whimsy

Oh, thanks for correcting me! Now that you mention it, I'm confused by a memory I have. Wired speakers seem to be less common these days but I remember being told about two decades ago that the "proper" way to install speakers was to run out equal lengths of speaker cable (basically just jacketed copper, afaik) to different speakers even if they weren't equidistant in a room. (This was advice for home installation, not stadium-sized installations.)

Do you suppose there exists some other reason for that, like maybe matching impedance on each cable, or is this likely one of those superstitions that audiophiles fall prey to?

This is very, very cool; it's a thing I've been looking for on my backburner for several years. It's a very interesting problem.

There are a ton of directions I can think about you taking it in.

The household application: this one is already pretty directly applicable. Have a bunch of wireless speakers and you should be able to make it sound really good from anywhere, yes? You would probably want support for static configurations, and there's a good chance each client isn't going to be able to run the full suite, but the server can probably still figure out what to send to each client based on timing data.

Relatedly, it would be nice to have a sense of "facing" for the point on the virtual grid and adjust 5.1 channels accordingly, automatically (especially left/right). [Oh, maybe this is already implicit in the grid - "up" is "forward"?]

The party application: this would be a cool trick that would take a lot more work. What if each device could locate itself in actual space automatically and figure out its sync accordingly as it moved? This might not be possible purely with software - especially with just the browser's access to sensors related to high-accuracy location based on, for example, wi-fi sources. However, it would be utterly magical to be able to install an app, join a host, and let your phone join a mob of other phones as individual speakers in everyone's pockets at a party and have positional audio "just work." The "wow" factor would be off the charts.

On a related note, it could be interesting to add a "jukebox" front-end - some way for clients to submit and negotiate tracks for the play queue.

Another idea - account for copper and optical cabling. The latency issue isn't restricted to the clocks that you can see. Adjusting audio timing for long audio cable runs matters a lot in large areas (say, a stadium or performance hall) but it can still matter in house-sized settings, too, depending on how speakers are wired. For a laptop speaker, there's no practical offset between the clock's time and the time as which sound plays, but if the audio output is connected to a cable run, it would be nice - and probably not very hard - to add some static timing offset for the physical layer associated with a particular output (or even channel). It might even be worth it to be able to calculate it for the user. (This speaker is 300 feet away from its output through X meters of copper; figure out my additional latency offset for me.)

reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

Coverage isn't great, but these two have managed to get in to my bookmarks:

http://thecontext.net/

https://legiblenews.com/

I seem to recall a similar weekly service for HN but I can't recall the name of it.

> Also, scary that SSH appears to be partially affected(?)

Yeah. Is it sufficient to set ServerKeyBits to 2048?

See my reply to zo1 on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7838800

Actually, San Francisco and San Jose both have laws increasing the minimum wage. Richmond also just passed an ordinance in March to raise it to $12.30 by 2017, which will be the highest minimum wage in CA.

"A larger body of economic research investigates the effects of state and federal minimum wage increases. These studies compare employment trends for states or counties that have different minimum wages. The best studies make comparisons to nearby states or counties to control for regional economic trends. These studies also find no statistically significant negative effects on employment or hours at an aggregate level or for low-wage industries such as restaurants and retail stores, or for specific groups of workers such as teens. These studies also do not find substitution effects (such as shifts in hiring away from black and Latino teens)."

...

"Several additional studies of Santa Fe and San Francisco have been produced by the restaurant industry-backed Employment Policies Institute. In a study of Santa Fe, Yelowitz (2005a, 2005b) found an increase in the probability of unemployment for low-skilled workers and evidence of replacement of low-skilled adults by teens. In his study of San Francisco, Yelowitz (2012) found the opposite result: a decrease in teen work hours and no discernible effect on overall employment.

Unfortunately, both studies suffer from serious methodological problems that make the results unreliable. Since higher wages are likely to increase the labor supply, unemployment rates can increase even as the number of people who are employed also increases. Pollin and Wicks-Lim (2005) replicate Yelowitz’s (2005a) study but look at employment, rather than unemployment. They find no negative impact on employment. Furthermore, even if the reported results for each of the studies held, total compensation for teens and low-skilled workers would still have increased. Any employment or hours reductions would be more than offset by the increase in hourly earnings (Pollin and Wicks-Lim 2005; National Employment Law Project 2012). "

...

