skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you plot the "importance" N(n) of the positive integers, where

N(n) = The number of occurrences of n in the OEIS

an interesting anomaly appears[1]. The "importance" of the integers fall into two clusters, separated by Sloane's Gap[2][3].

Also, Neil Sloane appeared[4] several times on Numberphile. In the last few videos of that[4] playlist ("Amazing Graphs"), Sloane shares some of the particularly interesting sequences from the OEIS.

[1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/vcNYb.png

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4470v2

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YysNM2JoFo

[4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWJXQqPe_llz...
Interesting and awaiting any response.
Music market is almost perfectly competitive market. Extremely low margins should be the norm.

The supply is endless. Talent pool is huge. Millions of amateurs are making music even if nobody is paying for them and are delighted if someone wants to listen them. People are willing to take huge pay cut to earn living doing music and perform in lousy bars.

I think the best model is patronage. Music online is almost completely free and works as marketing to get people to listen. If people like the music and want to hear some more, they will pay in advance for musician to produce it and perform it.

Superstars are somewhat separate category. It's a showbiz and fashion industry where people like what others like to connect. The product sold is famous persona with music.
> HTML5 should have been XML from the start

The point is that this hasn't happened; neither back in XML's heyday, and much less today. Now you can bemoan XML's demise until the end of time, or you can fallback to XML's big sister SGML. As I said, SGML has lots of features over XML that are in fact desirable for an authoring format, such as Wiki syntaxes, type-safe/injection-free templating, stylesheets, etc. on top of being able to parse HTML. Many of these features are being reinvented in modern file-based CMSs and static site generators, so there's definitely a use case for this. Whereas editing XML (a delivery rather then authoring format) by hand is quite cumbersome, verbose and redundant, yet still doesn't help at all in how text content is actually created on the web.
> It should be quite evident (or at least intuitive) that 90% of Spotify subscribers are niche (deep into rock, electronic, hip hop etc)

Not at all evident or intuitive
Tennessee isn’t “The Volunteer State” for no reason!

Then, you know, they are also cool with others’ impersonation of well known Tennessean.
Yeah, I'm nearly 50, and I never start a new game of anything after 9 because it wakes me up to much, I can easily find myself still playing and not tired at all after midnight. I need at least an hour of winding down after gaming before bed.
Of course you could do anything, it is a very touristic city and Spain forces Castilian spanish to be taught in schools.

Also, you can tell the polls are not that favorable or the central govmt would have made a referendum on the issue.
Simple software is simple. Complex software is hard.

In the choice between simple (and cheap and correct) vs complex (and expensive and buggy) customers and stakeholders with very few exceptions go for the latter.

Our software is exactly as buggy as we want it to be - a decision we make with the tradeoff of cost and complexity.
Sorry to polute your pure and precise word but outside of mathematics people will continue using fractal to mean self similar. As with many mathematical words the colloquial meaning is different.
Skeptical about LinkedIn these days as it might be overused. Even I tend to receive lot of pitches these days and generally distrust the medium.
Which tournaments did you play in?
Good old SC ruined my high school but god damn did I learn much from playing it competitively.
I've never lived somewhere that had decent daylight in the morning. When I lived in the states, it wasn't light outside until 8am or something in the winter. I now live in Norway, and december days are less than 5 hours long where I am - and the light isn't very strong.

Perhaps 5am is just a difficult time to wake up.
In my experience, you should follow up 4-5 times. In many instances, we receive positive responses much later in the follow-up cycle. For context: Selling to 100-plus-person SaaS B2B organisations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXliQvd1vW0&list=PL3A50BB9C3...

enjoy!
Yes. It will happen whether it’s desireable or not. For example, I think it’s inevitable that the US will use an ISO date format eventually, and further down the line I think many Asian scripts will be replaced with western etc.
It sounds almost like the scatter plot of grades and competence at an actual job (or perceived competence at least) isn’t a straight line.
> and we are definitely past the point at which one person can even reasonably understand the entire stack from transistors all the way up through OS, compiler, language, etc. We must accept this fact of complexity and formulate ways to deal with it, to contain it and reduce it when we can, but it will always be with us.

