skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, convenience is a big plus for illegally downloaded music.

But I believe, some sort of middleman will remain in the digital world.

Their value proposition is reducing transaction costs -- the costs associated with finding content that's worth to be produced, promoting it, distributing it to a place near you, and managing all monetary transactions.

Yes, distribution is a no-brainer in the digital world. All other points, however, remain valid.

And as far as I know, concerts and tours are expenses for lesser known bands, not money makers. In general, planning a tour is a very risky business. Today, a band may recoup some of the expense by selling physical stuff (CDs or merchandising). In the digital world, only merchandising remains.

On a side note, producers are currently struck in the world of physical copies because there's no reliable copyright enforcement method. Otherwise, they would have embraced it years ago. It's simply less expensive to make digital copies (and therefore generates higher profit if prices stay the same).

Under the premise of the OP, buying music would be as convenient as getting a illegal copy, I'd say.
Great email security article.
The tragedy of the commons is not about how many people abuse the commons, but about the fact that the commons is abusable precisely because there are no property rights in it.

The obvious solution is for fish farms to start raising Omega-3 production, but the fact that the fish in the ocean are unowned means it's still cheaper to overfish, and the only time that won't be true is immediately before the ecological disaster (assuming it is one) of menhaden extinction.
$28/hour would work out to $56k/year, before overtime. He'd have to work a lot of overtime to get to $100k.
It's hard to believe that business checks are going to be phased out in a world where Morgan Stanley takes $9Bn in funding in the form of a paper check.

For small businesses, it's also hard to see how you replace the value of being able to fedex a check to a new vendor. Online payment works in places where both companies are established and have a relationship, and less well elsewhere.

I know this is UK and not US, but is there something I'm missing about how business works in the UK?
Witness: An unending series of Stackoverflow questions on doing encryption in Javascript, all of them much like this one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1528012/secure-login-publ... .
Pretty much every big payment processor is viable so long as you have a US Bank account into which you withdraw your sales revenue—except a lot of us live outside of Bushland and thus the only option is either using a local bank/merchant account (expensive, complex, slow-moving, don't understand new technology, poor interface, etc) or paypal.

ApparentSoft is a developer based in Israel, like me. They probably opted to use PayPal because PayPal recently opened up the ability to withdraw directly to an Israeli Bank account -- something which all the ohter entrants on this list cannot do (with the possible exception of 2CO, haven't looked at them).
I think it would be a great loss if people started seeing music as intrinsically worthless.

I was asking a question. A loss of what?

From where I stand, every musician is a simple drain on society that would be far more productive flipping burgers. Now some people have become moderately wealthy playing music, but the music industry is a tiny slice of the economy because most people don’t place much value on music. It’s become adept at promoting its self but the self storage industry is a larger slice of the economy because people place more value on storing junk than music.

PS: IMO, replacing ALL music education with math/other real forms of education or even PE would be a far better use of students time and taxpayer money. Every court case over music copyright, contracts, or whatever is simply a waste of taxpayers’ money so IMO just abolish music copyright and get on with life. I understand that's and extreme view, but its still where I stand.
I think it would be great to deign your own case and be able to share it from your "saved designs" list in your account. For instance, I made a cool case with a picture of mine and I would like to post it to facebook or sent it in an email to share with my friends. This would let them see my cool case and be good marketing for you.
I'm always amazed by news stories about people being prosecuted for possession of child pornography, found when they took their laptop in for servicing/fixing. So in light of that someone taking a stolen bike for servicing doesn't seem that far-fetched..
Agreed. This is weak on Plurk's part. How were they harmed?

Microsoft screwed up and hired a shady vendor who did a shady thing. As soon as they realized what happened, they owned it, fired the vendor, and shut down the site.

Just because Microsoft has money doesn't mean that Plurk deserves it.
They're still used extensively in the US. I lived 25 years in Australia without a chequebook, but since moving to the US I've written scores of 'em.

