w1nt3rmu4e

> this salty-ass junk

Do you mean sea water? The amount of fresh water the human race will extract from the oceans will be what fraction of a percentage point of the total? Not accounting for, of course, the fact that most of it will make its way back to the oceans.

If pumping it back in has a local effect, then by all means try to mitigate that. But the idea that we're producing 'toxic waste' by creating saltier sea water is absurd.

What is with journalism today?

It's amazing how many people here -- presumably reasonably successful people -- are butt hurt about paying a few more dollars a month for unlimited, high quality (in terms of streaming quality) content.

I fail to see this as a cynical attempt to squeeze more money out of consumers. Netflix is cheap. Really, really cheap. They're putting a ton of money into original content. The streaming quality is fantastic.

No, it's not all amazing content. How much f'n content do you need? Get off the damn couch, go outside, get some work done, whatever.

Started my own company with a couple of partners.

Lots of risk and hard work, but it can pay off. It did for me. Not really that company, though it was successful, but companies I started after that which were more closely aligned with what I love to work on.

My plan was to become my own boss, or at least a boss. Turns out it's not that black and white, but it defined my career for the better.

I will say this:

Taking calculated risks is as important, or more, than any other factor in what you'll accomplish in your life. I've seen many otherwise very talented people get stuck in local maxima because they're afraid of failure.

Listen to your instincts. Take risk.

That's interesting. Do you have source(s) for that?

I'm not a 'the Moon landings were faked' person, but how does this reconcile with manned Moon missions?

[Edit]

So I don't have to add another comment:

My first thought was, 'oh shit, how long before someone hacks one of these and repurposes it?'

If you happen to be fishing for app ideas, here's one I'd pay $50 for:

An app that controls `~/Downloads` and automatically organizes (somehow), tracks usage and schedules files for deletion.

Once a week I'd like to see a dialog listing files likely to be unwanted, info about how many times they've been accessed, where they came from, etc. With a simple, one button, 'trash them all'.

The idea would be to optimize sets of files so they're more likely to be 'all trashed' because they aren't useful anymore, while minimizing situations where you want to trash all but a few and have to spend time managing that.

Not sure what the heuristic would be.

I've got a lot of different gear, but the stuff in question was the HiBy R3, which has a new ESS DAC/AMP combo (an SoC which eliminates a lot of variability in quality due to implementation problems) and a very healthy 200mW/16R (or somewhere around there) output power in balanced mode. Small, the software is great by DAP standards and it's inexpensive.

The IEMs I struggle to recommend: Fiio FH1, which is a dynamic driver / BA 'hybrid'. They are enjoyable to listen to but definitely not reference -- bass heavy. They're leagues beyond a typical earbud, however, and for $75 it's hard to complain.

I mainly don't recommend them because they're the first IEMs I've tried anywhere near that price range, apart from freebies included with smartphones, etc. They might be easily bettered by something else in the same price range, especially since there's a lot of competition there now.

I generally don't name drop and I never tell people to get better gear. The burden of proof is not on me. I simply do not give a shit what they believe.

I only take issue with people telling me what I do or do not experience -- because of the absurdity of that. The fact that this is about audio is coincidental.

Personally I have zero problems A/B-ing DSD, PCM and lossy formats on my reference system (headphones). I also know (award winning) people in the audio industry who can walk into a listening room and tell you where the dominate resonances are or tell you if a reconstruction filter is linear or minimum phase.

The idea you can take a group of non-professionals and run tests with no requirements on equipment quality and then draw conclusions about what any human can hear is absurd.

Those tests (Hydrogenaudio was one of the main proponents back when lossy codecs were more important) are a decent way to tell if something is audible for the average listener with average equipment. It cracks me up when people start telling me what I can or cannot hear based on those tests without knowing anything about me or what kind of equipment I own. This happened just the other day on an audio forum.

