powrtoch

Is 13 sq ft a typo or am I missing something?

Why does each language's Loved + Dreaded = 100%?

Most languages I've worked with I neither love nor dread. Clicked through to the SO survey results and even skimmed the methodology section, but I couldn't find what question they asked to get these numbers.

1. Highlight the clip and "strip silence" to split it into a bunch of separate clips the leave out the silent bits 2. Highlight those clips and "shift left within selection" (I might not have that command name exactly right) to collapse them against each other

Whoa. For years I've been seeing YouTube videos that seem to just teleport choppily around what I assumed were silences. I always assumed there was a standard tool that everyone used to do this. I can do the equivalent thing to a podcast episode in like 5 seconds in Logic. The notion that people have been doing this by hand is staggering, but kudos to you for finally coming along and filling this niche.

I wrote and played for a pop-rock band called Doctor Squid back in college. Still pretty proud of it.

https://open.spotify.com/album/3A0HzsaCTe1JI3noFR2GZi?si=roy...

"HiQ only takes information from public LinkedIn profiles. By definition, any member of the public has the right to access this information. Most importantly, the appeals court also upheld a lower court ruling that prohibits LinkedIn from interfering with hiQ’s web scraping of its site."

Surely I'm not reading this correctly. This would seem to suggest that websites are not legally allowed to prevent bots from crawling their sites. Lots of sites have ToS preventing such things, are those legally void now? Are captchas on public pages illegal, even if you request the page 8000 times in a second?

"In this case, hiQ argued that LinkedIn’s technical measures to block web scraping interfere with hiQ’s contracts with its own customers who rely on this data. In legal jargon, this is called” malicious interference with a contract”, which is prohibited by American law."

This is almost weirder. If LinkedIn wanted to force users to sign in to view profile info, would they be not allowed to do that because some company had signed a contract that implicitly assumed access to that data? If someone writes a web scraper for my site, and I unknowingly change my site in a way that breaks that scraper, can a court force me to revert the change?

Seems to imply that every business is somehow beholden to every contract signed by anyone.

Re CYOA/RPG combo, I believe you're referring to the Fighting Fantasy series: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy

There's a fun confusing fact about that series, which is that Steve Jackson was one of the creators and frequent authors. "Oh, Steve Jackson, the creator of GURPS and Munchkin!" you're saying. Nope, different Steve Jackson. But wait! That Steve Jackson did come along later and author a few books in the series. So now a bunch of those books have "Steve Jackson" listed as the author, and there's no way of knowing which one it is without googling.

Using this on subjective questions (e.g. “Is Cymbeline one of Shakespeare’s best plays?”) would help you find... what? Underrated things?

30% of the population holding extreme views isn't the same as any particular view being held by 30% and considered "extreme". They don't go into exactly what this figure means, but at the least we can imagine 15% of Americans holding one extreme and 15% holding the opposite extreme. Or even more credibly, it could mean that 30% of people hold at least one "extreme" view, but each individual "extreme" view is only held by 1-2%.

An article about a "growing body of evidence" that fails to link to a single study. Great.

"Smartphone use takes about the same cognitive toll as losing a full night's sleep"

Would love to see this study, since it sounds completely implausible (but really important if true). Without looking at the research, the only reasonable course of action is to assume it's false.

I'm surprised that this works. I always assumed Siri etc. would do some bare-minimum pre-processing of the audio input, if only to reduce noise, of which the simplest kind would be cutting frequencies that cannot be produced or registered by humans. Any insight into why this isn't already the case?

Yeah. The impression I get from this article (which is pitifully short on specifics) is that they're going to exploit some of the seemingly-nonlocal properties of QM, like quantum teleportation.

So, a normal refrigerator decreases entropy in one region and increases it in another, but they're directly adjacent regions and the entropy (heat) is moving from one to another along a simple, everyday path (like a heat exhaust tube). It sounds like the researchers have proposed using some quantum-teleportation-like trick to have the heat show up in some unconnected region of space.

