subnaught

I'm currently taking Andrew Ng's Coursera course and I'd agree it's quite accessible. In fact, if you have a solid understanding of calculus and linear algebra, you might find it a bit slow at times.

Since it's also being discussed, I blogged about my experiences learning SuperCollider: http://subnaught.org/supercollider/archive/

"This is why using more bits does not mean you can "reproduce music with a bigger dynamic range" - not without turning the volume up, anyway. What actually happens is that the maximum possible volume of a playback system stays the same, but quieter sounds are reproduced with more or less accuracy."

You are slightly confused. (It may help to remember that a decibel always refers to a ratio, so the setting of your volume knob is not important.) Greater bit depth does allow for greater dynamic range, this stems directly from the definition of dynamic range. 16-bit audio has a theoretical dynamic range of:

  10 * log10 (2^16)^2 ~ 96dB

24-bit audio has a theoretical dynamic range of:

  10 * log10 (2^24)^2 ~ 144dB

For reference, a quiet recording room has a noise floor of ~40dB SPL and the loudest amplified music rarely exceeds 115dB SPL. This gives a dynamic range of 75db, which indicates that a well-recorded 16-bit master should be more than adequate.

The idea that having bits in excess of this amount will somehow result in the perception of a smoother or more accurate sound is fallacious. Even at maximum playback volume, this information will exist well below the noise floor and will simply not be perceived. In fact, this information will likely exist well below the noise floor of the recording studio and thus, in some sense, will not even be recorded.

I up-voted you because it's a fair question, but the grand-parent is absolutely right: there are plenty of cases where opioids are marginally effective. The management of chronic pain in particular is problematic because opioid tolerance can develop in as little as two weeks. In addition, some people have paradoxical reactions to opioids, i.e. increased pain (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21412369). Finally, the side effects of high-dose opioids are no joke.

I would be more sympathetic to that explanation if the feature being rolled out was somehow novel or at least adding new functionality. But it's not, it's just removing a small quirk and making the service more like everything else on the internet.

Translation: Our users don't understand our service, and we don't either, so we'll just try and mimic a successful one.

If the price of coal rises 50%, a whole host of non-coal alternatives suddenly become economically feasible.

So yes, entrenched actors (i.e. coal companies) will react to a rise in the price of coal by mining for more coal. However, many other actors will be incentivized to innovate and develop new sources of energy.

Three years later, this is still an amazing story. It has less to do with wine than with the ease with which certain types of people can be separated from their money.

For the exceptionally curious, the message board thread referenced in the article is still up: http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6117...

Just my knee-jerk opinion, but absolutely not acceptable. I can't see any way in which this could be construed as "expected behavior."

For the most part, the Weather Company is merely redistributing data collected by the federal government, specifically the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You can easily access historical rainfall data here: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/oh/hads/

Serious question: what's wrong with a rubber-tube stethoscope?

I've noticed this as well, and I think it's because 1) technical queries have a different optimal algorithm than non-technical queries and 2) as Google's audience grows, the proportion of technical queries shrinks.

For a technical query, you essentially want something like PageRank-weighted grep, which is, of course, what you used to get. All of the fancy NLP/fuzzy-matching stuff that Google has been adding recently, while helpful for all sorts of other things, is going to be a detriment for technical queries.

When you're doing something like googling an error message or a code snippet, you're basically querying machine-generated speech, and much of Google's recent work has been on improving querys of human-generated speech.

It seems like it should be simple to implement a little "technical query" checkbox...

Turns out someone in the comments to that article had a better idea of what was going on:

"He isn't trying to push the price with his big orders so much as get a certain type of participant to join his level whose behavior he can exploit. He's exploiting two things about market-makers. 1. They look at book imbalance to decide where to bid and offer. By balancing out the book or skewing it one way, he incites them to join and can sweep them. 2. Once they trade contracts on one side of the market, their risk management logic creates price impact or is predictable."

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-21/regulators-...

True, and not necessarily a situation unique to India.

Interesting profile of the founder of this site: http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numbe...

Their website is here: http://www.startupcastle.org/

This [1] is a pretty good description of the spider silk stucture. Turns out it's a self-assembled liquid crystal composed of oriented rods of a hydrophobic protein (an alanine/glycine co-polymer for those who care). It's not hard to imagine how a carbon nanotube could substitute for one of those if it's around in the soup...

[1] http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/spider/page3.htm

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372355

To answer the previous comment, there is no special preparation of the potassium t-butoxide necessary. The reaction itself is indeed quite simple to carry out. (In fact, this is one of the things that makes the research significant.) The achievement of the researchers was simply to find this reaction, which they did in part by paying attention to some early results that others may have not noticed or chosen to ignore.

Right now, the "key new idea" is simply that this is possible. But because the reaction is so general (i.e. it works on a wide variety of substrates) and so unexpected, it's clear that some new unifying ideas are just around the corner.

The Caltech student newspaper interviewed some of the researchers involved: http://loridajose.com/?p=249

An organosilane is basically any molecule with a Si-C bond. This reaction step creates the Si-C bond, so you could (in theory) use it to prepare any organosilane by starting with the correct Si- and C- containing fragments. Organosilanes currently find wide use in industry as hydrophobic coatings, adhesion promoters, and as useful intermediates in drug synthesis.

It's a little hard to describe just how unbelievable this discovery is. Before this, if you were to propose research in this area, you would most likely be laughed at. It's a bit like if you discovered a hard drive could also be used as a microprocessor. In both cases, there seem to be very good reasons why it could never work. In this case, however, those reasons just happened to be wrong.

EDIT: Free access to the original paper here: http://rdcu.be/cmm5

I didn't find it irritating at all, but perhaps you would prefer this article: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-cheap-abundant-chemical-outperf...

Indeed, engineering is about tradeoffs.

Frank Wilczek is both a highly accomplished physicist and an exceptional writer, two things that don't often go together. You can find all of his 2014 writings here:

  http://frankwilczek.com/2014

And 2015 in progress:

  http://frankwilczek.com/2015

You're absolutely right that, if we define life generally as a self-replicating system implemented in chemistry, there is no a priori reason to assume that extraterrestrial life would use the same elements as we do. However, there are a couple good reasons that this might be the case:

Abundance - Broadly speaking, the prevalence of an element decreases with its atomic mass, which means that, while elemental availability will differ from planet to planet, lighter elements will always be more abundant. Thus, statistically speaking, it is likely that extraterrestrial life uses C,H,N,O just as we do.

Bonding - When you study the chemical bonding of elements in relation to their position in the periodic table, what you realize is the "first row," i.e. C,N,O, is actually an exception and the rest of the periodic table is the rule. What this means in practice is that these elements are capable of a much greater diversity in bonding than those below. It is this diversity that allows for the development of the complex biomolecular machinery necessary for life.

Edit: Here's a great essay by Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann on the differences between Si and C and the implications for life: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/80th/print/silicon.html

If you enjoyed this article, you should read "Relating Tuning and Timbre" (http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html), which generalizes these ideas to tones with nonharmonic partials. I think it also does a slightly better job at explaining the underlying ideas clearly.

Here's a great video where Chowning describes his discovery of FM: http://www.aes.org/historical/oral/?ID=85

Fun (but only marginally-related) fact: In Hindi, the words for tomorrow and yesterday are the same, the meaning is inferred from context. Also, the words for "day-after-tomorrow" and "day-before-yesterday" are the same!

So it's horseshit because it "seems like horseshit" to you?

In fact, coordinate transformations are at the heart of the modern conception of classical mechanics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics

General Relativity is not needed to explain elliptical orbits. This is a very clever reformulation of classical mechanics, and certainly not horseshit.