ThJ

Scientific paper? Not entirely sure. Go at it, hackers!

Forskningspapir? Ikke helt sikker. Kjør på, hackere!

The writing is great.

this.

I don't know how widely known this is among the HN crowd, but: Sennheiser did professional audio equipment for many decades before they entered the consumer market. To me, it sounds like they're returning to their core business.

many sims use some variety of SPICE and some convergence algorithm a-la Newton's method to discover the voltages and currents at the nodes. simulating a system where every single component runs in parallel with every other component isn't easy.

speaker frequency response simulations will sometimes use an equivalent electronic circuit. it could help design better speakers. any time you interface digital circuitry with the real world, hybrid circuitry is used. also, with this increased processing capacity, you could be looking at simulating the parasitic properties of components, not just ideal versions of them.

i've had a lot trouble with analog simulations in SPICE. they often fail to converge or run incredibly slowly. i do a lot of audio circuitry. the speedups addressed here could potentially make it possible to simulate audio circuits in real time. suppose you feed a signal in via an audio interface, pass it through your analog processing circuitry and play it back in real time. the design cycle would be so much faster.

but the movie portrayed him as a dick...

the article seems to skip over the entire field of colour science. there is a colour space for the human eye. it's called LMS. there is also a colour space, derived from it, called CIEXYZ. it's the colour space that all ICC profiles are specified in. they are RGB-like in nature and correspond to the three types of cone cells in the human eye. there are other colour spaces that derive from it, such as CIELab and CIELuv, which are luma-chroma versions of XYZ.

Looking for: Contract jobs

Location: Oslo, Norway

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C, digital signal processing, electrical engineering, embedded, ESnext (vanilla, vue.js, node.js), hybrid circuits, Java, multimedia programming, OpenGL, PCB design, POSIX, Python, SoC

Email: thj@thj.no

More like cabins in the wild than country cottages, some of them not accessible by car. Calling them country cottages makes them seem like they’re houses, but they’re more like cabins, often without water and electricity, because they’re not near population centres, so the infrastructure doesn’t exist. The entire point of a Norwegian cabin is to escape the urban life for a little while and go back to basics.

It helps to use linear gamma when manipulating RGB values. Linear gamma fixes most issues with interpolating and mixing RGB values and that’s also why most modern CG pipelines use it. It produces the most natural results.

This is what futures contracts are for. They are settled with a physical delivery or in cash, depending on the contract.

Futures trading is a prediction market. If you produce a commodity, you could, for example, place a sell order that is settled on a certain date in the future, and if you’re lucky, the market price will be below that of the price set in the order.

The buyer of the future will then purchase the commodity from you at the agreed price, or for cash settled futures, he’ll pay you the difference.

If the market price is higher, the difference is paid to the buyer, if the future is cash settled.

Dunning-Kruger effect

I think all those trains, cars, carriages and people would’ve made a lot more noise than the audio mix suggests. The trains and cars especially should be drowning out everything else as they pass near the camera. This sounds more like the audio track of a feature film than anything captured with a microphone in the field.

They’re not? Take a look at at a Final Cut Pro.

These are prescription medications being taken under the supervision of both a psychiatrist and a doctor. Again, I'm actually cutting back on the medications. I was on a much higher dose before.

I find it very funny that themes of self-realisation, self-discovery and insanity are often mentioned together. It's almost as if you have to be slightly mad to actually live a little.

And the moment you begin to express your joy of living, people come out to say "You should be careful. You might be going crazy." and other people, who have lost their fear in a similar way, come out to congratulate you on your self-development.

It's almost as if every idea is a double-edged sword if you take the time to examine it.

I’m 36. Did not expect this to happen at my age. I’ll be 40 in 4 years and I thought I was too old to learn things about myself.

Some of the stuff on the hypomania page rings a bell, but I don’t think disinhibition requires testing and confronting your fears first. What I’m going through, behaviourally speaking, feels more like learning the actual vs believed limits of what I can do to affect my environment. It’s a bit like being a kid and testing borders with your parents to see how far you can take it and then gaining a little more confidence. I wait patiently to take the next step and plan things out and then execute them. Again, if I was feeling a loss of control and my behaviours made me dysfunctional, that would be the time to seek help. Instead, it would seem that I’m actually improving my life situation. The definition of mental illness isn’t symptoms but whether they are giving the patient issues interacting with their environment, and as far as I can see, I fail to satisfy that criterium.

