skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea of simply creating a different distribution mechanism (eg CDBaby) for unsigned artists so that they don't have to sign with a major label is popular with the tech crowd, but fundamentally flawed. It assumes that unsigned artists can all produce well recorded, popular music on their own.

Most can't.

A good producer can pick a rough artist or band and get something popular out of them, but it often involves both mentoring and investment in recording and promotion upfront before any opportunity of return. Note I deliberately use the word "popular" rather than "good" (which is subjective anyway) because clearly as a business "popular" is where the money is. The "long tail" theory is fiction. Music is a hits business where most of the money is made by a relatively short fat body of popular music.

Many of the most popular "artists" are created from scratch by producers. Where do you think Britney and the Spice Girls came from? Like them or not, the revenue from hit music funds the production of new acts who haven't become profitable yet.

Another flawed assumption is that everyone wants to listen to new music. A lot don't. So you have a large body of recorded music that the record labels will never give up or let you sample or remix without a hefty toll. And as soon as any new act gets popular, you can bet they'll be offered a seat at the "big 4" music table. It's the DeBeers business model applied to music.

Personally, I think what the radio station JJJ in Australia does with their unearthed site (http://triplejunearthed.com/) is an excellent model for identifying quality artists. The next step IMHO is a ycombinator style production startup company that invests in developing the most promising acts to become popular and then offers all the recording, promotion, management and touring services that the labels do but on just terms. Distribution is just the last piece of the puzzle.
When was the last time you disconnected from programming? Holidays? Have you taken a halt and re-started? If you are getting nowhere, try to get two weeks off. If you can manage, a month. And keep away from programming for that time. You will crave coding after 2 weeks :D
God... This whole debacle is a true indicator that the patent office should just grant my patent already. I have a non-obvious solution that has solid legal grounding.

If anyone is interested I am going to be handing out a bunch of trial membership codes to interested parties in a few days...
One of the spookiest things about burn out or stress of any kind is just how incredibly stealthy it is. It's impossible to self-diagnose in many cases. You can't trust your own evaluation at all.
Yes, but why can't I just drag and drop mp3 files on my iPod/iPhone directly from the file manager?
Comparing and Evaluating epoll, select, and poll Event Mechanisms
> That took the systematic leveling of a good chunk of Germany, just for starters.

The parallel was not between the specific route and methodology used, but the eventual outcome: the religious extremists must come to be viewed with the same revulsion with which the Nazis are viewed today. My point was that this can happen only through a massive propaganda campaign generously supported from outside.
View it again in a WebGL enabled browser:

http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Getting_a_WebGL_Implementa...
This is serial. I've lost a couple of jobs in a row from this.

Luckily I still have a reputation earned from some years ago. Plus, I interview well. People still give me jobs.

Managers don't seem to have a response here. In my experience most managers only have one bit of information devoted to programmer ability (ROCKSTAR xor SUCKS). They have alternately told me to try harder, or threatened then fired me.

I had felt like I was deceiving employers so I took a nine month break and did an artistic project. However even with a whole day to do nothing but that, I wasn't able to achieve much. I worked with a small number of people and lef that project, and it got done, but not very well, even though it was my "full time" job. Still, I felt that I had had enough of a sabbatical, and also had made some progress in psychotherapy, so I returned to the workforce, only to run into the same problems I had before. I now think the psychotherapy was not addressing the right problems -- it's more about what I do than how I feel. And it's clear my attempt at a sabbatical didn't clear up the fundamental issues.

I have friends that are able to learn programming languages on the side or take blacksmithing courses and otherwise have full and exciting lives. In other words they have reserve energy. I am so behind on just the basic requirements for my project, I feel I can't do any of this. I schedule more and more and more and more time for work and yet still nothing gets done.

As for happiness with work; I have a pattern of working with codebases that are in great need of refactoring and I am feeling a great need to stretch out and do something more original. So that is a problem.

That said, the guy who sits next to me has enough energy to actually satisfy those needs both at work (gets managers to agree to major refactorings) and also code up some great things in his spare time. Whereas I'm perenially playing catch-up and my code is ugly.
Sorry you feel that way. Upvoted you anyways. :-)
Definitely tried it as soon as I saw mention. Extremely easy to implement and fun to boot.
This was there on HN 6 months back. More discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1280304.
Most useful thing I got out of that:

http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/

Kinda fun. Though I'm getting a fair number of errors on the presets, only about 2/3 of them work properly.

edit: tried in Webkit + WebGL: nice whale. Is it really 80k triangles? Gotta love the render speed :)

Definitely more interesting in a WebGL browser, but could really have used more fun with that cube. It just seems... random. Like there wasn't enough 3D™ or something.
Exactly. He says, "Quick, identify 10 different pieces of technology that truly meet your needs and that don’t bug you due to a major flaw you either have to live with or compensate for in some fashion. Could you come up with more than five? I didn’t think so," as if Apple's strategy is to land on that list.

