firehose

djempirical

the “further reading” list had a shermer link so i didn’t share that far.

At Spotify we take user feedback seriously. We noticed some users complaining about our shuffling algorithm playing a few songs from the same artist right after each other. The users were asking “Why isn’t your shuffling random?”. We responded “Hey! Our shuffling is random!”

So who was right? As it turns out, both we and the users were right but it’s a bit more complicated than that. It also tells a nice story about how to interpret users’ feedback.

Our perspective

Since the Spotify service launched, we used Fisher-Yates shuffle to generate a perfectly random shuffling of a playlist. However, perfectly random means that the following two orders are equally likely to occur (different colors represent different artists): A side note: I think Fisher-Yates shuffle is one of the most beautiful random algorithms and it’s amazing that such complicated problem can be solved in 3 lines of code in some programming languages. And this is accomplished using the optimal number of operations and optimal amount of randomness.

Gambler’s fallacy

At first we didn’t understand what the users were trying to tell us by saying that the shuffling is not random, but then we read the comments more carefully and noticed that some people don’t want the same artist playing two or three times within a short time period.

It is known that we humans are sometimes bad at estimating probabilities. Suppose that you use a coin every day at work to decide where to eat lunch. The first four days of the week the coin decided that you should eat Thai food, but you prefer Indian. You might think “The coin decided four times this week in favor of Thai, it must be Indian today”.

If you think the coin has higher probability of deciding for Indian on Friday, you are wrong. Throwing the coin for a millionth time is the same as throwing it for the first time. After all, it is just a simple coin, it has no memory, doesn’t know who threw it, etc. So both heads and tails have the same probability on Friday – 50%.

Another example: people often think that if they haven’t won anything in a scratchcard lottery a couple of times in a row, they should have bigger chance of winning now. This phenomenon is called Gambler’s fallacy and it’s the same fallacy that lead to the mistake about Thai/Indian food.

Let’s go back to our users who have also fallen victims to Gambler’s fallacy. If you just heard a song from a particular artist, that doesn’t mean that the next song will be more likely from a different artist in a perfectly random order. However, the old saying says that the user is always right, so we decided to look into ways of changing our shuffling algorithm so that the users are happier. We learned that they don’t like perfect randomness.

The algorithm

It seemed like a problem that must have been solved by somebody else before. Indeed, we found a blog post The art of shuffling music by Martin Fiedler that solves precisely the same problem. However, his algorithm is complicated and could be very slow in some cases, so we modified it to better suit our needs.

The main idea is very similar to the methods used in dithering. Suppose we have a black and white picture that uses a few hundred shades of gray.

We would like to simplify the picture even further by using only pixels of two colors, black and white. We could use random sampling: say a pixel has an 80% shade of gray, then it will have 80% chance of becoming black and 20% chance of becoming white. We process pixels one by one and for each one we randomly decide its new color based on the original shade of gray. However, the result is very far from satisfactory.

As you can see, the black pixels form clusters and there are also big white spots. It would be better if the black and white spots were spread out more evenly. Other algorithms like Floyd–Steinberg dithering avoid clusters and produce much better results.

The clusters seen on the previous picture almost fully disappeared. We can take inspiration from the dithering algorithms to solve our problem with clusters of songs by the same artist; we will try to spread them throughout the whole playlist. Suppose we have a playlist containing some songs by The White Stripes, The xx, Bonobo, Britney Spears (Toxic!) and Jaga Jazzist. For each artist we take their songs and try to stretch them as evenly as possible along the whole playlist. Then we collect all songs and order them by their position. A picture is better than a thousand words.

As you can see, songs from an artist are nicely spread out and it looks pretty random to a human eye. Let’s look in more detail how the algorithm works.

• Let’s say we have 4 songs from The White Stripes as in the picture above. This means that they should appear roughly every 25% of the length of the playlist. We spread out the 4 songs along a line, but their distance will vary randomly from about 20% to 30% to make the final order look more random. You should be able to see that the distance between the red circles on the line is not the same.
• We introduce a random offset in the beginning; otherwise all first songs would end up at position 0. You can see that both Britney Spears and Jaga Jazzist only have one song, but the random offset causes them to appear at a random place in the playlist.
• We also shuffle the songs by the same artist among each other. Here we can use Fisher-Yates shuffle or apply the same algorithm recursively, for example we could prevent songs from the same album playing too close to each other.

All in all the algorithm is very simple and it can be implemented in just a couple of lines. It’s also very fast and produces decent results.

Conclusion

The algorithm is now rolled out to everyone using our desktop client and other clients will follow soon. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on our Community page.

Original Source

midcenturymodernfreak:

Kung Fu Weather Man! | Bruce Lee as Kato (unmasked) in the Green Hornet TV Series (1966-67) - Via: 1 | 2

A central concept behind the 3-D printed housing idea is to use recycled materials and cut down on transportation requirements.


