skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>publishers should offer podcasts through their own app that measures listens, and either sell ads themselves if they have the scale or outsource it to a company like Midroll. Midroll, for their part, should leverage their new player technology to offer skinnable apps for publishers who can’t build their own.

Here's my problem with this idea:

I, like many people, listen to a lot of different podcasts. Dozens, in my case. I have a podcatcher app that puts them all in one place. That makes it easy and convenient for me. Some of the shows I only listen to maybe once per month when there's a guest on that I enjoy, or if I run out of new episodes of everything else. If each show required its own app for me to listen, I'd only listen to the ones I really, really enjoy and support, and the rest I'll do without or bootleg. So, in a sense, the individual app per show idea would be limiting the potential audience.

I'm already seeing this happen with Libsyn custom mobile apps[0]. There are a number of shows I listen to that have paywalls for old episodes which can only be accessed through subscription plans available in individual apps. $1.99 or $2.99 may not seem like much by itself, but if it's 10 or 20 shows you're listening to this becomes an unjustifiable bill.

The only viable alternative I see is the further growth of podcast networks, where multiple shows are available for one price. But, currently, this model is still too small and fragmented. Until the Netflix or Hulu of podcasts comes out, I'll be left to pick and choose which deserve my support enough to justify buying into their distinct "ecosystem".

Edit: I see that my points here were addressed in the paragraphs following the one I quoted, but I'm still not buying the idea that siloing is the best way to monetize podcasts.

[0] https://www.libsyn.com/custom-mobile-apps/
I believe you can count yourself among them :)
> Productivity has soared in farming and construction. [...] It's merely a social expectation that we should all work, and a preference, not a necessity, to punish those who don't.

This seems like grasping entitlement. High productivity in farming or construction does not automatically give you the right to demand that they hand over their food or houses. Their preference to share their output in an exchange is not a punishment - it's reciprocity. If it wasn't for the prospect of exchange, why would anyone ever make more of anything than strictly what they needed? They could be hanging out with friends and family instead of catering to the needs of strangers.

> We do them despite the fact we could feed and house everyone with perhaps 9/10 people not working.

There is plenty of other problems to solve like cancer, diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space and unfortunately in many places still housing and food. Claiming that people no longer need to work is like saying that we have run out of problems to solve. That this is it. That this is the world we want.
Which page redirects you back? Even the explore/about/tos pages? We're working on redesigning the front-page right now to solve the messaging problem. Thanks for the feedback Jason.
From the comments it doesn't look like many read the article. Here's the tldr:

Free software won. Yay!
However, what about hardware, infrastructure, and services?
Oops. All those things have been become increasingly centralized.
Centralization has diminished our privacy, and therefore our liberty.
Time to put restrictions on corporations so we can have liberty again.

-------------------------------------------------------

Now the only part I disagree with is the last part. Laws and regulations got us into this mess in the first place. These companies are huge because they can sue or prevent others from competing through laws and regulations. Guess who lobbies to create these laws in the first place? (It's not the little guy) The biggest problem is Intellectual Property (IP). Because of it we have DRM and many companies have very literal monopolies (enforced by government) on things. Apple has a patent on rounded rectangles for heaven's sake.

What we need is a decentralization of power, and a turn towards distributed systems. The best way to do that will be to eliminate IP. That will take some time, but we should do it gradually. By allowing people to "copy" it will create competition and weaken the monopoly-like position many of these companies hold. Power will fragment and decentralize. That should be the goal.
If you hate systemd that much make your own distribution with blackjackd and hookersd instead.
I'm actually currently working on projects related to traffic management systems for UAS. I'd say that currently air travel is much more complicated than street travel. And there is a lot of research and engineering that needs to be done before we can safely handle large amounts of UAS traffic.

For one, UAS take up more space than cars. Sure they can be smaller, but operators/systems need more space to safely fly. Two, we don't have systems in place to handle large amounts of traffic. Traffic on roads is much simpler. You have well defined routes, and you have well-defined regulations to safely handle adverse driving situations. UAS do not currently have systems that can automatically handle large amounts of traffic or adverse flying conditions. Plus the autonomous systems are currently not quite up to a human pilot's ability to fly. There may be some very advanced autonomous flight systems, but there isn't anything that could handle the amount of traffic comparable to current street traffic.

I think this is definitely an exciting time for autonomous flight. But I also think we are just really starting to get around to solving the problems caused by UAS. I don't know if it's fair to compare large amounts of UAS traffic to street traffic. I think the state of UAS traffic management is closer to the state of street traffic 100 or so years ago. UAS safety systems and airspace regulations definitely aren't sophisticated.
This is an interesting question. I'm actually not sure that there is an unlimited amount of R&D or interesting engineering work to go around.

