nervechannel

Dunno, I think the raw frequencies work fine in your case, because there aren't really any themes that all (or many) authors across your selections keep returning to.

But, thanks :-)

The exact details are out of my hands -- I'm just a tech guy -- but we're active members of the music information retrieval community and always have been.

No-one even knows if it's possible to crowdsource good enough BPM data like this yet, so even demonstrating that it's feasible would be progress :-)

Don't worry, we do intend to share the data publically once it's all in.

It's actually pretty debatable whether this year's KDD Cup will really help the science of music recommendation:

http://musicmachinery.com/2011/02/22/is-the-kdd-cup-really-m...

Because it's entirely anonymised, not just the users but the artists too -- c.f. Netflix's problems with deanonymization:

http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/

This means you can't use any interesting characteristics of the music itself, or the associated metadata, to aid the recommendations. All the interesting domain knowledge is stripped out, which likely means the best solutions still won't work as well as algorithms that use metadata (like Last.fm's) or content analysis (like Pandora's) or both, and certainly won't lead to any particularly interesting insights about what drives people's tastes.

Disclaimer: I work at Last.fm

Yes, and graduates with an interdisciplinary background and strong reasoning skills are more likely to get the interesting jobs than pure software engineers who know JUnit inside-out.

(Generalizing from myself with a sample size of one)

As a counterpoint, I like this quote from Twitter's Nick Kallen:

This smacks of the oft-ridiculed Java AbstractFactoryFactoryInterface. But let me put it bluntly: AbstractFactoryFactoryInterface's are how you write real, modular software–not little fart applications.

http://magicscalingsprinkles.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/why-i-...

[N.B. I'm not saying there isn't a lot of truth in the factorial article, it's just you have to know which challenges just need a one-liner function and which require an AbstractFactoryFactoryInterface]

If you're also on gmail, you can manually set up a filter to 'never send to spam'.

I've had to do this for friends' emails before, e.g. someone whose domain has a letter->number substitution which sets off spammer alarms.

It may be a 'great' name ideologically, but the fact that there are three other comments in the thread giving three different ways it's pronounced, shows a certain degree of name fail.

EDIT: Sorry, five different pronunciation suggestions at last count.

Dear gods, please, someone give it a better name.

Sadly, superficial things like names are important if you want to compete with better-known products.

I can't even pronounce LibreOffice fluidly -- there are no words in English (I think) with a schwa followed immediately by a short 'o' sound, so no native English speaker is phonologically equipped to deal with it.

"Our servers are over capacity and certain pages may be temporarily unavailable. We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience."

Posting an apparently controversial rant to HN when you don't have the capacity to handle the traffic... considered harmful.

Have you tried it with Firefox pre 4.0? Doesn't seem to work on 3.6.13.

I can select the section of code but not actually edit it. It's just plain, unadorned text in a regular div.

But pressing Execute does nothing anyway, apart from a page refresh.

That's not slow. In 20 generations, humans hardly change at all.

But many interesting problems can't be solved by throwing more RAM at them, because RAM isn't the bottleneck.

That's terrible advice, I hope you're being sarcastic but I fear not. There's plenty of useful stuff outside of CS which isn't liberal arts.

Maths, stats, electronics, physics could all be useful in an entirely computing-based career.

Biology or chemistry could open up a career in bioinformatics, molecular modelling or simulations. Likewise linguistics for text mining, information retrieval, speech/language processing.

Economics if you're interested in being an entrepreneur.

The crunchier end of philosophy, where it overlaps with maths and linguistics and cognitive science, will give you a much deeper frame of reference for understanding many hard problems.

Not all computing jobs involve twee social web startups or mundane CRUD.

If I could go back and do it all again, I'd definitely do more stats courses.

Also if you're interested in data science in general, some basic linguistics (syntax/semantics) would be useful. (Saying this as someone with a PhD in natural language processing, who had to self-learn all the linguistic background the hard way)

Did anyone else assume that headline was about a big argument breaking out between some startups?

I went to an article on Facebook which starts off by explicitly discussing the portrayal of events in a movie I haven't seen yet (and intend to).

How's that not a spoiler?

Exactly. Something else scary that doesn't resemble a spider.

SPOILER ALERTS please.

"It is fundamentally different from the ad platform that is Google. People go to Google to find something they need, possibly ready to buy, which a good percentage of the time can in fact be solved by someone's ad. Facebook ads, on the other hand, annoy users. They yield no real value, and thus no profits. "

Err -- television ads also just serve to get in the way and annoy users, when they want to sit and relax and do something completely different from hunting-for-stuff-to-buy.

But last time I checked, most TV channels are still running ads, 50+ years on.

a). They didn't link to the study. Or if they did, not anywhere I could see. Inexcusable in 'science' journalism!

b). Any control group on the babies to see if it's actually fear of spiders they learnt, or just fear?

Yeah, good point. Probably smartphones too, I'm not a big enough user of apps to say for certain though.

It's interesting how software got better over time on the same hardware back then.

My first was a 48KB Sinclair Spectrum which I used for at least 5 years, and the games coming out by the end of that time were much more sophisticated than the early ones, e.g. filled 3D polygon graphics over blocky 2D sprites. The programmers just had to squeeze more and more out of the same hardware.

These days, a similar jump in sophistication just doesn't happen without new hardware.

The experimental noise band/art collective Throbbing Gristle used to systematically mis-spell certain words in all their writings (e.g. "the" -> "thee", "of" -> "ov") so people would have to concentrate to read them.

This reminded me of that (esp. the "salt:p_pp_r" thing).

"As a Brit I do find it mildly racist that they’re censoring a British Classic"

Eh? Bollocks.

This is the first time I've heard someone argue that undocumented bugs are better than well-documented ones.