The Kamermaker movable, large-scale 3-D printer has been delivered to the site in Amsterdam where DUS Architects will build their canal house.

txchnologist:

Dutch Architects 3-D Printing Canal House

A team in Amsterdam is working to 3-D print the classic Dutch canal house, a project that marries the city’s traditional architecture with state-of-the-art additive manufacturing.

Their effort is more than a study in futuristic design and building—they’ve got their sights on very real global issues that are set to mount in coming years.

"For the first time in history, over half the world’s population is living in cities," says Hans Vermeulen, a cofounder of the 3-D Print Canal House project. “We need a rapid building technique to keep up the pace with the growth of megacities and we thing 3-D printing can actually be the technique to provide good housing for the billions of people on this planet.”

See the video and read more below.

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Three years after copyright review recommended changes to the law to allow format-shifting for CDs and ebooks, the 1988 law will get an update to allow it

SUPER PRESS START (by NicksplosionFX)

submitted by CosmicGame [link] [11 comments]

Vernon Sewell, Curse of the Crimson Altar, 1968

Official death toll in Washington landslide raised to 21 from 18 Daily News & Analysis The official death toll from last week's devastating mudslide in Washington state has risen to 21 from 18, Snohomish County Emergency Management Department officials said on Sunday. Agency program manager Jason Biermann told reporters the latest ... and more »

Search ends for man swept away off California Newsbug.info GUADALUPE, Calif. (AP) — Rescuers have ended their search for a 43-year-old man swept to sea during a baptism ceremony on a Southern California beach. The U.S. Coast Guard says the search was called off about midnight Sunday and there are no ... and more »

The school said on its website that it had an "active shooter" on its Owings Mills campus north of Baltimore. "Shelter in place until further notice," it said. The Baltimore County Police said that officers had responded to a report of a person on the campus with a "long gun." There were no reports of shots being fired, it said on its Facebook page.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Reuters reports that Wal-Mart has sued Visa for $5 billion, accusing the credit and debit card network of excessively high card swipe fees. Wal-mart is seeking damages from price fixing and other antitrust violations that it claims took place between January 1, 2004 and November 27, 2012. In its lawsuit, Wal-Mart contends that Visa, in concert with banks, sought to prevent retailers from protecting themselves against those swipe fees, eventually hurting sales. 'The anticompetitive conduct of Visa and the banks forced Wal-Mart to raise retail prices paid by its customers and/or reduce retail services provided to its customers as a means of offsetting some of the artificially inflated interchange fees,' says Wal-Mart in court documents. 'As a result, Wal-Mart's retail sales were below what they would have been otherwise.' Interchange fees, the industry term for card-swipe fees, have been a major point of contention between retailers and banks. The fees are set by Visa and other card networks and collected by card-issuing banks like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Retailers have argued that the fees had been set too high due to a lack of competition with the two payment industry giants. Wal-Mart also took a shot against Visa over payment card security. Data breaches last year at Target Corp., Neiman Marcus and others have drawn attention to the country's slow adoption of card technology that uses computer chips and PIN numbers and is seen as less susceptible to fraud than the current system of magnetic stripes. 'Wal-Mart was further harmed by anti-innovation conduct on the part of Visa and the banks,' says the lawsuit, 'such as perpetuating the use of fraud-prone magnetic stripe system in the U.S. and the continued use of signature authentication despite knowledge that PIN authentication is more secure, a fact Visa has acknowledged repeatedly.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AltDrag:

AltDrag gives you the ability to move and resize your windows in a new way. When running, you can simply keep the Alt key depressed and then click and drag any window. Besides just moving windows, you can resize, maximize and close them too.

For Windows.

Via Trivium.

There is no company that I have changed my mind about more often than Facebook.

One of the first articles I wrote for Stratechery – almost exactly a year ago – explained why LINE and other messaging apps were superior to Facebook on mobile. I predicted that Facebook Home would be a failure because Mark Zuckerberg and company didn’t understand how people used mobile phones, and reveled when my prediction came true.

Facebook’s incredible transition to a mobile advertising powerhouse, though, changed my mind; in Mobile Makes Facebook Just an App; That’s Great News I argued that the constraints of mobile solved a lot of problems for Facebook, and I’ve been largely bullish ever since (although I was critical of their attempt to buy Snapchat). I also approved of Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, and wrote how Facebook was becoming the Social Conglomerate.

This week’s acquisition of Oculus, though, has changed my mind once again. I’m back to being a Facebook bear.

---

There is certain logic to any Facebook acquisition given the current stock price. The current market valuation of $156 billion implies significant revenue growth on an annual basis far greater than simply converting desktop revenue streams to mobile ones; if you assume the stock price will decrease in the future, then making largely stock-based purchases makes a ton of sense. Moreover, Zuckerberg is highly incentivized to spend Facebook’s money; he only owns 28% of that money, but has 100% control of Facebook – and of whatever is purchased.

