skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Immigration is also about stealing talent (a precious resource) from countries.
Comcast is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: CMCSA & CMCSK), which makes it liable to a host of external pressures, legal and otherwise, that SpaceX as a currently privately-owned company is not.
Updates on Hayabusa 2, the Japanese asteroid mission
Why should Uber get to flaunt the law just because they're big enough to get away with it?

What about the little guy who can't afford the fines he'll have to pay if he operates a cab without a license?

Sure a lot of the regulation is overburdensome, but the solution is to change the law, not encourage companies to break it.
http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.ro/2013/10/indif...
"Actually C was already primitive in 1984 and only mattered for those coding in an UNIX system."

There was lots of code getting written in C on IBM PCs (running DOS) back then. This article in Byte Magazine from 1983 reviewed nine different PC C compilers:

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-08/1983_08_BYT...
Don't deal with what if! The dominant notion is that of the inability to hear a sound of frequency higher than X. Your question leads to other interesting questions, like how is the frequency of a tone defined for a point in time (much like it's not intuitive to derive velocity). To be honest, I don't know either, but I'd bid two cents that ear and brain don't compare well to the devices we record music with.
How can $273 million in profit be a bad sign at all? Sometimes I don't get oeconomics.
I wonder if the next step in the evolution of public transport is something akin to Uber. It may be more entropic come the day self driving cars come along.

Given that each car heads to its destination without a transit route where passengers are buffered would be good.

Additionally, since the road is shared unlike the subway, it may be more efficient on resources.

Perhaps when the option becomes available, the government of some affording country may be able to pilot such a thing.
Donald Sherman orders a pizza using a talking computer (1974) [video]
> Factoring for repeat viewers

And you're doing this... how, exactly?
How do I rate an uber drive?

Say I pick up an uber, and everything goes exactly as planned. No weird side streets, no funky smell in the car, and an amicable driver. Not the best uber experience - I've had uber drivers free water bottles and nightlife recommendations at the ready in the past - but we got exactly where we wanted to go.

The service was satisfactory, but not above average. What do I rate this driver?

The answer to this question varies depending on who you are. The problem is that there is no standard for riders to objectively rate uber drivers. It's the equivalent of the easy-A teacher in high school versus the strict grading-on-a-curve teacher.

People have their own biases and experiences that affect the scale they rate on. The differences in my own personal grading syllabus versus another persons can get people on uber fired for the exact same ride experience.
I wish the 5 stars system worked like that. I love UberX, but I don't like the negotiation at the end of the ride over ratings. It hasn't been as bad for me as in the Forbes article, but there's a definite read-between-the-lines of always giving 5 stars.

I'd much rather give my feedback/rating in private once I'm out of the cab, and for the driver to do the same with me. I really don't need/want to know how they rated me. The "I gave you 5 stars, now you rate me" conversation is always awkward.
Well, our taxis take longer routes as well to get to the 30 euro extra.

The train costs 4 euro, by taxi it's on average 45-50 euro, but could also easily be 60 euro's.

For a tourist it's not very clear what is the best way of transportation; hence, very easy to get ripped off. When the price differce is 10-15 times the price of a train ticket that is supposed to make you wonder
You could still typecast. The code may be simpler, but less explicit.

In a storage heavy application it's still sensible to save bytes. Even if it is not a remarkable saving in this case, especially with compression algorithms reducing the impact.

Assert will stop the program immediately, so you want to sensibly catch the error, at which point you need to know as much about the error condition as you need to know to use unsigned or casts correctly. So it's rather a question of taste, isn't it?
You are overestimating the jitter problem by a large amount. The first S/PDIF receiver IC I find via google (CS8416) claims to have an output jitter of typ. 200ps on the clock output, running from its internal PLL synced to an externally supplied S/PDIF input.
When bad ideas will not die: from classical AI to Linked Data
I believe his assistants help him articulate his thoughts. The article implies that he writes everything meticulously himself, but that isn't true. As far as interviews go, interviewers usually send him the questions ahead of time.
Interesting. I'll have to check those projects out. I have the same problem as the GP -- I have a script that rips CDs, taking multiple reads until it gets two bit-for-bit identical copies. And just about every time at least one track is silently "corrupted."

(I put the scare quotes on because I haven't actually bothered to check if there is an audible difference. But it does confirm the GP's experience.)
SpaceX is nothing compared to NASA in scope (and history) and would be even less without NASA's (and general government) past work and experience.
None of which have anything to do with why they suck.
Yes. And 16 bit cannot by itself represent without distortion the full dynamic range of a lot of music. Most samples, most of the time, do not use a full 16 bits. This is why during CD mastering dithering is used.