You're studying the tautologic that you're studying

Sickeningly, you're studying illogic

You're a circular logician because you're studying circular logic. You're studying circular logic because you're a circular logician.

I realized you'd been studying fridge logic

The front page is pretty worrying.

The situation seems almost identical to when Reddit axed r/jailbait: one of their more embarrassing communities started to get too much attention, its users were increasingly behaving in a way that was damaging Reddit, and Reddit decided to kill it (ostensibly for the greater good of the site).

But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.

Weirdly, the author even acknowledges this:

> It's pedantic, sure. Isn't 1.16180 close enough? Yes, it probably would be...

For some reason he didn't see fit to delete that section of the article after realizing it was pointless. Which is too bad, because the rest of it is pretty solid.

"No, you're not crazy" seems to fit the sentiment most closely.

Roughly, a sound that happens during some measure of music, or an arbitrary point during that duration.

Imagine folding a strip of paper exactly in half. Now you have a crease at the middle of it. If you fold it again, you have a couple more creases at the 1/4 and 3/4 points. The above quote is talking about the same thing, but with a length of time instead of a strip of paper. The more folds you have to make in order to put a crease at a certain point (event), the less salient it is.

Hope that's helpful.

#4 shouldn't be possible according to the No-Communication Theorem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

There are niche-case advantages. Some artists (Tool comes to mind) refuse to sell on iTunes etc for the reason mentioned in the article: they only want to sell albums. Currently their only option (that I'm aware of) is to not sell digital music, or sell it through their own website.

So the advantage to the consumer would be that if GhostTunes catches on, we might at least have the convenience and price advantages of being able to buy these artists' music digitally, instead of having to choose between physical media, piracy, or going without.

For 99+% of artists currently selling music? No clear advantage.

Can anyone explain the bit about 1x1.gif being the only way, to this day, to vertically center elements? AFAIK there's still no way to vertically center a dynamic height element without javascript, so if invisible gifs can do it I'd at least like to know how.

I don't think this problem is solvable in any elegant form, but it is solvable. You'll just end up with massively conjunctive questions that you can't even hold in your head at once, like "27: Are you a non-practicing Catholic with exactly three children, or an asian owner of a minivan produced between 1998 and 2004 that isn't green, or a licensed boat mechanic with astigmatism, or..." and so on for the next 6 pages.

In short, you can draw categories to include or exclude as precise a number as you like, you just have to be willing to draw really, really complicated boundaries.

This is really cool. I'd love to see it calculate not just likelihoods but actual probabilities.

Right now I can see that liking Artist A makes me 10x more likely to like Artist B. But Artist B might still be really terrible, so it might work out to only a 1% chance I'll actually like Artist B.

I think that this is a poor analogy. Saying that a problem suffers an "exponential slowdown" is making a statement about how the performance suffers relative to the size of the problem. As the amount of data to be processed increases, the time required increases exponentially.

The type of slowdown you would get just from moving to a system with a weaker processor (like a cell phone) should be approximately linear. You might get worse-than-linear for certain types of RAM issues (more swapping, etc), but this wouldn't be the same as saying there's an exponential slowdown, and it's not a hard fact about the simulation algorithms themselves.

Anyway, the point isn't that classical computers are just less powerful, the point is that they're so fundamentally different that calculating quantum phenomena can become actually impossible (as in, process will not finish before the heat death of the universe) relatively quickly as the size of the problem increases.

I feel the same. but it's worth remembering that from the store/salesperson's point of view, it's all a numbers game. No single tactic will work on everybody, but as long as it improves sales in the aggregate it's usually a good move.

Which is just to say that your experience/reaction isn't invalid in any way, but it doesn't mean that the OP can't still be good advice.

This article seems to rest on the totally false premise that there's no difference between setting headers and setting body text.