Just to be clear, I'm not convinced there isn't, either, I just think it's an interesting enough thesis that I'm willing to consider it (sorry for no cite, I have read interesting discussions of this point, may google around for them later).

I think the basic thesis boils down to this - there are, at any given moment, an "unlimited" number of scientific and technical tasks required to solve those deep problems you mentioned. However, there are (this is a thesis, not a conclusion) a limited number of those problems that can be worked on right now. Those problems need to be solved before the next set can be solved.

Now, if you have 10 research teams working on these problems, you have a better chance of solving them in a reasonable amount of time than if only 1 research team is working on them. 100 is better than 10. 1000 is better than 100... but at some point, you're maxed out on the number of research positions that can contribute effectively. Out of 1000, 100 will take a promising approach, 10 will get it right, and... 1 will solve the problem a bit faster than the other 9. There's a point at which you hit diminishing returns.

Is this true? (and btw, I'm constructing some of this thesis myself, as you can probably tell, I don't think I've read it in quite this form before). Is it true-ish?

I'm not really sure. I'm not sure it matters for the moment, because I don't think our budget for R&D and high value engineering work, or our educational systems to develop talent, are anywhere close to a point where we should be discussing whether we're reaching diminishing returns to scale.

But is there a theoretical point at which throwing more genius at problems won't make a difference in how quickly we progress? The question interests me, in an abstract way.
Inside Lego Molding Factory, Lego Vault and Lego Ideas House [video]
The concept of cooperation also fits to the tolerance-intolerance debate.

https://www.myind.net/tolerance-intolerance-and-game-theory
Include JavaScript Libraries in an Ionic 2 TypeScript Project
UberPOP banned in Germany
Ironically, I was later involved with the team at Oracle that converted Linux from a toy into a functioning kernel.

Seriously?
They could always scrape some gold off the top of City Hall.
Twitter’s Fabric launched real-time analytics on their mobile app
I am sorry to hear that. We spent a lot of time trying to get SQL compliance nailed (Triggers, constraints, etc.). Our 2.0 product with Spark for our analytical workloads has helped our performance and resource isolation significantly.

I hope once we open source you might try it again.
Is this because journal editors like to see their own lines of research expanded on? (Incentive problem?) Or harder to referee novel papers? (Time and attention problem?)
Yahoo puts more than 3,000 patents up for auction
You don't have to be a salesperson to be good at sales. The art of selling something (and it is an art) is something that you can apply to many situations. Generally, it's the art of getting what you want, and that is extremely valuable to pretty much anyone.

The way you talk about it reminds me of people's account of Jobs' so called "reality distortion field". However, it's not some mystical thing that some people are born with. It's a learned skill just like software engineering.
15 minute flight, 15 minute back to depot, 5 minute battery swap, charge batteries at the depot.
I were talking not about HN, obviously.
Don't you have to report application/locations/etc too? Or did you actually do the applications and log them in some type of database (flatfile/etc), and have this script auto fill in the benis every week?
"...shares her learnings about..." -- this is not English. Failing in the second sentence.
The Copyright Office thinks software licenses are limiting hardware tinkering
> checking the weather over the next few hours by spinning the dial is very convenient

Holy shit I have no idea why I never thought to do that, that's a great feature.

I agree that the watch is not a life changing tech upgrade like the iPhone was, but personally, I find the features on the watch that I do use to be convenient and compelling enough that I still put the watch on every morning.

Really, the killer feature I want is disable the god damn screenshot feature on the watch, or at least give me a button in the photos app to "purge all watch screenshots" because fully half of my photo library is accidental watch screenshots, and I haven't had the time to come up with a way to script it.

Oh yes, and apple pay when a vendor accepts it is just down right awesome.
I think your concern was appropriate, but it reminds me of the corresponding view that many people have that communications software developed in the U.S. will inevitably have backdoors for the U.S. government. That view feels reasonable to them because they know the U.S. government is also extremely aggressive about surveillance capabilities.

I find it sad that we're in an environment where assuaging these concerns can be a complicated and difficult undertaking, and even trying to understand the landscape is a big challenge. Lots of people see it as risky to use technology developed in another country, and while some particular fears and theories are overblown, it's hard to dismiss the overall concern.
Ah, that's interesting enough to be worth looking into.
The better one is worse. :/

That medium gray text is harder on the eyes.
I just linked to this article in the comments on "Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11866868 As what the author did is essentially ethnography.