Take it from me, when you master 24 bit stereo tracks, and you don't dither, huge amounts of low level detail disappear. The detail in the quiets is there in 24 bit, and lost when its truncated to 16 bits. Add the dithering, and you get increased noise, but the detail comes back.

One could suggest that with dithering 16 bits can represent it. But that's with a whole bunch of noise added to the signal. You can argue that noise is not audible, but it is _just_, and when mastering you can audition the different dither spectrums to find which dither least impacts the music.

http://www.digido.com/articles-and-demos12/13-bob-katz/16-di...
I wish I could throw all of my karma at this. I would really love more support in IRC, especially since I think fully owning some fanatical support for a developer-focused company can only be a good move. It'd also end up meaning a much better product.
I just realized taxi medallions could be an good preview of what cap-and-trade will look like.
Fair enough. Then the OP comment is completely off topic. What has encoding bitrates got to do with the original article?
And as Lessig is fond of pointing out, code is law.
Thankfully Python fixed that discrepancy about 3/2

Anyhow, I don't agree with you: I think that getting a bug years down the road due to a too small numeric type is something that the programming language itself should avoid.... not because "developers don't ought to know it", but because mistakes happen

Anyhow, even with a dynamically typed programming language like Python or Javascript you can care about the size of your numbers.

Just import the array module (in Python) or use the Int32Array/Int8Array/etc. types (in Javascript)
Uber allows people with poor credit scores to purchase a vehicle so they can make a living? That seems fundamentally different than the "subprime crisis" involving mortgages.

Are you alleging that all lending to people with poor credit scores is wrong, even in the cases where doing so might be the only way to give that person a job and help them improve their life?

The point about indentured servitude seems like hyperbole. Certainly the drivers can decide to just stop driving for Uber (they can't withhold income that doesn't ever come through) and/or allow the car to be repossessed if they really can't afford it. It also looks like Uber is helping buyers get manufacturer discounts (http://uberwest.weebly.com/la-vehicle-financing.html). Maybe I'm missing something here, but it looks like a good program for a number of people who can't afford to buy a car but want to become a driver.
A book might be around 50,000 words. There are about 2,000 working hours in a year if you only work 9-5 M-F. Which means that writing a book a year requires only 25 words per hour, on average.
I use Klipsch x7i and they allow you to listen to audiobooks on a low volume setting in an underground train. Which, in Moscow, seems like a perfection.

The sound is very clear, but not balanced. Neither an expert nor a musician though.
Actual implementations of AIXI are also quite easy. I've written one before. Not that it's very interesting to run -- it is basically indistinguishable from an infinite loop.

As for what the acronym stands for, heck if I know.
What would be needed exactly?
Are you saying drivers are making you rate them while you're there? I've literally never seen anyone rate a driver in the car.
Wouldn't most of the digital cable costs be due to analog interference in the machines they are connecting and them acting like antennas and not that the signal is corrupted on the way?

Unless it's an insulator (like fiber optic cables), you are hooking both a 50 foot antenna and a digital transmission line to your box; if you want just the digital transmission line, you have to insulate the hell out of the antenna part of it.
What languages are you interested in?
> yuri was the one peddling errant bullshit ... Whining ... his perfect unicorn ... Cue whining ... All he wants is to sidestep US immigration law

Whoa, this is not ok.

Most of your 15+ comments in this thread have combined grand unsubstantiated claims with lashing out at those you disagree with. That's bad enough, but here you've crossed into personal attack. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.

The level of discourse you're practicing here makes me ashamed of this site: lacking in either civility or substance and whipping up indignant froth. In the future, please optimize for quality rather than quantity. One high-quality comment is a greater contribution than a dozen rude ones.

People legitimately have divergent views of this complex matter: companies use the immigration process for different reasons, there are different levels of talent being sought, employers and employees have different vantage points, and so on. Turning it into a polarized nastiness match, as you and a few others have done, destroys the capacity of this site for exploratory conversation.
I never heard: it's over Google Android, on the contrairy. I have been a fan from the start (just i have been from Apple (not anymore)) and from Microsoft (.Net developer) - that love has renewed since Nadella :)
I don't have a fancy college degree, but even I can see that you might be mixing correlation and causation. College doesn't necessarily cause people to earn more money, better understand the world or communicate well. It's that intelligent people who are likely to succeed in life tend to go to college, mostly because they are expected to by society. Those people would have probably been just as successful without college, but that's hard to prove empirically without a large control group. Your argument seems different when applied to basketball instead of education. Was Michael Jordan great because he played for a top college basketball program, or was he playing for a top program because he was already great?