I use and enjoy my share of Apple's wares, but even if I could come up with 10 different pieces of technology that never piss me off, none of them would be from Apple. Has this guy ever used iTunes, or dealt with the App Store?
What Advice Would You Give To Novice Programmers?
I've had similar stuff happen to me. One trick that has helped to get me out
of the rut is to go back to the basics. When I'm stuck I would find a textbook
problem, from the very simple (reverse this array, etc) to the more complex
(implement a red-black tree). I find these problems help get me back on track
and give me useful tools that I might use some day.

I think there are two pieces to being effective at programming. If you have
a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve, you can just bang out the code.
Unfortunately, most of the time you are understanding the problem while you code
it due to very ambiguous specs, so you just can't code as efficiently.

Last, but not least, tweak and tweak away. Write some code, take a walk, come
back and take a look at it again. Review your own code thinking about where you
are making mistakes, it'll give you a map of what to watch out for.
When I'm not in Xcode, my preferred editor is Komodo Edit (with the optional Vim bindings turned on). It's the editor portion of their IDE and is free.
I can show you what I think it will be like. I have developed a media distribution system that is unlike anything that I have seen before. I will be opening it up to a limited number of people soon, and when I do, I can give you a code that will let you create an account.
Supra Fifre Thigh-High is Celebrities’ Choice
I'd go ahead and apply (since being rejected won't affect any future applications), but in the meanwhile, build a prototype and see about getting a quality cofounder in the meanwhile. If you don't get in, then apply next round with the cofounder... but perhaps you'll get in this round as a solo founder and you'll find one during YC.
My job is about as good as it gets. I believe in the work, the people are great, it's interesting and affects lots of people. The downside is the codebase is old and has problems, but I've seen far worse.

Part of me is itching to strike out on my own but if I don't have the discipline to even do halfway well at a job like this, how am I going to deal with a startup?
Eric Schmidt says Android could eventually be a $10 billion/year business
Improve revenue by dicking your users
Comparing rails to just plain PHP pages - yeah, rails is VERY MUCH MORE COMPLEX. The rails 3 project is like some 2500 files and I dunno how many lines of code. There's great benefits in using a framework, most of which is consistency and no need to write the boilerplate functions. Here's a few things to think of:

1. When using a framework you can treat it like a black box, you don't actually need to know how it works, but you need to have a good enough idea of how it could work - that's why so many people roll their own framework in the beginning of their career - it's very useful to have done that.

2. Do you know Object-Orientation works? Can you program object oriented code? I did a lot of programming before I knew OO and could just not understand a single line of object oriented code (that I sometimes had to write in perl using the godawful OO syntax at that time). I just poked at that code until it worked, but I had no way of understanding the code. Took a class in OO programming at the university and it was dead easy after that. I suspect that it would be VERY HARD to grok rails without being able to code object oriented code.

3. Perseverance - for me learning new programming languages and environments always includes making the code work first and then understand. Programming is a practical thing, it either works or not works and the theoretical understanding is just a tool that's more or less useful. You'll just have to keep on working on it until it runs and then try to understand what you have done, you might not even have to understand how rails works, you just have to know enough where to put stuff and have enough experience to know what to do.
> To those who use MongoDB - does this sound like something that might have been caused by MongoDB itself, or Foursquare's use of it?

MongoDB still has problems with locking too much for certain operations. The 10gen guys keep on introducing "yields" to those operations, but the simple (and fast) database/process-level locking could very well cause this... (not a 100% 'yes', but it seems possible)
> it's easy to check for

Really? That's news to me. How do they check?

> Move into management

+1. The tech world needs more managers who actually know tech.
Or is it the other way round?
Also look at dynamo based systems like cassandra and riak (riak seems to have a better load balancing at the moment, cassandra is a bit more "bumpy")
Ask HN: Where could I get quality content written for my startup?
I want to have quality content written for my startup. Homepage content, paragraphs explaining the site, etc.

Where would I find this?
Has anyone ever gotten something like this unless they were the only practical choice and they could dictate terms?
I second the ADHD check. This sounds like classic ADHD symptoms to me. Once you sort of reach that pinnacle you've been striving for, it's easy to lose the drive when you can relax and quit striving or when things are less challenging. You will find your motivation will wax and wane, week in and week out. You start avoiding the real work so much with distractions that it becomes painful just to face it and your own procrastination, which magnifies the symptoms by an order of magnitude.

Do NOT let this relatively easily solvable problem destroy your career. I made this mistake early on in my career and paid for it with a lost job. I'm glad things ended up the way they did, but it would have been better if I left there on good terms.

