skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although this will likely cause outrage from the entitlement brigade, I think it's pretty reasonable.

If you feel the need to listen to a track more than five times a month then that's surely an indication that it's worth chucking the artist/label ~£1 to get the MP3/FLAC. Once you you've done that you can move on to finding another new track to obsess over on spotify, with no opportunity cost.

In short, this emphasises spotify's suitability as a discovery service for new music, rather than as a way to avoid having to curate your own music collection. This was always it's strength anyway.

The problem is that spotify is probably banking on the latter use case to support their business.
Hi

Kevin is right, also jrmg and most others from my point of view. I am the one who started the service discussed.

As in every topic there are at least two positions. I think in normal cases the service will help service providers to keep the userdatabase clean of temporary mail addresses. From the point of a user (and I am often only a user looking for services) it should also not be a problem to give a email address away if you trust the provider.

But I agree: In special cases acting as a user it is useful not to give someone the email address. Like a creditcard number.

From providers angle I would decline such email addresses in every case. Most of the services are free today - so the only return service is to have a communication channel to the user. It's clear for me not to spam my users as I treat them as customers.

It's up to you if and how you use the service. And hopefully most of you would like them.

But I know that not everyone is happy with that kind of abuse killing abuse killing systems ... (see jrockways new idea of block-sites-that-block-disposable-emails.com).

Best regards,

Gerold
http://www.block-disposable-email.com
Why do so many people, including scientists, get stuck on the maths problem?
Remember, we don't know anything about your ex co-founder. So it's not about whether you are right or wrong, it's just that anything to do with him is completely irrelevant - bringing him up can only hurt your pitch.

The fact that you complain about him (and the power imbalance between tech/business founders) instead of explaining why you and your project are awesome is really off-putting.

You're looking for a co-founder: you should be selling yourself and selling your project!
I'd need to read the Amazon agreement much more closely, but what's to stop developers from gaming this by taking all their apps released on Amazon's app store and making them special "Amazon Editions"?

Then the argument is there that the minimum list price on Google's store doesn't apply, because the Google Edition and the Amazon Edition are two different apps.
I personally use vim, and have gotten very used to the action+movement commands and the modal behavior.

However, I am very jealous of emacs' integration with other OS tools. Nothing in vim comes close to emacs integration with gdb and lisp REPLs (slime, etc). So I could see using emacs+viper if I was programming lisp, or doing a lot of debugging.

Also, I feel that vim is a very powerful text editor, but only a competent text creator. How do emacs users feel about the distinction?
I personally find that seeing the points by comments allows me to see interesting comments while I am skimming over a thread. I wouldn't mind having points hidden if there was some way that the most commented on threads or most popular threads appeared closer to the top of the story.
Not only SQL - memcache and MySQL 5.6
Even if it's a bad time NOW to be going into CS, that won't be the case forever. If you have enough resources to survive the lean times, seems like you'd do well to get the CS degree so you'll have it when times get better.
To force every player out there to do this?

How would it know when you own the CD and have ripped it yourself?

I guess you could always just detach it from the network.
That probably won't be true long-term. Amazon is perfectly capable of cutting deals with manufacturers/carriers to get their apps pre-installed; their MP3 app comes with many Android phones.
Rackspace Cloud Files.
If it's what you love, it's never a bad time. This is true for virtually anything. There are times when it may be easier or harder to make a living doing so, but if you love it, you should work at it.
Do it because you want to. There were a ton of people who jumped on the bandwagon in the late nineties, but a lot of them faded away after the dot com crash.

Don't do it for the money, there are plenty of other ways to make about the same amount from an hourly perspective. Do it because you want to.
Make Money From Your Blog Using Infolinks In-Text Advertisement Program
My 3rd Happy Dance and Learning To Savor Small Victories
I've been logging my weight with their fantastic Weightbot for a couple years now. Great intuitive UX and graphic design. Fine work.
Drop me an email in my profile, we are not taking work right now, but I have a developer who just came off a project and has some time between projects, if it is small enough we may be able to fit you in. We are a strong JavaScript and mobile shop of Independent freelancers. Even if we can't help due to scheduling conflicts, I can help you find the right person.
Over the years, I have had a ton of people approach me about doing various startup ideas. For some reason, 90% that are pitched related to music.

I immediately say no to any startup involving music. I know pg has the same policy now, but I've been saying it for about 10 years now, and my reasoning is a bit starker than pg's.

Basically, there are only a handful companies making good money off of music, and you aren't going to be one of them. (the labels and Apple, basically)

* This is slightly less true when you are including instrument makers, but musicians are an AWFUL market to try to sell to, since the only ones who actually make money tend to get everything free anyway through sponsorship deals. IE. musicians can't spend money, and if they can they won't anyway.