Mostly, the problem is that the US still lacks a system for transferring money freely between bank accounts. If you want to send someone some money electronically you wind up paying fees at both ends.

(Also, some people use cheques just to be annoying, like the old women who write cheques to pay for their groceries at supermarkets.)
New definitions of words creep into usage all the time, and this is one I've been noticing.

Folks are using "pirate" to mean "intercept" or "surreptitiously copy", rather than the traditional usage (leaving aside the even older meaning, of course) of simply "distribute copyrighted material".
Ow, my brain. People forget how hostile an environment Javascript is for trusted code. It's not just that you can stage an elaborate man-in-the-middle attack; it's that anything that allows you to run code in the same JS instance can sabotage the encryption. That includes MITM, but it also includes XSS and Javascript injection, JSON injection, and it applies to every source of script and DOM content that builds up the page.
I mean it in the following way. While it is totally legit and generally a good thing to build a product out of an open source project, I sense that some naive customers of these products give most credit to the product builders rather than the actual developers.

For example, git has a totally clever way of hashing, efficient delta storage, signing of code etc. whenever I see a product made out of git I know deep down that someone will think its the product supplier who came up with all the cleverness of it, whereas its usually just a wrapper.

Also, there is so much that goes into the git project, that is very valuable, and people charge $50, $70 whatever using all the value of its design over naive users, essentially "centering their business over IP that someone else produced and gave away." To me this is easy money earned, and that's what I am objecting here.

Using open source ain't the problem, you gotta create the core business value yourself.
China Imposes New Internet Controls
Could try to educate your client, explain why only the most important things should be above the fold, and show him a comparison with re-explanation if needed.
Not sure there is that much statistical analysis needed. If you are bad at darts aim for a high number that has high numbers around it (like 14). If you are good or excellent at darts aim for the highest pointed areas (triple 20 or triple 19).

From the heat maps, I would say that even the "above average" skill level should still be shooting for the triple 20, but if the study said that it makes the findings moot.
eh.. it's called an "audit", and they've had that infrastructure forever.
On the other hand dynamically generated Flash captcha is a pain in the ass to crack.
"""Finally, we have a few issues, since Apple doesn't want us on the Mac platform and is blocking us a lot, and refuses to explain why."""

I don't understand this. The Mac is pretty much an open platform. Putting video on the screen is not something Apple can block.

Does anyone know what they are specifically talking about?
Thanks, I value minuses more than pluses nowadays. It shows that you're thinking against the stream.
I've been going thru SICP with Gambit. Wouldn't mind an alternative to Emacs at all, if/when this supports Gambit...
I've been using the table method with Gibberish AES, although I don't compile the tables, I'm not sure the size benefit is that significant.

http://github.com/markpercival/gibberish-aes

The advantage of mine is that it's fully OpenSSL compatible and plenty fast. 20k of text on Chrome take .064 seconds to decode and encode.

But I love the idea of compile on load, might have to steal it :)
Thanks. Shoot me an email if you have any suggestions for who I should interview.
I don't get it, according to the figures in 2017 we'll be down to 300 million cheques a year, which is roughly 4 cheques per year per person in the UK.

That's still a pretty high number in my book given that a lot of them will be for large money amounts.
On the first page of the fax we wrote all 6 paypal accounts of our partners + all the URLs at _their sites_ where they show link to the sale.

Surely, the 6 vendors won't point to a pirate selling web site, right? Also, we provided all their 6 paypal accounts. They could just call them to verify (which they apparently did when processing limitations of my partner's account).

Jacob.
Apparent Software.
It may have been the bundling that caused the problems- I don't know. If one of my competitors started bundling my software with theirs I would be grateful for this kind of leverage. On the other hand, there should be some known (= advertised) means of acceptable proof for resolving disputes.