It’s of relatively recent date, but thinking back on it, I’ve had vaguely similar experiences before. Difference is that there wasn’t the same bringing online of feelings and abilities. It wasn’t as powerful.

I mean, it looks that way, but who walks around telling that to people? I recognise it as that. I took some interest in Zen Buddhism, years before this happened, and would sometimes experiment with meditation and controlling my breathing.

“In the oldest texts of Buddhism, dhyāna (Sanskrit) or jhāna (Pali) is the training of the mind, commonly translated as meditation, to withdraw the mind from the automatic responses to sense-impressions, and leading to a "state of perfect equanimity and awareness.”

I don’t know if it’s perfect exactly but the whole training the mind to reduce automatic responses to sense impressions sounds exactly right to me.

I still have some difficulty controlling it but it gets better every day. It seems that the more I dare myself and confront my fears, the better I get at self regulating my emotions.

And damn do I wish there was science to this, because I was very committed to a scientific viewpoint before this happened, which is rather inconvenient at the moment, because my only source of information about what I’m currently experiencing is religion.

Oh, I read psychology. Actually, it was mania at one point, but, uh, I... stopped it? And then interesting things began happening. My ability to improvise on the piano improved. My appreciation of classical music grew. The paranoia was replaced by the understanding that people usually aren’t out to get me. It wasn’t so much mania as it was my social skills turning on for the first time and it was a bit intense. I’m talking to people as I’m going through this and the feedback was concern at first, followed by keen interest in what I was saying, in the sense that people now want to talk to me more often, women actually pay attention to me and laugh at my jokes. I think if this is mania, it’s controlled mania in a way? I’m able to bring myself up and down and I stop if it goes too high. There are a couple of friends of mine who have had similar experiences and they’re smart people too, and nobody locked them up for it. I think there are people out there who can control their mind states like this and it’s a rather powerful tool. I’m positive about it. I live, think and feel. I have good days and bad days. Also, I’ve been stepping the ADHD meds down not up, and even late at night when they’re supposed to have worn off, I can still get into that state.

I guess in a way if I didn’t know breathing and relaxation techniques and didn’t know much about psych stuff, I’d be very confused and would possibly lose it, but since I know these things, and I know science, it’s a thing I can control. I’m not alone in it and I’m sharing these things with friends and while some of them don’t get it, some of them do totally get it.

I think what you should know about my story is that I was a ball of stress and fear before this happened. All my life, actually. The notion that people go through breakdowns at stages of self development isn’t exactly unheard of.

The scary thing, of course, is that it DOES break people down completely at times. It’s too much for them to handle... but when it isn’t too much to handle and you just grow from it? I’d call that self development.

People tell you to “focus” and it’s very funny because I think much clearer than them by NOT focusing. My brain isn’t so much focused on one thing as it’s focused on everything at once. Intuition works very fast so if you give it a few data points it will triangulate them almost instantaneously.

Oh, um, that’s interesting. I have found I can make myself dream while awake in a way... I use relaxation techniques on myself all day and it’s actually a bit frightening what you can make your own brain do...

What happened to me is I became more openminded, more fluent in my writing, more daring in my choices, and actually also more socially aware...

I can only compare it to eating the forbidden fruit of the garden of Eden, or to Buddhas awakening. I have such control over my own state of mind that I can calm myself down to such a degree that it almost feels like I smoked a joint, or work myself up into rage or excitement. It’s like playing yourself like a musical instrument as you constantly focus on your breathing.

The other day I had the bizarre experience of sustaining a sexual climax for what must’ve been 20 minutes because I had put myself in such an extremely relaxed state that I could just let it “hang” there forever.

This state of mind seems to be what artists, writers, lawyers and other people who just apply creative thinking in their work are in most of the time, as well as astronauts and professional athletes. The calmness makes you extremely fast and precise.