"In his review of minimum wage research, Schmitt (2013) considers several channels through which employers might adjust to increases in the minimum wage. One possible scenario is that employers will simply switch to hiring more skilled workers, thereby hurting the employment prospects of less educated workers and, in particular, black and Latino teens. Schmitt reviews several studies that have explicitly researched this question, some of which yield conflicting findings. Again, research design matters a lot here, and studies that thoroughly control for regional or local differences do not find evidence of labor substitution. For example, Allegretto, Dube and Reich (2011) examine the impact of the minimum wage on the employment of white, black, and Hispanic teens, covering the period from 1990 to 2009. After improving on previous research by controlling for regional differences, they find no statistically significant negative effects on employment or hours for teens, regardless of race or gender. In their contiguous counties dataset, Dube, Lester and Reich (2013) similarly find no evidence of such substitution by either age or gender."

http://murray.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/UC-Berk...

This isn't the first time we've seen an artificial increase in the minimum wage in the US - it's just the highest artificially increased minimum wage.

There are nine other localities where this has been done where there's empirical evidence available. See a link somewhere in the child tree of your comment.

"University of California, Berkeley study: Who Would be Affected by an Increase in Seattle’s Minimum Wage?" is a more comprehensive study on the empirical effects of raising minimum wage in nine other US localities.

http://murray.seattle.gov/minimumwage/#sthash.u0fx1kth.dpuf

It would be an interesting and compelling secret if there was evidence for this occurring. Research indicates that it's simply untrue.

"A larger body of economic research investigates the effects of state and federal minimum wage increases. These studies compare employment trends for states or counties that have different minimum wages. The best studies make comparisons to nearby states or counties to control for regional economic trends. These studies also find no statistically significant negative effects on employment or hours at an aggregate level or for low-wage industries such as restaurants and retail stores, or for specific groups of workers such as teens. These studies also do not find substitution effects (such as shifts in hiring away from black and Latino teens)."

...

"In a prospective study of the San Francisco minimum wage, Reich and Laitinen (2003) carried out a representative survey of establishments. They estimated that a 25.9 percent increase in the minimum wage from $6.75 to $8.50 would result in a 1.1 percent increase in the overall wage bill. When viewed from the perspective of operating costs, a 26 percent increase would result in 82.0 percent of establishments experiencing an increase in operating costs of less than 1 percent or more, and 95.2 percent experiencing an increase in operating costs of less than 5 percent. Breaking down results by industry, they estimated that 17.9 percent of restaurants would experience an increase in operating costs of 5 percent or more, as would 8.6 percent of retail establishments. For manufacturing, entertainment, hotel, and personal service firms, the estimated increase in operating costs was close to zero.

Pollin (2004) similarly estimated that the average increase in firms’ costs relative to sales under Santa Fe’s 2003 minimum wage ordinance would be 1 percent; the average cost increase for hotels relative to sales would be 3 percent.

Benner and Jayaraman (2012) analyzed the impact of a proposed increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 (a 39 percent increase, not accounting for inflation during the phase-in) on the food industry. They estimated a maximum increase in operating costs for the food service and drinking establishment industry of 2.25 percent over three years, and 1 percent in the retail food industry. "

from "University of California, Berkeley study: Who Would be Affected by an Increase in Seattle’s Minimum Wage?"[1], one of the pieces of research commissioned during the development of the Seattle ordinance. "This research was based on nine localities in the United States currently have enacted minimum wage laws: Albuquerque, NM; Bernalillo County, NM; Montgomery County, MD; Prince George's County, MD; San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Santa Fe County, NM; and Washington DC."

http://murray.seattle.gov/minimumwage/#sthash.u0fx1kth.dpuf

Well, the primary goal is, of course, to raise the income of minimum-wage earners. Failure criteria probably include things like a) a marked increase in businesses that rely on minimum-wage earners going out of business relative to other and/or b) a marked increase in unemployment among minimum-wage earners. I don't know what thresholds are reasonable. (Possibly confounding: as minimum wage increases, the available labor pool will also increase.)