So why not buy an option on what could be the next platform? That is Fred Wilson’s argument:

But the roadmap has been clear for the past seven years (maybe longer). The next thing was mobile. Mobile is now the last thing. And all of these big tech companies are looking for the next thing to make sure they don’t miss it.. And they will pay real money (to you and me) for a call option on the next thing.

Zuckerberg said much the same thing:

Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. For the past few years, this has mostly meant building mobile apps that help you share with the people you care about. We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we’re in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences.

I have two very significant problems with this:

• Buying WhatsApp was the first step in making Facebook competitive in the messaging space, but the job is not even close to being done. When I wrote Messaging: Mobile’s Killer App I barely mentioned WhatsApp simply because it is barely competitive with the platforms that LINE and WeChat are building; for most users, it’s simply free SMS, and if Zuckerberg thinks Facebook is home safe in mobile, particularly in Asia, he is sorely mistaken.
• More significantly, while Oculus’ technology is by all accounts incredible, I, quite strongly, don’t believe it is what is next for general purpose computing.¹

In this regard, perhaps the most pertinent article I’ve written wasn’t about Facebook at all; it was about Apple, and their new digital hub. I argued that Apple is positioning the iPhone as the center of your digital existence, with a potential iWatch as an extension of that, and, perhaps over time, the future hub.

Setting aside implementation details for a moment, it’s difficult to think of a bigger contrast than a watch (or ring) and an Occulus headset that you, in the words of Zuckerberg, “put on in your home.” What makes mobile such a big deal relative to the PC is the fact it is with you everywhere. A virtual reality headset is actually a regression in which your computing experience is neatly segregated into something you do deliberately.

The power of computing, at least in my world view, was best articulated by – who else – Steve Jobs years ago:

What is so powerful about this analogy – that the computer is a bicycle for the mind – is that it elevates the humanity of a desired action, in this case transportation, and inserts the computer as an aid. This is exactly what the iPhone and the smartphones that followed have done for people: instead of a computer being a destination, it’s something that is always with us, ready to call up a map, or a restaurant recommendation, or simply fill time with a flapping bird. To put it another way, mobile is a big deal not because we use computers more, but because a computer is with us in more places.

Envisioning a future in which Oculus’ technology is the dominant platform is diametrically opposed: it’s a reality where humans retreat from day-to-day activities in favor of computers. This idea – a life lived in computers – is something that appeals to the technically predisposed; who among us spends all day in front a glowing screen, and then goes home to do the exact same? I’m sure Zuckerberg is in that boat. But it’s a much smaller boat than many technologists realize.

For most people, computers are a means, not an end. Computers help them create music, or write novels, communicate, wayfind, or hookup. To use Jobs’ analogy, it’s not that people want to ride a bicycle for a bicycle’s sake, but because they want to go from Point A to Point B; offering such a person a full-featured massage chair simply misses the point.

Zuckerberg’s biggest strength is his willingness to adjust and adapt, as seen by Facebook’s mobile pivot. This acquisition, though, suggests that pivot was rooted more in a response to the facts on the ground than it was in a fundamental appreciation of why smartphones are the best bicycle yet, and that makes me pessimistic.

1. Killer game platform though

The post Face is not the Future appeared first on stratēchery by Ben Thompson.

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KUTV 2News

NHTSA to require backup cameras on all vehicles USA TODAY The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a proposed regulation Monday requiring all light vehicles-- including cars, SUVs, trucks and vans -- to have "rear-view visibility systems," in effect, requiring backup cameras. The rule applies to all ... US: Rearview cameras required in new cars by 2018Boston.com US Regulators to Require Rear-Visibility Technology in VehiclesWall Street Journal Feds: Vehicles to require backup cameras by 2018MLive.com Automobile Magazine -fox4kc.com -Business Recorder all 116 news articles »

djempirical

MOTHERFUCKER, FRED SCHNEIDER IS THE FRED SCHNEIDER OF PUNK.

the interviewer is pure summer’s eve so you don’t need to watch.

The Fred Schneider of punk takes issue with our advertisers.

Original Source

petermorwood:

thrashleydawn:

femintits:

so my friend is in italy and she bought me this

Is this what eating a bag of dicks is like

They’re called cazzetti d’angelo.

Google Translate gives “cazzetti” as “cocks” but I’ve been told it’s more a cute childish word like “willies” or “peepees”, supposed to be funny, not sexy. (NB that the “sexy pasta” label is in English.)

But if you want to translate that sign (looks like it was photo’d in Naples) as “prick’n’pussy pasta” you’d be right. Obviously the Italian words aren’t considered as rude, crude, obscene, offensive etc. as their English equivalents. Put that English version in an Irish or British shop window and it might generate a order to take it down. In prudish America it could well have some sort of legal repercussion as well.

