tacos

There's a difference between being a prick to fellow community members versus being tough on submissions. I rank myself in the top 5% regarding expertise on a few topics that come up here regularly, and most (not many, most) of the submissions are simply tragic. To enter a thread late with a hundred young people politely chatting about something that's completely wrong or completely plagiarized says quite a bit about your ability to maintain decorum. But I don't think it's quite as flattering regarding your ability to maintain quality.

Googling a machine learning or signal processing technique from 40 years ago, seeing a link to HN on the first page of Google results that gets it wrong, and having the only comment that actually provides counterpoint or correction missing because you pushed a magic button? I can't believe that's the impact either of us are looking for with regards to contributing to world knowledge.

Likewise I increasingly find myself reading the top comment then scrolling down and squinting at the dimmed out bottom comment. Half the time it's someone being an idiot. The rest of the time it's useful counterpoint or something correct but imperfectly phrased. Groupthink and tone-policing-by-committee may be a bigger problem than someone who dares to use the adjective "flaming" to qualify the nature of errors in a submission.

I too hate dealing with the stack of complaints at the end of a long day, and I too hate seeing the same names causing trouble. It certainly is hard to remain impartial given even a small number of people who are obsessed with the "report misbehavior" button or, worse, those who harbor grudges and abuse the feature. In general those people need to toughen up and the people who are causing the grief need to turn it down half a notch. But HN, in technology and in personnel, lacks the nuance necessary to correct and communicate evolving community standards.

There's nothing more boring (and more damaging) than a public debate around a moderator's standards versus a popular user who bumps against the edge on occasion. Out of respect for your work (and my time) I'm stepping out as that's precisely where this is headed. Good luck with the site, I'm all too aware of the effort you put into it.

The "several flaming errors" were previously mentioned here and as comments on his website (not by me). To detail them again could also be construed as piling on. You are reading this thread outside the timeline in which it occurred and taking the most negative possible connotation of my actions.

Even in this thread people can't quite decide where my remarks lie on the spectrum. (I assure you this is not some game I'm playing to test the waters.) Likewise in a previous thread your banhammer was overruled by the community.

I personally think you're overreacting (calling me a "genuine asshole" ... really, dang?) but I don't wish to cause you any additional stress by being an unintentional canary in this coal mine. I will however deduct a few points for waiting for the thread to die, zeroing out an upvoted comment containing useful information, then banning my account at 1am on a holiday weekend. I know you abhor off-topic meta discussion but, as a fellow moderator who handles forums far larger and friendlier than this one, that's pretty weak. Good luck, you have my word that I won't reappear under a different name.

And so it ends. The mere act of partnering with Yahoo indicates desperation and signals poor decision making.

I'm not sure I understand HN's fascination with this site but this is not a good sign for those who claim to use it in these never-ending threads.

Yup, not buying it. Too cutesy, too impersonal, too obvious. This is a team effort. And not a very good one.

> It's just impossible to "bid" on traffic via Facebook and win out over companies that have far bigger budgets

Not my experience at all. Also, have you seen their hyper-local ad-targeting options? As in, draw circles around neighborhoods, then choose "parents" who are interested in "children's clothing"?

You can easily reach thousands of people with a $5/day budget. They'll even provide the stock photography for free.

Perhaps not the most neutral source for information. I found their summaries of paywalled articles to be a bit... misleading. They'll sell you Swarovski crystals and Himalayan salt lamps though.

Repost as a semi-useful thread below didn't meet humor standards and people who aren't logged into HN should see it, too.

If you need an FIR filter, click here and push the button. Generates the code too.

http://t-filter.engineerjs.com/

Also if you don't know what you're talking about, kindly refrain from wandering into it in the middle of an article that might otherwise be useful. "An Intro To Beamforming" is a hell of a lot stronger if it doesn't have several flaming errors about basic DSP processing in the middle of it. Those sorts of errors may cause experts discovering you for the first time to avoid your project, not devote time to fixing it.

> The next Gawker will be decentralized and it may follow the Wikileaks model or even publish on the dark web.

There are plenty of ways to publish someone's sexual preference or sex video and you don't need to evoke Wikileaks.

Likewise I doubt the marketing maven for the next Adam Sandler movie will be paying in Bitcoin for a site takeover of a .onion domain, no matter how many celebrity nudes and confidential Sony documents it leaks.

I see no mention of sales and use taxes. Welcome to Hell.

https://www.boe.ca.gov/info/taxoverview.htm#sales

I worked there. Ways we solved these sorts of problems include: hardening the other side of the API/HAL when appropriate/possible, simplifying the driver model so that mere mortals could write drivers, writing our own drivers and overwriting known buggy ones for companies that couldn't get their shit together (usually network vendors), adding workarounds to the OS not to use certain features of certain cards, flying external engineers to lavish parties and our driver development labs and compatibility labs and providing one on one engineering development assistance from senior kernel developers, providing free testing of drivers for known problems before release, rolling fixed drivers into Windows updates, providing marketing funds as reward for fixing problems, and not using NVIDIA in the Xbox 360 after using them in the original Xbox as punishment because they were personally responsible for over 80% of blue screens in Windows for the preceding five years.

Sadly the motivation was often to ignore the data or watch it get spun by some jackass with the exact wrong agenda. It's just software, there's always a way to fix things if you really want to.