Beautifully put and we definitely are, I think the trick now is knowing which bits of the layers underneath you need to know to interact with things well (in terms of your goal), I came up on computers in the 80's and used C and Pascal, those early experiences have been useful for 30 odd years because often I have a 'feel' for what the computer is doing underneath that younger (and really capable!) devs lack.

Often when performance is really critical I'll go look in the source code for the tool to get a feel for what it is really doing (even though I haven't written C in a long time) which is regarded as voodoo.

On the flip side of course is I can build things in an afternoon or a day or two that simply wouldn't have been possible with months or years of work and a dev team of dozens back then.

My next side project is a tool for motorcyclists, you drop pins on a map where you are going to be at points in time and it then pulls the complete meterological data for those points and does some calculations (are the roads likely to be wet, icy, show the direction of the wind, show the windchill at 30mph, 40mph, 50mph etc) with the ability to set recurring routes and email you the day before something like "Tomorrow morning, there may be ice on the roads, wind chill will be 5C, feels like temperature at 40mph -2c, Sunny, low winter sun so wear your shades/visor"

The data to do that didn't exist 30 years ago and the GIS tooling (I'm using open street maps) to process the entire UK would have cost millions.
Using some console tools like echo and sed: https://mathilde.website
Humans are social. Golf (or whatever it is that floats the VPs boat" can only get you a foot in the door.
I’ve seen PDFs like these- it’s one way for publishers of (costly!) industry research reports to allow limited downloads and still track who’s reading them (the kind where a copy is listed at 5000 USD for non subscribers). And they are horrible to use, but do serve a purpose.
There’s a bell curve here. 1/3 in high school, 2/3 in college, 1/3 in the adult workforce (CDC data).
If the music industry had started selling an album for a dollar instead of fighting Napster they would be making more money than now.

Spotify pays very little to the artists but I'm not sure the margins are there. Tidal promised to be more generous and everybody saw how that went.
I always used that time to clear my inbox and read the internet. Get those early distractions out of the way.
We made a foray into designing and building a brand new house and let me tell you, my fellow HNers, the state of affairs with the design part is ABYSMAL, even in a reasonably modern architect firm.

Basically you first design, for look and feel, then you calculate technical details, then you build. Or rather the architect does all three, but you would normally want to "chip in" during the design phase - change the layout, move things around, etc. That's where things get bloody awful.

I wasn't expecting full VR tours of the place (though it is doable [1]), but I did expect to be able to walk through the place in 3D and see how it will look like in the winter morning and summer afternoon. Hell no. What are you smoking?

Floor plans. Planimetric facades. Roll your eyes to the ceiling and imagine. 3D renders that looks like from the early 00s take hours to produce, so they aren't done often. That's _still_ renders, mind you. 3D walk-abouts are possible, but they look like butt and they are viewed as the final step of the process, when everything has been done and done.

And this is with firms where principles are in their 40s and generally computer literate. It just seems that the industry is very conservative with its tooling choices AND these tools are also ridiculously expensive, further stifling any desire to switch. So they are stuck with using technical design software like ArchiCAD (good for laying out piping, calculating stress, air flow, etc.) for visual design. And the resulting process is sooooo slow, small changes and iterations take hours if not days to complete, so it takes weeks to converge to a general design of the house.

Painful, painful process. Ugh. Caveat emptor.

[1] https://www.benoitdereau.com/
> I think it’s inevitable that the US will use an ISO date format eventually

About half the programmers I know (including myself) already write dates as 2019-10-27 even when using a pen, it really is a more convenient format.
Pentagon awards $10 bn cloud contract to Microsoft, snubbing Amazon
I use gmail (too late to change even though I have personal domains). I register it everywhere and it’s probably searchable in many places. I think gmail does a good job with spam, I don’t get more than 1 spam in my inbox or one non-spam mail misidentified as spam in a year. So I’m completely happy and feel it’s a solved problem. This could change in the future of course, but I have had zero problems in the past decade.
> I agree with OP that HTML5 should have been XML from the start.

