24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html <comment><USER2> Problem with music sounding bad doesn't really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120).

The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range. This is why when downloading music you should avoid remasters (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago) and go for the first edition presses.

This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.

That being said, I think flac is generally a good choice for a music collection. You can't transcode mp3s without killing the quality so if you ever want to convert formats (like for a mp3 player), you should stick with flac (16-bit, 48hz).

The original idea of 24-bit 192hz flac was for vinyl rips, where hypothetically you might be getting more information.

<comment><USER3> But who is using MP3 players these days any more?

I found myself to buy an iPod in... like... 2011 or so. Converted all the CDs I had to FLAC because losless was the way to go.

Two or three years (let it be 5, doesn't matter) pass by, I got a better Smartphone, Spotify Premium and don't touch my 1xx GB of FLAC music anymore, because I don't want to carry around another device etc.

I'm not sure but I think "owning" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me. That obviously has downsides but I feel lucky to use Spotify these days and being able to discover new music every day and listen to all of it on the go without buying something, converting it and more.

<comment> mark-r I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.

<comment><USER4> Slightly off topic, but do you use something other than iTunes for this process? I'm looking for a good way to manage a FLAC library.

<comment><USER5> As far as I am aware, iTunes is not even able to play back FLACs, so when I am on a Mac, I use Clementine, ([https://www.clementine- player.org](https://www.clementine-player.org)), or cmus, ([https://cmus.github.io](https://cmus.github.io)).

Converting etc. I do exclusively on my Linux desktop, so can't help you there.

<comment><USER6> iTunes doesn't support FLAC, but it does support ALAC, whose implementation is also open-source. And it has a neat feature where it can store ALAC on your computer, and automatically transcode to a (much smaller) lossy format when syncing to a mobile device.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I'm aware, I just feel like FLAC is the more popular, more multi- platform friendly/preferred option, definitely seems to have more momentum behind it, it's easier to buy FLAC then ALAC for one.

<comment><USER7> Buying options shouldn't be a concern at all as long as they are lossless - you simply convert them to the lossless format of your choice. There won't be any quality lost. Lossless to lossless is still lossless.

Your format of choice should be dictated by your mobile platform - if you use iOS device or simply like iTunes, go for ALAC. Any decent player will handle FLAC and ALAC, but Apple requires ALAC. If Apple isn't a concern for you, there's no reason to use anything but FLAC.

Personally, I use ALAC since I use iOS. So far there haven't been any downsides.

<comment><USER5> > Buying options shouldn't be a concern at all as long as they are lossless - > you simply convert them to the lossless format of your choice. There won't > be any quality lost. Lossless to lossless is still lossless.

Absolutely, but it's an extra step that to me brings little practical benefit, since FLAC is already the source format & is more widely used practically everywhere outside Apple's ecosystem.

> Your format of choice should be dictated by your mobile platform - if you > use iOS device or simply like iTunes, go for ALAC. Any decent player will > handle FLAC and ALAC, but Apple requires ALAC. If Apple isn't a concern for > you, there's no reason to use anything but FLAC.

I use iOS as my smartphone platform for now, (waiting for the Librem 5), but Linux on the desktop, so that's why I prefer FLAC. It's worth noting however that iOS itself _does_ support FLACs perfectly well, just iTunes doesn't, (I prefer not to deal with iTunes at all, so not a concern for me), but if you use something like Airsonic, you're set.

I do have a set of AirPlay speakers however, since I wanted something wireless, but still lossless, which kind of means AirPlay is the only option & that does transcode my FLACs to ALAC on the fly, so there's definitely an area where I use ALAC, even if indirectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Already discussed. Main posts:

[2012] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310)

[2014] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8689231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8689231)

[2015] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10520639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10520639)

[2017] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127633)

<comment><USER9> It's a very good article which shows up again and again. Think it's 2040, singularity reached. AI runs the world and on HN we have this article popping up very frequently like every hundred Planck time unit .

<comment><USER10> It is a good article, and since the misunderstandings are persistent in the same way a lot of other commercially exploited mysticism is it remains a relevant one as well. Having said that and to try to add on something new to these discussions, since you brought up this:

> _Think it 's 2040, singularity reached. AI runs the world and on HN we have > this article popping up very frequently like every hundred Planck time > unit._

One argument I can see in principle for 24/192+ _sound_ (not music) recordings would be if someone was a serious transhumanist and honestly did anticipate that some humans will move beyond baseline human sensory limitations in the foreseeable future (by 2040 would certainly count). Combine that with the sort of incredible environmental destruction we're seeing right now, with enormous numbers of species going extinct, forests being destroyed, insect/bird levels plummeting/moving even if they aren't going extinct entirely, etc. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to imagine that in 2040 somebody with genetically enhanced or bionic ears who really could hear ultrasonics (and had grown up with that, so their brain had developed from the start with that input) would find themselves not being able to ever hear "what it was really like" back in the 2010s even for a simple walk in the woods. If they had been here in person they'd be able to hear all sorts of things, but our standard recordings wouldn't have any of that, and in that time the whole character of forests may be different forever ala the silent spring. It's similar I think to one of the obvious guiding principles of modern archaeology, which is to try to disturb as little as possible precisely because we recognize there will be superior tools and sensors in the future which could pick up things we can't right now. Saving as much raw data as feasible in many experiments is also like that, even if we can't process it all now decades down the line new insights might be found.

None of that has anything to do with music which is a subjective human artistic creation. Even though instruments give off sounds beyond our perception, by definition we aren't taking those sounds into account in the creative process. Future transhumans would undoubtedly create transhumanist art taking full advantage of any enhanced senses, but that wouldn't apply retroactively.

<comment><USER11> > One argument I can see in principle for 24/192+ sound (not music) recordings > would be if someone was a serious transhumanist and honestly did anticipate > that some humans will move beyond baseline human sensory limitations in the > foreseeable future

True, except that few microphones provide a useful signal over 20kHz, and in the case of produced music, that segment of the signal was never heard or "signed off" by the original artists/engineers and therefore can't be considered part of the _artist 's intent._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of Monty's A Digital Media Primer for Geeks[0] and Digital Show & Tell[1] - the delivery, the explanations and the way the experiments are set up is superb.

[0] [https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml](https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml) [1] [https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml](https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml)

<comment><USER8> The article's author, Chris "Monty" Montgomery, is one of the authors of Ogg Vorbis [1] and Opus [2].

It puzzles me that many people don't yet know about Opus. Let me quote the FAQ [3]:

"Does Opus make all those other lossy codecs obsolete?

Yes.

From a technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates, ...) Opus renders Speex obsolete and should also replace Vorbis and the common proprietary codecs too (e.g. AAC, MP3, ...)."

[1] [https://xiph.org/vorbis/](https://xiph.org/vorbis/)

[2] [http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/](http://www.opus- codec.org/comparison/)

[3] [https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other...](https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other_lossy_codecs_obsolete.3F)

<comment><USER13> I thought for a moment that Spotify uses Opus, but it turns out that they use Vorbis. Wonder why a switch isn't on their roadmap.

<comment><USER14> Do they publish their roadmap?

I'd imagine they consider what they have is good enough considering the backwards compatability issue it'd likely introduce.

<comment><USER13> They don't publish their roadmap, but there have been threads on their community forums suggesting this, and an official "Not Right Now" response:

[https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Music-Use- Opus-C...](https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Music-Use-Opus-Codec- instead-of-OGG-Vorbis/idi-p/1207548)

<comment><USER14> I've yet to see them implement anything suggested on their forum (or github).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The choice of colour analogy is unfortunate, because there really _are_ colours that are "out of gamut" and cannot be accurately reproduced on normal monitors. If you have the opportunity to and look at one of the IKB works in person you'll see what I mean.

[https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klein- ikb-79-t01513](https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klein-ikb-79-t01513)

[https://contemporaryartetc.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/fact- of-...](https://contemporaryartetc.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/fact-of-the- day-61/)

<comment><USER10> I don't quite agree with you, taking into account it's an analogy designed to help illustrate the issue for general audiences. It's not as if we don't have ProPhoto RGB or other wide gamuts or don't understand the issues of rendition accuracy and resolution within the visual spectrum. There was never any debate that sRGB alone in particular was quite limited, or that dynamic range was an issue. It's just that it represents a ton more data and is technologically and commercially much, much harder. As tech has caught up displays have continued to chase human visual limits, starting with resolution, then frame rate, and finally major industry wide improvements to gamut and range with BT.2020/2100\. I mean heck, it wasn't _that_ long ago that we barely had color at all. I still remember well the first 8-bit system I ever got, or back when I regularly had to manually change between 16-color/256/16k to prioritize resolution or color because my system just didn't have enough VRAM to handle both at once. Audio did far better at matching human limits much, much longer ago.

But within the visual spectrum but not showing on the screen is still _within the visual spectrum_. The article examples refer to infrared and UV+ for contrast, and that's entirely correct. Monitors displaying either of those would make no difference (well, beaming ionizing EM at your face raises significant concerns audio doesn't at any level) at any point. They're simply beyond human eyes period. It's an accurate analogy. Failing to reproduce something _within_ human limits would be what you're talking about, but that's a solved problem and not something 24/192 offers you anything with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Question: Is 192 kHz better when you want to slow down (or speed up) a track significantly while keeping pitches the same? Does it produce less noticeable artifacts?