Another dimension to this is that DAC quality has been increasing steadily while the prices of high fidelity DACs have been dropping. The DAC chips on the market today are really the best ever made (ESS and AKM notably). More people than ever have access to (near-)reference quality DACs. When lossy compression tests were popular few people had access to reference quality DACs. I remember people talking about using their computer sound cards as sources for those tests.

I think a lot of people react negatively to this topic because it's considered elitist (expensive toys). The good news is just about anyone can afford a near-reference quality, inexpensive headphone setup these days. You have to do your homework and read reviews but they definitely exist. I recently picked up a DAP and IEMs for ~$300 total (for running) and it's 90% of the quality of my reference rig. I listen to it instead of my reference rig sometimes. It's that good, despite the price.

(Even on that, I can easily ABX FLAC and 192kps AAC, which has been universally declared "transparent" more than once.)

If you think your smartphone's audio jack sounds good, you really need to listen to a device with a proper amount of output power (you need more than you think for headphones) and a high resolution DAC. You need both to be good, though they can be part of the same device. When you have them, music really becomes holographic and, for lack of a better word, alive.

Can you offer an insight as to why? Of all of the project / language tools / package managers I use NPM seems to offer me the least amount problems. Easy to install, fast and 99% of the time 'just works'.

I actually use Node for writing tools way more than other options because of how drama-free NPM is.

Delegation does not require sharing private keys. Nor does it require transferring XTZ to anywhere other than your own wallet. Ever. Period.

The only risk associated with delegation is that the baker will run off with the baking rewards instead of distributing them. Of course, the incentive is low since this can only be done once. The community is active is discussing the trustworthiness of bakers (which, to date, has been pretty much all of them).

The staking risk (risk of losing a bond) is entirely on the baker. This incentivizes them to make sure they're not double baking or otherwise running misbehaving nodes.

Incorrect.

1. The number of nodes is not fixed.

2. The process for node selection is random, based on the amount staked. This happens continuously.

3. The D in DPoS is entirely optional. Anyone holding Tezos can directly participate by running a node. The only cost is the cost of a VPS.

The only real restriction* is a 10000 XTZ minimum for running a node. At current / ICO prices that's around $5k. While that's not cheap it's a lot more attractive than the CAPEX/OPEX of mining hardware.

Also, that $5k will grow by 5.5%++ per year, i.e., no depreciation of hardware and only a trivial amount of overhead.

Those not wanting to run a node (or with less than 10k XTZ) can delegate to a baker. There are a wealth of them available already.

*This restriction may be lowered in the future -- by way of on-chain voting (as opposed to a hard fork).

That 30% is unjustifiable. Period. If we're talking cost, the cost of hosting software and payment processor fees are closer to 7-8%, 99% of which are on the payment side.

The cost of Apple's gatekeeping -- their review bureaucracy -- is entirely their own doing and benefits no one. Software can and should be sold directly. There is zero justification for a middleman with digital delivery.

They say it's for consumers which is absolute nonsense when you look at what makes it into the store. Most of it is garbage.

The effect on "real" developers is staggering: Discoverability is virtually non-existent, the review process is time wasting, opaque and capricious. There is constant downward pressure on pricing. Reviews have to be aggressively managed, either by begging users for positive reviews or buying them and risking a ban, since people tend to review when they're pissed off. And then, Apple takes 30% off the top for your trouble.

The 2 million apps (or whatever it is now) boast is laughable. Apart from the expected stuff (browsers, social networks, etc) there is a dearth of worthwhile software. Which is a shame given the capabilities of the platform and its overall utility.

I don't see the US regulating Apple (or any big tech) given the prestige and money coming into the country, so I'm sure status quo will remain. But Apple should really be forced to open up iOS as a platform. And I say that as someone opposed to government intervention.

I will say this, if they ever close macOS as a platform, I'm changing careers and throwing away all of my Apple products. Which would be a shame, since they really are the best in a number of areas.

It's simply a power and money grab. Anyone who says anything else is full of shit.

Not sure why this was flagged.

Looks nice. I did find the UI confusing since the map will jump to a location if you click on it and if you hover. I'd suggest click only, or at least not both.