Ethnography is a powerful tool! Talking to your users, and more importantly seeing first hand what they are doing with what you have built can drastically change how you view your application. If you have the ability to get out there and SEE your users in action, do it! It might just change your world.
Core Infrastructure Initiative best-practices badge
And this doesn't apply to stopping a mob and a witch hunt, an endless, or rather open-ended, and mostly anonymous smear campaign, where "rapist", "sociopath", "jerk", and "plagiarist" all become mutually interchangeable?
Not strictly true, it was quite possible to write code on OSX that could be run on Solaris and Linux easily enough. You just had to not depend on autotools too much, and understand how to use the OSX linker/libraries properly in your project.

(Disclaimer: I am one of those programmers who only switched to Apple because of the tiBook, which was a damned sexy Unix workstation in spite of the fact it was also a damned sexy laptop.. and I used it for developing apps for Linux and SGI Irix without much hassle.)
I would hardly say that deep learning has taken over - some of the best results in the last few years have come from 'classical' domains like nonlinear optimization.

Well, the article is arguing deep learning has taken most of the "mindshare", the attention of most researchers. If great results are coming from other parts of the field, that would be a reason to be concerned.
> You need to believe that there is some merit to the government or people's position,

We've seen them invent the fear ("You'll be raped") and spend tax money freaking people out with that idea, as well as the thoroughly useless idea to fingerprint drivers. It's a bad solution to a fake problem.

If taxi-rape really was a problem (as opposed to a statistical anomaly) they'd realize that Uber and Lyft are already an order of magnitude better. (They log so much more!)

> I think you're missing my point about perception. The world runs on perception. When presented with the same facts, even two identical twins may come up with a different conclusion. They each lead different lives.

They both live in the same world, where the same number of people have been abducted and raped. It's ultimately a factual issue.

> and that they might have reason to believe that the public perceive a government background check is more secure than a private one, and would vote accordingly (as they did).

We know why they believe the public thinks this - they spent time and money creating and advertising it.

The public might also think they have an opinion on the brand of police car, or the type of transformers used in their electrical system, etc, but without relevant data their opinions would be meaningless.

If the politicians spent months lying about one company's transformer as being a "kiddy cooker", do you think the discussion would be meaningful?

> The facts about background checks are useful to present on U/L's website or in media, but the only thing that matters to the politician will be public perception.

Right, the only thing that matters to a politician will be their own propaganda and the money they can make from it. Facts are those thing you use to judge actual effectiveness and if we tried that we'd see there isn't a problem to try to fix.

> Whether the fingerprint-based background check is better or not becomes irrelevant at the negotiating table.

Right, it's about the graft. The issues are lies and nonsense; you can't meet in the middle because there is no middle. There's common sense and there's a cash grab and there isn't a way to reconcile those.

When you realize you're being railroaded, the best solution is to not play.

If they stayed the best they could accomplish would be paying some graft for some useless services which would then become standard. (Well, if Austin needs that, so do we!) That'd make their service worse for everyone, everywhere.

> Barney Frank says, (paraphrased) ["I've never seen a politician who didn't decide what to say by seeing what would pay the most."]

They see a potential new tax base and jobs they can claim to have invented. (Fingerprinting drivers and checking that. Both require new workers, etc...) And none of the politicians care about the services offered because they already have limo service. There's no downside for them in ruining it for others.

> I think you have to come to the table with a mindset other than "you're out to get us".

So when they are out to get you, you should be delusional and refuse to admit it?

No, Uber and Lyft did the right thing. They walked away from the scammers.
I think the key lesson of things like Fitbit's smart watch has been that you don't get a good watch by taking "everything it could do" and then subtracting features until you get where you want to be.

You do it by building up features from user story primatives (e.g. I want to glance down and see who's calling). Then shipping with enough primatives covered to be useful.
I like the way Richard Hamming stated a similar sentiment:

" I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, ``Luck favors the prepared mind.'' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not."

Full Talk: http://blog.samaltman.com/you-and-your-research
I didn't realize it, but Django CMS got OSS CMS of the Year Award from CMS Critic. That's very impressive.
Confessions of a bootcamp graduate. (Hack Reactor)
I like that goal too, but I'm not sure how to really do that. A lot of states direct all lottery money to education but that just allows the states to spend less on education out of the general fund. Ultimately money is a fungible thing. No way around that.
"Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all" - Hobbes

I see Hobbes as closer to reality
Ay, but it's kind of the like the road out of a forest fire. Sure, you can go both ways, but if you don't know what the hell you're doing, or are even experienced, but not an expert, best to follow the directions of those around you.
Compensation is based on competition for the limited supply of top developers. High RPE businesses are, by definition, ones that can make a lot of money with a limited number of people. More importantly, they are businesses in fields where their competitors can do the same. Accordingly, it is totally unsurprising that high RPE businesses pay their employees lots of money, whether we are talking about software companies or investment banks.
I would say that revenue and marginal marginal contribution are the most important. It is OK to be unprofitable of you can fix it by growing and diluting fixed costs.
> The issue I see with Elite/Privateer/etc is that its hard to encourage group play which tends to be a near requirement for most MMOs to succeed.