I think part of OP's point was that college itself isn't what makes people successful. There are a lot of great reasons to go to college, but advances in communication technology have fundamentally changed the landscape. It used to be that college libraries and professors were the only way to gain access to certain kinds of knowledge. That period in time is obviously over. College degrees will become less and less important in a world where anyone can communicate with everyone. A diploma used to be the only way to certain open doors. Now a facebook account and an impressive resume can do just as much or more.
It also happens in highly regulated markets. For example, due primarily to my outward appearance (I'm not a member of the majority race), I'm often asked for 2x the normal fare in auto rickshaws. If my girlfriend (a different non-majority race than me) is with me, 3-4x [1].

I'm mostly denied access to banking (except for some legacy accounts) due explicitly to regulation.

This also happens in private markets without a company marketplace. For example:

http://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/moral-panics-an...

[1] She's normally asked for 2x if I'm not around. If I'm with a woman of the same race as me, the price goes back to 2x.
"bad book" is no more than name-calling.
Whoa, that's insane. I've never had a driver ask me to rate them, and I've taken a lot of ubers (though more recently, lyfts). (This is in SF.)
I get the sense we're going to need to do some heavy genetic engineering before we're able to survive long-term on other planets. Probably more than anyone from this generation will be comfortable with. This of course will raise the question, have we really saved ourselves from extinction if what we save isn't exactly human?
> Even with something not-so-high-level-but-sorta-high-level like Java or C#, you still have an abstraction level (JVM/CLR) that must first boot, then interpret, then execute.

There's no reason those shouldn't be resident daemons. Heck, if they were, why should the OS be anything other than a hypervisor for managing those, plus some abstractions like a "container" interface that each runtime execution driver implements? We could have had something like Microsoft Research's SingularityOS a decade ago if we had approached the problem from the other direction—pushing the runtime lower in the stack, instead of trying to write a kernel that does everything. Imagine your laptop booting into Xen, and then loading a Smalltalk image that contains the desktop, while in parallel booting up some background daemons into virtually-isolated Erlang nodes.

> Sure I may use a great many separate apps, all working together in orchestration (my database, authentication server, some 3rd party libs, etc), however for some apps, a great deal of the codebase will end up being a monolithic piece, and that is just fine so long as it's maintainable and extensible.

The author's complaint was less about factoring of components and more about the way we (still) do IPC. As in, why are we directly-and-unsafely sharing allocated memory handles between families of processes (i.e. using threads) instead of just having processes push information to one-another's inboxes over sockets? Anything that's currently threaded could be done with message-passing instead. And like the article said, it'd be only a 2-4x difference in overhead, minuscule compared to the speedups over the past decades.
Sure you can use that kind of rationale to justify immoral and stupid actions, but in this specific context it was a completely rational action.

Someone else was going to build a nuclear bomb eventually (at the time time the Manhattan project began, the US was worried Germany would). Unless the US wanted someone else to have a massive advantage over them, the only rational choice was to build nuclear weapons.

Do you believe that no other country would have developed nuclear weapons if the US didn't?

Let's say Russia had nuclear capabilities and the US didn't? Would Russia have used them as leverage against the US? Of course they would have.

>but Gorbachev let go. Was that rational within your framework?

First, this isn't really relevant. Gorbachev kept his nuclear arsenal and military mostly intact, and thus was protected against potential foreign aggression.

Second, that's a very simplistic view of what happened. Gorbachev didn't want to completely dissolve the USSR, he just realized that in it's current form it wasn't working. He wanted to modernize communism, but he completely lost control of his reform. His eventual plan was to form a new union, but the Ukrainian Referendum made that unlikely, and then Yeltsin forced him out of power.

It's also very unlikely the USSR could have evolved into anything like North Korea--mainly because Russia was much more developed than North Korea, much larger, and had a much larger population.
Hmm, I wonder why this was added:

#if DEBUG
currentKey = unchecked((int)0xdeadbeef);
#endif

https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/src/System.Linq... line 110 :P
Google doesn't have products that are expected to operate perfectly 15 years from now in outer space. Google's products can survive significant defects, have bug fix turnaround times measured in minutes, and worst case, can take some downtime without too much harm.

When you talk about oil and mining companies, you mention the same ones that suffer dozens of spills, contamination incidents, and accidents? Or is there some sort of hypothetical perfect oil company with no accidents whatsoever?

I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.
Running Debian on a Graphing Calculator
It's no longer 1974.

Type safety is discussed in "Types and Programming Languages" http://books.google.com/books?id=ti6zoAC9Ph8C

"Strongly typed" is not.
I am sorry, but the authors' examples and parallels doesn't make much sense to me.

First of all, what does sample rate has even remotely to do with hearing range?

If we are comparing this to visual information, perhaps it would be best to draw parallels with video. Namely, sample rate would be equal to frames per second and bit depth to colour depth. In both areas we are still seeing improvements from TV manufacturers (100Hz TVs) and gamers are still racing to get better fps so it looks more realistic.

The question then would be, why 25 fps is the minimum average human can withstand? What are the limits here and can it look more realistic for certain people with more frames per second.