Even if medication is a temporary fix, it might be what this situation calls for. Often in life we have to chose the best of two evils, and your career is not something to put on the line. I know that I am way happier working 40 hours a week steady than I was when I would binge hack for 120 hours straight while riding a motivation wave.

If you can get yourself back into the groove and being productive, try to figure out what gives you motivation and try to work your way into a position that continuously feeds you these things. That's what I'm working towards.
I am not enthusiastic about the App Store as a developer, but as a user I'm pretty happy as it is the best app store I've seen judging by the quality and number of the apps available.

Surely I'm seeing Android taking over just because it will sell more devices, but the Android Marketplace is really shitty ... I can't even sell or buy apps for Christ's sake, as my country is not on their list (I can do both from the App Store).

And you would think Google has experience in building web services.

So the iTunes App Store may be painful with lots of restrictions and cursed with an awful workflow for publishing apps, but at least it works.
Wenger 16999 Swiss Army Knife - "Epic all-situation survivor's kit"
This is consistent with Saras Sarasvathy's "effectual reasoning model" for expert entrepreneurs. See her paper "What Makes Entreprenurs Entrepreneurial" at http://www.effectuation.org/ftp/effectua.pdf for a good introduction.
Just today I bemoaned the cost of a design conference and random people banded together to help offset the cost for me... so it seems like this is a good time to pay it forward. You should have additional funds in your Paypal account, and see you at Startup School. :)
The classic advice: http://projecteuler.net/

Helped me get something done.
Lorem Ipsum is Greek huh? How can I read the rest of the article without vexation knowing that the writer can't identify a simple foreign language and a prolific tool of design?
I can identify with elements of what you are going through, but I cannot add anything to explain the why behind them.

I remind myself though, that what you see in others around you is the polished exterior surface of their lives, which many times hide the tangled mess of cabling and crap inside. My point is you are comparing your messy insides to another person's polished exterior - hardly a fair comparison for you.

Best of luck
I think their (skype's) basic thinking was right but the implementation sucks.

I want all messages to appear on all devices. I want to be able to close the laptop, get up from the couch and continue the conversation seamlessly on the desktop or phone - with all context being present.

It's just the little notification sound that needs to be handled smarter.

Ideally skype would only ring the notification on the device that you have been last active on (skype already detects that anyways). Also let me select a default device that becomes the noisy one when all clients have gone idle for a while.

Unfortunately the impl is a far cry from that. As it stands skype doesn't even reliably deliver all messages to all clients for me. When I leave my desktop-skype running over night and open the laptop in the morning then sometimes I'll receive the messages from the night - but usually not. I literally have to walk around and check any open skype clients (including the one at work that I forgot to shutdown over the weekend..) if I want to ensure I didn't miss a message.
Why you shouldn't buy an e-reader
Google Goggles comes into iPhone focus
I get this sometimes. For me, it takes the right balance of something I'm excited about, having a lot to learn, and having drive from people whom I feel are pushing me in a direction that's better when I'm having trouble ramping up, but not in the way when I'm really rolling out code.

I've been doing most of that lately, though I can get into a dream state quite a bit where I want to make something really awesome that will slow things down a bit too far.
The beginner mistakes line stuck with me. What types of mistakes (specific examples)? This might be useful for me to know what is going on ewith you.
See "this is serial" above. I took about 9 months off. Didn't really do any coding at all.
Backtick operator in Windows
Assigning an output of a command to a shell variable, Unix:

var=`command`

And, Windows:

for /f "delims=" %%tmp in ('command') do @set myvar=%%tmp

Not that surprising, but still pretty shocking if one comes from the Unix side of things.
It does if you are stuck in traffic waiting for the accident to be cleared.
Maybe he meant it in the "it's all Greek to me" sense.
Definitely familiar. What I would suggest is to figure out what it is you're really getting hung up on. It has to be something more specific than "my brain turns to mush." Try writing down a description of the problem you think you're having. The act of rendering a thought into writing will often break a logjam for me.
The True Cost of Free Business Cards
I swear, they redesign that site every month. This is getting old.
Nike Hyperdunk 2010 Basketball Shoes For Sale
You know your site better than anybody. Write it yourself, then show it to a friend or two and figure out why it sucks. Wash, rinse, repeat until you have a kick-ass piece.
> I second the ADHD check. This sounds like classic ADHD symptoms to me. Once you sort of reach that pinnacle you've been striving for, it's easy to lose the drive when you can relax and quit striving or when things are less challenging. You will find your motivation will wax and wane, week in and week out. You start avoiding the real work so much with distractions that it becomes painful just to face it and your own procrastination, which magnifies the symptoms by an order of magnitude.

