skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Traditionally payment & accounting has never been a problem in the music business, so I think blockchain would not really help. The underlying economics is what has changed dramatically. Distribution is close to free, but unlike the ~ $1 an artist might have seen out of a CD sale (before discounting for costs & advances) they now see sub-cents on a single track. You used to pay $15-20 for an entire album to get 2 or 3 good songs; now you only stream everybody's top tracks and pay less than that a month. So the artist gets a couple of pennies for the period when they are hot, then nothing.
BorgBase does not do scheduled pruning? Not even via script?
Apple holds ~40% of the US smartphone market[0], and >50% of mobile revenue from app store purchases[1]. Apple is one half of a duopoly.

The citations of global mobile device market share are deceptive. It is not necessary for US regulators to prove that Apple has a monopoly in India to prove that they are engaged in anticompetitive behaviors in the US. If you want to make money as a mobile app developer, deciding not to support iOS can be a crippling decision. You don't really have a choice[2].

----

[0]: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...

[1]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/10/11/as-usual-apples-ap...

[2]: That ends up being the much more interesting argument anyway, because Apple advocates mostly want Apple to be able to force developers to jump through hoops. I've seen a lot of arguments on this topic that say that 3rd-party app stores would be a disaster because companies wouldn't be de-facto forced to distribute through the primary app store.

For those people, the duopoly and monopolistic power structures are the point -- they're not debating whether or not Apple is so powerful that it's taking away developer choice. They want Apple to take away developer choice.

I disagree with those people, but I find their position to be much more compelling than, "India uses Android, so the US can't regulate its own market."
Show HN: Slash Books – Read EPUBs with Email
Spotify is complicated because the big record companies are also big shareholders. They have a conflict of interest.

Also 70% doesn't mean anything without actual numbers. If they lowered their subscription to $1 / month and gave 80% to rights holders it wouldn't be an improvement.

I'd be more interested if they reported how many plays per month it takes to earn as much as you would in a minimum wage job.

Edit: I was curious about the minimum wage question so I looked it up.

Assuming $15 / hour for minimum wage it would take 750,000 streams on Spotify and 430,000 streams on Apple Music to earn the same in a month as you would working a minimum wage job.

https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
GPT-3 for reading science papers
I did some looking into what made black licorice taste so good and to see if enjoying it was genetic. I was surprised to find out it can be toxic. All of these years my grandfather and I have been poisoning each other. Guess we should celebrate we survived it with a pint of sarsaparilla.
So anyone who's ever bought a house in the US or Canada has had an SAR about them?
Why would you put blockchain in this?
Pretty easy to find "support" for Postgres too and more convenient. e.g. submit a request on CodeMentor and you'll have you several solid devs willing to help you, live, in a matter of minutes.
There's more to life than procreation. How many of those 300 million vegetarians are still able to perform at a high level in strength and endurance into their 50s and 60s?

Assuming equal caloric intake there is no reliable evidence that eating meat increases obesity, blood sugar, or blood pressure. Rather the opposite.
As China Ages, a Push to Add Elevators Offers a New Kind of Economic Relief
There's no need to focus on just one. However people are passionate about advocating for eating a plant based diet because it is so easy, relatively speaking. Getting fracking to stop at even just one site is a lot of work, but getting more and more people to stop eating animal products, because it's directly within their own control, is simple. Many are also passionate about it because there are other benefits that come with it - no longer needing to kill sentient beings (you probably wouldn't eat your dog, so why eat a pig who is of equal awareness and intelligence?) and as long as it's based on whole foods, eating plant based comes with a lot of health benefits compared to how most people's diet is (in the West or Western influenced - e.g. a lot of Koreans and Chinese have hugely increased their animal product consumption and started including animal products they didn't previously eat like cow milk cheese).