Arial is terrific for body text, because at small font sizes the modifications separating it from Helvetica are basically impossible to even render. Since it has all the hinting to ensure it displays nicely at small sizes, it's a best-of-both-worlds scenario. And Helvetica looks pretty good at large font-sizes, even on Windows systems (admittedly less smooth, but the readability concern goes away). There's no reason to stop using these, just play them to their strengths.

Likewise, Verdana and Georgia are terrible for headers. Not for any technical reason like hinting, but simply because they were designed to be extremely legible on computer monitors at small font sizes, at the expense of actually looking good when blown up. Hence Verdanagate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA#Verdana_typeface

Re: #2, My understanding of the experiment is that they simply had people assume poses, and then measured their hormone levels. If they really did tell them up front whether the pose was intended to make them feel powerful, that would certainly be an egregious mistake in the methodology, but that wasn't the impression I had from hearing the TED talk.

Actually, I wonder if you could even pull of that version of the experiment without the participants seeing through it ("No really, shrinking into your chair and looking at the floor is a great display of power!").

"Nothing lives longer than temporary code."

Love this quote. I assumed it was an existing quote/idiom, but it looks to be original.

I don't understand all the moralizing going on in this thread.

VC is about funding the companies that could make a lot of money. When did we start expecting them to be the morality police?

Sure, if YC wants to build up a reputation for funding "honorable" startups, then they can choose to do so (and will choose to do so to the extent that they think it makes business sense). The comments here that say "This might be bad for YC's image and hurt YC long term" are all well and good. But lots of them amount to "this is bad and you should feel bad", and these just seem disconnected from the reality of market economics.

If YC doesn't fund some scuzzy but profitable company, someone else will. You can't solve job-outsourcing by asking companies not to outsource jobs, because the companies that play along will just get their asses kicked by those who don't. If you want to solve this problem, you have to do it at some other level (usually the laws and taxes level).

It's unreasonable to demand that YC pass on profitable businesses just because we don't like what those businesses are doing. I agree that IM doesn't seem to be making the world a better place, but that's not a problem that gets fixed by asking everyone to cooperate in starving them out.

Perhaps there's a line at which it's worthwhile to call out people for following the incentives that the market has given them, but I think this line is probably a lot closer to the "murder" end of the spectrum than the "installer checkboxes" end.

(Expecting downvotes, think I'm okay with that.)

Talented artist here :-)

I think there's definitely a market for helping artists get discovered, especially as more and more of them tend to operate online from their bedrooms instead of going on tour. So kudos for trying to help them along on that front.

From the other comments here, it looks like the $20 goes to the "feedback", and not the promotion to labels.

From an artist's point of view, this seems backwards. Personally I can't see why I would pay $20 just for feedback on a recording. If it's a demo recording, then there will be lots of things about it that could be improved, but I will already know this. If it's a professional recording from an album I've done, then it's sort of too late for feedback on it to do much for me. I suppose I could take it into consideration going forward, but my ability to act on this information still seems pretty minimal. So it's not clear why the "feedback" would be worth my $20, especially since there are lots of free ways out there to get feedback on your music.

"Submit your music for free, and if we like it we'll contact you about paying to have it promoted (and maybe give you some feedback)" is a model that would make more sense from my POV as an artist. That said, I know it's not the easiest model from your POV, as you'd be inundated with YouTube acoustic guitar covers.

So my advice would be to work on making it clear why the $20 will be well spent. I'd be more likely to pay up if I knew how likely I was to be "liked" by you, how likely I would be to get in touch with record companies if this were to happen, and exactly what benefit I could get from your feedback if I wasn't selected. This might something that gets easier once reputational effects start to play in.

Hope that's helpful!

P.S. My band, in case any one feels the need to investigate my boasting: http://doctorsquid.bandcamp.com/track/on-my-way

That makes sense. I was confused because I was also getting the error when I typed the line into the interpreter by hand. The issue being that I forgot to assign it to a variable (facepalm). Thanks for the explanation.