skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Penny per stream? That's an awful lot in most countries.

If I stream a record twice I cover my spotify premium fee (US is more expensive than Argentina or India, because people can pay more).

Copyrights create artificial scarcity, if you don't like it, just don't put your music on the platform, you have an effective monopoly.

Most music is not that valuable, prices used to be high due to cartelization of the publishers and because the media was difficult to produce (records, CDs).

Cassettes started changing that, and the internet completely destroyed it. There's no going back. If prices go up, piracy will too, and you'll likely end up making less money.
> Obviously salt is the cheapest, otherwise it wouldn't be in such high use.

Not sure why you would assume that's obvious. The various solutions vary in effectiveness due to a number of factors, and are not equal in what they actually do. Sand doesn't melt ice, it provides traction. It's better when it's cold enough for the ice to stay ice. Salt melts ice, but is less effective in lower temperatures, and causes lots of fallout (corrosion, etc). Meanwhile plowing is the only real solution for heavy snowfall.
The US is unique in it's low population density and enormous scale of it's postal service.
Written by Thomas Chatterton Williams [1], author of Self-Portrait in Black and White [2]:

> “It’s not about color for me,” my aunt said while railing against Obama. “For example, I love Thomas Sowell.”

> To that side of my extended family, I became the stereotype of a coastal liberal, writing for the New York Times and wholly out of touch with the real America. In fact, I’ve always prided and defined myself as an anti-tribal thinker, and sometime contrarian, working firmly within a left-of-center black tradition...

Why was this published in Law & Liberty, has he burned his left-of-center media bridges?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chatterton_Williams

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Portrait_in_Black_and_Whi...
Shade is certainly a consideration, especially given people normally prefer to park their cars in shade to avoid them being unpleasantly hot when they return.

Cost, however, isn’t. The cells themselves are extremely cheap compared with the cost of putting them on a rooftop (in the case of homes), and in this case replaces the use of paint on the bodywork.

Specifically, the cost of cells is now down to ~$0.30/W, so 5 m^2 [0] of 200 W/m^2 would cost about $300. Similar arguments exist for PV roofing tiles being replacements for ceramic etc. tiles rather than the common sight of bulky window-size sheets attached after construction.

The claimed average range boost of 112 km/week (~3600 miles per year) in “average” conditions, and ~7900 miles per year in optimal conditions, definitely sounds about right to me based both on discussions last time a completely different PV consumer car was discussed here and on my BOTE calculations. Is that range worth $300 extra on the purchase price? Perhaps; it would pay for itself after ~1.88 years.

Doesn’t guarantee this isn’t vapourware (thinking of recent news about Nikola Corporation), but it is at least plausible.

[0] I am guesstimating the area
We can even easily write it as a one-line without lambda:

[{ 1: n, 6: "Fizz", 10: "Buzz", 0: "FizzBuzz" }[n**4%15] for n in range(1, 101)]

The lambda in the original code is just used to convert the 0..99 that's generated by range(100) to 1..100. Using range(1, 101) instead generates the appropriate range of numbers from the beginning.
Let's do some back-of-the-envelop calculations:

Let's say people stream for 4 hours a day on average.

4 * 60 = 240 minutes

Let's say a song is 3 minutes.

240 / 3 = 80 streams == 80p/day

80p * 30 days per month = 2400p

2400p == £24

So that would be ~2.4x increase in price for end users without including Spotify cut or taxes.

Doesn't seem possible to me.
Built and hosted on squarespace. Noted.
It's an exciting time for alternatives.

Patreon, Twitch, Cameo, OnlyFans, et al, are providing ways to connect with your community and earn a living through their support, which is not only very important during shutdowns when live events are harder, but will be a long term trend.