Citation?

For me the issue comes down to whether or not Microsoft does anything useful with this data (probably not, if 20 years of NVIDIA blue screen driver failure logs, Windows 8 and OneDrive are any example of how 'big data' impacts Microsoft product quality) versus how many comments I have to read where joeblow52 is personally offended that Microsoft dares to learn what his compile time plus 999,999 other compile times, divided by a million, equals.

"The telemetry is only in the tools and does not affect your app."

Estimate states it did less than half a billion of dollars of damage to human lives, the environment, and the economy.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/29/vw-excess-emissions-linked-to...

Allowing some New World Judge the power to destroy all international subsidiaries of a global corporation with 610,067 employees at the stroke of a pen might not improve the situation.

And 100x quicker than setting the clearly documented environment variable that disables the feature.

> You can opt-out of the telemetry feature by setting an environment variable DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT (e.g. export on OS X/Linux, set on Windows) to true (e.g. “true”, 1). Doing this will stop the collection process from running.

You seem to be treating this like "Knuth solved it in 1965, how hard can it be?" I provided a link to 100 language parsers with commit history. A quick Google reveals the most frequent committer has a CS degree from Caltech. Either it's hard or they're idiots. (I suppose we both can be right.)

Personally I wouldn't want to write something that can parse the Javascript embedded in the HTML emitted by a PHP script.

Subtle details like "screw that, life's way too short" can conspire to make "easy" things hard.

From the release notes:

"We used industry benchmarks for web platforms on Linux as part of the release, including the TechEmpower Benchmarks. We’ve been sharing our findings as demonstrated in our own labs, starting several months ago. We’re hoping to see official numbers from TechEmpower soon after our release.

Our lab runs show that ASP.NET Core is faster than some of our industry peers. We see throughput that is 8x better than Node.js and almost 3x better than Go, on the same hardware."

Way too many compatibility issues unaddressed by that PR to have a hope of getting anything changed there. Also it looks like what you (?) are trying to do could easily be solved with the Path.* and Directory.* path manipulation functions. No need to put a million apps at risk when you can wrap your call to Uri() with a three line helper.

Meanwhile, Microsoft wins $10,000,000,000 profit by forcing users to upgrade to Windows 10.

These broad generalizations about psychoacoustics are simply not accurate. It sounds like what every novice engineer experiences before honing his or her craft. If you're surprised by what you hear after recording something, either you weren't listening properly while recording it, you haven't learned how to record it properly yet, or your recording/listening environment itself is flawed.

Of course we notice different things about an object after taking a picture of it. But you've got to be very careful about cause/effect/bias.

It's XLR. But even then Americans and Europeans couldn't agree on where to stick the three wires.

This is the 1992 document that finally standardized "pin 2 hot" among other minutiae: http://www.aes.org/publications/standards/search.cfm?docID=1...

As odd as it sounds, microphone cables weren't standardized until 1992. Before then companies did all sorts of stuff.

Here's a Neumann mic from 1952 that could be set remotely. http://recordinghacks.com/microphones/Neumann/M-49

Today it is increasingly common to put the analog stuff as close to the source as possible and remote control it.

Agreed! Unlike the U87, the RE20 is a dynamic mic so it doesn't need power. Quieter, less to go wrong, built in pop screen, smaller but still big enough to look "important", and you really can't break it. It's less boomy by default and so you get a more natural sound when you close mic things with it.

Likewise I'm sure you could swap a U87 on person X with a RE20 on person Y and it might even sound "more like NPR" depending on the natural sounds of their voices.

There is bass rolloff in the mic even when set flat. This is the proximity filter designed to correct for the way the mic responds when it is close to a source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_effect_(audio)

That's due to the person being close to the mic. A flat microphone, by definition, emphasizes nothing. Moreover it's other aspects of the signal chain (compression, distortion, broadcast filters) that accentuate sibilance.

For a vocal/voiceover mic loud sounds are not a concern. (The U87 has a pad switch for those cases separate from the proximity/EQ switch.)

The things you mention (vibrations, LF rumble) are typically handled by the highpass on the mic preamp and are in the 75 or 80Hz range. In musical terms, that's 4+ octaves below the 1k proximity rolloff on the mic itself.

Actually it's a terrible interview because the interviewer won't shut up and is far less knowledgable than the person he's interviewing.

The "EQ settings" on the mic are actually to compensate for proximity effect. On the U87 it starts cutting at 1k -- way above what the interview states.

http://www.coutant.org/u87ai/u87.pdf

Another mic commonly seen in broadcast (and top podcasts) is the Shure SM7. Has similar switches, and even comes with a plate you can screw over the top of them so people don't futz with the settings.

The directory I linked shows Ragel lexers. It was a command line tool that fed a web app. All it had to do was count lines of code, blank lines, and comment lines for a variety of languages.

It took years and they never got it right. Partly because every technical decision was based on neato-tool-of-the-month in the early Ruby/Zed Shaw era. But mostly because it's hard.

> Text parsing for programming languages is NOT a difficult problem

Counterpoint: Ohloh tried to build a simple line counter. After 7 years even with community support they never really got it right.

https://github.com/blackducksoftware/ohcount/tree/master/src...

Stewart Brand wrote a book called "How Buildings Learn" and in many ways it's a better version of this post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shearing_layers