I'm not target since I have a home office but I'm sure some people would find it useful.

Maybe I didn't parse it but is there anything here that couldn't be preserved as a video? Video can be stored as a series of images, which can be (and often are) stored as a list of RGBA values. Those are as timeless as a WAV file (a series of amplitude values) or a vinyl record.

It would be trivial to read those 1e5 years from now, assuming we're still around and not living in caves.

I've seen some truly awful journalism from Reuters. Articles that were so agenda driven as to almost laughably gloss over facts in order to present the desired narrative. (Laughable if reputations and money weren't on the line.)

I've called some of the offending journalists out on social media, which I encourage everyone to do.

Action?

All I remember is the father -- a superhero -- unable to perform basic child rearing tasks and I tuned out. I don't know what Bird's intention was, but I felt it played into current gender politics rather than addressing them. The first movie was a critique of culture, this was -- an attempt to please?

I don't get worked up about 'dumb men' stereotypes since I'm not dumb and take an active role in raising my children but I felt the second needlessly betrayed the first film. Elastigirl was a superhero. She and her husband may have had somewhat gender-appropriate powers (brawn vs flexibility?) but she was his equal in fighting bad guys. Her becoming a housewife was the satirical part of the film.

So in the second we have a woman who never lived in her husband's shadow -- beyond their assumed identities -- but now the thrust of the story is her outshining her husband?

You can argue that his was satire -- since in the story her taking center stage was a plan driven by PR people and expected ratings -- but I really don't think it hit the mark. Instead of backing it up with something appropriate, Bird just gave us, see, isn't being a housewife hard! Again, Mr Incredible is a superhero, I'm sure he can manage.

My wife felt the same way. Loved the first one, was disappointed by the gender politics of the second.

Oddly, my advisor (I have a BA in lit) asked the class to comment on the often ignored line -- but then left it when no one offered the more correct interpretation. (Why I didn't bring it up is another story.)

Funny enough, not long ago a friend who attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop (considered the best MFA in writing in the country, if you're not familiar) said, out of the blue, "about that Frost poem" and I replied, "about the same." We both laughed. Apparently that misreading is widespread, even among the most promising new writers.

I may be stretching the definition of algorithm here, but I've always been fascinated by signed distance functions / signed distance fields for 2D / 3D shapes.

Being able to do the full set of boolean operations on shapes with just `min` and `max` operations is pretty cool. Doubly so because boolean operations on standard geometry is such a difficult, messy problem.

I prefer a complementary theory -- that it's a spent stage of a multi-stage spacecraft. If the primary stage were decelerating for a rendezvous with Earth, then any stage that made it to full acceleration would reach us first, probably getting close and then flinging back out of the solar system, just like this did.

Easy enough to test -- we'll eventually see another object following the same trajectory, give or take, but that's decelerating.

(Cue the dramatic music.)

Synthetic training data. Sometimes it's cheaper / safer / easier to work with simulated data rather than real world sensor data. For some types of machine learning, a simulation is "real enough".

Someone asked me to build a startup doing the same. His most convincing use case was training camera systems to detect people falling overboard on cruise ships, etc. It's impractical / dangerous to use real world camera data for that.

There are other advantages, e.g., being able to generate simulations where everything is already labeled.

Honestly, I don't see why everyone hates blockchain these days. Two things are going on:

1. It's a potentially revolutionary technology (trust-less, decentralized, nearly tamper proof, etc) that hasn't yet found a killer app(s) at scale

2. We're in the middle of a gold rush with zillions of shit-coins really throwing off the signal to noise ratio

This period will pass. Blockchain tech is maturing (PoS replacing PoW, throughput increasing, formal verification, on-chain governance, etc). Most of the shit-coins will disappear (a common headline these days is exchange X delisting NN coins because they're worthless). Things will consolidate, the really valuable tech will bubble to the top.

If you follow the news, you'd know there's a lot of stuff in the works, from major corporations to governments trialing blockchain for different purposes. Now, you can take a philosophical position about blockchain and say it's worthless, but the rest of the world doesn't seem to care and its widespread adoption is beginning to look like a foregone conclusion.