In the case of Seattle, they commissioned two pieces of research for this ordinance:

UW Evans School of Public Affairs study: Local Minimum Wage Laws: Impacts on Workers, Families and Businesses [1] University of California, Berkeley study: Who Would be Affected by an Increase in Seattle’s Minimum Wage? [2]

The second paper addresses a lot of the questions I suspect you're interested, and it addresses them with empirical evidence based on previous such experiments in other cities.

[1] http://murray.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Evans-r... [2] http://murray.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/UC-Berk...

• Studies of the impact of minimum wage increases on restaurants’ operating costs find that an increase of 10 percent in the minimum wage increases operating costs by about 1 to 2 percent.

• Researchers find small one-time price increases in the restaurant industry (of about 0.7 percent following a 10 percent minimum wage increase), but not in other industries.

from "University of California, Berkeley study: Who Would be Affected by an Increase in Seattle’s Minimum Wage?" which is one of the two pieces of research commissioned in the development of the Seattle ordinance.[1] The research explored empirical evidence provided by similar minimum-wage increase ordinances in other cities. (9 total, I believe, including San Francisco.)

[1] http://murray.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/UC-Berk...

Ohoho, you think all minimum wage positions are full-time?

This is simply false.

"Scrivere" is Latin (I think) for "to write," as in "scrivener."

On the other hand, now their wages are entirely disposable income, right?

Just like most PHP projects.

What software are you using to screencast?

Uh, doesn't b. preclude your conclusion?

This is a large thread. "Remote" is the keyword you want to include to advertise to people who are using ctrl-F.

Huh. That's an interesting discovery; thanks for sharing it. That's going on my reading list.

I know how ants stop going to a food source (e.g. the pheremone trail stops getting refreshed on the return trip) but how do bees stop? I know they transmit pathfinding information with dancing... do the bees just stop dancing on return or something?

The reason I ask is the 1-5% figure you mention. I assume bees must have some mechanism to prevent sending bees to fatal sites. For ants, no one comes back, so no one keeps going. Ant traps short-circuit this by providing food with a slow-acting poison - the ants make it back with "food," causing more ants to be sent, and soon a significant portion of the stockpile is poison, drastically reducing numbers in the colony. Could that have happened here? It sounds like that's probably not the case, given that the bees appear to have died practically on contact with the linden trees.

But I don't know how bee flow control works.

The link to their petition is broken. =\

> Every time you see a dot, do NOT think attribute access. Think message sending a la Smalltalk.

Huh. You just rekindled my interest in learning Ruby. Learning Smalltalk was pretty mind-expanding.

> there are a large number of syntactical ambiguities, so writing a parser for it should be completely impossible

Keep in mind that while your protest does sound intuitive - e.g. that Ruby can be syntactically ambiguous, ergo it is unparseable, it turns out that that doesn't stop us from writing a parser. We can parse most things even if we can't parse the "general case." When we DO encounter something unparseable, the compiler can a) guess or b) fail, hopefully with a message that will help us investigate and rectify the failure.

You point out that Perl's syntax may be worse than Ruby's, and I assume that implies that it is more syntactically ambiguous, ergo, writing a parser should also be impossible for Perl. It turns out that Perl is provably unparseable in the general case - in fact, it's been done rather rigorously: http://www.jeffreykegler.com/Home/perl-and-undecidability

Regardless of Perl's general unparseability, we have compilers for Perl and even large projects manage to compile to what appear to be functional executables. The same is true for Ruby.

I wrote this comment mostly a reminder that while something may appear to be insoluble, we may be able to solve for sufficient cases that we don't care about the rest, particularly if we have an oracle to fix the number of cases that we can't solve. (In this case, the oracle is the developer.)

What would you recommend as a substitution for that entry?

https://github.com/nddrylliog/thechoice/pull/3 :)

firstdoor, twodoors, secret, randomsecret, conditionals, lying, ship

It's really irritating that the syntax is incorrect in some examples.

Nah, this turned out to be interpretation error; the Street View driver acted ethically. See other comments on this page.