If may also make a difference if you are working as a sole proprietor vs having a govt id # (EIN in the US). But this is wild speculation.
James Randi on "Global Warming"
My dad's a psychology professor and he calls it an art.
Isn't "pirate radio" a radio station that broadcasts illegally? If I am listening to my local pirate radio station, I myself am not a pirate. I think the use of pirate here is just to sensationalize the situation.
Interestingly, if air were in danger of being over-breathed then privatization would be the best solution. The only reason we don't have a tragedy of the commons in the air is that there's an awful lot of it and nobody has anything to gain by breathing a hundred times more.
adroll is more of an open ad marketplace, a site can be in multiple rolls and from what I can tell the sales force isn't actively pushing individual rolls. It also doesn't appear to be very selective. The CPMs are pretty bad compared to what I would expect with a niche network and a good sales team.

If you want to advertise on Surfing sites would you rather go to the surfing roll at adroll or to a niche network focused on Surfing sites that has the best sites and good ad placements?

Playing around with adroll I also noticed that once you want to advertise you still choose sites individually where in a network you are usually paying for the expertise of the network builder to have chosen the best sites.
but they didn't create the myspace community, they jumped in the phase when they were already hiring senior level execs(the only early guy, is on the tech side, and joined it at 300,000 users), and it's quiet different growing a community from a few million users compared to growing a community from 0. The hardest phase of any company, are those first 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000 users. After that 100,000 user mark, as long as your site is viral enough(like myspace), you'll continue growing at XX,XXX users per week.

and it's not really them, that I'm talking about, I'm talking about their future users, the admins, who'll be implementing this to start their own forums. Those are the guys that will have a huge churn rate, that will use the system for 1-2 weeks, before shutting the site down, due to lack of users.

And yes I use plenty of forums, message boards are the only avenue that you can use just for discussion. Sure there are other things that focus on something else and allow discussion(i.e. HN, where the key goal is submitting articles), but if you want to discuss something you gotta hit up those outdated forums. The comments in blogs etc, are really not the same as an actual discussion on forums. I've read a 10,000 posts forum thread. I've never read a blog post that had more than 50 comments, since there is no way to hold a discussion, just a bunch of +1 comments.

The api thing excites you as a techy, but almost all of the forums are run by fans. Camaro fans, harry porter fans, excersize fans, the words API are like magic to them, they mean nothing.

Yeah it's still up in the air, and can go either way, but I just don't see any mass adoption or mass revenue in their future. Any business that relies on their users starting communities, has a very long road ahead of them. Granted their goal is probably just scale(like ning), where they have a few million communities, but each with 5-10 people.
Plurk Still Considers Suing Microsoft Over Copy-Paste Debacle In China
I'm feeling the same way. Maybe it's time to learn Obj-C. Might give it a try.
Building a Company with Customer Data – Why Metrics Are Not Enough
The US is about the only place where people are scared to give out bank account details and that is because in theory you could initiate an ACH bank transfer from the other parties account. What many people don't understand is that that same information is on a check.

In most of mainland Europe everyone pays everyone through online banking. In Denmark people put their account details on their web sites and letterheads.

There is really reason why you couldn't do the same here even with first time vendors. Except that some banks make it really hard to do.

My old bank Wellsfargo had me sign up for something called I think DirectPay where you could do it easily. But my new bank CitiBank make it just as easy as in Europe from both my personal and business accounts to send money.

This love afair of checks that American business has is all about float and frankly I am incredibly annoyed that all my clients insist on paying me by check.
Burn your checkbook
This should still give you useful data about the vertical placement of elements on your page, no?
That seems like enough to me, but the problem apparently is that you couldn't get through to someone who actually had authority+knowledge to fix this. It sounds like you can't even get anybody who can tell you what evidence is required. That is a total FAIL on PayPal's part.

But Google does the same thing. I have an issue with adwords that comes up over and over, and nobody there will give me a workaround.
I could hardly find a single person in that discussion advocating for an M16 over an AK47.
I agree with you.