Interestingly, I began to learn this after taking ADHD meds, but now in need less meds than before. Turns out my ADHD was just a need to stay in a very calm and playful state most of the time. The funny thing is that this has caused me to climb up on Maslow’s pyramid of needs.

I think what ADHD meds often do is help you function but also push you to a breakdown and then your brain starts testing other modes of operation that won’t cause another breakdown. Facing adversity, such as the death of your mother, also seems to be a common trigger for it...

Why the comparison to the forbidden fruit? Because every thought I have now is a double edged sword. Whenever I think something I instantly see the flip side. When I look at other people, I read their body language like a book. Also, self talk has become frighteningly effective.

I wish I had a scientific explanation for it. The closest I can think of is something called psychosynthesis, together with the theories of Jung. I feel like what I’ve done is let the id and ego swap places... or perhaps the id and the superego. Feels like I’m damned near egoless. It’s almost impossible to say hurtful remarks to me.

On the way here, I had something that can best be described as a breakdown followed by a feeling of all encompassing love. A gentle voice told me it loved me and wanted me to be happy and I was overwhelmed with emotion.

I also went slightly paranoid at one point and was convinced everyone was out to get me. I trusted everything my intuition told me, every suspicion and gut feeling felt like reality.

I got over that, but I rely far more on gut feeling now than I ever did before and it makes me very fluent in my writing and very unafraid to ask questions, etc.

It’s been really bizarre.

The field of information technology is still in its infancy. Had it been more mature, we would already have formalised the distinction between the researcher, the engineer and the craftsman, so commonly seen in other fields.

Our current use of titles is loose and very imprecise, and serve as marketing more than anything else. I would like to see a formal distinction between the different roles.

Douglas Engelbart, Dennis Ritchie, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds are not "developers" or "programmers".

Engelbart was a "computer scientist" in the true sense of the word. His systems saw little practical application, but they enhanced our understanding of what computing machines could do.

Ritchie, Stallman and Torvalds are engineers. If they were in the car industry, they would be renowned engine and drive train engineers.

Your typical programming job, on the other hand, is equivalent to the title of "mechanic", "construction worker" or "craftsman".

Many people who enter the field don't actually want to be craftsmen, but since we are so poor at making the distinction, we get misunderstandings. There are retired programmers who worked in the business for 30 years who never quite understood why the job turned out to be so different from what they had imagined.

One consequence of making this distinction is that a hierarchy of exclusivity inevitably emerges from this. There are far more car mechanics than drivetrain engineers. Only so many people have the privilege of doing that.

I don't know if the supply of computer engineers and computer scientists is smaller or greater than the demand, but what I do know is that these jobs aren't the kind you find on a job site. They are found through networking, which requires you to have the right kind of network, which isn't possible for everyone who would be a good fit for the position.

Knowing the features of your language can expand your horizons. I had already been a programmer for years when JavaScript entered a new era, and I thought I knew a thing or two about computing.

With time, I understood that what I had was a lot of memorised knowledge about specific systems. The layout of a Master Boot Record. The numbers to BIOS interrupt calls. Memory addresses.

The transition from Pascal to C that I made at age 12 had only opened my eyes a little. I learned that there is no true distinction between a function and a procedure (subroutine), that statements and expressions are really two sides of the same coin, that a for() loop doesn’t have to enumerate anything, and that pointers, direct memory access and direct access to system calls are a very powerful tool.

For the past 10 years, I found myself repeatedly involved in web development projects. I had minimal interest in JavaScript at first, viewing it as a toy language for simple automations, and I did most of the heavy lifting in PHP and Java Servlets. Gradually, as people began doing more and more “weird” stuff in it, I became more curious.

That’s when I fell into the rabbit hole.

Functional programming, map-reduce, lambda notation, closures, asynchronous code, generators, observables, applying argument lists to functions at runtime, destructuring assignments, spread notation, treating functions as behaviours you can pass around...

Basically, stuff that modern JavaScript has borrowed from languages such as Lisp.