The key requirement for HTML5, And why it succeeded where XHTML had limited success, was that existing HTML docs had to work with it. Which is why it has both an HTML and an XML format.

It was not wrong for it not to be pure XML, it was absolutely necessary.
The USPS used to sort the mail on trains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_post_office
Solving the chaotic three-body problem using deep neural networks
Indeed, in my normal browsing habits, I rarely rely on the back button, as it usually forces a page reload which is very slow. Like you, I am using a stack of tabs instead. On mobile though, I use the back button more, as tab creation is not as easy (why no browser does this with a 2-finger tab, I don't understand).

However, the side effect of this goes much further, it also hoses your browsing history, and sometimes you really need that. So while this is a cool hack, there shouldn't be a direct link on the HN front page.
I seriously doubt that Spotify saved the music industry. If anything, Bandcamp is the one that could claim such thing. Having an easy way to pay for music where I buy an album or song is the way to go if you respect musicians. Downloading ALAC is the same as buying a CD but a digital way. Using a streaming service is a much more complicated way where niche artist are not going to be too happy. (Some examples from musicians below).
Steve Jobs at a Microsoft conference, WebObjects and dev Q&A (1996) [video]
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynote-with-Bob-Muglia-and-Steve-Jobs
My kids are only 6 and 7 but they are up first and can mostly do they rest themselves. I just have to work out how to get them to carry that through to the teenage years.
JavaScript – Most Important Design Patterns
Kind of hilarious really. Or pitiful.

We had the National Research Development Corporation (to patent and commercialise research) and the various defence research establishments. Gave multiple successful innovations, including the hovercraft and commercial use of carbon fibre. Also involved in the Miles M52 that government essentially gave to the US. It became the Bell X-1 - compare the photos - X-1 was famous for some reason. What's more, those defence establishments had world renowned reputation.

Thatcher sold the lot.

I call hogwash on this idea though - it would require government research funding. The Tory party has been allergic to that since 1979.
Quick point. If you set commission based on revenue then make sure you attach a minimum margin condition. Otherwise set margin based targets...
There is a Dunning-Kruger-esque quote on painting, that applies maybe even better (&#42;) to software:

"Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do." (E. Degas)

(or for a more literal translation: "Painting, that's very easy when you don't know how to do. When you do know, it's very difficult.")

(&#42;) (Although Ecce Homo by E. G. Martinez is a good image of what can happen to the software you're working on when management adds someone to help you out ;).
This article calls bourbon whiskey. If we consider whiskey could be made from corn we may as well allow agave or potatos too.
I’m fairly confident there is no need for Google to do anything to keep making boatloads of money.
It's kind of ironic that the reply to the parent is dead. It's almost an exact reflection of exactly what he's talking about here on hacker news.
> And even more perniciously, I think, are the playlists curated by utility. Like "showering music." I mean, that's offensive. It's an offensive concept. And so that's one level of it. I push back against that notion, just because I think that it's offensive and barbarian.

Yeah, fuck Spotify for catering to different ways that people like to enjoy music. I guess he finds traditional music radio offensive as well, never mind mixtapes or the shuffle button on a CD player…
> GPL is for code.

Citation needed. GPL can work for anything.
If you use Cloudflare, they’ll obfuscate email addresses for you (i.e., from scrapers), while maintaining clickability.

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170016-W...
People who care enough about music to pay a monthly fee, surely are also invested enough to develop their own tastes?

IOW, who pays for listening to "radio" (Top 40) music?

