If you open an MP3, speed it up in Audacity, and save it as an MP3, you are still re-encoding it and decreasing quality, which is what I assume you mean by "conversion".

After any processing step, you should save to a lossless format to avoid this. You can start with whatever format you want (AAC from iTunes and MP3 from Amazon are pretty indistinguishable in subjective quality.)

Better yet, use a portable player that can change playback speed on the fly while decoding. (many "DJ" apps, a hardware player than can run Rockbox, etc.)

Realistically, he's not going to notice the marginal quality loss when he's jogging.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6150773

I thought part 1 (http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...) was particularly insightful:

"A certain small number of very vocal men (and it was always men) resented that we were not letting [them] try to exercise additional control over our team members. This was true even though compelling research has shown that servers do not adjust quality of service as a result of tips; instead the idea that the restaurant was not offering our servers up as objects of control, was heresy. For these people, the primary service they wanted from the restaurant was the opportunity to pay for favors from the server..."

dont really agree with his analysis.

I think the vocal group probably felt if i have to explicitly pay a separate line item for service then I want explicit control of that... the whole 'primary service is control' angle feels to me like newspeak

I was a TA at this one (and the last). It was really great to see the high turnout and how passionate the organizers are. Many thanks to all involved.

If you want to improve your people skills and ability to explain technical concepts (I'll be honest, I'm not very good at either, which is why I do this as practice), I really recommend answering beginner questions from people of a different background than your own. Apart from getting better at teaching (you work in a team, right? You need to explain your code) you can get a lot of insight into how programming language design is user interface. Users are a diverse group.

If I press a key it just changes to a giant "3" and then a giant "NaN".

This has actually been a debated usage in American English:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-united-stat...

That debate effectively ended in 1865.

I've always loved the one-liner of this in Perl: http://learn.perl.org/faq/perlfaq5.html#How-do-I-select-a-ra...

Let's unpack that,

    rand($.) < 1 && ($line = $_) while <>;

We all know rand and while, but if you don't know perl the rest is hard.

<> is a common way to read stdin, and the value is assigned to the $_ special variable.

The one I didn't know was $., the current input line number. In other words, its your loop index that automatically increments.

http://www.kichwa.com/quik_ref/spec_variables.html

That's good until your input stream exceeds 32768 lines [1]. There are better generators available from CPAN, like Math::TrulyRandom.

[1] - http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/random

Release notes might be a more useful link: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/22.0/releasenotes/

Wondering about the Web Speech API and speech input...Chrome does a great job, but doesn't seem to allow hooking up to 3rd party recognizers like Nuance or even something local.

Anyone know how Mozilla is going to handle this? Are they going to use Google's recognizers in the cloud?

tnx mate :)

Unlike most people, I have a protected Twitter account (my tweets are not public). In order to "opt out", I have to authorize their app to be able to read all my tweets! Insane.

I guess I'll just continue to hope they're not building a "shadow profile" on me based on my friends' public tweets (and pretending said profile doesn't exist... I don't appear to have one, anyway).

I got tired of looking at it in my terminal, so I made this: http://man-ascii.com/

(I had forgotten until now that the Linux and BSD versions of this man page are so differently laid out! I was running Linux at the time.)