When DJing, I often speed up or slow down a track I'm cueing in order to match the tempo of the playing song. So having 192 kHz tracks might be better (although usually you try not to change a song's tempo too far from the original anyway).

<comment><USER17> I personally read the article to be addressing 192 kHz as a consumer of the music, I have a feeling for those producing (or mixing, etc.) it's a bit different.

It's kinda like how there's advantages of recording at 8k, better cropping, supersampling, etc. But for the average consumer there's no perceivable difference between the pixel density of 8k footage and 1080p footage on their 7" screen anyway.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, the author is not arguing against using 24 bits when recording, just when distributing to end users.

If the producer is planning to slow down the audio (and wants the ultrasonic components to become audible), then recording at higher sample rates makes sense, and the author doesn't address this; probably this is pretty rare in practice. You'd also need ultrasonic-capable microphones.

The much more common operation is to filter or amplify the signal, and for that, more bits per sample is better to avoid amplifying your quantization error. The author covers this in the "When does 24 bit matter?" section.

<comment><USER11> > and the author doesn't address this

No, it's literally excluded from consideration in the article's title. This is about music downloads, not music production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The only rebuttal to this that I have found compelling is that 24/192 downloads make sense if you are going to sample the music in your own creations. Recording and mixing with extra dynamic range, combined with only needing to low-pass once at the end has demonstrable advantages. Of course this was a response to marketing that was definitely _not_ targeted at samplers, so it's not so much of a rebuttal as arguing at cross points.

<comment><USER20> Yes, adding any sort of nonlinear distortion to audio will make frequencies depend on other frequencies, i.e. audible frequencies in the output of an effect can depend on supersonic frequencies in its input. For example, if you add a 100 kHz sine wave through a high-gain guitar amplifier, you'll definitely be able to hear it.

I didn't really see a mention of this point in the article since there was no "So when _do_ you need 192 kHz?" section, but in its defense, DACs, amplifiers, speakers, and room ambiance are all incredibly linear in 2019, so for music listening, most super-sonic frequency content doesn't turn into to lower frequencies. It _does_ matter when you're using the very nonlinear Apple earbuds, but if you were doing that, you wouldn't care about audio quality in the first place.

<comment><USER11> He mentions this in the section "192kHz considered harmful" without the misleading rubbishing of Apple earbuds (which are among the best regular earbuds on the market, for what it's worth).

In most sensible systems, super-sonic content should be filtered out before it has a chance of doing nothing other than risking the fidelity of the final output.

As for your quip about a 100 kHz sine wave sent through a guitar amp, what you'd be able to hear are the distortions and subharmonics which are below 20 kHz—and if they're desirable in the recording they would need to be captured as their sub-20 kHz components. Capturing the >20 kHz components will do nothing but make the sound wildly and randomly inconsistent depending on the consumer's system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I casually researched the upper limit of human hearing, I came across something that mentioned that some people can detect lowpass filtering up to 27khz.

That's less than half an octave over the "traditional" 20khz limit. Even the 20khz limit is more of an average then a strict biological limit.

It also means that a sampling rate somewhere at 54khz is the "ideal" limit when trying to pick a sampling frequency that is completely transparent to everyone.

This is less than half an octave higher than the traditional 44.1khz rate, just 22% more data.

That's the thing that really drives me nuts about high sampling rates. The minute improvement really only needs a very slight boost in sampling rates, not 96khz or higher.

<comment><USER22> > When I casually researched the upper limit of human hearing, I came across > something that mentioned that some people can detect lowpass filtering up to > 27khz.

Link?

<comment><USER21> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range#Humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range#Humans)

<comment><USER22> Thanks. It's wikipedia but there's actually some good stuff there. The important link from that page seems to be:

[https://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/1.2761883](https://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/1.2761883)

A decade has passed and it would be interesting to know how many people have reproduced the results detailed in the abstract. I gave it a quick read and at first glance it looks like an impressive experiment:

 _Hearing thresholds for pure tones between 16 and 30kHz were measured by an adaptive method. The maximum presentation level at the entrance of the outer ear was about 110dB SPL. To prevent the listeners from detecting subharmonic distortions in the lower frequencies, pink noise was presented as a masker. Even at 28kHz, threshold values were obtained from 3 out of 32 ears. No thresholds were obtained for 30kHz tone. Between 20 and 28kHz, the threshold tended to increase rather gradually, whereas it increased abruptly between 16 and 20kHz._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you use foobar2000, you can use ABX Comparator to compare between various bitrates and formats. Start with a lossless format and convert it.

[1] [https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx](https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd be happy with CD quality - usually I have more than enough download bandwidth and storage space for it. Apple has had Apple Lossless for years but Apple Music (and the iTunes store) still use(s) lossy compression. Movies are now 4K, but Apple has been stuck on 256Kbps AAC since 2009. :(

Though as others have noted CD quality won't improve a terribly mastered recording from the loudness wars.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder about one thing. Sure you can't hear above/under certain frequencies, but these frequencies still resonate with parts of your body (that are not ears) and you might feel it in other ways than just hearing, and also their presence generates harmonics. Not sure if it is observable to a human, but just because you don't hear N hertz, doesn't mean you can't hear its harmonics/it doesn't affect your _perception_ of the rest of the signal at all. Cutting off some frequencies can create patterns that are not hearable per se, but might induce unwanted sensory feelings (*opinion, not a fact). I think using physics to break this down doesn't make much sense, and that the most practical debate solution would be to do a double-blind test on a statistical group of the so called audiophiles.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have a related question that someone here probably has a good answer for. I recently heard a song I like on the radio while driving. Shortly after it played I pulled up the same song on Spotify with my phone, plugged my phone into the car stereo through the headphone jack, and played it. The quality was MUCH worse. What's the likely reason for that?

I know very little about audio but my best guesses are:

1\. The media cable was poor quality and/or playing music through the headphone jack is worse quality than radio station airwaves.

2\. Spotify was sending back poor quality audio, possibly because I was not on wifi.

I'm sure the particulars matter but does anyone have a best guess as to why the quality would be so much worse? I don't really expect mainstream radio stations to serve up the highest quality audio, but maybe my assumptions are way off.

<comment><USER27> 3\. The A/D converter used by your car stereo headphone jack is low quality and introduced sampling artifacts.

4\. You have a high definition radio and were listening to a high quality digital signal over FM as opposed to an FM analog signal.

It's probably a combination of all of these.

<comment><USER28> There is no "high definition radio." In the context of FM radio the H stands for hybrid and the D stands for digital. The digital often sounds worse when you compare them. Less noise for sure, but synthetic treble, almost as bad as Sirius XM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This same argument can be made for many things

Why have an engine in my car that can exceed all speed limits?

Why have a heating and cooling system in my house that can exceed any comfortable level?

Why have lights that get brighter than I need?

Why have an internet connection that exceeds what I need now? </comment><comment>==

I keep all my music rips in uncompressed FLAC - 1) because i can 2) because I have the most flexibility (transcodes) 3) because it is capable of capturing _more_ signal that the original contains

No point in bottlenecking my audio just because _other_ people are unable to appreciate it.

<comment><USER30> Your examples all have good reasons though.

> _Why have an engine in my car that can exceed all speed limits?_

So I can drive faster than the speed limit if I want to. (And I do)

> _Why have a heating and cooling system in my house that can exceed any > comfortable level?_

Well, you shouldn't oversize your HVAC system if you want to save money. But it's nice to be able to achieve your target temp in a reasonable time period. Any system that can heat your house by 10°F in 20 minutes will—as a side effect—also be able to heat it to 90°F if you were to set it there.

> _Why have lights that get brighter than I need?_

Other people may need that extra brightness. You can choose dimmer lights if you want. In any case, there's a clear difference between the two choices.

> _Why have an internet connection that exceeds what I need now?_

Again, other people may need that extra bandwidth. If you can choose a slower one, then do so.

The point of this article is that 24/192 downloads do not improve anything. It's like having a car engine with blue anodized cylinder heads. Nothing about the performance will benefit from the color change of the heads. Or using gold plated ducts for your heating system. The quality of the air is not affected by that.

Our ears are not capable of hearing the differences when they affect only frequencies above our range. Imagine if those lights boasted that they rendered 200nm light more faithfully. That improvement is wasted on your eyes.

<comment><USER11> More analogies—

It's like printing your brochures at 160,000 DPI instead of 2,400 DPI. The difference is entirely imperceptible by the human sensory system without artificial augmentation.

It's like capturing the invisible infrared light spectrum in a cinematic movie camera so it can be projected back to cinemagoers as infrared light in the theatre.

<comment><USER30> Yours are much better than mine. Closer to the real issue with 24/192.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Mastering should be done for studio monitors. No, studio monitors do not sound the same, but they are somewhat neutral, they sound somewhat in the same ballpark, which is the point of them to begin with, have a flat frequency response (which does not imply that they "sound flat" just that music mastered for active-subwoofers sound flat).

