skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love music - but I'll be honest, I rarely buy my new music. However, the music industry still gets my money, and here's how.

If I had to spend let's say $10 per CD, and on average I get a new CD every week (I do) that's over $40 per month. Instead, I get my music for free, and I spend the $40 going to a concert almost every month. So far this year, I've been to 4-5 concerts.

Now, I'm not saying this is legal or this is even "right" but it's just what I do. Besides, bands don't see much money from CD sales, they get money from touring, so I much more prefer to spend my money in the way that more directly affect's the band's paycheck.

I do still occasionally buy CD's. For example, Linkin Park's new album "A Thousand Suns" I downloaded before it was even released so I could listen to it, although I had already pre-ordered it and received it a few days after it was released (it's still unopened)
Not really mind blowing, they will use the same setup as dropbox i presume; storing the same file only 'once' instead than on a per-user basis.
Does Mason want to get out of Groupon?
This App Store-only distribution has me concerned about small business upgrades.

Let's say I have an office with 10 workstations. How do I upgrade? Do I have to create an iTunes account for each computer, and enter a company credit card number on each one? Can multiple iTunes accounts even share the same credit card number?

Perhaps I could get by with two accounts, since iTunes allows sharing on up to five Macs. But that's still far from an elegant solution, and it doesn't scale any better. And what about users who already have their workstations activated with their home iTunes accounts?
This actually may solve some problems I had been trying to wrap my head around in an app I'm designing.

The existing method of introducing documents into apps (using iTunes) really sucks, I wonder what the iCloud API will look like.
I couldn't agree more. Microsoft dominated the browser market just to slow the adoption of any internet applications.

Google tried to break their lockin with partial success by helping Firefox and later on by releasing chrome. Then Microsoft had to catch up again.
It looks like this essay is saying that 6174 is a fixed point for Kaprekar's operation on four-digit numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_(mathematics)
I am very sceptical about an approach that concentrates on code generation and punts GC to later. My experience is that you can always improve the code generation later, but the early decisions you make about GC will be with your forever. Things like data representation, whether objects can move, the interface to native code, the concurrency model etc. are very dependent on the GC and once you have built a big system that doesn't have a moving, precise GC you have probably boxed yourself in in terms of making a good design for your memory management later.
Yep, could make itms match almost like a $25/year unlimited music service. Go find a bad recording of what you want then let it get 'matched' and you'd be legal and have a good copy.
No, you could buy bitcoins with unlaundered dollars, even with a credit card, and then launder the bitcoins themselves so that when you spend them they can't be traced back to the account you bought them with.
And I'm also going to mention Android - while not as
stylish as iOS, the development model is so close to web
apps it's actually beautiful.

Really? To be quite honest, I found Android's development model to be closer to Silverlight/WPF than true web development. The relation between the XML-based layout language and the Java code behind reminded me much more of the relation between XAML and C# than HTML and Javascript.
I think their assumption is that it is for music that was paid for in the past.
You can never make everyone happy. Don't include enough new features, and get complaints that your doing nothing new; add new stuff, then complaints about stepping over toes of developers with similar apps.
Shouldn't dropbox be a little nervous?
It's because they're not storing anything new. They simply distribute the exact same file that they've had on iTunes to begin with if it detects a match of you owning it. Other services (Amazon and Google's come to mind) let you upload literally any audio file you want (to an extent), regardless of whether it's on their music store or not.

Both schemes have their pros and cons. The comparison of upload time during the keynote was a complete joke to anyone that knows anything about this sort of technology though: saying how much faster the upload on your service is that doesn't upload to begin with to services that do is just silly.
Only when the windows client comes. I hope it's portable, with SSL.
The Wikipedia war over Paul Revere
They are a bunch of assholes. I wonder what all the people defending Apple at the time ("it's not right to hijack the buttons! How dare they presume to ship such hacks to uesrs!") have to say now? Probably something about how brilliant Apple is...
FIGnition: a £20 educational DIY computer, based around an Atmel AVR
I'd like a RSS for search result (want to subscribe to a topic and get a notification whenever it's mentionned here)
Something something pennies, something something steamroller...
I'd much rather bootstrap than take VC money – but that’s beside the point.

If Color ends up burning through $41M doing another failed social service (which seems likely), no one wins, and stories like these cast doubt on the whole startup economy.
The politics are mind blowing, not the technology.

Over the last few days I have read so many comments on HN confidently proclaiming that the music labels would never ever ever do something like this.
This is great, but can cell networks handle the load? They're already struggling from a significant lack of investment and this could well be a straw that breaks the camels back.
> Adobe Acrobat, Skype updates and the like.

