skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting, but I think this is missing a lot of the reasons Jazz isn't popular. Lyrics are a part of it sure, but that's just on the surface of the issue.

He talks a lot about listening to music, but I like to make a big distinction between hearing and listening. It's kind of like seeing a website and really looking at its design. Listening is an active, focused activity; hearing is passive. In my experience, even many musicians I've played with don't really know how to listen to a recording.

That's one part if it, but there's so much more. Another issue is that casual ears just aren't equipped to appreciate the extended harmonies, progressions, and chord substitutions that are used in Jazz. It is so advanced beyond what most of us can understand that it doesn't really mean anything.

Last thing I'll mention is part of the culture of Jazz. Jazz musicians get bored easily, they master one thing and then just keep pushing it forward. Sometimes it's just a sport where the whole point is to demonstrate how far you can push the theory and how fast you can play. That's not conducive to listener enjoyment.
I don't see anything wrong with it if you actually know what all that (being a supposed "rockstar" in a field) entails. It only annoys me when I hear it thrown around in general conversation by folks who have no clue what a "insert-programming-language-or-framework-or-markup-language here" rockstar really is and they're just tossing it around because they've heard somebody else say it.

> "Is this a by-product of a job market so oversaturated with incompetence that the employers must resort to extremes to make sure only people with real talent apply"

I think it might be. I figure folks would still just ask for an "expert" in a job description if that concept hadn't been taken up by a bunch of folks that aren't (in fields everywhere--not just writing code).
There's a difference between being able to appreciate the artistic value of something, and being able to enjoy it. I don't like jazz, and I mostly listen to music where I can't understand the lyrics, or where none exist. Sometimes people just don't enjoy certain genres of music. I'm sure part of it is cultural, but this article seems to portray the inability to enjoy jazz as some sort of cultural failing, and that's just ridiculous.

Pixote was thought-provoking, emotional, and well made. Despite that, I did not enjoy it. That does not mean I'm incapable of recognizing art, it just means that I don't enjoy the style of the piece in question.
Here are my notes and comments: http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/459029585/nosql-smackdown-at...
NO. Sorry but you're doing it wrong. Relying on the editor to highlight parentheses is a highly inefficient and error-prone way to work. It's distracting, it wastes mental cycles and inhibits flow.

The correct way is to configure emacs so that when you press a certain key (in my case, right shift because I configured my keyboard so I can activate left shift with my thumb), emacs inserts "()" and puts the cursor in the parentheses. No need to remember or count closing parentheses this way.

No, sorry you are doing it "wrong!" :) I also use the insert () technique. I basically use whichever technique is optimal in context. Please note that your assertions about flow and distractions are highly subjective.

http://www.cyberbore.com/puzzle/klok.html

Incidentally, I no longer use emacs, and I don't write Lisp.
You're so right. Jazz musicians are boring. Worst than that, I hear them complain every time that "the crowd was not in it". So, they don't even try to be less boring, they blame their clients for it. Way to go jazzmen!
Jazz music used to be pop music.

The reason why many people don't like jazz music is the same reason some don't like classical music.

It doesn't say them anything because they weren't brought up with it.
I wonder if the demographics of jazz enthusiasm skew at all for hackers.
I read back the source file so it still contains the comments.
It seems society has a notion that music alone cannot in and of itself be the only event.
SVG in IE9 Roadmap
"By this logic, English-language opera (yes, it exists) ought to be doing well in America."

We call them "musicals". They're doing OK.

If you want to argue that a "musical" is an "opera plus some stuff added to make it more palatable to visually-oriented Americans" I'm not going to argue.
Its an interesting concept, and I do agree that to a degree he is right. But that is definitely not the whole of it.

Personally, I enjoy a variety of classical musical and some modern purely instrumental music (TSO for instance has many purely instrumental pieces that are classically inspired, as does their forerunner Savatage, though the connection to the classical inspiration is less obvious there.) I still do not like jazz. In my admittedly limited exposure to it, I find much of it to be rather dissonant and atonal (I am well aware there are multiple types of jazz and not all will have these properties)

I suspect I could acquire a taste for it if I wished and spent some time studying it, but I have seen no reason to yet. I rather enjoy classical, metal, and hard rock and there is enough depth there to keep me quite satisfied for many lifetimes.

It is quite easy to enjoy and appreciate instrumental music without enjoying or appreciating jazz.
I've been working on it for quite some time. Its nearly ready now, and it supports the quad core Cortex A9 - the latest intel rival mobile cpu.
I agree with your first point, the author's claim that it is an instrumental vs. lyrics problem is not accurate. There are easy counter examples, such as the popularity of instrumental dance music, which often features very little in the way of lyrics and the vapid nature of most pop songs, as well as the ability of many listeners to appreciate music performed in a language other than their own.