This way, those who wish to hear how the music was intended to sound, will have a somewhat decent chance of coming near to what it sounds like, and people who want other flavours can still simply buy equipment which colors it in the direction they desire.

</comment><comment><USER32> High resolution audio is important to me as a sound designer because of the ability to severely slow down a piece of audio without any aliasing or stuttering.

At 96KHz and higher with certain samples I can slow down by 80% and it will still sound good.

<comment><USER33> Do you mean slowing down while lowering pitch (without resampling)? If so, you're correct, as you bring harmonics from out of limit of human hearing back and the result sounds natural.

But if you mean just changing the speed of the sound, than you need to change the algorithm you're using. There should be no difference in quality due to sources having different sample rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I store stuff in flac, i got a large nas at my house. Then i can down convert to any other format I might need. I enjoy the flacs when I'm home.

</comment><comment><USER35> Storage space is cheap, and we have the ability to record and store music in 24/192 or any other format we want. Even if it's useless to us now, it may be of value some day when our genetically-engineered descendants can hear up to 40khz or when someone invents a direct condenser-microphone-to-brain interface.

</comment><comment><USER36> TL;DR: 24/192 is useful at the mastering stage, to avoid error creep from mixing and effects. This is way beyond human hearing however, so scaling down to 16/44.1 (CD quality) in the final mix for playback won't result in noticeable degradation. CD quality was chosen on principles of human limits.

Perhaps we could give a bit of extra headroom for kicks, to widen the envelope at extremes however. A useful amount would look more like 20/48 rather than quadruple or sextuple the resolution. No one produces in this format though, the next one up is typically 24/96.

<comment><USER37> Like how banks keep track of fractional pennies when calculating interest, because rounding them off at time of calculation would introduce cumulative error. Instead, they round them off at payment time.

<comment><USER36> Yes, as done in an image compositing pipelines as well, with higher resolutions and bits per pixel of color information until final output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Please do not confuse the usefulness of 24/192 for playback and listening enjoyment, and it's usefulness for recording and heavy 'in the box' processing.

<comment><USER39> In the box processing uses 32-bit or 64-bit float. Fixed-point DSP processing was a thing maybe ten years ago, and even then the standard was 56-bit. 24-bit is nowhere close to good enough for ITB DSP.

That aside - the bit depth part of this article is silly and wrong. With an unprocessed acoustic recording, the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit sources is fairly easy to hear on professional equipment.

By the time rock/pop/IDM/etc has been mixed and mastered, the dynamic range can be so limited you might as well distribute it at 8-bits. (Barely an exaggeration, BTW.)

This is not even close to being true of jazz, orchestral, and folk recordings. Typically recording engineers allow somewhere between 10dB and 20dB for peaks, which means the actual recorded resolution of sustained non-peaky instruments and quiet sections is somewhere around 12-bits - comfortably low enough to hear quantisation errors, even with dither.

So for some genres, 16-bits is plenty. For others it's nowhere near good enough.

In 2019, there's really no practical reason not to distribute music as 24-bit FLAC for high-end use. If you're listening on mobile you may as well use one of the better compressed formats. But for home playback, 24-bit is master-tape quality with no significant downside.

Sampling rate is a more complex issue. 48k is significantly better than 44.1k for the reasons mentioned.

Vinyl can go up to 100k or so, although not very accurately, and some people - including some very highly respected professional audio equipment designers, like Rupert Neve - believe that makes a difference.

But it's very hard to record ultrasonics "just in case" because the microphone->preamp->ADC chain has to handle them accurately, and that rarely happens. So there's very little of value up there in most recordings anyway - although maybe more on vintage tape masters than on modern digital recordings.

Personally I'm equally happy with 48k or 96k. The 192k recordings I've heard have been disappointing, possibly because of the intermodulation effects, but also because jitter becomes more of a problem at high rates.

<comment><USER40> Very inadequately. There was a quadrophonic vinyl system that failed commercially, which played back surround speakers using modulation of a 30K carrier tone. You had to use a special (aka 'good') stylus, and it sort of worked. The resulting carrier tones would go from 18 kHz to 45 kHz and the fact that this worked at all is evidence that vinyl goes up that far if you let it: wear will tend to scrub off that information unless it's a high energy transient, in which case there's a big chunk of plastic refusing to be worn off (but you'll dull it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> My favorite music these days is left-field and lo-fi hip hop. High-fidelity is pretty irrelevant. Music is produced, mixed, and mastered at home.

e.g. [https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-some- ra...](https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-some-rap-songs/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Thanks to this article, when I torrent music that is shared in 24/192 format, I always resample to 24/96:

ffmpeg -i foo.flac -ar 96000 -acodec flac bar.flac

<comment><USER43> I'm curious why you torrent music still when streaming is so widely available and free/cheap?

I did a lot of torrenting back in the 2000s, but thinking back on it I spent a ton of time finding things, organizing my file system, transcoding, editing metadata, etc. I do not miss that hassle at all now.

<comment><USER42> I spend about half of every year traveling, often in particularly undeveloped countries and/or far from a mobile signal. Having my entire music collection on a portable hard drive is more convenient for me personally than being bound to streaming.

<comment><USER43> Makes sense, thanks for answering!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is a good example of the Dunning–Kruger effect. Guy reads some books on a subject and thinks he understands all there is about it and think everybody else is stupid.

</comment><comment><USER45> Should this have a (2012) tag? Neil Young did end up releasing music in this format with his Pono player, which failed[0].

[0]: [http://www.noise11.com/news/r-i-p-pono-neil-young-kills- off-...](http://www.noise11.com/news/r-i-p-pono-neil-young-kills-off-his- digital-player-20170423)

<comment><USER46> Footer of the page suggests 2024, not 2012, as the latest edit date. You can ask the mods to add it by emailing them (link in HN footer).

<comment><USER46> 20 _1_ 4, sigh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Title should have [2012]

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm not a big believer of audiophile stuff, but when I'm listening to 24k music I'm hearing new instruments, new sounds. It's not the case with everything though. Am I retarded ?

<comment><USER49> Confirmation bias. If you listened to the same track, but at 44.1/16, and were _told_ it was hi-res, you would have the same reaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> author doesn't take into account that although you cannot hear above 20khz or below 20hz. That doesn't mean you cannot sense it. Sound after all is just air vibrating, therefore obviously there must be an effect on the body.

</comment><comment><USER51> Just to be a Devil's advocate (just a little)...

Sure, 24/192 doesn't physically improve the sound you are able perceive when listening to it.

But listening to music is a highly subjective emotional experience.

If a listener _cares_ about getting the best possible quality listening experience and _feels_ downloading 24/192 music will achieve that, then the listener _will actually enjoy_ music more knowing it is playing from a 24/192 source.

Listening to music is all about the feels.

Of course, I get how this can be abused. Next thing you know someone will be selling 32/320 for twice as much, then 64/480 for three times as much, etc.

Not that this kind of article isn't still really important. It is. It provides _a lot of reassurance_ to audiophiles that they can enjoy their music to the maximum without buying into the 24/192 hype.

And that's what it's really all about: the best enjoyment of the music.

<comment><USER52> And like homeopathy, this should be scrutinized scientifically. There is nothing wrong with eating tiny bits of sugared balls, but don't tell others they are somehow of special powers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I have a degree in electrical engineering, and I'm currently in a graduate course on computer music systems, so I hope that qualifies me enough to avoid the author's ad hominem attacks he seasons this stinkpiece with.

I can't stand seeing frequency response charts and scientific measurements in articles about audio. Like my favorite audio reviewer says [1], I listen to music for enjoyment and I talk about audio in subjective terms like "warm", "lush", "wide soundstage" \- not "unexpected 14.5kHz falloff". I don't go to a restaurant and demand to see pH tests or measure the temperature of my steak myself. I'm not going to do blind A/B listening tests because I don't care about that. If you told me you liked one wine, would it be appropriate for me to say "No you didn't. You don't have taste buds that can tell the difference between that and any other wine."? Of course not.

Music is an entirely subjective experience and trying to distill it down to data is both condescending and telling of how little an author cares about music. Even if you don't care about subjective experiences of audio, why are you so bothered by letting people like what they like? How does it affect your life that I listen to music encoded at 24/196?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlCG2fK- abo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlCG2fK-abo)

<comment><USER20> So you think our senses transcend what tools have the ability to measure? Maybe that was the case in 1970, but in 2000+, hearing (and vision) is completely understood scientifically and far surpassed by measuring apparatus at every frequency range. Saying otherwise is an appeal to what is called _audio mysticism_ and is caused by placebo and confirmation bias, which was mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER54> If it was true, the entirety of hi-fi industry would not exist. I myself built a number of amplifiers and, after a certain threshold, roughly .02% THD (total harmonic distortion) at 20khz, there is a very little correlation between the THD (what is usually measured)numbers and perceived quality of the sound. Which means, while it is true that is everything could be measured, no one measures the right thing (perhaps some weird subtle phase shifts or some almost immeasurable frequency response deficiencies)

<comment><USER55> Are you suggesting that things like healing crystals work, because the market for them exists?

<comment><USER54> You are putting words in my mouth. I am telling what I actually verified. Amplifiers with lower THD and IMD often sound worse than those with less impressive meausured parameters. Ergo, the measured parameters are not relevant. We need to find the actually important paramters and measure them.