So again, we can work on more than one issue, but why there is strong passion behind diet is that it's a very direct action and comes with other positives.
In the world I inhabit, Apple is the one that intentionally makes it really hard to cancel subscriptions. You literally cannot cancel a subscription to an iOS app from an Android phone or Linux PC.
From https://appfairness.org/our-vision/

> No app store owner should prohibit third parties from offering competing app stores on the app store owner’s platform, or discourage developers or consumers from using them.

I don't disagree but does this mean Sony should allow, for example, Steam to be installed on the PS5? Or is the definition of "App Store" used here narrow and arbitrary?
Agree with this absolutely.

I'm dealing with this a lot lately. Namely having to work within a spaghetti of procedural code...told to use bizarre global scope variables disguised as static classes (Java).

Wading through it all and making proper tests is so much more difficult than it needs to be. The messiness of even determining what's going on seems to reflect the inability to think about interfaces and construct objects accordingly.

This is simple stuff. Java's got tons of standards, and none of them are used.

This is OOP...if you've got objects, use them!
We are at a state where these tech companies have the same value as countries and entire stock indexes. It is obscene, and yet they make their devices more locked down, harder/ILLEGAL! to fix by paying off politicians both to not enforce laws and to write them in their favor at the expense of smaller competition.

The merger of state and corporate powers is complete. We live in a fascist world with surveillance that Stalin could only dream of.

So yea, a bit "unfortunate"
IBM PC BIOS Source Code Reconstruction
Apple is a vertical monopolist across a large-market-share hardware platform it manufactures and an exclusive system for putting software onto that platform.

Epic has a store, but doesn't have a large-market-share hardware platform they control exclusively to go with it. Any machine I can install the Epic app store on, I can also install Steam on.
On the other hand, well powered human studies are expensive, but supplements are very cheap.
I agree with this.... I approach it as "now is as important as the future". Don't sacrifice your now for your future, but also don't sacrifice your future for your now.
You are completely talking around my point.

Gas stations are already on decline in SF as more profitable businesses (and housing) find better uses for the land. If there are even 10% fewer gasoline cars cars on the road, that puts a huge dent in profitability those stations.

People may want gasoline cars, but owning one is going to be a hassle, particularly in places where real estate is at a premium.

> These folks can't afford a new ICE car, let alone a new EV car (they don't have garage to charge anyways).

The cost of EVs is coming down fast and will continue to decline. The cost of used EVs will also come down quickly, particularly since right now newer models are quite a bit better than EVs just a few years old.

> No doubt we'll see ICE cars disappear, but I just don't think it will happen that quickly.

"Quickly"?

There is nothing quick about it. We're talking about 25 years in the future as opposed to 50 years in the future. It's just your idea of cars driving around for a 15 years with no gas stations and increasingly hard to find mechanics that I question.
A Lot of Data and a Little Singing: How the Times’s Best-Seller List Is Formed
IMO, minimum wage both creates a market floor and by doing so shuts some people out of the labor market at the margin.
They're the messenger. The idea behind an ad hominem is to attack the messenger instead of the message - whether the messenger is a human or corporation doesn't really matter. Who's behind the argument doesn't matter, if the argument is solid.
Epic scored a lucky (?) hit with fortnite that brought them a lot of cash but I believe their bread and butter is their game engine where do they charge a percentage of the profits. Their store is more of a long-term investment, it might not bring a lot of revenue at the moment but if things go well for them it can easily convert to the top dog.
Trump Campaign Actively Discussing Radical Measures to Bypass Election Results
It's only demonstrably wrong if you assume that wealth inequality should be calculated within the borders of a nation. That people in Chile should only compare themselves to their nearest oligarchs.
It might be, but you can make same argument about any curated platform.