I don't think it would have to be "massive", multiplayer with a dozen of players or so could be just fine if we talk about coop (aka PvE) only: you could form convoys with escorts, attack/defend bigger objectives than in solo play, etc.

Competitive multiplayer (PvP) brings a lot of issues, compromises and downsides; one of them being the ability to customize your game. I casually play Oolite, and it's key feature is precisely the ability to modify almost anything in the game. Those mods for instance let you escort an AI ship or be escorted by AI wingmen, which compensates a bit for the lack of multiplayer.

> If ships are the primary draw how do you group people up

When you look at it, this genre is not very different from an ARPG: you upgrade your ship just like to equip your character; your ship can be a freighter or a light fighter and it is similar to character classes. If you need more variety you can for instance introduce distinct damage types (energy damage with lasers and kinetic damage for missile) with specific defences (shields vs lasers and armour vs missiles). Or you can reserve certain capabilities like interstellar jumps to certain ships.
So, Moller claims to have a flying car, but can't afford to get it tested? Or that they could make a flying car, if they had enough money and time to build and test it? No technical challenges?

Uh-huh.
I sure love articles that take a small group of people and makes broad negative generalizations about them. This surely is important reading, and not just angry writers upset that someone might think differently than they do.
Yahoo is unloading 3,000 patents, and it will be a fire sale
How I Manage My Founder Hindbrain
Early on profit will be negative by definition. (Otherwise they wouldn't need to raise money) This is advice for hypergrowth startups, not stable companies.
Fun things you can do with your heart rate data (yea that's possible)
> If he meant GNU why didn't he say so?

Because people think it's cool to just call it Linux and endlessly deride Stallman for insisting it be called GNU/Linux, even though the nuance is very important in discussions like this one.
I've heard that floated before and I think I'd really like it. I think it would probably devolve into "each employee takes EXACTLY 20 days" however, due to the same psychological stresses present in the other schemes. So the best suggestion I think is to have the minimum be generous in itself. Say, 30 days.
Before doing anything mentioned, figure out if you can change your employment status to an independent contractor via an S-Corporation. This will allow you greater flexibility in creating a defined benefit plan and minimizing your taxes.

https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/plan-participant-employ...

You will need an attorney/accountant/actuary to make sure your S-corporation is valid and does not ever create some situation where you lose that status. Then you need a good accountant that knows the ins and outs of keeping track of your S-corporation accounting especially two corporate-level attributes—earnings and profits (E&P) and the accumulated adjustments account (AAA).

Then you will need an actuary. Most actuaries have transparent pricing like the following:

http://pensionspecialist.net/defined-benefit-plans/

The goal for a single owner S-corp will be to maximize your salary to defer as much as possible. The money put into your defined benefit plan is tax deductible. The contribution limits are high and are set with your actuary.

Your goal will be fund your benefit plan up to 2.5 Million. When your retire (early at 55 is possible I think), you can take the lump sum or an annuity. At this point you pay taxes on it.

Meanwhile, you can manage and invest your fund according to what you and the actuary think is best. The investments/contributions/plan will change due to various factors.

I believe when you hit 2.5 Million you are fully funded. You can freeze your plan at that point or continue funding it. Ask an actuary.

This is what doctors, attorneys, and high earning consultants do. Very few corporations provide this any more.

If you want to look at examples, put your zip code into this page:
http://search.pbgc.gov/search/InsuredPlans/InsuredPlans?quer...

The added benefit is that your pension is insured by the government via the PBGC. For small firms the insurance rates are affordable.

http://www.pbgc.gov/prac/prem/premium-rates.html

Here is a sample of deductions per plan. It seems dated, these amounts should be more by now.

http://www.412iplansinc.net/whatis412i.htm
> The best metric to choose is good old fashioned profit

I agree that ultimately, the only measure is profit for a company you are building to operate. The only caveat being that in the early stages, it may require more investment, and you don't want to sacrifice good investment to higher profit when it could mean the ultimate decline of the company (and profit). This is why there could be a period of time where the revenue measure is simplest and meaningful.

With regard to at least Amazon, I think they are focused on the long game and profitability. Twitter and others I don't follow, but I would agree that from the outside, many seem not to focus on building sustainable, profitable business without continued funding or expectation of being sold.