me feedback asap so I can somehow wing getting it under consideration later this week. merge window for big stuff is FRIDAY
No they aren't. We have 500 cycles (I believe, maybe more if we change the charge rate) of our battery before it goes to 80% of max capacity, which is still 8 hours.

Even if you were to use the same device for years, the sound masking would just turn off prematurely in the night and make sure it preserves enough juice to sound the alarm in the morning
If bitcoin exchanges were an efficient market, there should be no drop, because this sale has been anticipated, just not the exact date. However it isn't an efficient market.
If browser vendors adopted this this opt-in, polyfill-first approach it would make it significantly less expensive and much simpler to progressively rollout experimental features to the public.
of course that ignoring the fact that I kinda think people say "pandas" as a proxy for "i want a decent multi dimensional aggregation db thats a library for my language"... kinda thing. People say "data frame" but can mean a HUGE range of actual workloads
As much as I love LSD, I have no idea in what capacity it could possibly be legalized, other than in heavily controlled settings.
I'm happy to share the list of the other places I'm considering with any recruiters who will also share their list of candidates they have under consideration. It's only fair.
That's what it has to do with the free market. Free market and regulations exist in tension and conflict.
Native Apps Are Part of the Web
I had the fortune to speak directly with people who have been through the Cisco training program, and it is pretty rigorous. Pretty impressive how they can not just answer my question about the equipment, but put it in context with how networking "works" overall.

Regarding the Facebook move - I think it's funny how people are going to try and copy Facebook here. Facebook has a very unusual business problem they need to solve, and they are very creative and clever about solving it.

A lot of folks are going to look at Facebook from the outside, ignore the unique business problem they are solving, and say "we should insource all our network gear etc." Next thing you know they have a whole mess of new problems on their hands, support and staffing at the core. I saw this with an insourced VOIP phone system. Yes, it is cheaper but when it stops working you wind up paying for support, plus the features fall behind without care and feeding over time.

The downside for the companies that aren't Facebook (or Google, Amazon) is that you can miss out on a whole range of technology that will solve your problems just as easily, with support and the "ecosystem" to go along with it. If you don't have a unique problem (and this is part of the vanity in these decisions IMHO) then you are well served to leverage the options available.
Fantastic! I had been looking for this kind of overview of basic recommendation systems for the past few months, and this is the first time I've seen so much understandable yet really helpful information in one place. If anyone else knows of similar kinds of articles, I'd appreciate suggestions.
An interesting bit of that is how small the cash donations are in absolute terms! Giant companies like NetApp and Google have now been out-donated by one individual person! A wealthy person, admittedly. But those companies' cumulative donations to the project over 7 years are surprisingly small, basically in the range of what you might expect one wealthy person to donate to a charity or university they support.

Given the cost of developers, perhaps that suggests that cash donations are not all that effective a method, and measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time? If you convert the donations to developer-years, companies like NetApp and Google have each donated an average of less than one developer per year over that period in the cash format. Surely there is some company that beats that threshold, if measured in developer-years?
You should fill a claim before 180 days. Good luck. I don't understand this kind of CEO putting their employees in such situations... It hurts a lot, and really embarrassing for everyone
Well that's horrible. You need to pay for two cell phone bills with this? And you are locked in with AT&T?

It's ok. In two years these will all be forgotten in someone's sock drawer.

Seriously though, in two years the cell phone providers will have to come to grips with ancillary devices which use vanishingly small amounts of bandwidth. I suspect they just don't know how to bill them now.
What is the Khan Academy approach to article vs. video formats? IMO, lessons with video introductions then a hybrid of text with interactive exercises as the bulk of the lesson would be ideal.

Is KA working towards an ideal combination of methods or are you guys experimenting depending on the topic?
The "disappointment feeling" comes from wishing that Juniper and VMware's donations were of an amount that would put them in a much higher category.

Well, it would always be nice to see more and larger donations, but I wouldn't be too harsh on them. As far as I know, VMware doesn't use FreeBSD at all; and while Juniper certainly uses FreeBSD a great deal, they also contribute a lot of developer hours -- vastly more than I ever have.
Until we have Elysium-style re-atomization machines that magically heal people, I'm perfectly happy having a doctor in the loop.
Yes the first MySQL book will take you a long way and lay most of it out for you very nicely. The other books add on to the foundation that is given to you in the first book.