I also don't think this serves the public interest. App developers have much less interest in maintaining the privacy of users and making it easy to cancel subscriptions, among other things.
Does this generate diagrams from schemas and vice versa? That's always been my preferred way to both refactor and get started, and a few tools do this.
I don't know about India, but in Kazakhstan I don't care if Google or NSA can access my data, but if local police can access my data, that would be quite concerning to me.
Indeed, what is the cheerios example supposed to show? I don’t expect the discount coupon comes out of the store’s cut. Tinder or Epic are free to discount boosts or in game purchases, and spotify can give free months.

The cheerios example probably involves a fair bit of negotiation between manufacturer and retailer. Whereas apps can discount whenever they choose, without permission.
Non-extension get_random_uuid() and the Unicode normalisation stuff are great, love it!
Yes, I was thinking of joining, but the fact that the site didn't work without turning off my ad blocker was a turnoff. Why do they even need cookies? Terrible first impression.
As a former bank teller let me tell you all the brilliant ways people would try to get around this.

* Depositing $9,999 cash (yeah, still gonna report that)

* Depositing random X,000 cash increments across multiple transactions (yeah, still going to report that)

* Making cash deposits across multiple locations in the same day/week (as if the computer didn’t alert us to multiple cash deposits)
My mother, who's fully deaf in one year and mostly deaf in the other, has heavily depended on strong and expensive hearing aids her whole life.

Over the years her hearing aids have improved in battery life, gotten smaller, and improved in things like filtering background noise. Every new hearing aid would start by sounding distorted and weird but her brain adapts to the new sounds after a couple of weeks.

The single largest life improvement I've seen for her was about 10 year ago when she could finally get a hearing aid with bluetooth. Suddenly she didn't have to decide between the "whistling" (feedback) or not hearing to talk on the phone. We got her an iPad and she stopped watching TV almost entirely and now watches YouTube and Netflix. And she can do her yoga over Skype.

Her biggest challenge, at this point, isn't a hearing aid problem but a bluetooh one. Her iPhone inconstantly switches between her hearing aid and her Volkswagen (pre-CarPlay).

I agree hearing aids are stuck in the past, but I'm also convinced most of the problems are lower hanging fruit than a neuralink :).
This is a good analysis but it always seemed so simple to me. If they win this ruling they overnight can make like a billion dollars more a year. Putting resources into this case makes more business sense then any other venture they could try.
> "better."

Inertia is what I've noticed as well. The few people I've convinced to actually try out postgres have ended up liking it more than mysql.
I'm not washing my hands of anything. I'm not denying there is a problem. I'm trying to identify the nature of the problem, because that's important to finding solutions.

> Knowing what their system does, they wake up every day and with intent say "We are going to continue with this system".

No. They don't. Please don't pretend to read others' minds. There are a lot of people at Facebook who are trying to improve these things, but it's a very complex problem and a very complex system. There's lots of disagreement about what the solutions are, or even which direction represents improvement. And mindless bashing just doesn't help. If your only answer is that Facebook should die, then you might as well just be going "bla bla bla" because that doesn't move the needle at all.
These days they are fairly sophisticated; my hearing aids will automatically switch between several different programs depending on the environment. (It doesn't work how I'd like it to, though, so I have a program that I manually set for music.) There is also a phone app for adjusting settings, though it's limited and buggy.

It's difficult to evaluate hearing aids because they are proprietary. Reading about the features in a brochure for a hearing aid is like reading the features for a TV set or stereo. Who knows what those trademarked terms really mean when it comes to how the code works?
A single entity that only serves its shareholders is able to singlehandedly terminate almost any IT business out there... Sounds dangerous.
Apple doesn’t charge itself a 30% fee when it competes with other developers for the same paying users.
I'm about to trial a replacement for my current HA (about 5 years old) for the Phonak Paradise (the just released successor to the Marvel). The bluetooth connectivity has been a big reason why I want to upgrade - the work from home situation this year with constant phone calls and Zoom meeting requiring headsets has been a constant annoyance.

