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21echoeson Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

You can wax poetic all you want about anecdotal values differences between the first and third worlds, but speaking in terms of actual practical impact: what you are saying is simply not true. Greenhouse gas emissions scale super-linearly with income: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitte...

There are dozens and dozens of studies all reaching this same conclusion, if the International Energy Agency isn't good enough for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=greenhouse+gas+emissions+by+...

OP's point was that the global rich (most US citizens included) have lifestyles and patterns of consumption which produce an outsized amount of greenhouse gasses, and any attempts to alter those behaviors are routinely met with anger and political backlash

21echoeson What Makes Music Sound Good? (2010) [pdf]

the reason they are named differently and are notated differently is that they serve different functions. they're more or less homophones.

or, perhaps to keep it within the artistic sphere, they're like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion and other "same color" illusions -- they are technically the same, but taken in context they signify different things.

you would build different chords around them, you would play different melodies around them, etc. in other words, it's not just when writing them out in english that we treat those two intervals differently -- we treat them differently while using them during music

you are, of course, correct that many very competent musicians would not correctly name this distinction using the official theory terms. but that doesn't mean that they don't understand the distinction when using them in musical contexts, or that the distinction is not meaningful. plenty of professionals are experts at something without being able to describe it perfectly in words

21echoeson Mind Grenade (2019)

The tradition of using shift registers for automated music generation very much lives on! These days they are typically called "Turing Machines" (I know, kinda of confusing for us CS folks), due to the influence of a popular version which came out in 2012: https://www.musicthing.co.uk/Turing-Machine/

21echoeson Commonly used idioms in the tech industry

This seems to be exactly the definition given in the article?

21echoeson Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

a documentary presenting an impersonator as the real person has always been unethical, yes. this one is newsworthy because it was done in a new way.

21echoeson How Harvard Business School Has Reshaped American Capitalism

I figured that, but I wanted to give the chance at clarification, because we were mainly discussing operational expenses, and there's no way data centers even clears 1% of the cost of running Harvard

21echoeson How Harvard Business School Has Reshaped American Capitalism

Of course! The point was to put the number next to a number known by the typical HN reader, not to imply the businesses were at all similar.

> Most universities get by with a dozen clustered on campus serving administrative, educational and research objectives

... A dozen what?

21echoeson How Harvard Business School Has Reshaped American Capitalism

Invests it, and runs the university on the returns. Assuming a 4% yearly rate of return, then that's around $1.5B a year in money available for operating expenses. As a point of comparison, Facebook spends ~10x that (~$15B), Uber spends ~2x that ($3B), etc. Harvard obviously has additional revenue streams, but there you go.

21echoeson Why are browsers so slow?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226078

When I'm in my working tab group, that's like 8 tabs or so. Most of the tabs in the storage groups are months old (more like bookmarks I didn't have to hit Cmd+D to save)

21echoeson Why are browsers so slow?

Ctrl+tab'd thru all 56 tabs in this group, waited for them to finish loading, opened activity monitor: CPU at 20%, RAM at 811MB. So yea, a fair amount weren't loaded, but loading them didn't make too big of a difference.

21echoeson Why are browsers so slow?

Firefox with Tab Groups and AwesomeBar fits very nicely with my workflow--

1. I dont have to think. I Cmd+Click links as I find them interesting, switch tabs as my attention changes, etc. and the tabs just stay there, waiting.

2. AwesomeBar searches over open tabs by default, and selecting a suggestion switches to that open tab rather than opening a new one.

3. When I have time, I can sort my tabs into labelled groups ("Work", "Research", "Shopping", "Politics", etc.)

4. Tabs are sync'd to and from my Firefox for Android automatically, so if I'm on the move and I want to pull up that thing on the tip of my tongue, it's right there on my phone as well.

I'm sure it's not perfect for everyone, but it works for me /shrug

21echoeson Why are browsers so slow?

Mmmm that's true, I don't. I tend to close GMail tabs once I'm done with them because I also noticed they tend to leak and are poorly optimized for non-Chrome browsers.

21echoeson Why are browsers so slow?

Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s). I can screenshot my Activity Monitor if that'd help?

21echoeson Why are browsers so slow?

Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s).

21echoeson Why are browsers so slow?

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier back then than working with ten in today’s Safari or Chrome. But that’s a whole different story. What would you do today if you opened a link and saw a long article which you don’t have time to read right now, but want to read later? You would save a link and close the tab. But when your browser is fast, you just don’t tend to close tabs which you haven’t dealt with. In Opera, I would let tabs stay open for months without having any impact on my machine’s performance.

This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. And it doesn't reload every page when I quit and restart my browser -- it only loads a tab when I click into that tab. And it has tab groups so that my current group has only about 8 tabs in it, and the other groups are sorted by topic. And on and on.

I find it frustrating when people post these articles as if everyone has this problem, and don't provide enough details as to their setup so that people can help them fix it. I promise you -- if everyone around the world right now had the problem the author was having, it would have been solved. No one would stand for it. Rather than assume everyone is suffering just like you, assume that other people either a) don't behave the way you do, or b) have found a way to fix the problem.

21echoeson Google launches its own festival to bring together music and technology

In most contexts, an entertainment event being "presented by X" just means that X funded the event in exchange for having their name associated with it. E.g., "Thursday Night Football, Presented by Bud Light" -- Bud Light has nothing to do with the content or transmission of the event, it just paid the most money for advertising.

However: you're totally right that they may do some cool tie-in with the phone itself in this case.

21echoeson Katana – Modern Swift framework for creating iOS apps, inspired by React/Redux

The one issue I see with bringing Flux/Redux to iOS is that iOS shipped with unidirectional data flow from day 1 with KVO: view => IBAction on controller => model method (incl. any API or CoreData work) => controller is notified of changes via KVO => rerenders view via a pure function. I don't think it was struggling for a new, clean solution here in the same way the web was.

That said, for people used to the React patterns, this could be a somewhat easy way to make the transition over to iOS programming! So that's cool :D

21echoeson Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

...which is why I spent my entire last paragraph discussing why addressing inequality is often considered as a way to tackle inequality. We don't get to pretend they're separate things for at least another few centuries.

21echoeson Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

> Ignoring [the mental state of the people being optimized for], what is wrong with inequality between groups?

A bit cheeky, I know, but I don't think you can just write off emotional results of systems.

But to answer in better faith: I think [Rawls's Veil of Ignorance thought experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance) is a good response here. In short (skipping how he arrives at the conclusion): when judging the quality of life a system produces, measuring by maximums (or even averages) is probably not the way to go. Median and mode are also very important dimensions to pay attention to.

Also worth noting: if we did live in some future utopia where "inequality" really meant the difference between "all my needs are easily met with little stress" and "I experience nearly constant bliss"... yea, we can have some inequality. But, pockets of the developed world aside, we're not there yet. Not even close. So long as we have around 50% of the world in poverty, and more than 1 billion children in extreme poverty, aiming to "lift all boats" faster than the amount a "rising tide" does is a discussion worth having.

21echoeson iPhone 7

> The corollary is that you have to worry about the DAC in the phone if you have an analog jack, and they're not good. So with digital only, you have the option of buying a good off board DAC (if you care), or otherwise selecting digital headphones at a price point you like.

You could already connect an off-board DAC to the iPhone pre-iPhone 7

21echoeson Is It Here to Stay? Rock’n’roll Considered

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/08/is-jazz-enteri...

21echoeson Jazz in the 21st century: Playing outside the box

well maybe listen to more than one ;D

I included that one as an example of how artists are merging instrumental hip hop back in with Jazz; there's plenty of other styles of Jazz in the list! You're right that a global statement of "couldn't have been made before 2010" for the whole list was a bit over the top.