Part One gives a really good overview of writing queries for mysql, optimizing them, understanding all the data types etc.

Part Two gives you the practical hand on that you need in multiple programming languages C, Perl, and PHP.

Part Three teaches you administration and security which helps complete the circle of knowledge. As you don't want to be a developer that does not know how to talk the Database administrator language. As the more you know and learn the better you and others can help optimize and secure the different development, staging and production environments applications and hardware.
i'm curious: why isn't this part of attic in the first place? i have been working with the bup folks for a while to try to make a similar interface, and i was wondering what was your experience with upstream...
I have read and enjoyed many of the classics that others have mentioned. I would give a shout-out to Wasteland of Flint by Thomas Harlan. I enjoyed it for how it incorporated alternate history in our relatively recent past - imagine a world in which the Inca and Imperial Japanese kingdoms became the dominant superpowers and led the industrial revolution, Europeans were conquered and fast forward into far future world with aliens, FTL space travel all mixed with what the Inca and Japanese cultures might have evolved into in that context and how those of European descent were seen as the lower caste. Some interesting cultural reversals and twists mixed in with future technology and ancient alien technology.
My comment on the matter:

=====

Both sex and gender have quite specific objective meanings. Gender is clearly the correct term here. We're not talking about determining sex (male or female), we're talking about determining gender (masculine or feminine or whatever) from a name. On that basis, the proposed rename makes sense. (The whole sex / gender thing is one of my language pet-peeves. Ask me about "male toilets" sometime ...)

But: this is also completely ridiculous (using the term precisely). It's on a par with putting 'trigger warnings' in University-level course material. If as a society we can't deal with the word 'sex' in a library name, we are fucked (using the term ironically). It feels as though we are descending back into some sort of parallel-universe Victorian prudery. The last time this happened, apricocks became apricots, haycocks became haystacks, and a hundred years later everyone was laughing at the stupidity and childishness of it.

How did feminism become the new prudery? Perhaps that's a question for sociologists rather than a pull request discussion thread, but it's probably worth investigating.

=====
The Secret Language of Girls on Instagram
Lawyer lawyer lawyer lawyer lawyer.
If you considered the reliability and security concerns. It would be interesting in terms of anonymity though.
I get what you're saying, but not everything costs money. For example, SMS piggybacked on infrastructure that already exists, so they are pretty much free to run (despite what your phone bill might say).

Similarly, this payment infrastructure could be a similar thing (maybe it opened up channels used for other mechanisms already?)
Hi dragonwriter, is there a way that I can contact you with a few questions about REST that aren't appropriate for here? Twitter, IRC, email?
Do you have the source or a video in action? This sounds hilarious.
Lord of Light is a harder read than Amber. If you trail off partway through don't kick yourself, just try again later. I think it took me three tries to get into it, but once I did it's definitely high amongst my favorites.
I learned about those four sorting algorithms before ap comp sci in high school. And I know I covered them again in college at some point. Also, I remember talking about big o in the second level cs class in college. So I see them as appropriate curriculum. I am not a genius programmer that wants to figure out two algorithms cause I understand the other two so well. Show them all to me, I'll take in what I can. That being said, I am intrigued that you have a different perspective and I will check out your book to see what you have to say.
Good god. Imagine something similar for source code.

click

You now have 2 hours for your bug fix, and the file is getting checked in, whether you like it or not.

click
Mystery of 12,000 Missing Teslas: Overseas Boom? Waning US Demand?
How to Trim Videos When Converting Blu-ray Movies with DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper
An interesting bit of that is how small the cash donations are in absolute terms!

Keep in mind that those are lower bounds based on which "donation bracket" they fell into. I know there was at least one case where a company donated $200k (which fell into the $100-250k bracket).

measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time

Yes. But that's harder to measure, of course.