<comment><USER56> But "sounds worse" in this case is relevant only to your preferences and to the preferences of some N of listeners, where N is totally unknown. The parameters you believe amp manufacturers should measure are therefore only relevant to _your idea_ about them.

THD, SNR, frequency response and many other metrics are easy: they define either accuracy or precision. If you want more than that, add external affects hardware or DSP. The purpose of the amplifier is to amplify.

<comment><USER54> It is relevant to a very large number of people, and that is why it is reflected in the price of the equipment. A very well known engineer, who has not ever peddle snake oil, Nelson Pass, sells his rather primitive audio equipment at high prices. Jusdging

You seem to be highly inexperienced in the subject, THD, IMD etc are parameters that are measured on highly artificial signals - singke sine waves or mix of small numbers of sine waves. Real music signals more resemble white noise than clean sine waves, and there might be hundreds of different very subtle modes of distortion, that are very difficult to measure but which have very significant influence on the precepted quality of the sound.

<comment><USER56> It's not clear to me how one person selling boutique equipment at high prices is indicative of any flaw in measurement methodology. There are many companies doing this, of dubious real value to consumers. How is Nelson Pass different, and how is that relevant to what we're discussing?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Haidinger's brush - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush

<comment><USER2> _Haidinger's brush may also be seen by looking at a white area on many LCD flat panel computer screens (due to the polarization effect of the display), in which case it is often diagonal._

funny I can see this looking right under the very paragraph above against the #FFFFFF background of the wikipedia page</comment>


Show HN: Slim4Py – Use Ruby Slim as a template engine in any Python framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/multiversecoder/slim4py <comment><AUTHOR> Just uploaded to github this module that allows you to use Slim as Template Engine in any python framework.

Being this my second public repo, I repeat that I accept any advice to improve the code. :)</comment>


Show HN: An hour in front of you? Build your own on-device Voice AI - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/snips-ai/build-a-weather-assistant-with-snips-4253541f1684 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a co-founder of Snips.ai, our vision is to allow companies and makers to build their Voice AI which is 100% on-device and private-by-design.

We don't see why Amazon and Google should send data to a server when you want your AI to open your door or have your connected coffee machine brew a cup, so we build a platform which allows you to create private AI

We will open-source the platform later this year</comment>


Khan Academy for iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/khan-academy/id469863705?mt=8

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that the first app they got into a store was the Windows 8 version: [http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/d23cc2b2-c105-4db3-9946...](http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/d23cc2b2-c105-4db3-9946-e44bacc56f7b)

<comment><USER3> The iPad app has been out since last spring...

<comment><USER2> Ah, makes sense. I assumed too much from comments and titles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is anybody wondering when there are going to be new exercises added to khanacademy's math program?

I already completed 95% of all their math exercises(362 concepts out of 380 to be exact) and is waiting for higher levels concepts to master or lower level exercises to reinforce my knowledge.

<comment><USER3> New exercises are added every so often. For example, some basic matrix math was just added a couple weeks ago. We're currently iterating on our current, lower level ones, to try to figure out what works the best, before we move on to higher level math and other topics.

<comment><USER5> I put in a feature request to make the exercises input field use type="number" instead of text. Just thought I'd ask again here. I'm trying to get a Nexus 7 set up to do KA and little things like that would help (currently it brings up the alpha keyboard).

Is there any internal discussion about tweaking the site to run on tablets?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we've been working some on making the website more mobile-friendly -- just last week we added some styles for our topic pages:

<http://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra>

Visit that page on a phone to see the alternate layout; we're also working on improving support for tablets.

I'll look into making the inputs use type="number"; off the top of my head, there's no reason why we shouldn't make that change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great job, KA! You guys are doing marvelous work, seriously. I can't remember the last time I saw an organization be so well-received by... well everyone. Salman is a top-notch guy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Surprising that IOS shipped before Android given the higher market penetration of Android in developing countries coupled with Khan Academy's mission.

<comment><USER8> Simply because the overall time to develop and ship on iOS is quite less than android. KA can learn a lot from shipping and iterating faster. And I am sure the Android version is likely under development and will be out soon.

<comment><USER9> Eeeeh, iterating on Android can be much faster than iOS. No week-long review wait. Of course, if your iterations are significantly longer than a week, it really doesn't matter.

<comment><USER8> Iteration doesn't really happen daily or weekly. It's about gathering enough data and the making changes on monthly bases maybe. In my experience I learnt that it's easier and faster to build an iphone app (no fragmentations, no jelly beans or ice cream sandwiches) and show it to a large user base, iterate over it and then work on android.

<comment><USER10> So far I've found iterating on Android faster. It's also ridiculously easier to do large betas because you don't have to do the iOS provisioning song & dance and deal with a 100 device limit.

I suppose it depends on the kind of app you're writing but I haven't spent much time on fragmentation issues and get reasonable UIs on 7" tablets almost for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like this. I only have one computer, and it spend the whole weekend on the office. When I'm home I want to learn something, with my iphone. The problem is, the actual MOOC alternatives don't have mobile solutions. Now Udacity allows you to download the videos. But this is not natural and I have to put on my dropbox, open a video at once, and sometimes they have 6 second videos.

Now I can learn when I'm on the bus and on my couch. Thank's Khan Academy!

</comment><comment><USER12> There have been KA video apps for iPhone for quite a long while now, I was expecting that the official one would have the exercise dashboard and practice problems. Hopefully this will ship in future versions. Thanks KA team.

</comment><comment><USER13> Any chance of making the source available for learning purposes?</comment>


Ask HN: What are IRC channels do you follow? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Same question (basically) was just asked 4 days ago, FWIW.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17454009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17454009)

<comment><USER3> Not many replies, though. It's worth giving it another shot in my opinion (in my opinions mods should have bumped that discussion)</comment></comment>


Help Wanted HN: Marketing and Sales for B2B Software Product - throwaway-dena I'm struggling with marketing and sales for a B2B software product, and need your help.
I've bootstrapped a single-product business selling add-on software for a well-known software solution deployed in reputedly 25% of development firms (and growing). For sales, there is a small collection of both large and small paying customers spread around the world (fun fact: the sales cycle ranges from 1 week to 1 year). Paying customers have told me that the product solves concrete problems, but I'm still not satisfied with fit partly because telling the right story is integral to finding fit. There is a trickle of a revenue stream, juicy TAM and upside, and established competitors with inferior but lower-cost solutions (customer's words) and primitive marketing (my assessment).
Despite being well-versed in software & product development, I'm a marketing newbie. Pushing into marketing, especially positioning, opening sales dialog, and generally getting the message into peoples minds, I feel blind (side note: please mention "syzygy" in your message; this little trick helps filter for those who pay attention to details), lacking sheer know-how, and frustrated that I don't have the additional capacity to make the time investments that those activities properly deserve. I'm way stretched - I feel like too little jam spread over too much toast. Clearly, it's time to ask for assistance.
So, I'm looking to strike a long-term, productive relationship with a talented and motivated person/people. An accomplished-but-still hungry autodidact, self motivated and disciplined. Like mercenaries or crack lieutenants, we'll cooperate to grow the product and ourselves. And if we find our synergy is great, the future is wide open..
Posting as throwaway. Pls Contact me using the email address in this account's profile. <comment><AUTHOR> What is your customer lifetime value[0]? This one value controls everything you need to do.

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value)

<comment> throwaway-dena Appreciate your help! Not sure how to calculate this; I'll look into it, this[0] looks like a good start. I can say there are annual payment plans based on seats, with reduced pricing for continued patronage. ARR for each customer is (I'm eyeballing it) roughly 700 USD for smaller customers and 4000 per year for the larger ones, and they buy 1- or sometimes 3-year licenses.

Most growth has come from customers that have just bought licenses with no or little questions. Some I have interacted with and arrived at a sale or a rejection that I can act on. And the rest slip through my fingers, like sand...

0\. Referring to [https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-calculate-the-LTV-in-a- subs...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-calculate-the-LTV-in-a-subscription- SaaS-business-for-a-company-that-most-of-its-customers- chose-a-1-6-12-24-or-36-month-plan) The article also mentions (LTV / CAC) > 3 "is good" which I've seen elsewhere, like First Round Review IIRC. Is this what you might have in mind?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is tricky. Depending on your churn you are right on the border of a direct sales model being viable. The rough rule of thumb is you need a CLV of $2000 for direct sales to be viable. Below this number and you need to rely on marketing to drive inbound sales.

My best guess is you are sitting in the sales valley of death. You have two ways to go - figure out how to increase your CLV so that direct selling (i.e. sales people on the phone) is viable, or decreasing your true CAC so that you can avoid the need for sales people.

There is an alternative which I suspect you don't want to hear - stay small and handle all the sales yourself. If you do this you can make money with a CLV well below $1000 and still do OK (it will be a ton of work). You are not going to be a billionaire, but you might be a millionaire.

<comment> throwaway-dena According to scuttlebutt from other vendors on the same platform, word is that 4000$ per annum is the mode, representative of larger customers and therefore their tendency to stay as a customer for at least a generation worth, say 3 years. That would place CLV around the 12,000$ mark. Not sure if that is optimistic or pessimistic. There is a little churn, but lots of repeats too, makes me feel surprised.