P.S. To the guys in Glastonbury I recently spoke to through email and who I know read HN, this isn't directed at you, even if it may sound like it.
>Once you've spent your first month downloading everything you've ever wanted

This only makes sense if you're talking about someone with tragically limited tastes in music. There is no way you could ever listen to "all the music you want" in a lifetime, let alone one measly month.

There is more good new music produced and released in a month than you could listen to in that month, before you even consider the entire history of recorded music that already exists.
Do what you love, or at least want, because ultimately your choice of course is not something that binds you irrevocably to one career or another.
The post has many good suggestions! To them, I would add:

The mark ring. Whenever you place a mark (highlighting a region), its place is also added to a ring, and you can jump between them by pressing "C-u space" (or "C-x space" for pop-global-mark, which will jump between buffers). Many commands that move a long way add an implicit mark, so this works quite well as a "where was I..." command.

For "dynamic abbreviations", I recommend pabbrev (http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord/download/emacs/pa...) - when Emacs is otherwise idle, it starts building a lookup trie of prefixes to frequently used words, so it will suggest completions under the cursor as you type. I love it.

I much prefer iswitchb to the default buffer switching system. YMMV.

Don't forget about learning Emacs lisp, either! It adds quite a bit of flexibility to Emacs. It's kind of a crappy, backward Lisp dialect, but still tremendously useful.

Finally, learn to use the help system. Emacs's naming is really idiosyncratic, but it gives you several powerful ways to look things up, so you don't have to memorize everything.
Consider that even if there are increased numbers, if you are in it because it's what gets you motivated, those numbers will fade away over time (they'll be the developers that only last 3-5yrs before switching careers). Meanwhile, you'll still be there because you enjoy what you do. Believe me, computer work is not going away any time soon (even if the bulk of it is not thrilling or exciting).
Two reasons to fail fast and cheap:
1) It's fast.
2) It's cheap.
This would require a lot of work to not violate FERPA, which is a federal law preventing educational records -- such as course history -- from being disclosed without consent from the student.
I agree with this question. If you're in it for the money than you should probably look into something else. The fact that you're questioning going into CS probably means it possibly may not be for you.

If technology/programming is something that you love to do, then there is no question to go into CS if you're wanting a formal education.
Gwt requires .java.
Why is this not done as an RBL-style DNS-based blacklist? The queries are cheaper, mirroring and distributed caching are already built-in...

Of course, charging for access would be harder, but you can still offer to sell people lists who don't want to rely on external infrastructure.
Best Comments (with no points)
Technically the Amiga Platform has always been rather agnostic about it's timing & video output. It spits out PAL / NTSC / RGBS in various funky resolutions, all you have to do is ask or set a jumper depending on the model. Secondly if it wasn't for this spot on NTSC carrier frequency that the Amiga could output we would never have seen products such as the Video Toaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

Or this oddity, the A2024 with a 10hz-15hz refresh rate: http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=863
That picture is meaningful to me because of what it represents.
tzs, your write (tomb) was unbelievably helpful... just finished reading all of it.

As you walked through all the examples I was slowly leaning towards BrainTree and as you kept going through the reasoning I felt like I concluded at the same place you did by the end; sounds like the perfect thing to launch with and if I want better sub handling I can always add something like Recurly later.

I have no love for merchant account banks after reading all that.

I had no idea where the "points" on reward cards were coming from, very sneaky!

Fascinating read, I can't imagine how long it took to write up. I really appreciate that.
Pretty awesome, looking forward to buying one
Companies are always in need to good programmers and Computer Scientists. Why not go to school for CS now while the economy isn't perfect and then you'll be out when it starts to pick up again.
I really like the simplicity and the choice of language. I think a comments / discussion section would be useful, for people to ask questions, talk about the ways to make the articles even better and perhaps translate the code to other languages.

All in all - I hope you keep up the good work, solid tutorials like these make it more compelling to keep up with the basics and learn new things from the "CS 101" department.
Follow that bus
My guess is this is a requirement from the record companies for a US launch.

So, might actually be good news for Spotify - and you americans who can't access this excellent service.
Awesome. This will save a whole lot of time for developers like me. Thank you
Pictures of the first GUIs from Xerox
If You Need Angel Investors, Avoid These Startups
Definitely do it yourself. You want to know about the person or company who wants to purchase the domain. It makes a world of difference (re: how to negotiate).
Report: White iPhone coming by end of month
It really is that much more expensive here.

With stats like the ones in the article posted, you're incorporating a really geographically diverse area for NYC. Do the SF ones include Oakland? Here they're talking about way out in East New York, or East Flatbush BK, or the South Bronx. So sure, CNN says you can buy a house for $455k, but in any neighborhood you'd feel safe living in it's more like $600k for a smallish 1 or 2 bedroom co-op, and that's in the neighborhoods going through gentrification.