Also keep in mind that the FreeBSD Foundation != the FreeBSD Project; it is only in the past couple of years that the Foundation has had enough money to hire ongoing engineering staff. For a long time their budget went to project infrastructure and self-contained projects proposed by individual developers.
It's a bit of a catch 22 situation though: if mega-corps did contribute large amounts to the project, there would be suspicions raised that they are "influencing" the project. There is often an expression of disappointment when people learn that Google is a significant donor for Mozilla.
I was expecting yet another article on Collaborative filtering but was pleasantly surprised to find SVD and Locality-sensitive hashing mentioned. If you're looking for a more thorough understanding of these topics (& other algorithms related to mining data) checkout the course - Mining Massive DataSets at Coursera - http://coursera.org/course/mmds
There are lots of comments on how sad it is that nobody donates to the FreeBSD foundation.

Part of the blame lies with the foundation itself - they don't know how to ask! Fundraising is a full time, yet unsexy job...and very few people do it well. The key thing is to be top of mind by asking frequently and nicely.

Personally, when the time comes, I default towards Wikipedia because Jimmy Wales does a great job of asking. This is a problem not just with FreeBSD, but many others like OpenSSL,etc. If nothing else, I wish these guys just run a yearly kickstarter just for outreach.
> who want to bring a keyless hotel lock experience to the US

No thanks. Those keyless hotel locks fail too often when I use them to ever want them for my home. At least in the hotel, I can go back to the front desk and they'll fix it. I also don't care for the slowness of operating them vs a regular key.
Is it any different from tablets or e-readers that come with a hundred megs per month of included data? This isn't new. The 3G Kindles are the same, the Chromebook, basically any tablet bought from T-Mobile comes with a few hundred megs a month for free.

It's not like they're charging you $120/mo like they would with your iPhone. The part of this that gets paid to AT&T is probably incredibly tiny compared to the cost that gets paid to the high-price designers slathering a smartwatch in gold and gemstones.
> the "Freedom Act" is an act against the digital surveillance of US citizens

This was a revelation to me, so I would have to agree. I'm ignorant of the subject and my initial reaction to a thing called the USA Freedom Act was "great, how are my rights about to be curtailed now?"
Some background to those not familiar from Wikipedia[0]:

~Filing~

"In Klayman I, the plaintiffs, subscribers of Verizon Wireless, brought suit against the NSA, the Department of Justice, Verizon Communications, President Barack Obama, Eric Holder, the United States Attorney General, and General Keith B. Alexander, the Director of the National Security Agency.[5] The plaintiffs alleged that the government is conducting a "secret and illegal government scheme to intercept vast quantities of domestic telephonic communications" and that the program violates First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment and exceeds statutory authority granted by Section 215.[5] In Klayman II, the plaintiffs sued the same government defendants and in addition, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, YouTube, AOL, PalTalk, Skype, Sprint, AT&T, Apple again alleging the bulk metadata collection violates the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment and constitutes divulgence of communication records in violation of Section 2702 of Stored Communications Act.[4]"

~Current Status~

"On January 3, 2014 the government filed notice of appeal. On February 21, 2014 government filed a motion for extension of time to file dispositive motions in wake of the President's changes to Section 215 metadata program on January 17, 2014.[17][18] The parties argued the case before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on November 4, 2014.[19]"

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klayman_v._Obama
I was at Stuipd Hackathon. I've never been to anything so unabashedly motivated to be pointless and irreverent.
Workshops included: "3d printed sex toys", "how to be come alan ginsberg in 30 minutes", and "pissing off my landlord".

All the projects there were so beautiful because they were liberated from the whole motif in tech of products constantly "revolutionizing field-xyz and solving 1000 major world problems".

If we are going to enter into a truly tech-literate, post-internet phase of humanity, we gotta be making dumb, hilarious junk like this.
Looking at this later I see I worded it badly - I should have said 'as long as the company hasn't been breaking the terms of the permit.' I might have mistakenly given the impression that they had done so, whereas in reality I have no reason to think they did.
Great question. I do think this should be part of what attic provides out of the box, but I still really wanted to use attic despite the fact that it doesn't include this sort of functionality. I'll try contacting the attic devs and see what they say about it.
How much will cost a lawyer?