21echoeson Jazz in the 21st century: Playing outside the box

different senses of innovation /shrug

for stuff in the more progressive vein, check out:

Jaga Jazzist : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVIFUQV20NM or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws25EyTGdTg

Jacob Collier - P.Y.T. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaNxq6Q4v1w

more Hiatus Kaiyote : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-e6-jjbrs0 or

more Snarky Puppy : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_XJ_s5IsQc

21echoeson Jazz in the 21st century: Playing outside the box

dead on. for more examples of what goes by "jazz" these days:

Takuya Kuroda - Rising Son : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mUymaxWmMw

Hiatus Kaiyote - The World It Softly Lulls : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqzFgkkQXWw

Kamasi Washington - Changing of the Guard : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtQRBzSN9Vw

Snarky Puppy - Don't You Know : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqY3FaZmh-Y

Thundercat - Them Changes : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNCd_ERZvZM

Jordan Rakei - Talk to Me : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkvdRNi7qQE

Flying Lotus - MmmHmm : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uCyv05SG1g

None of these tunes could have been made any time before 2010, and all are clearly jazz (or at least heavily inspired by Jazz). With R&B, (Neo-)Soul, and other jazz forms re-emerging in pop music, Jazz remains the source of much of modern musical innovation.

21echoeson Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music

No disrespect, and I could be misreading your point, but I think it only seems hand-wavey to you because you're not familiar with the definitions of the terms being used. It's just statement of facts that is in basically no dispute by the musical community. A few definitions:

> Harmony

The frequency ratio of two or more pitches

> Scale and mode

The set of frequency ratios out of which a given piece of music can be constructed

> The 12-note Western chromatic scale

The modern western chromatic scale is formed out frequency ratios which are powers of the twelfth root of 2, or ~1.059. This is called the "12 note" scale, because 1.059^12 == 2, and our brains are predisposed to find pitches who are multiples of two apart similar. This is because pitch classification in humans (along with many other human senses) measures inbound signal in exponential, rather than linear, terms, and 2:1 is also the simplest ratio by which two pitches can have constructive interference.

As far as why the 12-note scale is the Western scale, there's a fair amount of debate, but most are in agreement that it likely comes from the fact that 12 is a low number with a fair number of integer factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6). Integer factors translates very directly into constructive wave interference (3:2 has less destructive interference than 101:100). So, one can easily construct many constructive interference ratios out of the (2^^(1/12)) atomic element (e.g. the "major chord", the most common set of three pitches in western music, is (1.059^7):(1.059^4):1 ~= 6:5:4). Each exponent of the twelfth root of two is very close to, respectively: 16/15, 9/8, 6/5, 5/4, 4/3, 7/5, 3/2, 8/5, 5/3, 16/9, 15/8

So! Now the only remaining question is just a question of the antropological evidence: do all other cultures also use the twelfth root of two as their simplest harmonic difference? And the answer is very clearly no:

* Indian music uses the twenty second root of two -- the "shruti" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shruti_(music)

* Indonesian music has many different scales, some based on the 9th root of 2 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelog ), others based on the 5th root of 2 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slendro which is often paired with a scale based on the 17th root of 2)

* Arabic music uses the twentyfourth root of two ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_maqam#Notation although to be fair, this is just the square root of the western twelfth root of two, but this conceit is largely used for notation, while actual performance uses adjustments smaller than the twenty-fourth root of two)

* And plenty of other cultures besides ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtonal_music#Microtonal, https://danielpaulschnee.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/microtonal... etc )

Does this constitute "A large portion of the world (possibly a majority)"? I'd probably say not a majority, but certainly more than 15%, likely at least 25%.

21echoeson Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings in the United States

If it's true at the county-level, it's true at the national level (which is also stated in the abstract). By specifying it's additionally true at the county level, it makes a much stronger claim -- that high racial bias does not exist only in high-crime areas, and as such, racial bias is not explainable by crime rates.

21echoeson Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings in the United States

re: 2, this is covered quite clearly in the abstract: "There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates."

21echoeson Who pays when startup employees keep their equity?

Of course, no one is saying that companies and employees have to value ISOs the same, but no one is saying employees who value ISOs at zero should be working at a startup either

21echoeson Who pays when startup employees keep their equity?

Because startups are, effectively by definition, equity rich and cash poor. Trading $100k/yr in ISOs for $100k/yr in cash across 10 employees increases your cash burn by $1M/year, which is make-or-break for a lot of startups.

21echoeson Another successful DAO attack recursive split

This. Bitcoin is currently paying transaction fees through inflation, but as the halving process continues, those fees will shift back into the marketplace in a less implicit way, as miners need to continue being paid.

https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction-percent