Rent is generally around $1500/month for a 1 bedroom in bed-stuy or up in east greenpoint. You can easily pay double for Manhattan.

Then there is the cost of everything else in the city. It really gets expensive quick!
Indeed! Spoiler alert:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8opv5u9nf0

First time (as a kid) was shocking...
Are you processing any international charges with BrainTree? In tsz's post he mentioned that they don't help with that until you are doing serious volume of sales and then they will handle international charges for you.
Eradicating Non-Determinism in Tests
It's exactly like Apple's rule for in-app purchases.
I'm in the (seemingly small) group of people that has several years experience with both. I think that vi is a better editor (I prefer its compositional & modal keyboard interface to Emacs's modifier keys), but Emacs's multi-buffer model and extensibility make it a much better integrated environment. On the balance, Emacs wins, but I tend to use nvi or mg for very quick edits. (OpenBSD's default install has them both.)

vi and Emacs are both excellent, and I'd recommend picking one (or an equally sophisticated editor) and mastering it, rather than waffling back and forth. For any professional programmer, the time invested in learning a powerful editor will quickly pay for itself.

I find viper mode unsatisfying - few to no mode / extension writers provide alternative keybindings for it (shocker), so you end up having using Emacs keys anyway, only with more cognitive dissonance. Other people may feel otherwise, but that's my experience.
I stand corrected. I thought I'd read somewhere that it was free software. Maybe I misread "freeware" in TFA.
I also remember a short story about a guy who builds his house using a tesseract as the model. More inside than outside--- until it collapsed! :)
The Unexamined Veil of Tenure
Sony Ericsson promotes Android bootloader unlocking
You're welcome :-D
Hey If you're going to turn off points on comments, please make it an option.
I definently enjoy programming. From GUI development to data science, I love sitting at a computer and thinking through problems. However, I think it's only natural to be worried about job market realities.

Let's say I loved art. What use is studying art history if I can't get a job and would be living paycheck to paycheck.
You can try other pricing strategies, it's just that you need to give Amazon the lowest list price. No different than Apple really, requiring your in-app content to match the lowest pricing available.

Amazon and [to a much greater extent] Wal-Mart play these games with physical goods too. It's just you never get to read the terms and big distributors don't complain publicly.
Sorry to sound negative but I never understand why if someone goes to the bother of making something like this. Why they can't provide a checkbox to allow users on a desktop (without gyroscopes) to interact via mouse and see the effect.
So what is the downside to you vetting these documents via a lawyer first? Ensuring that the documents are even a little bit better will save your users collectively a lot of legal fees.
Good article, but leaves a few points open in my mind. The biggest issue that most people seem to be missing is control. When you have a 50/50 setup, you better make sure that you are comfortable with all the decision-making dynamics that partnership structure will bring.

Consider when you have a technical and a semi or non-technical founder. Let's say the technical founder is the visionary for the product you are building, understands what the customer needs (which means he has some/good business savvy) and give direction to all engineering related activities - from technology stack selection to what features and how they will be built. He/she is the one who will take the lead in defining the product and its -hopefully- many iterations going forward. A quick high profile example that comes to mind is Mr. Zuckerberg - he did the programming and he continues to give direction to the product.

Now you also have the semi/non-technical founder, who is obviously there because he/she is talented, smart and will have large impact going forward in building customer relationships and contribute to higher level discussion on where the products should go. There is a good chance the company won't go anywhere without this guy either.

How would you now do the split? A 50/50 arrangement would mean both parties get the same say/leadership over where the company/technology needs to go. Is that right? This is not about money, as both parties will be in good shape as long as a reasonable arrangement is chosen. It is about what is fair/right/sensible regarding what the company is going to be about and how it is run.
The consensus points I'm reading are:

I miss knowing whether a comment will be good and worthwhile to read or not.

I miss the points because I use them to search/filter/etc.

I'm being more thoughtful in reading comments because I don't have the points anchoring or influencing my opinion.

I'm being more thoughtful in the comments I write.

On the whole, it's sounding like the change is bad for individual users, but good for the HN ecosystem in general.
As I understood it you have to have written procedures and policies, with fully secure change control and logging for section C ?!?
With billions of dollars on the line, I'd be shocked if it's not in writing.
Never Get Paid To Do Programming By A Programmer
I used the same high level categories used on the OMB budget for clarity, but you're right it probably would be interesting to see what details are below them, maybe when I have time later I'll add that detail.

