willtim

8 ms·

61.
by willtim 5y ago
Whilst it may appear that concatenation of strings is easier in other (more declarative) languages, in practice, understanding the runtime performance/complexity and memory usage/lifetimes is far from trivial. Sure, a more declara
62.
by willtim 5y ago
> Everything about these laptops feels cheap in comparison to a Mac. They are bigger, thicker, heavier, more plastic, hotter, and less elegant. This is completely wrong. For example, a Lenovo X1 Carbon is 2.5 pounds, which is lighter tha
63.
by willtim 6y ago
Yes I agree, the UI is a mess and they have made some bad design decisions. One time I was on train with my network connection dropping constantly and Thunderbird was giving me a model pop-up dialogue each time! It still gives pop-ups for u
64.
by willtim 6y ago
> all of the email clients on Linux were awful Thunderbird is pretty good and in my experience, less buggy than Apple Mail, especially when using providers other than iCloud. My wife absolutely hated Apple Mail, primarily because it woul
65.
by willtim 6y ago
This uses subtyping polymorphism not higher-kinded parametric polymorphism. If subtyping worked perfectly in all important cases, "generics" (parametric polymorphism) would not have been retrofitted to Java.
66.
by willtim 6y ago
Designing a serialisation format has a lot similarities with designing a programming language: data types, declarative/ease-of-use versus full control, abstractions, static versus dynamic memory areas, optimising representations etc. T
67.
by willtim 6y ago
Three years of support is very poor and encourages e-waste, I will not be buying a phone with Qualcomm hardware in it.
68.
by willtim 6y ago
An insignificant breaking change is still a breaking change; and over time they build up. This may explain why so many developers have been unhappy with GTK3.
69.
by willtim 6y ago
> and hints at backwards compatibility. To me it communicates no commitment to backwards compatibility, i.e. no semantic versioning. This might be enforceable if one is Apple, but doesn't sound good for an open-source platform.
70.
by willtim 6y ago
Very strange, I can confirm that your Spotify sample does sound much better than my one. Mine sounds identical on Windows and Android though, two very different platforms, so it may indeed be a UK problem. Thank you very much for the code.
71.
by willtim 6y ago
I've uploaded a small example, a small clip taken from the CD followed by the same clip captured from Spotify: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F3NvOpqcMfvNSmyyvbgfUlV6XMO...
72.
by willtim 6y ago
This reply might be interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26354999
73.
by willtim 6y ago
Thanks for the recommendations. I'm still very new to streaming and still buy CDs for most of my music. I am currently using UAPP on my phone and plug it straight into an RME ADI-2 DAC, the advantage being I don't have to fire up
74.
by willtim 6y ago
I can confirm Qobuz sounds great. I've signed up for a free trial. The integration with UAPP on Android works well and gets around the Android 48Khz limitation. Thanks for the recommendation.
75.
by willtim 6y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. I see that Qobuz also integrates with UAPP on Android (which gets around the 48Khz limit). Since I listen to mainly Jazz and Classical, it sounds like a good fit.
76.
by willtim 6y ago
Sure, one example is the first minute opening of Osmo Vanska's Mahler 5. The big crescendo between 40-45 seconds sounds particularly bad, lots of break-up and distortion. Sounds fantastic on the CD.
77.
by willtim 6y ago
I have it set to "Very High" and have their normalisation turned off. I can provide samples demonstrating distortion and break-up; the waveforms even look completely different visually. It's even audible over non-audiophile h
78.
by willtim 6y ago
The marketing for this one hasn't reached me yet. Thanks for the recommendation. EDIT: looks like Amazon HD might force re-sampling of 44.1KHz to 48KHz on Android, which is a shame if true.
79.
by willtim 6y ago
I am thinking of moving to Tidal. The Spotify sound quality is awful for Classical music with their compression/processing unable to deal with complex passages. The Android app also upsamples everything to 48KHz and has occasional rand
80.
by willtim 6y ago
> A new format is a really weird way to go about fixing a problem that already has a solution. Stripping comments before handing off to a JSON parser is not a full solution. For example, if the file has to be augmented with additional da
81.
by willtim 6y ago
I am not the source of the original statement, but my own interpretation of "powerful" aligns with simplicity and flexibility. Plain text has only slightly more structure than a stream of bytes, meaning it retains a lot of simplic
82.
by willtim 6y ago
Plain text is simple, elegant and has open-standards - it traces its origins back to telegraph codes that we have been using for hundreds of years - and still forms the basis of most of the internet now. So I am inclined to agree with the s
83.
by willtim 6y ago
Yes, deprecation is fine, as long as they are not removed.
84.
by willtim 6y ago
I was responding to "Can Haskell evolve?", I was trying to say "I think it can, but I would prefer it to evolve in a new language". The standard library is riddled with partial functions, like head and tail. We should no
85.
by willtim 6y ago
Only if Haskell stops being maintained, which I very much doubt would happen. Therefore no one is forced into the change.
86.
by willtim 6y ago
> You realize 3 would make 1 and 2 harder or less valuable? Yes that is why I think (1) and (2) need a new language. > And 3 would have also prevented a gazillion 1s and 2s from being still with us? I disagree. Most new features have
87.
by willtim 6y ago
IMHO Haskell is missing three features that would really improve programming in the large: 1) better structural types. For example, polymorphic extensible records and variants. These could even be the basis for all algebraic data types. Cur
88.
by willtim 6y ago
I usually recommend "Since We Met" to anyone new to Evans, its a great collection of tunes and a great performance. "I Will Say Goodbye" is a great record too, although my CD copy has lots of tape wow and flutter all ove
89.
by willtim 6y ago
The problem with encapsulation in OOP, is that the (mutable) state is not truly encapsulated, it is just hidden. State encapsulation would be a pure function that uses mutation internally. OOP encourages mutable state and in general it is n
90.
by willtim 6y ago
The original ones had some problems that were never fixed (IIRC, the original firmware was outsourced to a company that went under), but the Advantage 2 was a redesign and works great (at least for me).

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