Given that, going back to your initial statement, is there some particular assessment about what I need to do?

<comment><AUTHOR> The rough rule of thumb of when to bring in a professional sales person is when you have somewhere around a million dollars of ARR. It just doesn't work trying to get a professional before reaching that level of turn over. I didn't hire any sales people in my business until I have been doing more than this for several years.

On the topic of sales people they are very good at selling themselves and often not so good at selling your product. I have had such a bad experience with so-called "professionals" that I now only hire people with the right technical background and personality and train in sales instead.

If you really want someone to help I would look for someone with no sales experience, but who has business experience in the areas you are trying to target AND who believes 100% in your product. They might be a little rough around the edges with the sales patter, but being a genuine believer will more than make up for the inexperience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> which email address?

<comment> throwaway-dena Thanks for pointing that out! I updated the profile

endena.ppa AT yandex DOT com</comment></comment>


Who's Afraid of Peer Review? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

<comment><USER2> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6491226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6491226)

Edit: This _looks_ remarkably like an attempt by Science to smear their open- access competitors, given that it didn't even bother to test whether non-open- access journals have the same flaws (and in fact we know they do, including Science!), yet it's being presented as evidence that open access journals specifically are flawed. I'd hope this article would never survive peer review.

<comment><USER3> > This looks remarkably like an attempt by Science to smear their open-access > competitors, ....

That may be. I wish this had been done differently, and I wish "open access" were not the term used. It may be true that the author is trying to paint with an overly broad brush, throwing some FUD at the movement to make scientific papers easier to get at; I'm not sure.

But it is clear to me that this article is describing a real problem. The problem is the recent proliferation of new journals with very low standards.

> ... and in fact we know they do, including Science! ....

I don't agree. Problems with the peer review system have been demonstrated. It is inconsistent, sometimes lazily done, and subject to corruption in some fields.

But if someone were to claim that you could take 300 journals of the caliber of _Science_ , send them all a worthless paper, and get acceptances from half, then I would call that ridiculous. The occasional acceptance of a poor paper means that the review system needs work. The acceptance of poor papers as a matter of course indicates a lack of standards. There is a difference.

<comment><USER4> I think the point of the comment is that Science's study is purely self- serving, since they did not also send their sting paper to the more traditional journals to test their peer review rejection rate of this bogus paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A point needs to be brought out here. This article is not about traditional academic journals. It concerns journals of a kind that have been popping up like mushrooms in recent years. The article refers to them as "open access". I'm not fond of the term, since there are certainly selective, reliable journals that still allow submissions from anyone and publish articles on the web without a paywall. Regardless, plenty of more-or-less fake journals have been founded recently. As a researcher, I get solicitation e-mails from them every day.

It is true that it can be difficult for someone not in the relevant field to tell the difference between different kinds of journals. I know the difference, since I've heard of the major journals in my field, I know many of the editors, etc. But a science journalist might have more trouble with it.

For fields like medicine, this can matter a lot. It's the same problem we see with SEO and the like: how, in the modern world, do we form a robust measure of reputation and reliability?

<comment><USER5> Well put. I think _Science_ does have some conflict of interest here, but I also think they are one of the good guys in the publishing business, and that this is a worthwhile subject for an expose.

Like you, I get (about 1/week) blind offers to submit articles to this or that journal, and even (at a lesser frequency) offers to be an editor (unpaid!). It stinks to high heaven [1]

Getting back to _Science_ , their individual subscription rates are reasonable (~$150/year = 52 issues), their public health articles are available immediately after publication, and their other articles are available after 1 year. They are run by a non-profit institution (AAAS), so they are less motivated to jack up their fees.

I was not able to find institutional fees for _Science_.

Incidentally, the situation with _Nature_ is different -- they are for-profit ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Publishing_Group](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Publishing_Group)) and it seems to show in their rates: [http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/uc- libraries-faculty-protest...](http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/uc-libraries- faculty-protest-proposed-160117.aspx)

[1] Here are the most recent 5: "International Transaction of Electrical and Computer Engineers System" (sounds like a joke), "Entropy", "The Open Software Engineering Journal", "Journal of Robotics", "The Open Electrical & Electronic Engineering Journal".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Peer review is receiving a bad review, no pun intended. Please remember that good journals exist, and insiders know good from bad. A bad acceptance from a heretofore-unknown journal with a seeming credible title is not indicative that all peer review is flawed or done by impatient baboons.

And I say this having had a terrible time getting a decent review in recent conferences. But my journal review process has been largely positive, helping to improve my paper significantly, even if they miss some things. Certainly, when I receive a paper to review, I and my colleagues give it our best shot, but we largely work only for the established upper-echelon in our field.

<comment><USER7> "insiders know good from bad"

while often true, science and scientific journals do not serve solely the scientific community, they serve humanity, which includes the non-professional public. while you may be an honest person and would never knowingly abuse wrong information to harm others, gain, or advance a broken agenda, plenty of people do. the "vaccines lead to autism" people, for example, do that.

the history of science shows that careful, accurate and correctly performed experiments and publications are what give humanity progress. their absence, history has again shown, causes humanity to retreat, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

this is not an idle, "i sure wish more 'scientists' could publish" debate, at some level the very question of human progress is at stake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Major Comments: The author make a compelling case that a sizable number of Open Access publishers have potentially flawed review policies that allow substandard work to enter the literature. This is a promising first finding, however the authors then use this data to build a narrative of the nature of Open Access journals without having performed the corresponding experiment with an appropriate control arm.

Without a comparison to conventional publishing, these findings cannot be extended as far as the author does in the conclusions. Such an assertion, without support, is not justified or supported.

Recommendation: Resubmit after Major Revision.

</comment><comment><USER9> This isn't that surprising. It's common knowledge in the academic community that:

* There are bogus open access journals which exist solely to make money from author fees.

* There are bogus conferences that follow a similar business strategy.

* There are lower-quality journals and conferences that do not attract many top-quality submissions, so tend to have a lower barrier for acceptance: you might get work that's rigorous and unexciting, work that's exciting but preliminary or rough around the edges, or work that's neither rigorous nor interesting.

* Peer reviews vary widely in quality, from being thorough to overly critical and nit-picking to being cursory. This is extremely frustrating to many people, but is hardly an undiscussed issue. One particular problem is that more junior reviewers are often reluctant to criticize a paper unless they're very confident in their understanding, either due to it being slightly outside of their core expertise, or due to convoluted presentation: it's easier to assume it's correct than to go out on a limb criticizing something.

I would say that being published in a peer reviewed article is just the start of a gauntlet that any serious scientific claim has to run, regardless of the quality of peer review. Plenty of important work has started out as being extremely controversial: even once it got published people didn't necessarily think it was right. The consensus does continue to evolve.

I've never met a scientist who will believe something just because it's in a peer reviewed article.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a serious ethical problem with submitting dummy papers in that it abuses the trust of the editors and reviewers. You are wasting the time of volunteer reviewers who have nothing to gain but plenty to lose if they screw up. Reviewers assume papers are submitted in good faith, and are not traps.

Editors have practice spotting cranks but trap papers don't have that smell about them since they are written by smart but naughty people trying to trick reviewers.

<comment><USER11> If nobody ever _tests_ the review process, how can we know that it is working?

<comment><USER10> We read the journals. Many readers of an article are qualified to review it. Many also personally know the editor or associate editors and will raise a stink if the journal starts to suck. We _are_ these journals. We write the articles for free, we review them for free, we proudly share our results. We hate it when a shitty paper gets in.

Edit: There _are_ shitty journals that no one reads. Everyone in the business knows which ones these are. There is a problem explaining this to lay people, since the shitty journal web site doesn't have a sticker on it saying "zero credibility - please ignore these articles". This is not really a problem for researchers.

<comment><USER11> That is not relevant to the issue of whether or not the peer review process works in deciding what articles to publish. Researchers might be able to identify bad journals and bad articles (though in my experience, quite a few researchers only spend time reading the results), but the point of the review process is to ensure that bad articles are not published in the first place. If the reviewers are allowing bad articles to slip through the cracks, then the process is not working and we need to seriously reconsider the entire journal system (though I would say that the Internet already requires us to reconsider that system).

My real point was that submitting blatantly bad articles serves a purpose, which is to test whether the current process of reviewing articles is effective at weeding out bad articles. We should not blindly assume that journals, even top-tier journals, are only publishing good articles.

<comment><USER10> I addressed this point in the third sentence: "[Researchers] will raise a stink if the journal starts to suck."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Whos afraid of peer review?

Anyone whos ever tried to publish. I used to love science before I actually became an academic and realised how dark and corrupt it could be behind the scenes, I suppose the same stands for every field though.

<comment><USER13> > I suppose the same stands for every field though.