There's an audience for Top 40 music, but they will typically belong to the ad-supported tier of Spotify, not the paying tier.
My life feels nicer with plants around. I would love having plants at my workplace. The second best thing is views of greenery outside. The last resort is pictures, posters, desktop wallpapers of green places.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nomanazish/2018/02/10/think-you...
I don't see your point. Do you think the authors shouldn't give responsible disclosure because the underlying mechanism has been around for a while? The company would obviously fix the area where false data is allowed to be injected, not systematically harden their entire codebase against any possible ROP-based attack.
> Now you can bemoan XML's demise until the end of time

XML, while not the main format for modern HTML, isn't dead, so why would one bemoan it's demise? In fact, it's quite widely used.
One tip that I see folks use. Encourage or enforce business email addresses for your trial accounts. This helps you target your cold emails (especially after trial expires).
Obligatory reminder that, prior to Trump winning, Wired magazine ran a (popular, widely viral) article claiming that the idea that the vote could be rigged by hacking voting machines was a nutty conspiracy theory: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/wireds-totally-legit-guide-rig...

Like, I'm sure there are some folks whose concern about voting maching hacking isn't just a partisan tactic - especially on places like HN - but Wired magazine isn't one of them. Given that the last time this was such a major mainstream topic was after the 2004 election, well...
Hacking Famous Street Artist Banksy Fake Store with Bash and Varanid
However, for contrast, consider also John 11:47–53; the leaders both political (chief priests) and religious (Pharisees) were considering Jesus and his teachings to threaten the relatively stable situation they had with the Romans—that was a key reason they claimed in why they sought his death.
La Cina inserisce una nuova legge sulla crittografia
Interview with Exoplaneteers Ed Young and Alexandra Doyle
Same here. I buy almost all music on bandcamp nowadays, the site is amazing :)
Yeah, I can't see where the GP got this from. Spotify is perfectly mainstream around these parts at least.
Artificial Intelligence Trends to Watch in 2019
Is SGML even still used? The only usecase I remember besides HTML is DocBook and that of course also has a XML variant for a long time.

SGML is needlessly complex as an authoring format. Even HTML was considered too complex and that's why we got lightweight markup languages like MarkDown and AsciiDoc.

I would be very surprised if we ever turn back to something like SGML. Especially as there are well designed LML as AsciiDoc or reStructuredText.
Yes. And I even have a catch all for my domain just go to my inbox. (*@ironhlelmet). It's managed by gmail.

The only spam I get is an occasional email telling me that my page rank could be improved if I pay some seo spammers.
99% of people don't care. And the hardware they're listening on is typically the bigger bottleneck anyway.
Flagged. This doesn’t belong on the front page.
Stress Relief, being able to explore an extremely large world and do with it as pleased filled me with bliss. There has been no other video game that compares to what we could feel while just walking around and experiencing the features that Minecraft has to offer.
Bagpipes are amongst one of the oldest instruments, and originated in central Asia.

Also, Japanese whisky is amazing.
Maybe AGPL, which would scare more companies?
sounds like in tennessee you could hop into a police car and do vigilante missions, GTA style
I think one of their big advantages over SpaceX is noise pollution. Nobody is going to be launching Super Heavy near significantly inhabited areas just because of the noise.
FYI just another take on Banksy Fake Store

Hacking a Banksy with Bash and Varanid:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368691
Many distilleries are now owned by Japanese. Eg, the Bowmore.
Pretty sure youtube only use 128 kbps, which is a lot worse.

As you say, 320 kbps is nearly perfect.
TREE(Graham's Number) is just comically inefficient Googology. It makes me wince just to look at. Graham's Number isn't even on the same plane of existence as TREE. You'd just use TREE(TREE(3)) if you wanted to move up in the world. Somebody needs to tell them about the fast-growing hierarchy and how Graham's Number lives around \omega+1 while TREE hangs out with the small Veblen ordinal.
Somewhat familiar with that.