More often than not the installers and updaters decide unilaterally that a reboot is required and force the user to perform one when it's not needed.
Do You Really Need College-Educated Workers?
Marco (Instapaper) has said a number of times on his 5 by 5 podcast that he thinks Reading List either wont affect him much, or it will be a net positive (in terms of sales for him). I think he's correct in believing that Reading List will be a good gateway drug for the people who have never heard of Instapaper but will soon get hooked on the idea and potentially look for a more powerful version of the same tool.

What's "shady" about Apple listening to criticism and allowing the hardware shutter button? Would you rather that they stuck to their original position?
Integrating features from apps is a bit of an asshole move, but at least everyone does it. They pulled that app and threatened the devs because it hacked the buttons. You don't see the difference?
Efficient Parallel Set-Similarity Joins Using MapReduce
I've had a lot of trouble with agile projects, though I do think that when it works, it's by far the best way to create working software.

My biggest trouble with agile happened when I was dealing with a client who clearly intended to hold my feet to the fire where it came to promised functionality and deadlines, but was absolutely unwilling to consider an alternative approach to a feature or removing functionality to meet an iteration.

"Customer collaboration over contract negotiation" is the best way to write good software, but if your client is going to go to your boss and complain that say "hey you promised functionality X by date Y!", you better be careful negotiating that contract!

"Responding to change over following a plan" is the best way to write software, but if your client is going to rake you over the coals if you don't meet the deadline that was in. the. plan., well then you're probably better off just following the plan.

Really, agile is a highly effective way of working that requires a tremendous amount of skill and mutual respect (and trust) between all members of a team.

Another problem with agile is that just so much has been built up around it. I'm not saying that these things are bad, but they have diluted the original message.

I remember once a consultant ambushed me in a meeting and asked "what are your developer velocities?" I didn't know what that meant, and he said (I think he was setting this up) "well, if you don't know your velocities, you aren't agile."

For the record, a developer velocity is (as this dude explained it) a way of measuring whether a developer is struggling based on how much of a user "story" is being developed over a particular period of time. It's not a bad way to measure things, but this is a process, a tool, a procedure. As the agile manifesto says, we value these things, but it seems like "agile" has less and less to do with the simple and profound (I mean that without any irony) statements and is starting to become a big mess of consultant and techno babble.

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

http://agilemanifesto.org/

To me, this is the best way to write software, but it isn't something you can just decide to do. It requires a really major mind shift from everyone. And if it turns out your client values the things on the things on the right more than the things on the left after all,you can find yourself in a very precarious situation as a dev.
Title is misleading, $29.99 to zero decimal places is $30 not $29.
> It's similar to the problem with RPC; you should not and can not simply sweep the difference between local and network communication under the rug. It works small and is incredibly painful in the large. Unfortunately, I can not seem to find a pithy explanation of why this is true. (Perhaps I should write one.)

I would be willing to help you write it if you'd like. I understand network disruption, partial failure, and weak/episodic connectivity very well, including scenarios where nodes in a network are required to remain radio-silent for long periods of time. Command-and-control military-style systems are much more general than the Web.

Related, automatic code distribution is a sort of Holy Grail in programming language design. It is difficult for many reasons. Even data is a huge problem. For example, if the toolbar buttons on Google Docs suddenly die (like they did for our marketing rep a few weeks ago), then the application can become extremely hard to use. Web applications don't handle this well today, and a cache doesn't really address this well, either, because it could be that the new resource invalidates an older cache. In other words, it is a version control and configuration management problem.
Syncing with things can happen over 3g. Being transparent can be nice but not with unlimited plans gone from carriers. I'm wondering if there will be an option to say not to sync over 3g unless you are on wifi.
Anyone else surprised by how many hugely popular apps Apple is going to kill with new Lion/iOS?

I know, it'll be like the great Safari massacre all over again, where Apple singlehandedly drove Firefox and Chrome to stop releasing Mac versions. Not to mention the Day When Email Apps' Blood Ran Like Water In The Streets, when everyone stopped using Exchange and Gmail because Apple released Mail.app.

And don't even talk to me about what iChat did to Skype. I can't bear to think of it....
Ask HN: Is Apple carving out a pseudo social network with iOS5?
Considering the features in iMessage, Photo Stream, iCloud, Game Center, etc. Do iDevices now share a pseudo (web pageless) social network?
Apparently, there will be some sort of netboot option. Although that in itself will require you to have server for the role...
Hotéis em Fortaleza 
Visite o MalaPronta.com. Os comentários de hóspedes que já visitaram o hotel, vão lhe ajudar a escolher o melhor hotel para seu planejamento.
Exactly - many of the other commentators don't seem to be getting this. This will be killer for people with tons of lossy, mediocre, napster era mp3s who have just not gotten around to upgrading to better quality stuff purely because of inertia.
iOS 5, a tribute to Android
- OTA updates
- wireles sync
- notification in the title bar.. really?
The bottom line is normal users (ie those who "don't know anything about this sort of technology") don't give a damn. It's a few hours vs a few minutes.
I'm curious to see how well the iTunes Match feature works. Naturally it will have to use audio fingerprinting rather than just trusting user-supplied metadata. The catch is that this technology is probably based on Lala (who Apple bought out), and Lala's software was extremely dodgy. I had records where <50% of songs were correctly identified, the others "matched" to seemingly random tracks from completely unrelated genres.