That is not my understanding/observation, some fields seem to be considerably worse then others, while some seem to have relatively little.</comment></comment>


In Finance, 'J. Crew' Is a Verb. It Means to Stick It to a Lender - La-ang https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-17/in-finance-j-crew-is-a-verb-it-means-to-stick-it-to-a-lender <comment> La-ang If you hit the limit of articles you can read, refresh the page and hit Esc immediately before the whole content loads xD. You will miss images but you'd still read content.</comment>


Show HN: DynaBlogger – A simple, alternative blogging platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.dynablogger.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

My name is Vito and I would like to share with you a SaaS I have been working on for a few months now, DynaBlogger. It's a new blogging platform I just launched as a simpler alternative to platforms such as Wordpress and Ghost, for people who prefer something less complicated but still with all the features one really needs for a great blogging experience. Wordpress is an absolute beast and for many people it can be overkill. There are other options but they are often very limited in customisation and features. If you would like to just focus on publishing great content without having to worry about hosting and servers, and would like something simpler than Wordpress or Ghost, then I believe DynaBlogger can be a great option.

DynaBlogger has a very nice and fairly powerful text editor, as well as a code editor that allows you to customise any aspect of a theme and see changes immediately without having to upload a new version. I am launching with a few simple ready themes and I will be adding more soon. In the near future it will be possible for any user to share (or even sell later) themes in a marketplace. Themes offer maximum flexibility so DynaBlogger can also be used for other simple sites, not just blogs. The DynaBlogger website is also hosted on DynaBlogger.

Of course you can add custom domains, and invite other people to collaborate on your sites. You, the owner of the website, can choose which permissions to grant to each collaborator.

You can also very easily import content from Wordpress or Ghost, so if you already have a website you could migrate very quickly.

There's a free 14 days trial - no credit card required - so it's easy to give it a try. With the coupon code "EARLYBIRD" you get 50% off for the first three months. You also get 2 months free if you choose a yearly plan.

My personal blog [0] is also hosted on DynaBlogger, so you can take a look at it for another example of website.

Thanks in advance for checking it out, I'm looking forward to any feedback!

[0] [https://vitobotta.com](https://vitobotta.com)

<comment><USER2> Looks like an interesting service. Is there a headless API available?

Impressive performance on the blog, loads instantly.

<comment><USER3> agree on that, the performance are quite impressive, i think i'll have a look

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks! I've spent quite a bit of time trying to make sure that websites are speedy, so it's great to hear that you like the performance. :) Hopefully you will try it and let me know if you have any questions!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi Vito! Looks cool, I'll give it a try!

A couple of things I noticed that I'd like to share with you :)

\- I feel like there's too much text and information and it is kind of difficult to understand the power od DynoBlogger unless you read everything. (e.g. in the first text block you put in bold the word Dynablogger multiple times, I think it would be better to highlight the words that already explain at the first sight what this tool can do for you);

\- Same thing happens multiple times throughout the page, but in the price section especially. Just highlight those features that make one plan different from the other, in this way a potential user could understand immediately which plan suits him/her the best;

\- The "About" section is very cute, but if your intent is to build a profession website, I would change it a bit.

These are just my reflections on your work, if you don't like them feel free to throw them away :) Otherwise, hope they can help somehow, wish you good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Thanks a lot for the suggestions! I am actually looking with a friend who is a designer if he can help with the design and copy overall, since I am a programmer and perhaps it shows :) Note taken. Let me know if you try it and have any questions!</comment></comment>


The danger from climate change no longer outweighs risks of nuclear accidents - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nuclear-power-industry-now-i-think-it-should-be-banned/2019/05/16/a3b8be52-71db-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html <comment><USER2> This position is not justifiable, and the author must surely know that based on his experience and the lack of any quantitative comparison. In other words, he's lying and his lies will kill people if we listen to him.

> Coal and natural gas do not create this kind of acute accident hazard, > though they do present a different kind of danger.

Around 1000-2000 people died in Japan as a result of Fukushima. Around 5000-10,000 people died in Germany in the following decade because Fukushima scared them into switching back to coal ([https://www.wired.com/story/germany- rejected-nuclear-poweran...](https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected- nuclear-powerand-deadly-emissions-spiked/)). It's absurd to imply that coal and nuclear are remotely similar in level of direct danger; it's like (as in, the relative risk is similar to) writing a thinkpiece describing flu and Russian roulette as "both dangerous things". And that's ignoring climate change.

> And solar, wind and geothermal energy pose no safety threat at all.

This is just untrue. Solar and wind quite arguably kill more people than nuclear ([https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of- energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)). Even if you take the higher estimates for the risk of nuclear (the ones that assume it hasn't got safer since Chernobyl), they're certainly not different enough that you can claim renewables post "no safety threat at all" in an article about how spooky nuclear is.

And not really the same thing, but:

> without producing a single electron of power

This guy does have have a physics PhD right? He must know that you don't measure electricity in electrons, surely?

<comment><USER3> First off, you're definitely cherry picking -- or to put it more bluntly, and to use your own measuring stick: "lying" \-- if you try to sum up fatality risks of nuclear by referring only Fukushima, and including (in that part of your post) any mention of Chernobyl.

For which, using the same website you used (ourworlindata.org -- I'll let you find the link) we have estimates of up to 60,000 worldwide fatalities due to the radiation release from that incident.

Seconds - when the author brought up "acute risk" he was referring to the 30 km exclusion zone and forced evacuation of 150,000 people (after Fukushima).

In other words - you're accusing the author of making unbalanced comparison (and not only that, basically calling him out as a fraud and/or idiot for doing so). But apparently not even attempting to make a balanced comparison yourself.

<comment><USER4> I assume they left Chernobyl out because it was due to out of date technology that is no longer in use today and essentially cannot happen with the way nuclear power plants work today.

<comment><USER3> Another way of looking at disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima is not so much as failures of technology -- but of bad _policy_ , and it's generalization: hubris.

For which there doesn't seem to be an expiration date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aren't Generation 3 reactors with passive cooling much safer than previous generations?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor)

<comment><USER6> Aren't wind and solar farms a much safer and cheaper source of energy these days?

<comment><USER7> Not when you have to fire coal and gas plants to cover peak demand. Then pay your neighbours to take your oversupply during peak generation.

<comment><USER8> Meaning we need batteries?

<comment><USER9> Batteries are not feasible economically or capacity wise.

<comment><USER10> Today or in principle?

<comment><USER7> Today. Its just a technology problem. If batteries get developed that are up to the task it changes the equation completely. I honestly think that will take a few decades minimum.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the Equivalent of 'Hello, World' for a Quantum Computer? - <AUTHOR> The 'Hello,World' program is one of the simplest programs to demonstrate how to go about writing a program in a new programming language.
What is an equivalent simple program which demonstrates how to write a very simple program for a quantum computer?
I have tried (and failed) to imagine such a program. Can somebody who has actually used a quantum computer show us an actual quantum computer program? <comment><USER2> "Getting Started with Qiskit" [https://qiskit.org/documentation/getting_started.html](https://qiskit.org/documentation/getting_started.html)

Qiskit / qiskit-community-tutorials > "1 Hello, Quantum World with Qiskit" [https://github.com/Qiskit/qiskit-community- tutorials#1-hello...](https://github.com/Qiskit/qiskit-community- tutorials#1-hello-quantum-world-with-qiskit)

"Quantum basics with Q#" [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/quantum/quickstart?tabs=tab...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/quantum/quickstart?tabs=tabid-python)

Qutip notebooks: [https://github.com/qutip/qutip#run-notebooks- online](https://github.com/qutip/qutip#run-notebooks-online)

Jupyter Notebooks labeled quantum-computing: [https://github.com/topics/quantum- computing?l=jupyter+notebo...](https://github.com/topics/quantum- computing?l=jupyter+notebook)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's this to motivate you to learn more about it [https://youtu.be/l3eww1dnd0k](https://youtu.be/l3eww1dnd0k) the first result using my favorite search engine (thank you computer) shows the limitations of our current advancement in quantum [https://hackernoon.com/exploring-quantum- programming-from-he...](https://hackernoon.com/exploring-quantum-programming- from-hello-world-to-hello-quantum-world-109add25305f)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's some:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=%22hello+world%22+program+qua...](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=%22hello+world%22+program+quantum+computer&ia=web)</comment>


Why have Visual Programming Languages not gone mainstream? - <AUTHOR> There is no shortage of visual languages for teaching kids to code (Scratch, etc) and there are a few for specific applications (Simulink, Labview) but I have never heard of one gaining mainstrean acceptance.
I can think of a few advantages off the top of my head: 1)Less fighting with syntax 2)Easier for beginners to pick up 3)Easier to find logic errors (in my opinion)
The main disadvantages I see is: 1)that it is slower to develop in 2)historically everything has been text so people are used to it
Any other thoughts on advantages and disadvantages? What would make you use a visual programming language? <comment><USER2> 1\. Diffs: There is no easy way to diff two versions. You need to diff the visual changes (what it looks like) and the semantic changes (what it means). How do you visually display the changes in a useful way? IE, what do you put into github?

2\. Spaghetti code: Read the Dijkstra's paper on Goto, and mentally replace 'goto' with 'line'.

3\. Text labels: Many graphical languages have lots of text labels in the display.

4\. Limits: There is a human visual limit of about 50 items in a graphical picture, unless there is a underlying graphical semantic context such as geography or time series.