For the sake of completeness, what would Microsoft do if the tables were turned?
IE9 adds support for CSS3, denies importance of ACID3
> For small businesses, it's also hard to see how you replace the value of being able to fedex a check to a new vendor.

How do you figure? Here in Belgium cheques have been phased out decennia ago, to the point that I have never had a cheque-book. To pay a vendor, new or old, I just transfer money onto their account. What's the benefit of the cheque?

The only cheques I see are the royalties I get from some US publishers that refuse to do bank transfers. They cost like $30 to cash, because after I receive them in the mail and bring them to my bank, the bank uses a secure courier to fly them back to the US, where their sister bank cashes them, and wires the money to Europe. Madness.
We don't bother with the fedexing in the uk :) couriers are expensive.

Seriously though, wire transfers have become very efficient, simple and effective, and- i predict by 2018 - free. the FPS (faster payments service) can make transfers between accounts of different banks happen within 5 to 10 minutes or less. Whilst you and I know that it really only takes a few seconds to do a SELECT, UPDATE and an INSERT, the complexity of settling transactions takes longer, so having it all done within a few minutes is a boon.

The one disadvantage about the removal of cheques is that it'll be basically impossible to delay payment now... whereas you used to be able to say "The cheque's in the post", now you can't really pull that off.
I hope no one from SCO is here.
Mark Anderson's 2010 predictions
How To Install VMware Server 1.0.x On An Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop
You have to learn to live with bitterness
How complexity rules our lives
firefox saves your browsing history, so it just reloads when you come back(and you can even hit the back button)
The start-up chronicles: Deadly sins that destroy Web sales
Bouncing Autonomous Intelligent Botnets
1-line throwaway critiques really aren't very useful. Do you have more to add than a simple "he's wrong"?
You right. I dont think we have as much use of cheques as you guys do - but small businesses MUCH prefer them (lower charges: most banks don't charge you for small/medium numbers of cheques cashed).

My parent business is small and almost all their clients (Schools and institutions) pay by cheque. It's the easiest way for the schools to pay, if they have to do it online I doubt my parents will see the money for weeks :(
Britain's most influential Twitter users revealed
The don't-clutter-my-screen-with-nine-hundred-thousand-buttons-and-menus book?

Joking aside, most OS X keyboard shortcuts actually follow a very rational scheme (which is mentioned in the Apple HIG, IIRC). If Cmd+X performs an action X, both Cmd+Shift+X and Cmd+Opt+X will perform similar versions of X, so you don't have trouble remembering "special" shortcuts.

Example: Cmd+Q quits an application, Cmd+Shift+Q logs you out and Cmd+Opt+Shift+Q logs you out without confirmation.

Another example: Cmd+Opt+Esc brings up the Force Quit dialog. Cmd+Shift+Opt+Esc force quits the current application without confirmation.

I don't think this is an OS X specific thing. I suspect Windows, KDE and GNOME all follow a similar HIG.

(No, none of those shortcuts are good for your RSI.)
Angel Investors To Avoid
This is incorrect. The difference is that lazlo and flex are tools that build fixed binaries. They are the equivalent of a c++ compiler. This is designed to be like html. That means that you can, from a web server, create pages on the fly. You cannot modify or change code on the fly in lazlo or flex. In html, you can dynamically create a page based on information in the database or other state related info. This is a fundamentally different model (and one that most of you should be familiar with) and entirely different than flex (which most of you are not familiar with).