I use an Airpod in my right ear and leave one HA in my left for those situations - but its fiddly and annoying to keep switching things in and out. The new IOS14 feature where I can tailor the Airpod audio response to my hearing frequency loss is simply amazing! However, being able to connect/stream audio directly to my HA will be even better.

They are seriously pricey though - cheapest model is Aus$2700 (US$2000) and the top line model is Aus$8400 (US$5900). However, given I feel I got made redundant from a previous job five years ago due to my hearing loss (1), I'll basically spend 'whatever' to ensure I can hear as easily as possible.

(1) In that job, I was wondering why as the years went on, I felt like I was struggling to pickup new concepts or get a handle on projects as fast as I used to. I seriously felt like I was getting stupider. After I got my hearing aids, I realised how much speech I was missing - I was heavily relying on lip reading and also using the context of conversation to fill in the gaps of words I couldn't hear. Which is passable in general conversation - but when managing new projects or new technology concepts, you don't have the experience to generate the context that fills in the gaps. It was literally life-changing when I got my HA. Go an get your hearing tested if you ever feel you are even remotely struggling with your hearing!
Haha - this illustrates WHY the app store is so popular.

You've got Match.com (owns tinder). Repeat FTC offender (most scammmers never get the FTC slap on the wrist).

"Match Group also allegedly makes it too difficult to cancel a subscription through “confusing and cumbersome cancellation practices.” The FTC claims users must click through two pages of survey questions and cites a 2015 internal presentation that notes the cancellation flow as “hard to find, tedious and confusing.” “Members often think they’ve cancelled when they have not and end up with unwanted renewals,” More recently they were doing the fake match emails to generate signups. I'm not sure if that case has settled yet.

You've got Epic.

They are pretty famous for targeting kids and getting them to spend their parents money, auto-saving payment info parents may enter to allow a single purchase, microtransactions nightmare and using "v bucks" / bannanas etc to make it less transparent in terms of what things are actually costing. Refund / complaint procedures are horrible. "When Stecklare tried to request a refund from Epic Games, she says, it was like hitting a brick wall. She sent multiple emails over several days but says she received only boilerplate responses."....

Spotify

They find no name bands they don't have to pay to do covers of major musical acts or replace the "best of..." albums with these trash albums. They've also been sued repeatedly over their royalty practices. The lawsuit (below) alleges that Spotify has participated in "an egregious, continuous and ongoing campaign of deliberate copyright infringement" around the mechanical license for many of the songs on its platform.

Having these folks in charge of app subscriptions and setting standards inside the apple walled garden is going to be a TRAIN WRECK if they win this case. So much trust is going to be lost by users who are used to stuff in the apple world not having these and other scammers playing around in it.
Aha, I knew I was missing one! I added a bullet for browser tab bankruptcy. Thanks for pointing that out.
I kind of like the term "error matter". It emphasizes that we're talking about error terms in the equations, yet admits that much of that error would be resolved by the existence of matter.

"Dark" is descriptive, but it requires that there actually be relatively normal matter involved, which is going forward an unwarranted step. And then it gets reused for "dark energy", which is... what, energy you can't see or interacts weakly with existing sensors? That's not novel or even unusual. The phrase is bogus. "Error energy" would work.
It boggles my mind that there are people rooting for Apple to "win" here. Whatever you think of Epic, Spotify, etc, the changes they propose would be a win for customers to use the devices the way they want to. If you only want to download apps from Apple's approved app store, they are not taking that away from you.
On Epic's game store the product is PC software. Epic don't control how all PC software is sold.

On Apple's app store the product is iOS software. Apple do control how all iOS software is sold.

Seriously, this isn't complicated...
Sorry the auto correct changed the spelling. I meant fool-proof. I am a native speaker.
No, I'm not saying should or shouldn't. I am narrowly pushing back on OP that what Facebook is cannot be disentangled from what its end users do. If we agree Facebook's users collectively do X, then we must agree that the purpose of Facebook The System is to do X. I'll let other people discuss whether that X is good or bad.
In which way? Not on PC, that's for sure.
Does that charging circuit need to be inside the hearing aid, and not in the charging cradle/case/dock thing?
Can users and developers who are in favor of keeping the App Store as is form an advocacy group too?