Holy crap, you just described my life. There's no way I'm an extreme case, but maybe I really do have a little ADHD going on...?
Yes.

Different people are different. There is no such thing as "universally shitty" about jobs. Jobs are jobs and different people have different motivations about them. Luckily, the free market does not give you any right to try to stop or judge these jobs which you claim are "universally shitty".

I would suggest reading the book 'First break all the Rules'. Dan Pink also gave an insightful talk on motivations. You could find it here. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html.
I sometimes use semicolons in Python for convenience when writing short debug code. Fewer lines, fewer pound signs I have type to comment it out later.

e.g., print somevar, othervar; exit()
Big things like agreeing to start coding without requirements.

Little things like inconsistent return conventions or code disagreeing with documentation comment blocks.

People are referring me to classic coder texts like Code Complete. Okay, maybe I do need a review but I fucking read that book in the 90s. It's incredibly galling.
Actually for anonymous sharding (without a central index) a consistent hash is about the closest you can get to ideal distribution and flexibility. I haven't looked but I presume that's what mongo uses under the hood for their auto-sharding, too.
“Distraction,” Simplicity, and Running Toward Shitstorms
"Greek text" is a bit of industry jargon for placeholder text such as... lorem ipsum.
> You can get a CS student to watch you code and kick your chair when you stop for under ten bucks an hour.

Excellent idea.
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"Greek" is the correct design term for any dummy text in a mock-up.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeking
Google Goggles Lands on the iPhone
I always use semicolons, because I also code in several other languages, that require them. But I have no problem, if someone leaves them out. This is how JavaScript was designed.
Talk patio11 into starting a side business?
Visio is one of the most common apps for Windows that makes similar diagrams, but I really like http://www.gliffy.com and http://www.mindmeister.com. Both are webapps and would work equally good on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.
With Less than 50% Market Share, IE Is Now Losing the Browser Wars
Direct quote: "You will not sell user data."... Not sure how that is equivalent to selling your data, unless there is something else I am missing.
That's probably because they haven't experienced enough things in life. This world is huge with so many different opportunities.

People who appear dispassionate, are not always so. There are people who are passionate about serving their family. Or maybe some sport say football. They have to find a way to channel their passion to their careers. I admit passion is not enough, you need talents but that's again about channeling passion in the right way.

Of course, there would always be some people who would be physically (biologically?) incapable of feeling passion. But I don't think that is the norm.
Your comment influenced me to chip in a little to help Abraham get there. He's a great hacker and has already made an impact on the Seattle scene.

It took me a while to realize I wanted to build/run a startup - anything I can do, however little, to help somebody else get there faster is a great thing in my eyes.
The Web Clipper is very, very useful. It's almost replaced bookmarking for me. Actually, it's better than normal bookmarking since you can clip the important text, add your own note, and sync the whole thing to all your devices. Evernote's not perfect, but they've got this down great.
I get hung up in a number of ways, but the most severe is when I'm trying to learn how the existing system works. I'll be listlessly paging back and forth between spaghetti code classes, and things get all fuzzy, and then it feels like I've spent enough time on this, and some sort of strategy to do my project occurs to me.

And then I try it, but it doesn't work because I still didn't understand the existing code. Rinse, repeat.

However, just the other week I decided somehow to FIGURE OUT HOW IT ALL WORKS, DAMMIT. I actually kept a glass of ice cubes next to my desk and pressed one to my head if I felt I was drifting, which worked surprisingly well. I realized that this codebase always had a lot of the functionality I had always wanted, hidden away in a particular method. I'd been staring right at it for months and it didn't click in my head.

I felt ashamed.
New York Schools Go Google
Considering semicolons are needed or optional in most languages why not just get in the habit of typing them? Sometimes that means I slip them in my Python code, but everything still works. Just makes more time for thinking about what the code is actually doing.
Programming Languages, lambda calculus, calculus of constructions
Try to build the simplest, crappiest thing you can think of.
Leave perfectionism at work.
I have switched to macvim + peepopen.
The problem with the financial industry is cultural. It's endemically toxic. Every jackass has seen Wall Street and half of them want to be Gordon Gekko.

The only good reason to work in the financial industry is if you want to have the best odds of making the most money as quickly as possible. You just have to not care about almost anything else to do that.

You also have to work with people that made that choice.
> Really? That's news to me. How do they check?

Typically diagnosis is made after an interview (about an hour) and questionnaires. If there's some doubt about the diagnosis you may need to bring in old school reports. It's also possible to diagnose using brain scans now (e.g http://www.sydneydevelopmentalclinic.com.au/brain_scanning.h...), and medication can be trialled and selected on the basis of an individual response to the medication (shown with another brain scan, or using testing, e.g http://www.sydneydevelopmentalclinic.com.au/medication_testi...).