As far as swfmill goes, that is an entirely orthogonal concept as is haxe. swfmill is a tool for organizing assets, and haxe is a compiler. That is like comparing an apple pie to a shoe.
More proof of the McDonaldsisation of content.
s/crack/use
Hmm....appears to discuss confirmation bias.
I agree. The US banking system is quite far behind.
Same here. I've been using them for years with no problems. These stories worry me enough that I do an annual review of the other options out there -- but none of them are as good as PayPal. I also don't keep funds in my PP account, as well as transfer them out of the associated bank account ASAP since there is the potential that they could drain that as well.
ASP.NET MVC 2 RC Released
Most of them are students paying for drinks at the bar by cheque. Will not be missed.
From Scans To Listens
The US is extremely far behind in banking. It's a whole other world. Also there seems to be a culture/tradition of paying bills by cheque.

The UK enjoys free banking for people - free transfers, direct debits, automated payments, etc. Transfers show up in a couple of hours to most other bank accounts. Even businesses get most of that, including free banking for a year or 2.

Most 'bills' - water/gas/electric/cable/mortgages etc are all setup and automated electronic transfers - direct debits. (free of course)

Giving out your bank details to allow someone to pay you is fine and secure.

The need for cheques in the UK is incredibly small now.

Also, sure - people will probably still use cheques "for show". On things like charity TV programs we'll still see the big oversized cheques showing how much they raised. But it's just for show. The money is all sent electronically.
Maybe this is a good opportunity to discuss being acquired by MS. Apparently they like your idea so much they want to have something like. Just buying the technology would be a reasonable move for them.
I once had my PayPal account "temporarily" suspended under similar circumstances. Usually, all you have to do is fax them/upload copies of documents verifying your identity and you should be set within a week, if you're persistent and diligent.
Electronic Cheques should be easy to implement in an online banking infrastructure.

The debitor logs in and creates a new cheque. Amount, "pay to the order of", "for" and expiry-date are filled out as well as an e-mail address for the creditor. Perhaps also a password.

The bank emails the creditor saying that there's a cheque for him, tells him to click the link. He's prompted for the password, and asked to provide the account for the money to be transferred into. Once he confirms, a regular bank transfer is set up, and at the same time the recipient gets a confirmation that there is coverage for the cheque.

The final check could be that the debitor bank queries the creditor bank to confirm that the account is in the name of the creditor.

This procedure allows you to "cut a check" in advance for a business meeting. The e-mail arriving is like putting the money in escrow. When you sign the contract, you give the creditor the password, and that completes the transaction. If not, just wait for the expiry-date and the money is out of escrow.
No, there's a different reason.

The "tragedy of the commons", sort of deal. Freakonomics talks about it.

It would be better (according to the book, to the best of my memory), to legalize ivory and elephant ranching, as it provides people with actual, personal, benefit into insuring elephant survival. If they're MY elephants, I take care of them. If they're NOBODY's elephants, I talk a lot at parties about how "somebody should save the elephants", but then I forget about it.

I think the parents argument was similar.
Carl Sagan 4th Dimension Explanation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npjOSLCR2hE#t=4m12s
I've been using Paypal for years to collect money and they have been working great.

During one month where our sales were particularaly high they froze our account too, but not for incoming transactions, so no money was lost.

I called them on the phone and was able to speak to a representative in 5 minutes who sorted it out. Not exactly a horror story.
Good idea: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1922317/recommendations-f...
Not to say your boss was totally in the right, but if he thought the summary statistics could never be negative (due to knowledge of the source and meaning of the data) that can be very informative.

If I were told the numbers {1,2,100} and that the data was definitely non-negative, I'd fit the thing to an exponential perhaps and thus set my 95% error bounds as (1.74, 101).

Which isn't a whole lot better than the mean/sigma stuff, but it would take into account the non-negativity.
It seems strange to me that although Microsoft is the company at fault here many of the commentators seem to be basically praising Microsoft and blaming/deriding the guys whose code was plagiarized.
Carl Sagan plays Agent Smith in The Matrix
Have you seen this: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/18/visualizing-up-to-te.ht...
A one-line change to something which probably has assumptions all over the rest of the code is asking for trouble, yes.
Selected patents from 2009
It's required by law in the EU to put your bank account details on the web if you run a company.