The details of printing signatures and folios, and having the pages come out the way you want them to when bound, is another minor fascination. As are canons of page design.
Thanks for the feedback. The idea here is to let user take notes in mark down, then with one click convert it to mind map to make a structure to the text. After that collaborate with others (colleagues, friends, family...) in real time in note or mind map mode.
Headline news: geofft@HN states, "I deliberately write code without tests and ignore code review and cause problems in production" and goes on to say "my employer would be justified in firing me" - - vice.com
IMO that's wrong. You could write XHTML 1.0 documents that were backwards compatible to browsers that only understood HTML 4.01.

XHTML2 OTOH was a convoluted mess of modular documents that couldn't get out of design hell and completely disregarded the developers of browsers.

HTML5 succeeded because it was implemented by the browsers, because the same people that programmed the browsers were on board when designing HTML5.
I recall they also put cheaters together with cheaters, or rather accounts of high quality (no cheating, bought many games, older accs, etc) together.
Yeah came here to say this. The different states are almost indistinguishable. I also didn't understand that they where supposed to be holes. I'd make the shadow effect much more subtle and have the holes in the background color so they seem like cut out of the red board vs very bright white pieces. Also the selected indicator would be more noticeable in an entirely different color like yellow.

If you want to make it really cool implement drag and drop. When you start dragging a piece add a sublte hightlight to the allowed destination holes.
Sounds like an industry ripe for disruption.
Docker is a turn key solution to three different problems (build, package, run). A lot of people know of alternatives that cover only the run part and then they wonder why their particular solution didn't become as popular.
In a Mandelbrot fractal on one pixel you may see one value, on another you see another.

Let's say on the second wall, instead of graffiti of violence, you see a message of love. You look around the wall and you see there is a person in love, a family sharing love, a town with flowers, a peaceful city.

For a wall with nothing, it could be a value in the set that corresponds to a particular color that represents it did not meet the threshold.
I think having a separate email for business is better
I believe the use of the word "fraudulent" was indeed correct here. It was a program initiated by the post-WW2 military industrial complex to use a national crisis (the Cold War) to profit and regularize excessive defense spending, as per standard neoliberal tactics of the time.

The program spent a lot of money, made a lot of large visible moves, and in the end, did not produce one single thing, offensive or defensive. Tax dollars (not) at work.
It depends if we consider state sponsored agencies maintained for national security reasons part of the ‘space industry’. There are reasonable arguments either way.
The website attached to the store is astoundingly corporate. For example, it contains a long and clearly custom-written TOS with classic gems like this: "Our site must not be framed on any other site, nor may you create a link to any part of our site other than the home page."
Gif owned lossless image formats before Unisys asserted their patent. In the aftermath, PNG was created, even animations shifted elsewhere -- mp4 and, though also proprietary, Flash. SVG popped up later, but fills some rolls previously held by gif.

And simply using or supporting gifs became an issue -- it was political. That's not something you want to have happen to your standard.
Great idea. Definitely will try that.
> ASCII doesn't even cover all of the characters and symbols that are normally used by English speakers.

Such as?
It is a very famous example in economics, but it was very unusual for them to do their analysis in Excel rather than a stats package like Stata.
20M trees around the globe by January first, 2020
is quaint a bad thing now?

I like the pace of email better compared to instant-messaging where I usually feel like I have to apologise if im replying a few days later.

email is also better for having multiple topics. if you try to ask somebody about something off topic when using instant-messaging then it can easily get pushed out of view and forgotten about since it's all just a single thread

I wouldn't attempt write any sort of long form communication using IM and I wouldn't be cruel enough to make others read something like that
def LA
Some people are anxious by normal clapping, yes. See the video I linked to elsewhere here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ine7xIlLxgc .

Christian churches also tell people what they can and cannot do during services. Do you also think that a bit fascist?

HN moderators tell people what they can and cannot write. Also fascist?

In Germany, the academic tradition is to knock on the table, not clap. Also fascist?

I think this cast is a fundamental expression of the freedom of association, guided by democratic voting. Do you really want to deny the students the right to vote on what their internal policies might be?