5\. Too Big: Once the diagram is larger that one screen, navigation and comprehension become exponentially more complicated.

6\. Graphical API: Not clear what is the graphical equivalent to modules, namespaces, packages, etc. How would you package reusable code and make an API available?

During the 1970's, I spent years working on CAD tools, including logic schematic entry and IC layout programs. This was using graphical tablets in the pre mouse era. Even simple 8 bit microprocessors were too complex to draw schematics on a display, and barely possible to layout by hand on a display. I note that today logic design is using text languages such as Veralog, and layout is mostly automated.

<comment><USER3> > 1\. Diffs: There is no easy way to diff two versions.

Any visual programming language can be serialized to and deserialized from a linear format, which can easily be subject to diff.

It should be fairly straightforward from that to _also_ build a visual interpretation of the diff of the serialized forms (e.g., an animation of the transformation from the original to the new form.)

Visual vs. semantic changes is only an issue if the language admits multiple visual representations that are structurally equivalent rather than (e.g.) accepting different inputs and reducing them to a canonical representation. But even if you allow that, you should be able to use canonicalization of that type "behind the scenes" to generate diffs which are comprehensive or which only identify semantically-significant changes.

> 2\. Spaghetti code: Read the Dijkstra's paper on Goto, and mentally replace > 'goto' with 'line'.

As in text language, using block structure rather than arbitrary gotos addresses this. There is no reason a visual language can't be block structured. (If you are concerned about procedure/function-calls-as-lines rather than gotos-as-lines, there's no reason that calls need to be lines; callables can be _shapes_ , and calls can simply be inclusion of the shape in the procedure being drawn.)

> 4\. Limits: There is a human visual limit of about 50 items in a graphical > picture, unless there is a underlying graphical semantic context such as > geography or time series.

There are similar limits in other domains, which is one of the reasons for structured decomposition of code in general. I don't see why this would apply less to visual code.

> 6\. Graphical API: Not clear what is the graphical equivalent to modules, > namespaces, packages, etc. How would you package reusable code and make an > API available?

In general, names are shapes -- I don't see why that would be any different for names of namespaces vs. names of individual items within a namespace. Sure, how you depict either "opening" a namespace or accessing a name from it in a qualified way would be something a graphical language with namespaces would have to decide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They're popular in some domains. Aside from the ones already mentioned in this thread, there's Softimage ICE which I understand lives on in other forms in 3D modeling tools.

I worked on a visual dataflow language for complex ETL between databases some time ago. My experience with that was I would rather write Scheme directly (which is basically what the pretty directed graphs turned into). Mostly out of familiarity, but I did find the textual representation was denser and so faster to work with once familiar with it; maybe it's all about having the right level of abstraction for the task at hand.

I suspect a successful general purpose visual programming language would have to have some really powerful abstractions for parallelism and concurrency to take off in place of languages that already exist. You also have to remember the problems people have had integrating Smalltalk's image-based persistence with non-Smalltalk parts of a system, and avoid that kind of insularity.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you looked at non-trivial simulink models? The graph of connections between logical programming elements is too high to nicely represent in a single two dimensional plane. Once you render all the required connections, the gain of a clean, easy-to-follow visual schematic for the logic is lost.

There are ways to carefully clean it up and keep it logical - but once you get into all of that, you might as well have been working in text.

Look at Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) for hardware. For complex hardware logic, you often end up with multi-layer boards. The boards carry higher complexity and cost, but designers use them because two-dimensions is simply not enough for the interconnects.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would use a visual programming language in a heartbeat if it provided a first-rate environment for solving problems that I care about.

Here are some challenges that need to be overcome: 1/ I agree that the inertia of history is against visual systems. There's a lot of catch-up required to reach parity. 2/ People get comfortable and are often reluctant to adopt something new, especially when it's a big change. 3/ Text files provide a simple program representation, a format that's standard across languages. I don't know of a comparable data format that might work across visual languages. E.g., we need something that supports good diffs in a language- agnostic way. 4/ There's perception that a visual language needs to be programmed with a mouse, and that it would cater to beginners but not experts. I see no reason why I shouldn't manipulate visual elements with keyboard shortcuts and will use anything that helps me get the job done better. 5/ There's a perception that programming in a visual language will be slower, but I don't think that need be the case.

When I write software using a powerful IDE I often feel pretty far removed from the experience of writing a text file. There's a sensation of taking abstractions out of my head and putting them into the computer, with the text- file being a rather ancillary element in the programming / runtime environment as a whole. My feeling is that the text file has come to be limiting and I'd love to see other formats emerge.

</comment><comment><USER7> My impression is that they try to re-create the text language programming experience, in part because that's what we know, in part because they access the same underlying machine as text languages.

When graphic programming languages provide an _entirely_ new and better way of making what we today call a computer do what we want, then they'll catch on. In the current environment, I don't think visual languages can compete with the expressiveness and flexibility of text.

Plus I'd probably suffer from shoulder RSI injuries from pushing the mouse around.

</comment><comment> Warewolf-ESB Some "visal programming languages" are actually faster to develop, specifically where there are prebuilt components and the real ability to reuse existing work. Another great advantage is for business people and BAs to be able to easily see and understand how the application works, and even contribute at a meaningful level to what business needs.It's easier for new people on a project to pick up an understand what has been written, rather than getting their head around thousands of lines of code. While technically not a visual programming language, we're developing an ESB that works inside a visual IDE and uses a lot of flow based and visual programming principles to make it easy to learn and simple to use. It's an open source project, go check it out on GitHub - [https://github.com/Warewolf-ESB/Warewolf- ESB](https://github.com/Warewolf-ESB/Warewolf-ESB) or get a compiled version from [http://warewolf.io](http://warewolf.io)

</comment><comment><USER8> Of the three advantages listed, only the third has much weight because it's hard to see a pictographic language having simpler syntax than Lisp and the most useful software is rarely written by beginners because it usually takes time to develop skill of conjuring up useful abstractions.

Looking at the third advantage, finding logic errors, it is still a bit of a stretch since many pure logic errors can be caught by compilers and tests and the typical pernicious logical errors are related to modeling the domain rather than endless loops or dead code paths.

Finally, not only are words are a really compact way of communicating but the Turing Machine model of computation is based upon alphabets and input strings and thus text is closer to the metal than pictures.

That said, Drakon is an interesting language developed for the Russian space program that leverages graphics in conjunction with text.

[http://sage.com.ua/en.shtml?e6l0](http://sage.com.ua/en.shtml?e6l0)

</comment><comment><USER9> _> I have never heard of one gaining mainstrean acceptance._

Check out Max/MSP, Pure Data, and Apple's Quartz Composer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_\(software\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Data](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Data)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language)

I'd argue that some of the Microsoft stuff involving XAML and Blend and database tools could be considered visual programming, but I can see the other side of the argument.

</comment><comment><USER10> Visual programming languages (VPL) attempt to reproduce the low level constructs of general purpose programming languages and thus the complexity of the diagram becomes such that it is hard to discern the logic.

In highly domain specific areas VPLs are actually widely used. Blender 3D modelling tool is basically a graphical way of editing and visualising the underlying data structures. Now if you replace abstract syntax graph you can see the similarity.

wrt @RNeff's comment, AutoDesk Revit is a great example of how it might be possible to create a more general purpose programming language. What sets Revit apart from Verilog & VHDL is that it presents the user with context specific editors by which to set the parameters for the many different components of the designed building.

</comment><comment><USER11> I actually started "programming" back when I was a kid working on Starcraft maps. The Starcraft editor isn't quite graphical but it definitely isn't text documents (though in Starcraft 2, I believe it compiles down to a C variant).

Starcraft has one thing that modern graphical editors don't have: reactivity. State is synchronized behind the scenes between client and server (who is also a client). You "program" predominately in response to events, which can be initiated by the game itself, player action or by another function call.

Reactivity, which is programming in response to events, in my opinion, will lead to the first useful non-notepad editors.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is mainstream in certain domains. At my work we use a visual programming tool (an Eclipse plugin) for mapping data elements between one format to another. So if we have a customer who sends us something like a CSV file that they want us to upload to our system, but we need to transform it to XML first, we do that transformation mapping using the visual tool.

</comment><comment><USER13> The main disadvantage is that over the years, we have developed amazing set of tools that all presuppose source code is text (so it's not only we are used to it, it's stronger than that). Can you imagine what would it take today to reimplement all the editors, source control, half of unix basically...

</comment><comment><USER14> I'll take "fighting with syntax" over fighting with a GUI any day.

</comment><comment><USER15> There are big advantages to alphabetic texts.

The three advantages that you cite are not.

1) there is no less fighting with syntax when you use a graphical syntax than when you use a textual syntax. Now we can agree that a lot of textual programming languages have horrible syntax. I would advise you to try Common Lisp or Scheme. The use of S-exps (Symbolic Expressions) in those languages is a recognition that the syntax doesn't matter, and therefore the uniform and systematic use of the forms: (operator argument argument) for all the language elements is a big simplification at the lexical level. However, there still remain a syntactic element, an essential one, where you have to know that eg. the IF operator takes three arguments, a test, and then-expression and an else-expression, in that order:

       (IF (= 1 a)
         (print (quote one))
         (return (quote done)))

By the way, notice how the addition of formatting (inserting newlines in strategical places) and indenting, makes a textual form look like a graphical one. This helps reading the text.

