UrLicht

Yes, see https://familysearch.org

Mormon developers do not donate their time. https://www.lds.org/church/employment?lang=eng (Must be LDS to browse and apply for jobs, but you can see the heading on the linked page indicating Information Technology jobs are available).

The university of southern north Dakota at hoople? Yeah, it doesn't exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Q._Bach

...making the whole thing satire.

Wow, was it really 20 years ago? As a kid my family lived in the Summit at Warner Center townhouses in LA. One night my friends and I saw a bunch of movie trailers pull up and of course we just had to see what was going on. We watched for hours(!) completely enthralled as Dan Aykroyd stood on top of a car passing a wallet back and forth through a window. It really gave me an appreciation of the level of perfection that producers of movies demand.

The working parts, no. The iron frame, yes. But getting the frame out can be pretty rough.

The tuning pegs might become stuck to the side of the pegboard holes they are in. Also, if the strings are not kept at the correct tension, there is a real possibility of the iron frame becoming warped or even breaking.

Compared to pianos, violins are really, really simple machines. You have strings, a bridge, a sound box with some holes in it and a couple of posts inside, some tuning pegs and that's about it. A single key on a piano has way more parts, and most of them move.

The design and construction of string instruments like violins is pretty much a solved problem. Yes there is variation in the way the wood is shaped and carved, which gives you the different grades of quality, but the basic engineering problem of "how do you make a violin" is solved.

Because a piano is much more complex there is a lot of room for continual innovation in both materials and construction. This might be the reason that you don't see people performing on old pianos - the newer ones are just technologically superior. That and it just takes so much effort (and money) to maintain a quality piano.

That being said, there is a legion of both pianists and violinists that will tell you (incorrectly or not) that the sound of an instrument improves with age. Something about the fibers in the wood being affected by vibration.

[Edit: maintenance cost as a factor]

I once bought a beater piano for $200 so I could practice tuning it. We didn't have room in our apartment, so a friend let us set it up in his and I'd come over once in a while and bang on it (thanks, Eric!).

Most of the weight of a piano comes from the cast iron frame inside that holds the >20 tons of tension from the strings. And this piano was no exception - it was an "upright grand" meaning it was as tall as a baby grand is long. It took six of us to cajole it up my friend's stairs.

So when moving time came for him and his wife we had to decide what to do with the piano. None of us wanted to move the damn thing again, and since I really didn't have an emotional attachment to it whatsoever, we came up with the next best idea - cut it to pieces with a sawzall. And like another commenter said, if you ever have the opportunity to do this, do it. It was pretty fun. There's nothing quite like the sound of taking wire cutters to a fully tense piano string.

Also, if you're at least semi-serious about becoming good at piano, you'll want a real one because of the action (and if you're really serious about it, you'll want a grand). Digital pianos, while having improved over previous models, are still not close enough to the feel of a real piano to give you good tactile feedback and therefore good technique.

I've found Command-T slows way down on large trees, causing a very noticeable interruption in my "flow" when I use it. Also, it's written in ruby which can be a bit more painful to get started with if your distro doesn't compile ruby support into vim by default.

Sorry in advance for the pedantry. ;) Dissonance is when notes "clash" with each other and in traditional voice leading dissonance always resolves to consonance.

Atonality, on the other hand, is a more recent development in Western music and is defined as the lack of a tonal center. Atonality can be an extremely interesting way to write music. Some of the first atonal music (note how it's not markedly "dissonant") can be found in Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune[1] and the prelude to act I of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde [2].

I don't listen to a huge amount of pop music, but is there anyone out there that is at least experimenting with atonality?

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_7loz-HWUM [2]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bwl3GYBM3E

Only easy because they are traditionally taught first. This is because from a music theory standpoint the keys in which those chords are tonic have the least number of sharps and flats. From a memory and hand position standpoint chords that have a black key in the middle (D maj. E maj. etc) are the easiest.

The whole "Chrome as OS" thing will benefit from this.

I'm curious to know what was so frustrating. I've had my tab for a few months and love it to death.

Yes, you've managed to figure out why tax exempt status exists.

Kudos to him for redistributing his own wealth the way he deems fit. I admire that. But let's not try to push this way of thinking on everyone else (not saying that's what you're doing here) - for any given person the potential for abundance and wealth is so damn near infinite let's just call it that.

Edit - meaning to say there is no proverbial "pie" that you can only have a small slice of. Your pie is as big as you make it.

What a damn fine time to be alive.

I did that with a $50 bill once on my company's big office copier just to see what it would look like (uh, I swear) and was pretty floored when I saw the copy come out with stripes through it. I tried it with every other denomination I could find, and if I remember correctly bills at or below $5 don't have that feature (at least not at the time).

"I just wonder why the US legislature would want to deliberately cripple US's strength on the web."

I dunno, my guess is there must be a lot of money involved.

So I've been doing every google search these clueless legislators have brought up in defense of the act:

"You can search for 'free harry potter movie' and watch it for free"

"You can go type 'j edgar' into google and piracy links show up above legitimate links"

"You can watch breaking dawn online right now, and it's not even out yet"

etc...

Try them yourself as they bring them up. They're full of bullshit.

An example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1pcEtHI_w

I can kind of do this, but the volume these guys get on their overtones is amazing.

I didn't get a CS degree and therefore had no experience with state machines until I started programming professionally. Maybe that's why I took to them so quickly and used them from the get-go on my personal project. Their usefulness is so obvious.

"A story which suggested that users of Internet Explorer have a lower IQ than people who chose other browsers appears to have been an elaborate hoax."

"'It's obviously very easy to create a bogus site like this - as all phishers know it's easy to rip-off someone else's webpages and pictures,' he said."

So setting up a fake site with fake data is elaborate? Seems like these news agencies are the ones with IQs in the ~80s.

While I agree with the conclusion that you only get out of something what you put in, a quick review of the history of genius will reveal several characters that did have an innate talent that was indeed cultivated through hard work, but was not learned "from scratch". You may, in fact, be the artistic type, and glean from that a certain advantage over someone who is not.

My home network is based on the Batman universe:

My shiny new power tower (Windows 7): Batman

Same tower booted into ubuntu: TwoFace

NAS: arkham

Content Filter: gordon

Wifi SSID: TheRiddler

etc, etc

...or to wave it around all over the urinal whilst trying to clean virtual graffiti? Seems like you could turn something like this http://www.toiletmarksman.com/toilet_fly.php into an ad platform too and keep the floor and surrounding walls a little cleaner.

When I was 8 my classroom had a subscription to 3-2-1 Contact magazine. Every issue they would include a BASIC program that you could type in and play around with. Since I couldn't take the magazines home, I hand-copied the programs to note cards (and the first time, being a total noob, didn't differentiate the zeroes from the O's - my first experience with "debugging"). Those were the days...

...which on HN should mean the same thing, right?

Thank you for putting this up! I have a goal to launch http://privio.net by the 18th. It's nice to get that out there - feels... official.

Finishing anything you start is pretty damn cool.