I’ve been collecting a list of arguments in favor of maintaining the status quo on iOS and I’ve yet to see anyone offer a good solution to these:

---- The problems with letting all apps advertise external payment systems:

• Someone may publish a free app to avoid paying anything to Apple, and then charge users [an asston of] money to ""unlock"" via an alternate payment system.

• Users may not be able to see a list of all in-app purchases (and their guaranteed prices) as they can on the App Store, without downloading the app.

• Sharing your payment details and other information with multiple entities, and having to continually trust each of them (e.g. to not abuse or leak).

• Confused users may clog up Apple's customer support with complaints related to third-party payment systems.

• Angry users may demand Apple to offer refunds for shit that was paid for via third-party payment systems.

---- The problems with allowing third-party app stores on iOS:

• How will iOS sandboxing be enforced for apps delivered via third-party stores? Will those apps still have to be submitted to and signed by Apple?

• Store apps would need the privilege to write binaries on your iPhone. How will that privilege be regulated to prevent abuse? e.g. what happens if a store starts writing malware?

• Users may sometimes have to wait longer for an app to update on one store than on others (as already happens on Steam vs GoG).

• Developers would no longer be assured that they will have access to literally all the users that iOS has, by publishing on just one store.

• You would have to submit to each store, wait for approval on each of them, update for each of them... to come close to the userbase that you can currently access by just publishing once on the App Store.

• Developers will no longer all play by the same rules. One store may allow some content while another may prohibit it.

• Controversial content like porn may still ultimately be bound by Apple's ruling on such matters, rendering moot the freedom of third-party stores in what kind of apps they may offer.

• iOS Parental Control and Screen Time restrictions may be ineffective on other stores (and browsers too if third-party rendering engines were allowed).

• If an app or game is exclusive to a store that a user isn't already using, they would have to create a new account and maintain an additional app just to access that one exclusive.

• Not all stores may be compatible with the iOS backup and restore system, or the APIs for app-thinning and on-demand resources.

----

To resolve many of those issues, Apple would have to ultimately step in anyway.

The need for third-party stores is really not that great to offset the advantages offered by the current system.
I wire-transfer tens-of-thousands of USD / month from my bank to my wealth-management company for perfectly valid reasons (e-commerce revenue), primarily to exchange to CAD (far better rate than bank) for funding payroll and/or purchase Investments.

With each transfer, my investment company has me fill-out / sign a form declaring Source of Funds.

If the gov’t finds anything suspicious, there’s an airtight paper-trail for all these transactions.

Nothing to see here.
It's totally possible that it has vastly different reasons, but I find the jump to and insistence on "this is it, this must be it, and it's just different elsewhere" to be a bit hastened. It doesn't explain the strong variety in outcome and doesn't seem to apply to other regions. American Exceptionalism is well and good, but it does sound a bit wanted rather than found.
> This would be poor counting. You need the same number of ballots as FPTP. You just sum multiple columns instead of a single column.

I'm not saying you need more ballots to implement Approval voting, I'm saying that FPTP has the nice property (when counting paper ballots) that the votes can be put into piles, where the weight of each pile is roughly proportional to the number of votes for the candidate whose votes are in that pile.

Of course, FPTP votes aren't actually counted using measuring scales, but the fact that this isn't possible with Approval voting is an indication that "just sum multiple columns" is a slightly more laborious and error-prone step than you make it sound, at least for humans counting paper ballots (which I believe is a necessary property of trustworthy elections).
Prince's Sign O' The Times: An oral history
Yes, yes I do, and they are all shrugging their shoulders now because they don't care about what is happening to the world.
The configuration file should be a collection of hackernews headlines