2) It is not easier for beginners to pick up. Only to children who don't know how to read yet. But then, one may argue that they ought to learn reading and writing before trying to write programs. In anycase, at this age, you would rather use objects than graphics, to let children play, programming "robots" by putting operation blocs into slots in a specific order.

3) Ok, it's your opinion, but graphical forms do not make it easier to find logic errors. They may help in getting an impression, and forming a mental image. But it would be dangerous to rely on them in a rigorous reflection about the program properties, just like it is bad to use the graphical diagrams to reason in Euclidian geometry. As goes the saying, geometry is the art of making correct reasoning using wrong graphics. Actually, you can do all geoemetry purely in textual and logical form, without ever using graphics, because the geometrical objects are abstract objects, and the graphical forms are only coarse approximations of the geometrical concepts. Similarly, the graphical forms of algorithms and programs, are but coarse approximations of the program logic, which is better described using text.

There's also another inconvenient of the graphical forms: they lack abstraction. You can zoom in and zoom out, and sometimes, you can even hide subcomponents in closed boxes, into which you can navigate graphically to discover the inside diagram, but by definition an abstraction is naming a concept. And text is better for names, if only because of the combinatorials. Take a standard human, and try to determine how many gestures, or how many different ideograms he is able to create and later recognize to identify different concepts. Similarly, count the number of words or names he is able to create and use to identify those concepts.

Finally, there's the question of the complexity of the tools required to manipulate graphics (and animations at that, if you want to manipulate sophisticated graphic views), vs. the tools required to deal with text, with a clear advantage for the later.

And let's not forget, at the beginning was the Verb, not the Image, and it's the Verb who was Creator.

That said, graphical forms can still be useful in the context of programming, notably when you want to explain some concepts. You can use various kind of diagrams, to present facets of software (cf. eg. UML), and other free-form diagrams. But either you have some formalized graphical syntax like UML, and therefore you bring the complexity of reading and writing correct meaningful diagrams, or you are left with ambiguity usually found with graphical forms, and you can only use as an illustration to some textual description.

You could also compare a program drawn in Piet vs. the same written in any textual programming languages :-) Can you tell what this program does: [http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/Piet_hello_big.png](http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/Piet_hello_big.png) [http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html](http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html) And what about this one: [http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Text#Modula-2](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Text#Modula-2)

That said, if you read Asimov's Foundation serie, you may remember the room where the psychohistorian mathematicians worked, where mathematical formulae were displayed on all the walls of the room and where they could explore and manipulate them graphically with gestures and other input. I'd agree that it is possible that eventually we have sufficiently smart AI programs to be able to write programs and other mathematical proofs in graphical or such dynamical modifiable forms with simple and easy input (ie. with the system basically guessing what transformation or addition you mean from your grunting and waving). But I don't see that practical before AI is achieved.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Handle Student Who Copies Code? - <AUTHOR> I'm tutoring a couple of high school age students in Python. One of them doesn't seem to understand what we're doing at all. When I work with him, he just makes random guesses that show a lack of understanding for principles we just learned.
Yet, during the week, he emails me things that he has written that go beyond what we've learned. I'm not sure if he's writing the code himself, or just finding cool examples and taking credit for them.
Here are my top two concerns:
1) If he's copying code and claiming it as his own, he's not being honest and he's not learning.
2) If he's actually writing this code himself and I confront him about copying it, he could feel really hurt and distrusted when he should be rewarded for his efforts to learn.
What should I do?
NOTE: I don't have a problem with students using existing code as long as it is open source and proper attribution is given. <comment><USER2> Can you find the source that they're using or are they getting it from other students? If you can find the source, just ask why they didn't give attribution, then how he's going to approach understanding the code that they copy in the future. This has been my approach for students (college professor).

The alternative is much harder. I've been mentoring a nephew who blames his teacher for how little he understands, but sends me code very clearly copied off of another student. My general approach has been to explicitly not help him with any actual source, and instead work on pseudocode. He might spend 8 hours trying to figure out how to compile the broken C++ that he's working with, but he can't honestly claim that I wasn't being helpful. As suggested by flukus, asking for code explanations isn't a bad way to go. Such explanations always find themselves companion to homework assignments that I craft, and it's what I've been trying to do in the pseudocode conversations with my nephew. However, another great way to go is to just find examples of any given problem (and attribute them!!) in another language entirely. Then the student has the opportunity to become a polyglot in a very natural way. Ultimately, I refuse to speak in the target language because I'm very aware that he wants me to hand him the answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's entirely possible he/she doesn't "get it" while you're tutoring them but does after playing around a bit.

Ask them to explain the code the emailed, if they wrote it themselves then they should be able to explain it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm... good idea. Added bonus, if he has to Google it to explain it, he'll learn how it works. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tell him it's OK to use the Internet to solve problems and encourage him to learn from others code but to be honest about it. Then if he's actually able to solve problems using others code, go get him a job because he's figured out a way to get things done despite his inexperience.

</comment><comment><USER5> Let him explain his code in front of the class, it was always fun when our teachers did that and sometimes it was obvious he knows whats going on and nobody got hurt.</comment>


Bernie Sanders: Democrats Need to Wake Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/opinion/campaign-stops/bernie-sanders-democrats-need-to-wake-up.html <comment><USER2> > The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country > and the world.

This is a cute bit of rhetorical fakery here. Bernie is argues that, globally, the economy isn't working out for most people (in a real income sense and an income inequality sense). It's a global problem so it seems to follow that the "global economy" isn't working. Then he blames trade agreements, the basis of the "global economy". Nice one!

Why exactly does he think that reducing free trade will help the lower income percentiles? At best it will shift some money in lower-paying jobs around. How about doing something really politically risky and trying to attack income/wealth inequality directly? There's plenty of overall income (GDP) in the US under current trade rules -- it's just not distributed in anywhere near a way to maximize overall happiness or even overall ability to pay for basic necessities.

Also, somehow, even after his last paragraph, he still refuses to say "vote for Hilary". My respect for him is rapidly dwindling.

<comment><USER3> This is a useful graph: [https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2016/06/...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2016/06/wonk- globalincome0625-1.jpg)

I think the argument is basically that free trade redistributes working class incomes to the poorer countries that they trade with. I am not endorsing this idea, I know nothing about economics, but I don't think I've seen another explanation for this particular inequality.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2015/12/09/459087477/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2015/12/09/459087477/the-tipping-point-most-americans-no-longer-are- middle-class)

> A just-released analysis of government data shows that as of 2015, middle- > income households have become the minority. The trend is so firmly > established that it may well continue; Americans have experienced "a > demographic shift that could signal a tipping point," Pew researchers > concluded Wednesday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think there is a vacuum in US politics waiting for another real populist movement. And it should be working on the base of local and state offices, as well as building party machinery that transcends any single election. And it should NOT be focused around Hail Mary presidential candidates like Bernie until there is a network of democratic socialists in power somewhere besides Vermont.

<comment><USER6> That's part of Bernie's thing, even if he can't win the nomination he can put a lot of populist candidates into government positions. It's one reason why he hasn't stopped campaigning, he can use his campaign's money to finance candidates in lower races.

<comment><USER7> Where's the best place to find a list of the campaigns Sanders has moved his money into? It would be interesting to see how those candidates line up with his message. Since he raised money outside the DNC (much like Obama did) I'm not sure exactly how those contributions are being measured.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only occurrence of "clin" in the article is in "decline." It's not like he is going out of his way to specify who this person might be: "We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies and other powerful special interests."

Is he still in the race or is he just trying to steer the Democratic party policy?

<comment><USER4> > Is he still in the race or is he just trying to steer the Democratic party > policy?

Both. There's a chance Clinton will still be indicted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Coalition parties can't do revolutionary change due to divide and conqueror strategies. Which is how the D party got taken over and co-opted into the party solely representing the interests of the rich globalist corporate establishment to begin with. This is not the democratic party of the 60s radical hippies, this is an extremist form of Reaganomics hiding behind a Hillary mask. So this aspect of his message is the tilting at windmills, basically complaining about the inevitable and unavoidable result after things are already in motion. The world series game pitch has been made and the ball is in the air and all the complaining you do about strategic pitcher hiring strategies in the off season or ticket sales in an abstract sense do not matter when the bases loaded home run hit is already swinging. This would have been a very timely strategy article in, oh, I donno, 1980. Its more like an epitaph for the D party, in the current year.

Another major strategic error is you can't divert political momentum by saying "we're gonna be just like the winner except way more boring, lower energy, less controversial, and far less interesting". As a thought experiment, say for the sake of argument you hate heavy metal music and want people to stop following it because you're that kind of person. If you propose broadcasting even more formulaic top 40 girlpop on a different station, that's really going to excite the base of formulaic top 40 girlpop listeners. But the cool kids listening to the heavy metal station are just going to laugh, have a good time, the good time leads to more heavy metal listeners...</comment>


Ask HN: Do you always pay taxes on your side hustles? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This question is a cobweb, and you my friend are the spider.

</comment><comment><USER3> hustles _

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>