> In energy for instance, much talk about the financial aspect of a blockchain-based energy solution but absolutely zero talk of how the physical grid and infrastructure would engage to support the financial activity.

http://news.trust.org/item/20180828095937-yg29h/

This is a project trialing in Bangkok. Excess electricity from private solar is sold off automatically.

> Helping it along is blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins bitcoin currency, which offers a transparent way to handle complex transactions between users, producers, and even traders and utilities.

> Blockchain also saves individuals the drudgery of switching between sending power and receiving it, said Martin.

I don't have any details, but it seems they've figured out how 'energy on blockchain' actually works. I have heard the project has been successful enough that city decided to tax them to the point of being unprofitable (will likely correct itself in the future, was probably just a knee jerk reaction).

> 2. Have a supportive partner on whose earnings you can live [on]. This is much more achievable for many people, and under-emphasised (it's common for, eg, postgraduate education!)

My wife an I have taken turns shouldering our living expenses to good results. If it's manageable -- you both make enough individually to stay out of debt -- I think it's a really good fit. You both benefit if it works. If it fails, you're maybe out of some savings plus opportunity cost, but not in debt or having to deal with investors.

I understand the background of the "passion" conversation (e.g., PG's take) but I've begun to think it's way too biased.

At some point in my life I became obsessed with software and very quickly went from zero to getting paid. Now I am, as one of the other comments in this thread said, a 'white suit' consultant. I work in SV from NN time zones away and have been given complete autonomy over the project I'm working on. Some would call that a dream job. It's certainly different from the 'dark suit' consulting I used to do, where who I was / how I appeared was just as important as what I delivered.

A close friend of mine, on the other hand, has risen to the top of their industry and is one of the most driven and hard working people I know -- but they are decidedly not obsessed with or passionate about their field. It's just their career. They take it seriously and always give 100%, but catching an after-work conversation from them would be along the lines of 'fuck this nonsense'.

Years ago I suggested this person 'find their passion', hop careers, start a company, whatever. They never did. They're still doing well in their career and they still have a 'meh' relationship with it at the end of the day. When I say doing well I mean they're senior management and close to being offered a CEO/MD title.

Passion certainly helped me succeed in software. But it's not something I cultivated. It was something I needed to do, wasn't at the time and which was manifesting in other ways (e.g., baroque engineering hobbies). I didn't find or develop my passion for software, I just, one day, found that this obsession was a good fit for software. Because it's one of the more lucrative fields to be in today, it was an easy decision to pursue it.

But there are plenty of successful people who are not obsessed with anything. The majority probably. They strive towards excellence, because that is their character, but they could have done a dozen other things with an equal amount of dedication and wouldn't have fallen in love with any of them.

Obsession can be an advantage and the minority that have found a fit between their obsession and a lucrative career tend to think it's necessary. I did for a long time. But at the end of the day you're just creating value. You can choose to do that which just as much success as those who need to.

On the other hand, you could just as easily be obsessed with something that's not lucrative or even self destructive. Sometimes that pays off (e.g., someone obsessed with BASE jumping may eventually find sponsors). Sometimes not (they die before reaching that point).

I think a lot of this passion talk boils down to 'we had an aptitude for X when X was in demand and a good way to make money'. People are over-generously distilling that to 'passion=money'.

I know cryptocurrency is contentious in this community so apologies for injecting it here:

OCamlPro is heavily involved in the development of Tezos and a big part of the reason I invested in it. One of the main selling points of Tezos is formal verification, which OCaml (being a pure-ish functional language) was instrumental for.

Regardless of the future of crypto (fad or world changing) if it's handling money or other assets it should be done safely. This is step in that direction.

OCaml is also used at Bloomberg and Jane Street.

His videos on the Fourier transform are top notch. I can't recommend watching him enough.

It's been a while since I used mine since it was destroyed after falling 18 inches onto a wood floor (corner bent, screen connection shorted) but I'm pretty sure the Macbook 12 keyboard is worse.