If Apple has not earnestly dug into and improved on this software, users will be completely mystified and the whole thing will be a big embarrassment for Apple.
Is it so much easier to pirate a bad copy of some song than an ok copy?
Tor is a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing, in that LEAs hate it but it was developed by navy intelligence, and a lot of people had to use it in order for it to be effective. When law enforcement goes up against the military, law enforcement loses. That's not the case with bitcoin.
Meh? Large scale storage on Internet servers has been around since the '90s. Dropbox is important because of the user experience, which iCloud doesn't really address. You think the Windows client for iCloud is going to be as seamless as Dropbox? I bet the difference is so big my mom can articulate it.

Rdio, on the other hand, just got smote.
Wait, doesn't that actually support what I'm saying? I recall a shooting war in which a lot of people died as part of the process by which slavery stopped being a reality in the USA. Or is that your point?
Read the whole article, but wanted to stop after the second paragraph. Choice quotation:

"The real innovation Groupon brought ... was their ability to profit off of closing the attribution loop in online-to-offline commerce. And this is a huge land grab that others had completely missed."

That's funny, because I thought that Groupon showed just the opposite of that. How exactly has Groupon proved that there's a profitable business in hooking up customers and businesses with slash-and-burn deals? Even taking half of the revenue, Groupon is bleeding money and admits that it is going to have to invest even more to keep up the growth curve.

I get that Groupon is popular, sure, but they'd be even more popular if they didn't take 50% of the coupon revenue. Of course, they'd be out of business sooner, as well. The "naysayers", like myself, are pointing out that Groupon (willfully or otherwise) hasn't found a balance that allows them to grow and actually turn a profit. What they have done is grow their userbase at an astonishing rate by raising and spending huge chunks of cash. That's not a business, that's a party. And parties, while fun to attend, are a bitch to clean up.
EDIT: who would downvote this? (I'm saying that iOS 5 is nice, but it's mostly just adding features that directly copy its competitor Android, and not even all of them. Android had been copying in 2009-2010, but now it's Apple. A lot of people, even devs, don't realize that Droid has had all these features for months. I hadn't.)

I have an iPhone 4, I've had iPhones for 4 years. I love the iPhone.

I tried a Nexus S with the newest Android recently. Using it, I learned that Android is, frankly, today, ahead of iOS on the phone side.

Android's notification system is better. It's so much better, that Apple directly copied it. Android's hardware back button works, it works well, and it frees up more screen real estate for useful content. Android's home button is more consistent. Its apps are more powerful, google talk video works great. Its wireless seamless binary-only updates are revolutionary.

Apple has fallen behind, and will only catch up with iOS 5 in the Fall. Of course, I fully expect Google to innovate further and be even farther ahead in 2012.

The coolest thing by far, and this is something that Apple won't have in the foreseeable near future, is voice recognition. Google's voice commands work suspiciously well. I find it far easier to press a button and say "text John Appleseed: Hey, let's go to the movies tomorrow at 3" than to navigate menus and type it in. Google's tech recognizes words and phrases I wouldn't expect it to.

Apple still has more apps, but that won't last for too much longer.

I have an iPad 2, and I love it, but my next phone will be a Droid.
Sure, why not?

Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and a few others on a similar level have overlapping goals, but each has a stronghold in a different area. Each seeks to gain market share in their competitors' strong areas, in one way or another.
I'm curious whether this $24.99/yr revenue is shared with the labels who own the "pirated" music as part of the deal.
There's a typo: "Steady" not "stead" under Lesson 1.

EDIT: Actually, this piece has quite a few spelling errors and typos in it. This needs a once-over by an editor.
BETSCHKAIL CMQLT - FENGERHTF
I would say less than 3% of local business owners can understand the items that he is saying.

If your customers don't get it, getting them to signup is very costly.
A service that syncs any file you want across basically every platform imaginable, compared to a service for just iOS that syncs a subset of files and data from a handful of apps?

I wouldn't be worried at all.
Wall Street: The speed traders (video)
I think the post should be titled "The importance of using cobbler/puppet (or similar tools)".
A little arbitrage idea:
How about going on an illegal downloading-binge and getting every album one possibly could ever like from the past, I don't know, 30 years? Then when you've got your several thousand albums, you go legalize it all for $29.95.