The problem with a lot of jazz, what I would call "bad" jazz, is that it is formless noodling. It is in areas like jazz solos, jam rock bands, rock guitar solos, etc. that one hears the admirer comment on the difficultly level of the performance versus the coherent melodies and hooks of popular music, and even many popular classical works.

The popular jazz standards have melodic hooks that cause people to like and remember them. Beyond that surface, a vast majority of jazz musicians are more focused on the intricacies of group performance than composition. Sure more musical education, or better brains, would enable people to develop their memories to be able to recall and hum along with longer and more complex note sequences, but you still need to compose them- and repeat them. (Recall the Mark E Smith formula for pop music "Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.")
Fuck google! Music videos dominate the most popular youtube videos, so I don't know why you're saying they are all user-produced. Milly Cirrus has 2 in the top 10. It's right there on their own page for crying out loud, do you even know what you are talking about or are you just one of the countless content theft fanboys?

http://www.youtube.com/videos?lg=EN&s=mp&t=a

I hope the courts throw the book at Google. I'm so sick of their holier than thou attitude while they take content and do whatever they want and make money hand over fist for doing it. They knowingly break the law and then use their clout to get content creators to succumb to their demands.

Until we take a stand against this kind of behavior, it will continue.

Either stop the behavior or change the laws so it isn't only big corporations who can get away with it. They sue the pants off individuals in their homes with some computers hooked up to the internet, but Google does exactly the same thing and expect people to pay them for it.

What really is the difference here between a file sharer with some songs on their computer and Google with those exact same songs on youtube? Why is the law different for google than it is for Jane Internet User?
While I am not part of the project - based on the fact the wikipedia link just goes to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29 - I would assume that any lisp listed in the "dialects" in the sidebar would be a go? Meaning arc, scheme, clojure etc.
What happens in MySQL when the queries are character-for character identical except for literals, e.g WHERE t.foo = 'bar' vs. WHERE t.foo = 'blitz'?

update: NVM!

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-query-cac...
Depending on how much 'cost is no object', hardware dongle's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongle) are very much still used for copy protection on larger, professional software packages. http://www.safenet-inc.com/ and http://www.marx.com/ are two that I know of.

Another method I've seen is to lock the software down to a particular hardware instance. In this method, the customer has to run a program on the computer that the program will be installed to, which grabs all sorts of unique things, like MAC address of any network devices, hard drive serial numbers, etc. The customer then sends the resulting info file back and a unique unlock key is generated.

But at the root of it, the protection is still done in software, which is very much still crackable to a skilled enough attacker. But for software you cannot download from the internet without a company provided password, skilled attackers are harder to come by. Compare that to something like winzip which was used as a teaching tool for how to write cracks.
I don't really need a whole blog post to explain why people don't like jazz; it's because to most people it sounds like a cacophony of random noise. (Especially in "live jams")

Unless you've studied music and know what they're trying to show, where they're going and the technical difficulty involved, you just won't be able to appreciate it.

He does being up a very valid point though which was crystallized for me when I heard "How you remind me of someday". Basically Nickelback had this one really popular song called "How you remind me" and then, later, released another really popular song called "Someday". It was the same song. To prove the point someone mashed them together, putting "How you remind me" in the left speaker and "Someday" in the right speaker. The result was amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvujgcbaCF8

Talk about formulaic.
Some kind of dongle is definitely required, but wouldn't someone be able to read the code to our app, remove the dongle-checking part, and then copy it all they want?

We do have a way to keep the code encrypted until we run it, but we have to ship the key with the code...
"I think the difference today is that the context itself has changed. We've transitioned to an urban, fast-paced lifestyle and have lost touch with the beauty of nature from which many instrumental pieces draw inspiration."

Huh? Most classical pieces of music were written in urban centers not on some farm. Same with jazz. Jazz is fiercely urban. But what we have today is carcass. But between 1930-1970 some crazy st went down.

"The host on my local classical station once remarked that there are only two serious topics in music: God and sex. Though I'm not religious, I can tell that these days it's much less of the former and more of the latter."

In it's heyday jazz were certainly about Sex.

"That said, I wouldn't be so pessimistic right now. Think long-term: in 100 years, how many people will still be listening to Brahms, and how many will still be listening to Britney Spears?"

This is just too reductionistic. Folk (aka pop) music and classical (aka serious) music have been forever intertwined. Whether the average music listener appreciates doesn't change that.
Slinkset for Tracking Lean Startup News
For what it's worth, research has shown that people who speak languages with tonal differences (like Chinese, Vietnamese etc) tend to be far more likely to develop perfect pitch.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/18/china.highereduc...

Not sure if that contributes to musical education, but my guess is that perfect pitch should have something to do with it.
Benchmark sources are here: http://codespeak.net/svn/pypy/benchmarks/
I've watched PLENTY of full series on YouTube. However I don't watch so much mainstream.