After all, this race for fidelity is just attempt to get more accurate representation of analog sound, which opens different problem - absolute all of todays music is electronic - produced from samples and samples above 44KHz are simply not available. You may find some vinyl rips of more classical music (which does explain the phenomenon why so many rock stars would start listening to classic music - after getting rich and dumping money into expensive sound systems they'd discover elegance beyond distortion).

Saying all this fidelity does not matter is kind of equivalent of throwing away all the vinyls (although transistors play a role here too).
There's a difference between "licensed" (where the government only licenses a certain group to create a government granted monopoly) and "insured".
You're not really stacking your long-run odds any more than you're stacking your odds by playing the lottery a lot. The odds are stacked in favour of anyone who submits a lot and submits early rather than in favour of someone who submits well.
Skype co-founder backs Wire – to take on Skype
You're conflating pharmacy technicians with pharmacists. There are soft skills involved; it's remarkably hard to automate the person who has to know the weird interactions with drugs that different physicians prescribe--and how they interact with the over-the-counter, off-label, or just plain illegal stuff that their customers are taking.

Pharmacists keep people alive when their physicians try (with the best of intentions, mind) to kill them.
A better namedtuple for Python
The argument is fine for listening to a finished product but those absolutes in the post have some hidden assumptions that don't hold in all real-world scenarios.

That probably sounds like BS. Hear me out.

A common practice for DJs is to use special decks to DJ from iPods, or other digital sources (eg. regular turntables with timecode vinyls operating a PC.) DJing involves playback speed adjustment when there is a BPM difference between the two tracks during a transition. 192kHz is overkill for basic DJing and you'd probably be fine in the vast majority of cases with 48kHz, but if the DJ is a turntablist (scratch etc.), you want all you can get when going from zero to target speed—which is happening constantly. It sounds awful when consumer-grade¹ audio is used. As for the ultrasonics, filtering is the answer in this scenario. It may be quite a good thing for these DJs (and their fans) that Apple is doing this. (I'm not under the impression that this is why they're doing it.)

A lot of the music I listen to uses samples that are played at something like half speed, or tuned down at any rate. I tend to tune samples down by about a fifth myself. Point being: a lot of detail that would otherwise be present with higher samplerate source material goes missing. It doesn't help that tuning down like this dumps a good portion of the low end.

There are also neat ways of exploiting nonlinearities from ultrasonic sources, which I use, but that's harder to describe.

¹not meant as a derogatory remark.
As someone trying to hire, I find myself going through resumes for the firs ttime...

And honestly, my primary metric is if the word "rails" appears anywhere (It's a ruby on rails job). I might even let that go if I saw a cover letter explaining why they liked rails (but maybe don't have professional experience in it).

Honestly this is a pretty low bar. And the way I've been doing it, the phone screen that follows is pretty softball. But after that, I give out the coding exercise...

If you complete it, you get an in person interview for the most part. But all the rest of it - looking at resumes, the phone screen - sort of seems like a waist of time. I don't care how big a game you can talk, if you can't do the coding exercise (which, btw, is the most common outcome - they beg a couple extensions and then give up), then... oh well.
This sounds like a really interesting idea. I probably takes a weekend to prepare a proper application anyway, so spending the time on a project (which may be fun even) sounds much better.
Elon Musk and his friends' personal fortunes are a drop in the bucket compared to an established federal agency's funding. NASA's requested funding for 2014 is $17 billion.

If you count their accumulated physical assets, manpower and "intellectual property" (assuming aerospace knowledge such as that could be valued effectively), you'd find that very few institutions outside of some multinational corporations and government agencies are that big.

I doubt Musk would be able to get such funding every year until 2030, or whatever arbitrary target is set to get a man to Mars.
Seriously: it's really uncool that you keep asking this.

I'm sad that you're sad, but you're not taking the hint.
Machine Learning Can Capitalize on Information It'd Take an Army to Study
I've literally never heard anyone claim Android was done, the closest I've ever seen is Apple loyalists denying Android gains, which isn't quite the same thing.
Tcscdp DS150
Uber job post (2010)
Extending RDD for fun and profit
Since technical writing is part of an engineers job requirements, I would argue that an engineer incapable of writing a decent resume is already at a disadvantage.
I didn't mean to assert the private sector was better at everything. Sorry for the confusion. I only meant to say that it's better at most things.

Is that really mistaken? Since I'm getting so much pushback, I should probably think about changing my view. But I don't understand how this could be true: "The public sector is better than the private sector at most jobs." It seems like the vast majority of the time, it's the other way around.
Sorry to be "that guy", but what is System.Linq.Parallel? Can anyone provide a brief description/ list of links where to read more about it? Why is open sourcing it such a big deal?