Sounds like value?
Yes, we must get silkroad shut down. Kids will have to buy their drugs the old fashioned way (like mom & dad): on the bus, in a back alley, or from their senator, or somewhere equally perilous and sleazy. God forfend our little dumplings should be able to have their weed delivered safely by the fedex guy.
iTunes Match premise: Once a pirate, not always a pirate. Pirates are willing to pay $25 / yr for legit 256 kbps AAC tracks of stuff they already have? And you must keep paying $25/yr in perpetuity for access to these tracks?
1. That's what the comment you're responding to is complaining about (if I paid for it in the past, why would I hand over $25 bucks to pay for it again?).

2. Apple doesn't live in a vacuum and isn't stupid, they know they're effectively offering amnesty to pirates. Their bet is that they win by bringing people into their ecosystem, that $25 and a shot at future purchases is a better deal than the nothing they're currently getting from pirates.
They mentioned that music you have that doesn't match with anything already in the iTunes Store can be uploaded to the cloud. I don't think we have any details about the implementation yet though.
There isn't a database per se - usernames and password hashes are stored in a file. If someone managed to read that file, it would not be difficult for them to obtain most of the passwords.
Blame the telcos and their bad infrastructure.
The 3P's have really been an early adopter of new technologies on the net before they became mainstream. It's a good sign for Bitcoin.
Access to the tracks on the cloud server. It's not like they're being deleted from your hard drive.
When I read this, I wondered if it was about offering consumers the right number of choices. Cash Only sounds restrictive, while a laundry list of types of currency seems like you have options.
It's a real shame that there's still no real podcast support. Granted, now the devices can sync via WiFi, but what if I'm away from my main machine and I just want to download all new episodes of the podcasts I'm subscribed to?

Something like this CAN'T be that hard to do - at least it shouldn't be.
Probably uses something like robust hashing (Technically impossible) along with matching metadata tags to match songs/artists.
There was for mobileme too. Transmit would sync your settings across computers using mobileme.

This seems to me like a very large relaunch of mobileme. Awesome, yes, but still just a relaunch.
Nevertheless it's an enormous step toward unifying desktop apps and web apps. I'm actually shocked that MS would do this. It seems like the first bold, intelligent move they've made in years, assuming they actually have it in them (I'm still skeptical, but perhaps Sinofsky has squared the circle). At a minimum it should commit MS to making HTML5+JS run super fast in IE, which is a huge deal in itself.
"Hustling money through" is not exactly laundering. To launder you have to:

#1 get the money into bitcoin. How did you get it there in substantial quantity to begin with? There may be $100m of it in supply but how many people have a hundred k bitcoins they will readily exchange for cash? It has to be cash, if you put the money in a bank it's easily traced and therefore pointless.

#2 get the money out of bitcoin in such a way that you can pay taxes on it. Since you presumably can't buy houses, cars, or jet skis with bitcoin it's not very useful there. Even if you could buy a house or car, you'd still need to file taxes since the government can easily see that you bought a $500k house while claiming 0 income. The whole point of laundering money is to pay taxes on illegally gained cash so you can spend it. (Tax evasion is its own separate crime and industry, and I suspect bitcoin isn't very useful there either.)

So now you have to start a shell business that you can claim made all of those proceeds in bitcoin. It has to be one that doesn't legally require you to KYC (banking industry slang, meaning gather relevant info about the people you do business with) and report to the IRS. Then you have to find people to buy the hundreds of thousands of bitcoins from you.

Far easier to start a bar, buy alcohol, pour it down the drain, and claim you sold it. If I were laundering a few hundred grand a year I wouldn't waste time on bitcoin.
Yes, the metadata problem is a big issue too. Apple mentioned that the ones they can't match will get uploaded. This probably means the same thing as it did with lala -- those "unmatched" tracks are going to end up orphaned from the rest of the album since they don't have the same metadata.
>It is not an accurate source of academic information.

It has never claimed to be. It seems a bit silly to say that something is bad because it isn't some other thing that it was never designed to be. My iPhone is a pretty lousy toaster, too.
iOS5 was surprisingly underwhelming, given how long its been since they shipped iOS4. This certainly won't stop the train known as Android. I really don't see this changing the iOS sales trajectory upward at all.
Anyone know of any startups doing anything big with calendars of late? I feel like they could handily outpace Google Calendar, which has rolled out very few updates over the past few years.

I still use Google Calendar because it's the best (and just about the only) free, web-based offering, but I'd love to hear about alternatives.
Hopefully, the necessity for a more bandwidth will breakdown conventional current concepts and models from the big telecom, opening the way for innovation from smaller faster moving companies, We need some new competition, and some deregulation in the US. The current model it too expensive and US companies are getting wiped in comparison with companies from other countries.
If you didn't own it before running it through iTunes match then you don't own it afterwards either.