You can still catch the latest English Premier League or Champions League action if you get there quick enough (in before the lock).

IIRC all of the Naruto (Anime) subs used to be up there and they were licensed to Viz Media.

They're much better at removing the stuff then they used to be but say three or so years ago YouTube was stuffed with full episodes. I remember watching almost all of "Everybody Hates Chris" on YouTube.
...and that's why I have a simple email address: only letters and numbers (plus the @ sign).
Until I start getting reasonable workflow through it, it's onerous having to check it repeatedly, and so the emails are great to make it so I don't basically have two email accounts to check.

The email notifications especially helpful for those who are slow otherwise to respond who I otherwise just had to email to get them to take action.
I think this article is more accurate:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/11/18/116-black-music-t...
Ok, I agree. BUT I've yet to see a PRACTICAL inventory of what must be done to reduce the need to filter experience through interpretation.
Wynton Marsalis says "When the music stopped being about dancing, people stopped listening." I never completely bought it, but I like the sentiment anyway :-)
Why does he keep referring to himself as "your author here" or "the author"? Hiding the fact that you're referring to yourself doesn't make you not refer to yourself. It's just confusing - say "I" instead.
Is it a general bug in WordPress MU or just an issue with wordpress.com?
I've done exactly this in my MBP and been very pleased. 80GB X25-M as the primary drive, and a larger disk as the secondary drive.

As an aside -- for whatever reason, I couldn't get my optical drive to work in the enclosure provided with the Optibay. I didn't investigate too much, since it just doesn't matter to me.
This is a really old post, see this update: http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/12/3/dj_has_evolved_int...
You can embed it now: http://code.google.com/apis/wave/embed/guide.html
Want to find out someone’s native language? Ask them how many fingers they have
Recipe for a great customer experience
There's a misspelled word in the profile.

http://searchyc.com/identitiy
I thought I was the only one who didn't pay attention to lyrics.

My friend and I kinda of resemble that dynamic. He loves some of the shittiest songs (imo) because of interesting lyrical content, where as I totally ignore them. If I like them it's because of how they were sung not because of me diving through looking for "meaning".

That's why after all these years Pinback is still one of my favorite bands. Their voices are just another instrument in a lot of their songs, since it sounds like Rob Crow kind of mumbles through them all, and they're usually sitting a layer or two down in the mix.

For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59cQWw9ctOA (not the greatest quality I know). It's the way he sings / shouts "Stop! It's too late! I'm feeling FRUS-trated!" that draws me in.
IdentFavicon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7765

Hashes the domain and generates a unique favicon.
More like Jazz marketing got undercut by the popularization of cool. That used to be half the marketing: they were superhuman levels of cool. Untouchable. Today's Jazz musicians are just nerdy.
Baroque music seems to be quite noticeable. And people seem to be able to appreciate Bach on an organ (though they may not like it).
If it weren't for the high production value content, I'd argue Youtube would never have gotten as popular as it did.

I'm increasingly dismayed by how in our society we reward this kind of illegal behavior, whether you agree that it is moral, unethical, or whatever, it is against the law and repeatedly, these violations are accepted, promoted, and lead the owners of the sites to $300+ Million exits.

And then I remember where the U.S. got its land. I remember where Goodyear got his rubber. I remember where oil and diamonds and rare metals come from and wonder why we have laws at all. Why we have national borders at all. Why we have jails at all.
1985

I mean, I love music (I'm an amateur guitar & sax player, even tried my hand at writing some music software) but I can't listen to an album without doing anything else. Does that make me a bad person?
I'm a fan of jazz and I'm against any definition that doesn't put: Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Billie Holiday, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Nina Simone, Fats Waller, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Christian, and countless others on pretty much the same plane of musical transcendence.

"swinging" and "thinking" aren't so different after all.
That's a nice approach, but a naive bayes classifier doesn't seem like it would be the best method for this particular problem.

You probably want to do an N-gram analysis, like that performed by libtextcat http://software.wise-guys.nl/libtextcat/. This will perform a comparison based on common combinations of letters used (like "wo", "or", "rd"). Seems like it would be more accurate with such a relatively small sample of comments. If you had a list of 10-20 possible candidates, you could narrow it down to just a few.
Why do you consider this both astonishing and disturbing?

I don't find this surprising, nor do I see the problem.
This brings up a great point. Great jazz players are horrible marketers. Oddly enough, I think some of their "practice" time could be better put to use spreading the word or pounding the pavement.
Posted twice for same product. This is spam. And the page mimics Apple's web design, which makes it bait and switch, if not simply confusing.
You're right; nobody likes living next to a factory or power plant. But that doesn't mean you have to live twenty miles away. I lived in Madison, WI for two years; being on an isthmus, they've had to cram city government, utilities, shopping, the biggest university in the state, and residential housing all into an eight block wide strip.