On the production side costs continue to drop, and if we #abolishcopyright cost of living across the world will drop dramatically, so will be easier to balance the budget.
I'm on the conservative side, mostly, and I'm deeply disappointed by most prominent conservative voices. There's much more of value in conservative thought than people hear from conservative mouthpieces in the media, but instead we get ugly stupidity.
I am sure there have been murders from drinking alcohol but I doubt anyone has slayed their own father whom they love dearly whilst drunk. This story is just so sad, breaks my heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGVsJUW3WfY

I advocate supervised medical mushroom usage, but I really could never support home recreational use. I've taken a bunch of LSD and mushrooms in my youth and they have had lasting negative effects on me so I am speaking from experience too.
Could someone more knowledgeable explain the concrete footing and foundation log barrier? I can't make out what it is between them...it looks like a burlap sack, but that can't be right. What is preventing the concrete from transferring water into the foundation log? There is obviously some material there, I just can't fathom what it is.
The problem here is not the platform itself (Spotify). It'd the overall concept of needing a middle man to distribute your work.

I believe blockchain can be a good remedy for unnecessary middlemen.

Audius [1] is a good example applied to the music industry.

[1] https://audius.co/
I guess I've been of the opinion that the largest at-risk segment of the population are the chronically ill and frail and that includes the overweight and obese. They should take the vaccine. The elderly should definitely take the vaccine.

But once they're taken care of - I cannot really fathom most people accepting draconian measures in the absence of extraordinary deaths.

For me though the idea that the vaccine is the only option brings to mind the question: why does the public health establishment prefer advanced technology over something that's immediately actionable and dead simple like advising people to lose weight?

To me it seems like a system that's caught in a death spiral, sustaining an illusion that people can completely disregard their health and still be healthy.
So I wanted to try put this into perspective since "a penny per stream" is intentionally meant to sound insignificant.

This seems like it would roughly double Spotify's costs: https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/apps/how-much-...

And Spotify is already paying out 75% of it's revenue to royalty holders: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-pr...

So unless you believe that Spotify is bad at business and there's an extra ~75% of revenue Spotify could pull out of a hat, this is basically impossible to satisfy without cratering the total revenue by doubling prices, which is probably not in artist's interests.
Going after the pensions is probably the single quickest way to find yourself unelected. Old people vote, and there are a lot of them.

Also direct-to-consumer hardly absolves you from following tax law. I agree that sales tax is bad, but only because it is regressive and disproportionately taxes the poor. Raise income taxes and abolish sales tax.
Technophobic people are exactly the target audience that has a huge tolerance for broken software built on piles of abusive bullshit.
Researchers explore CRISPR-based antiviral therapy for Covid-19
I'm saying Shl is a shitty person and screwing the original creators of Gumroad out of their equity is just a drop in the bucket for the shitty things he's done, and Nathan creating ConvertKit Commerce in direct competition with Gumroad doesn't negate the things Nathan brings up, and other people have brought up in light of Shl taking peoples money for nothing in return.

People are too quick to just ignore things people point out because gasp he has a competing project!!!
You can also click the timestamp of any comment to reply before there is a reply button.
Use all-season radials. Swapping out tires every season is a relic from the past that the average automobile owner should not be doing anymore.
I think you raise important points about bundling and banning. I'm constantly terrified that Google will just lock me out of all my email and other Google accounts. What would I do? I don't have a massive social media following. I'd really be in a tough spot.

I've also gone through bouts of YouTube addiction - like, seeking professional help YouTube addiction. And it's tricky when such a high percentage of video is hosted on YouTube - training videos, news, etc.

I agree with you that there are some real problems here.

So how much of this was true during the FTC probe back in 2012? And what should be done now?
Artist and Dev here.

Yes to this. Having an imagination means you can think of different ways to monetize your work that isn’t trying to put an imaginary wall around ideas and information.
Your experience with unions seems very limited, please read about unions in countries where the system isn't broken.
Right, but the money has always gone to a middleman, be it record companies or Spotify. If Spotify gets any more expensive I can guarantee people will go back to privacy, music will become less accessible and those niche bands that Spotify knows I may like will never get found.

I understand the need to get paid more, but I am not sure killing Spotify is the solution.
I've been hearing this for 30 years, and it hasn't happened yet.