Fichette (little figs) look like what you’d expect…

These aren’t just for sex shops, for sale “under-the-counter” or for tourists (we watched a co-ed gaggle of college-age US kids in Rome having fits, torn between staring and not knowing where to look). They can be bought separated or mixed (misto = mixed)…

…And some mixed packs even include little pasta hearts. Awww, cute.

Quite the thing for a seductive evening, if everyone will please just stop giggling…

:-D

Reblogged for WonderHubby’s annotation.

Oculus's backers could have had a 145x return on their donation. Here's why that never would have happened.

People are logging on to sites and apps

Quinns: How is everybody? Are we all recovered from the biblical deluge that was last week's news? I saw one of you got a token right in the eye, so I hope this week will be a little more sedate *is passed piece of paper* OH COME ON

Alright, then! Let's get through this. Fantasy Flight has announced a new, English language edition of The Last Banquet (seen above). A feast of a game, The Last Banquet sits between 6 and 25 players, who (depending on their team and the scenario) will try and manipulate everybody's seating positions. Like a kind of... turn-based musical chairs, with added poison?

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An anonymous reader writes "In February, Judge William Alsup ruled in favor of Rahinah Ibrahim, who sued the U.S. government in 2006 after she was mistakenly added to the no-fly list and subsequently denied entry to the country. Now, the Department of Justice has finally decided it won't appeal the ruling, making Ibrahim the first person to challenge the list at trial and get herself removed. 'But Ibrahim's case, as just one of hundreds of thousands of individuals who have been placed on such lists, shows the system's opacity. First, the only surefire way to even determine if one is on such a list in the U.S. is to attempt to board a flight and be denied. Even after that happens, when a denied person inquires about his or her status, the likely response will be that the government "can neither confirm nor deny" the placement on such lists. The government's surrender in Ibrahim comes on the heels of a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union that shows just how insanely difficult it is to contest one's status on the government blacklists (PDF).'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBA2k14 is probably the best computer RPG I've played since Skyrim. Career mode is a ton of fun and very immersive.

Google Maps has introduced the Pokémon Challenge, a contest to become an official Pokémon Master at Google. The contest challenges users to collect a set of 150 different Pokémon from the video game franchise of the same name that are hiding throughout various locations on the service’s mobile application. “Strong-willed” applicants with every single Pokémon will be invited to Googleplex for a final hiring round, and the winner will ultimately start at Google as a Pokémon Master on September 1st, 2014. The challenge, which is conveniently right in time for April 1st, ends on April 2nd at 2:00PM PDT.

We value employees who are risk-taking and detail-oriented, have deep technical knowledge, and can navigate through tall grass to capture wild creatures. It turns out that these skills have a lot in common with another profession—that of the Pokémon Master. With that in mind, we’ve worked with Pokémon and Nintendo to develop a new training tool to help people hone their Pokémon-capturing abilities using Google Maps.

via Google Maps

The office conversation this lunchtime went a bit like this:

Me: “Two beer posts in a week is too much, isn’t it.”
Ben: “Maybe.”
Me: “OK. Damn shame: I’ve been sent a great automated brewing project; it’s way more complicated than the ones I’ve seen before. I’ll maybe put it up next week, after the new website goes live.”
James: “Can you send it to me now please? I’d love to read that. I want to update my system at home.”
Gordon: “Me too, please.”
Laura: “Can I see it?”
Clive: “That sounds brilliant.”
Eben: “Mmm. Beer.”
Lance: “Did someone say beer?”
Emma: “Do you have a link I can see?”
Me: “OK. I’ll POST ABOUT IT TODAY.”

So I apologise for inflicting two posts about beer on you in three days: I promise not to mention fermentation at all next week.

Ted Hale blogs at Raspberry Pi Hobbyist, where he concentrates on physical computing with the Raspberry Pi. His most recent project brings in another of his hobbies: home brewing.

We like this not only because we like beer, but because think more Pi projects should employ propane.

We’ve seen brewing projects where a Pi controls simple heating and cooling, but here, Ted uses a Pi here to control all the parts of the brewing method called partial mash: for this he needs to be able to:

• Open and close a valve to a tank of propane
• Start a grill igniter to light the burner
• Detect if the burner actually did light
• Sense the temperature for the wort (the brew of water, malt extract, and hops)
• Operate a pump for circulating water through the wort chiller.

I used shielded audio cables commonly used for microphones.  I am also a musician so I had some of this already.  If you have to buy a small reel you may find that it is rather expensive.  Cat-5 cable may also work well.  That is what I use for my hot tub controller, but it is not subjected to the massive EMI of this system.

There’s a writeup over at Raspberry Pi Hobbyist about how the whole setup comes together, and James, I expect you to have overhauled your entire home system over the weekend.