The city is extremely livable! Walking and biking around the city is fantastic and the culture is vibrant. In fact, given that its an isthmus I thought I'd have to bike farther to get to anything, but it turned out that sports leagues, parks, and city events were always within 4 miles.

There was a coal-fired power plant a few blocks from my house, and a nuclear reactor a couple miles down the coast near Middleton--supposedly one of the US's nicest suburbs to live in--and people really want to live in both cities.

Maybe it's just a problem of experience. I've lived my whole life in Portland OR, small-town Minnesota, Madison WI, and now San Francisco. Maybe I just got lucky by living in places where an urban growth boundary happened to work, or a city with insane geographic constraints. It's obviously not a representative sample, which makes me think I need more quantitative evidence to support the model. Still, I think these examples suggest that in certain cases it is possible to constrain sprawl.
Google knew YouTube did evil, but bought it anyway
>> This is equivalent to JSON needing to track {, [, ', and ", among other things. That's just parsing; both JSON and XML need to be parsed. That's not an advantage.

JSON can simply count brackets. That makes for a very simple parser indeed. XML needs to cope with invalid nesting, end tag names not matching start tag names etc. End tag names are just wasted space.

>> This is equivalent to the escape sequences in JSON: http://json.org/string.gif They also need to be parsed, they do not magically turn into bytes without that.

But those are sane. We all escape double quotes and backslashes in pretty much every programming language. They make sense in a very simple encoding.

Why should I need to replace & with %amp; they seem arbitrary, and the replacements aren't simple. &quot; ?? seriously? you're naming characters with odd abreviations, and then expecting people to remember those? why not just escape them with a prefix such as erm.... "\"
> than the rest of what's popular these days?

Depends on your definition of popular.
That's the problem I've been running into. At some point, in a piece of code we ship them, we will have to have a thing that checks a license and then decrypts the code and runs it. They can just edit that code.
I watch full episodes of poker shows. Broken up into 10 minute clips of course. In the "old days" I watched full clips of the daily show and countless other shows I can't even remember now. I didn't have a TV and didn't need one because Youtube had all the shows I wanted to see.
Protos will work fine. Thrift will also work fine. ________ (insert other binary format) will also work fine.

As long as there are libraries for the languages you're using it's not a big deal. I'd recommend solving the problem and moving on - in the serialization format wars the real victim is productivity.
UPDATE:

In Oracle, when you use literals any change to the text results in another hard parse on the database side. However, you can use bind variables instead of literals and it can re-use the query plan even when you are searching for different values.

http://www.akadia.com/services/ora_bind_variables.html

The OP is talking about LINQ. I assume that its Oracle implementation is smart enough to use bind variables, but I am not going to look that up right now...
On the other hand, their wiki is hosted on "The Common Lisp Wiki", all the libraries they mention are exclusively Common Lisp, and their mailing list description says "The purpose of this list is to provide community to Common Lisp game developers."

But it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things... The purpose of the thing is to motivate yourself to make a game; there are no winners or prizes or anything. So if you like, you can put your name on the list, and if your finished game is "disqualified" for being in the wrong language, you've still got your game, so you still win.
:-) I don't think anyone will call some of those Coltrane recordings or Ornette Coleman "color on the wall"
Firefox has a native JSON parser. http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/2009/02/12/native-json-in-fir...
If this was your personal site or a custom CMS, odds are there wouldn't be enough community support to report bugs (or exploits) like this one. You'd simply go about your business thinking your site was secure.
link. bait.
From Sunflowers to Abacabadabacaba's
When i read the title, I thought this was going to be about those scientology people who say they too can kill people with their minds.
I find it sad that some of my favorite pieces of music are inaccessible to most people - but it's not their failing. My own personal preferences causes me to listen for certain things in the music that I hear. In particular, I like music with depth and layers, clever melodic hooks, and some changes in tempo and rhythm. Like jazz, the best parts of it are instrumental.

But most people just can't seem to get past all of that screaming in death metal.
It seems to be part of the CL community that is setting this up so I would assume so. I'd ask on #lispgames though.

EDIT: I asked; am waiting for a reply. Will post when (if) I get it.

2nd EDIT: It appears that they haven't decided. I'd go ahead and submit your idea.
I agree with all these points. Some of them are out of practicality since it's not fulltime.

Btw, telephone means actually calling you via telephony, not mobile. However, an iPhone client is planned.

Obviously marketing something like this is hard. Notifo starts with a niche so it's easy. We did too: desktop notifications. But hey hey, we also do a lot more.

Anyway, we are a lot more badass, address some problems Notifo doesn't, but we just don't have a mobile client yet. Womp womp. We'll see who can be the better platform though...
I've shared an apartment with three jazz musicians, and I can assure you that they're not boring.