The main point was that a household can't continue with a deficit that large, and BudgetSimple's main goal is to help people create balanced household budgets
Until Amazon fixes that, there is quite frankly no incentive to use their store for anything that isn't free. I had thought that cross-promotion for software that works with hardware Amazon sells would be win, but until Amazon fixes their pricing policies I've no interest at all in their store. 30% off the top is bad enough but at least you got to determine the price. 20% of list price on a 99-cent app? Really?

FAIL. Call me back when you get your mind right.
You do hear complaints from smaller publishers a lot w.r.t. physical goods, and their troubles are one reason I hope this doesn't catch on. They're left with the poor choice of selling through booksellers, or selling direct to consumers at a reasonable price, but can't do both.

If their break-even price is, say, $8, then they might want to sell it for list $9.99. But then Amazon wants it for $5 wholesale (half list), which would be a loss per book. To sell it to Amazon for at least $9 (a $1 profit), they have to set the list price at $18. But now that's too high for how they want to price it on their own www.publishersite.com online store, and they aren't allowed to discount it back down to the $9.99 they actually want to charge.

So you have a weird situation where as a condition of selling on Amazon, they aren't allowed to sell outside Amazon for a reasonable markup above cost!
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9shi9/i_am_the_editor_...
The hunter-gatherers did not necessarily chose a farming lifestyle, they were likely displaced by the sheer numbers of the farmers. However, modern agriculture requires very few people (proportionally), under 5%. The second worst mistake in human history would be to stifle agricultural and industrial development. There is the great opportunity to lift the other 2/3 of the world out of "farm slavery". Not only to just feed them, but raise their standard of living too.

You could interpret a pre-industrial economy as working on a flat per-capita capital increase. People grew as fast as capital, so there was little opportunity for accumulation (outside the very small ruling class). That is no longer the case, although there are powerful ideologies that would undo it.
Luna Park[1] isn't going to build itself. Seriously though - is there a market for exotic vacationing (orbit/lunar surface)?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Series_Has_Landed
First, thanks for posting that video again- I love that ad.

Second, of course I know they aren't alive. But if I derive some enjoyment from it, isn't that suiting my whims?

It's just more fun when I can reprimand my motorcycle for trying to throw me. Maybe I need a horse, but I can't swing that.

(Third, I agree with scott_s)
Android Market access... On your TV
Rdd.me – Readability Powered URL Shortening Service
Yes, why I should open source my patient management app if I sure that 99% of nearby doctors never agree cure me for free..
Mobile device OS upgrades: How hard can it be?
Deferred pay, without equity, is a bad idea. First of all, seasoned people aren't going to work for deferred cash only, knowing that companies rarely pay it back until they're roaring successes. Deferred pay arrangements usually are, "we'll pay you $X when we have the cash on hand" but the problem is that the cash is never truly "on hand"; in a growing business, there's always a better use for the money than paying zero-interest debt to employees. Venture capitalists don't want their infusions to be spent on back salary, and most CEOs want to invest revenues back into the business.

In lieu of equity, deferred pay is a bad deal for the employee: no upside, only downside, and usually on terms that are a lot less creditor-friendly than what banks can negotiate.

A further problem with deferred pay is that when things become difficult, it's not much of a motivator. After a year or two, people assume they're never going to get it back and become resentful. It's better off for them to have equity, where they knew full well they might not be repaid.

If a founder forgoes a salary, why not agree to convert the pay difference relative to the other founders into stock at the time of the first equity financing at the share price negotiated with the VCs?

This is a decent first-order approximation, but for true fairness, the valuation should be set at the time the deferred-payment arrangement is made and should be lower than what is expected from a VC in the future. Because a deal may not happen, the fair valuation when this arrangement is set is lower than the expected VC valuation.
I can't believe I didn't think about comments. I've enabled disqus! Thanks for that, and the other, ideas.
I'm surprised the IGDA didn't also call out Amazon's apparent requirement that a developer must allow Amazon to distribute all the software the developer is distributing through other channels. In other words, there's no way to try out Amazon's service with just one title -- it's all or nothing.
>"Factoid" has come to mean, "a little fact", it seems.

Definitely. "Factlet" or "Factette" would probably be more accurate, and more pleasing to say, but we can't have everything.
You raise a good point about the distinction between a music discovery service and a way to avoid having to curate your own music collection. My personal use of music streaming services (we7 in my case) is built around the latter. If I have a party at my house, it's pretty useful to plug the laptop into the stereo and let people choose music from we7 rather than me having to specifically go out and buy any song that gets played.

It sounds like Spotify are probably shooting themselves in the foot by destroying a good part of their value for a lot of their customers.
Game makers says Amazon’s Android appstore terms are greedy
Aldus Pagemaker: The Mac’s Savior?
We'll look into it, we really will. But we'll still have to strongly advise everyone to again have them independently verified within their own territory and by a lawyer familiar with their situation.

There's no way around that.