It made me aware that there’s a distinction between computing as a Platonic ideal and computing as a practical discipline. Computing is a set of ideas about information and the logic of manipulating it.

Computer science is a branch of mathematics and information theory. Computer programs are living equations, written in a notation rigid enough that a machine can read them and perform computations with them.

I didn’t have that kind of perspective 10 years ago. My skill as a programmer has taken a very solid step up. Unfortunately, this has also made me overqualified, and I’m often in a situation where I’m doing work that just about any developer with a couple of years’ experience could pull off, and would learn much more from than me because they’ve never done it before.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the jobs that require you to actually appreciate the nuances of computing and programming on this level are virtually non-existent. Most customers don’t care if the application software is a rotting carcass under the hood. They want it cheaply and quickly, and if it breaks, “That’s what computer programs do, isn’t it?” and then they pay someone to fix it.

In most cases, the practical craft of programming is very far removed from that Platonic ideal I mentioned.

I would argue that the craft of programming is in fact almost entirely unrelated to the field of computer science. Here is an analogy: Building elaborate cuckoo clocks involves a great deal of classical mechanics, but it doesn't teach you anything fundamental about physics. A watchmaker is not a theoretical physicist, even if his practical knowledge of the mechanical movement of small parts suspended in a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen in a narrow temperature range under the influence of the gravitational field of a particular planet may be quite excellent.

As far as I can tell, this is basically the 32.32 fixed-point equivalent of Math.floor(N * Math.random()).

It reminds me of the sort of tricks I used as a teenager back in the 90s to speed up my MS-DOS graphics code.

Another trick: You can perform rounding by adding fixed-point 1/2 before the bit shift.

Army doctors heal soldiers so they can go out and kill more people. The Hippocratic Oath is rarely applied to indirect harm.

An oath in the same spirit for knowledge workers would be meaningless, since their work never does any direct harm.

If such an oath is instead applied to indirect harm, how many levels of indirection is enough to wash your hands of all harm?

You make it sound way worse than it was. That mild hiss would barely be detectable once the song started and masked it out. Calling mild hiss terrible fidelity is an exaggeration.

Some 16-bit consumer sound cards had outputs with way more hiss than the better tape decks.

As for the high end, the differences aren't exactly easy to pick out. I don't know where these peaks and troughs are in the spectrum, but I'd have to listen for them explicitly to pick them out, because I have no idea what you're talking about.

I mean, I've heard bad cassette audio with warbling and pronounced hiss and high end loss, but if you take a brand new high quality tape and record to it from a CD and play it back from the tape, it's damn close to sounding identical.

I have a fair bit of experience with audio. I have a home studio. I can pick out subtle quality differences between sound sources. I stand by what I have said.

Cassettes aren't actually that bad. A local radio station I worked at for a while used them for reruns. With a good cassette deck, brand new chrome tapes and Dolby noise reduction, it's hard to hear much of a difference between that and a digital recording. Cassettes only sounded low-fi because most people listened to cheap tapes on cheap players with cheap speakers. Even some of the better portable players from the 1990s sounded very transparent if you attached them to a good pair of headphones or a good stereo system.

I feel we reached transparency for professional analog recordings some time in the 1980s, and I would argue that this applies to analog film as well. Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure (1985) and Top Gun (1986) don't look blurry or grainy at all. Analog media kept improving until they were made obsolete. Everyone was trying to approach digital perfection long before it actually existed. Actually wanting artefacts and colouration is more of a recent phenomenon.

I'm from Norway. The backside of the medal when it comes to welfare services of that kind is the rather humiliating process you have to go through to actually get them. I've heard many stories about this.

Yes, you'll get help if you do as they say, but it can feel very invasive at times. Some clueless bureaucrat will need to know about your finances and all your medical issues, and if it's not a clear-cut case, these clueless people will need to form opinions about how sick you are and how much help you need, and they'll often be wrong, and you'll have to fight them.

It's better than the alternative, of course, but it's not anywhere near being the utopia that U.S. liberals like to describe it as. They're just using us to promote their own agenda.

With that said, I do find myself thanking heaven that I was born in this country from time to time.