blitzprog's comments

blitzprog | 8 years ago | on: SoundCloud's Collapse

Paying for a music playback?

I am paying for music storage, but playback should use source quality at all times. Exceptions are when the track is uploaded in a lossless codec like WAV or FLAC. Then it should be OGG compressed. If you use MP3, at least use 192 kbps or better 320 kbps.

Example: https://clyp.it/ allows 320 kbps streaming and it costs 0$.

blitzprog | 8 years ago | on: SoundCloud's Collapse

Wrong, I simply wasn't using it and heard of the service.

You can hear the bad quality by comparing it to a high quality version of the same song on good speakers.

blitzprog | 8 years ago | on: SoundCloud's Collapse

From a consumer perspective, SoundCloud lost my interest when I heard it's 128 kbps transcoded mp3 you're getting when streaming songs.

No thanks.

blitzprog | 10 years ago | on: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

Recognize the real source of the problem.

Like you said, someone trying to get information about the topics you mentioned could simply be doing this out of curiosity. Now person A from the government says you are X. However you are not X, you are Y.

Think again, what is the actual problem? The actual problem is not the data which is 100% correct.

The actual problem is people's prejudices and assumptions. This is what we need to fix. If someone searches about topic Z we should think very carefully about the consequences of drawing an assumption.

However, this view is very ideological. Your view on the current state is more practical. I do not disagree with your statements, I simply wish that we can address the real issue here in the future. Even if it takes us centuries.

blitzprog | 10 years ago | on: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

I see your point. If society ends up believing in the fact that assumptions based on collected data have suddenly turned into "facts" then we will be truly...let me say it frankly...we are done for.

I believe when this happens Hacker News won't exist anymore because the intelligence of human beings will be comparable to that of a fly.

Luckily...this didn't happen yet because I can still have intellectual discussions, even on the internet.

I like your separation of "ideologically" and "pragmatically". I agree, it's not a pragmatical approach.

blitzprog | 10 years ago | on: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

First of all thank you for respecting my opinion. I appreciate it.

1.) Free speech is a completely different topic. Snowden's quote on this page makes no sense to me no matter how often I re-read it. If free speech didn't exist I wouldn't be able to express my opinion about privacy :)

2.) Privacy means hiding the truth. Hiding what really happened. Hiding who you really are. I believe it is a flaw of the human personality that makes us want to hide information and eventually lie about it.

I don't care if Google or the government knows that I'm searching "[insert embarassing keywords for you here]" or if Facebook knows my location, or if Twitter knows what I like based on the people I follow.

Who is the government? It's people. People like you and me. If people decide to make assumptions based on data they collected and the assumptions aren't correct it's their own fault for assuming something in the first place (because...you know...it's an assumption...it can be wrong).

I am not aggressively opposing the concept of privacy. I respect other people's opinion.

blitzprog | 10 years ago | on: Internet users are increasingly blocking ads, including on their mobiles

> so why do you feel its ok for the site to not make any revenue?

There are many, many ways to monetize. Ad blocking doesn't stop them from making any revenue for their content. If the company in question still didn't realize that people don't like ads and any decently informed person uses an ad blocker then they are probably behind the times. Why would they rely on ads exclusively to monetize their content?

Relying on ads to monetize might have worked in the past. Adopt new ways to make money, the trend nowadays is to sell software and content as a service. That is much better than forcing me to view some gifs / videos / annoying ads or even text ads that waste precious space on the website.

blitzprog | 11 years ago | on: FOAM: New JavaScript Framework by Google Engineers

Regardless of how good it is, the presentation could and should be improved. Quick to grasp examples, an explanation telling me which problems this project solves and as a bonus how it compares to other frameworks. All of this should be on the GitHub readme frontpage. Poor presentation is like a 0.01 multiplier for your amount of potential users. It's easy to avert your eyes from this but it's almost as important as the quality of the product itself.

blitzprog | 13 years ago | on: The Crack Programming Language

That's because there is no online version of the documentation right now. It's only available in the editor, it's an Alpha after all. Just because the compiler is written in Python it does not mean the Flua programs are executed in Python. In fact they can be executed in multiple environments and C++ is the one which is currently being developed, hence the programs _are_ fast. How come the Windows download doesn't work for you? It works on vanilla Windows, that's really strange.

Just stay on a constructive level. It would have been nice if you submitted a bug report on GitHub about the error you got on your Windows machine.

blitzprog | 13 years ago | on: So Pythonistas, you want to get rid of the GIL...

I'm using QThread for PyQt GUI applications. However the GIL makes it impossible to execute _Python_ code in parallel. I can understand the reasons for that, however it doesn't change the fact that it makes my application inherently slower and is therefore something I dislike.

Apart from that I really like Python.

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