Maybe by a millimeter or so.

There is absolutely no way in hell a keyboard like this should be found on a laptop favored by software engineers.

I'm not sure if Apple is seeing the writing on the wall here, but why not just launch a developer line? Make it thicker, heavier, give it more battery, a keyboard with a proper amount of travel, larger keys, more keys, whatever. Ditch the retarded touch bar. More ram. More config options. More ports.

If they want to keep topping themselves on largely meaningless metrics and/or aesthetic self indulgence then by all means do so -- sell those to the rest of the market. The bulk of the market will buy the pretty ones.

Give me an uglier one that isn't so awful to actually use.

Or, seriously, start dying the death of a thousand cuts. I'm really close to pulling out of the Apple ecosystem and retooling for other work. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

What? Don't care about the people who work on iOS/macOS software professionally? Don't need us? Why don't you go talk to Microsoft about that.

Have to pile on here.

I have a 2017 and use it mostly with an eternal keyboard and monitors but I am shocked when I use the built in keyboard. It is really bad to type on -- all for what? A few fractions of an inch in thickness?

I had a first gen MacBook 12 and was ok with the horrible keyboard given its purpose of maximum portability. But on a desktop replacement / primary machine? What the hell were they thinking?

On this keyboard, 50% of the time when I type a single quote I hit the return key. Makes programming comically bad. It's just a couple of steps off typing on a touch screen at this point. (Which, I fear, is their endgame.)

Other joys of my 2017 (15, maxed out except for the absurdly expensive second TB of SSD):

1. (Un)plugging external monitors will crash the window server

2. Kernel panics -- usually related to IB in Xcode.

3. Unresponsive power key

4. Fingerprint reader that fails without any feedback

5. Serious hacking required to run external monitors in HiDPI mode

6. No more touch typing for the media keys, escape key

I'm professionally tied into the Apple ecosystem to a degree that it would be hard for me to leave, but I'm really unhappy with Apple these days. They seem to live in a fantasy world of unnecessary aesthetic goals and are alienating the small but extremely vocal community that have championed their products.

[Edit]

Oddly enough, I just talked to my father for the first time in years. It's amazing how faulty memory narrates.

It was a Cessna 421 and the tanks were vented, but the vents had frozen over because of a heater failure. The temp was 42F below zero. They didn't puncture the tanks, just unscrewed the caps.

The craziest part, which I had forgotten, wasn't the problem with smoking. Their nav equipment had failed after the engines quit. They had to dead reckon to Iceland. They were much closer than halfway, but were still navigating blind.

Needless to say they sighted Iceland and found the airport.

My father did this at least once (maybe a couple of times?) in the 90s, ferrying twin engine aircraft to the newly formed Czech Republic. This was, as I understand it, to establish the first commuter airline in the country.

Long story short, halfway between the East Coast and Iceland one, and then both, engines cut out. They had just a couple of minutes to figure out what had gone wrong before they ditched. And given the temp of the water that was very likely to be a death sentence.

With less than 10k feet to go, they noticed the fuel tanks in the back were buckled inward. They weren't vented properly. A pocket knife solved the problem and a few seconds later the engines restarted.

SOP for ferrying a small plane across the Atlantic is to install "external" fuel tanks in the space normally used for passengers. Whoever installed them in Maine didn't vent them.

The punchline was that he and his copilot were (at the time) both smokers. After that ordeal, they both wanted nothing more than to light up. But the cabin was full of gas fumes, so lighting a lighter was likely to blow up the airplane.

Awesome stuff. Just spent 20 minutes with my 4 year old tweaking settings in the platformer example to see what the results would be. He loved it. Way more fun (for him) than the other day when he asked what the modulo operator was.

It bums me out that the economics of indie games are so awful. The kid in me wants, so badly, to make a gigantic, sprawling version of Zelda or a dungeon crawler. But there's no way I can justify the time investment.

Still, seeing an API this simple is inspiring. Props to kitao.