Wake me up when it happens.
I don't see why you're lumping in IUDs with electroshock therapy and chiropractors? Sure, the CCP is awful and has awful policies, but IUDs are strong indicators of a healthy healthcare system elsewhere.
V8 is the only C++ component of Deno. The other bits of the runtime are written in Rust, and Rust is the native extension language.
In some countries if you fell a tree without permission, you have to put the equivalent tree back. Such operation could easily cost million euro to restore the forest.
Whiteness is far, far from the amount of reflected sunlight. It's about the curl of your hair, the shape of your face, the accent, and a host of other clues.

There's no sharp line. It's however people choose to define you. If they identify you as non-white, you get treated as non-white. Which means automatic negative judgments that wouldn't apply if they identified you as white.

That doesn't mean whiteness by itself gets you into every corridor of power. But non-whiteness excludes you from a lot of places, or gets you treated with suspicion when you're allowed to be there at all. It's a permanent set of bricks in your briefcase, on top of all the other ones that affect everybody.
Venture Capitalists Find and Fund the Next Billion-Dollar Company
I'm concerned about the risk there as well, but I feel like you can spin that both ways. There's a weird intersection with opening investment to anyone and concerns about folks making ill informed choices.
But isn't this part of the negotiation process? Start with a higher demand and work your way to a more reasonable position.
Does guix build for any embedded ish devices?

Like u-boot+ custom dtb's kernel etc?

Mmh I should have a look at how guix n nixos support rpi and similar devices, maybe it's adaptable
> make software development harder for those who can’t pass as white males.

I think bay area startup scene might be different but I've been consulting last 12 years in corporate America (banks, healthcare, big retail) and 90% of teams usually are Indian and Chinese.
Ethical music streaming co-op
Happy to see you in my thread again, thanks for jumping in.

And thanks for so much insight once more. A lot to think about.

I am actually looking here on HN exactly for this. Experience told by people like you to get a new perspective and new data.

It's a lot to digest and process, so I don't have much smarter answer than this. Again thanks a lot!
> given how past war on drugs panned out

Legalising something doesn't make the cost disappear. You still have to police DUI, only now with more substance profiles to learn.
>The solution is really to go direct-to-consumer

How do you go direct to consumer without collecting VAT (while not breaking tax laws)?
> Now I only wish I could find a way to move all our infrastructure off AWS

If only there were competing cloud/PaaS services.
It's also still remarkably cheap for unlimited access to all the music ever recorded.
They only hint at this, but I think a user-centric distribution model would be much better: define a percentage split (let's say 30% for Spotify, 70% for artists), and split that percentage of revenue between the artists THAT THE USER LISTENED TO.

I think that they currently use a global split, which over-represents "users" like stores, gyms, etc.
News Flash: Work on Dribbble is supposed to be inspiration-first, functionality second.

The writer appears to assume that the site should have case studies framing the problem and the solution. How is that possible when these are largely made up designs, and the real work is covered by NDA? Most "shots" on Dribbble are one or two small screenshots showing scenarios familiar to viewers, like booking a vacation home, streaming music, etc. They're tweaking an existing use case, not reinventing the wheel. It doesn't need a case study.
> Why should you not own copyright to that which you produce?

You don't want to use that line of argument, since authors and musicians are among the very few categories of workers with that privilege. As much as I agree with you (and actually think that privilege to be expanded to all workers), you won't find any solidarity from the common public on that line.
> Who can we trust?

I've spent the last couple of weeks working my way through the spectrum from healthy skepticism to conspiracy theory with regards to Covid-19 (on Twitter mostly).

One of the patterns I find really interesting is that the more towards conspiracy theory, the more extreme the allocation of trust becomes. At the end of the spectrum people will fully distrust large parts of society (government, big pharma, general scientists, WHO, CDC), but at the same time they will fully trust a small group of 'independent scientists'.
Truckers Hitch is also very useful. Allows you to get things very tight due to functioning like a pulley.

https://www.animatedknots.com/truckers-hitch-knot
Actually, I believe it would be a guild, as artists are not actually employees of any particular label or service, but just contractors. I also thing Guild is a far cooler name, but that's beside the point!

As for your actual question, no I don't think they are. They seem more like an advocacy or lobby group

https://www.unionofmusicians.org/#about
Copyright and patents creates artificial scarcity. The things protected are not scarce, they are abundant. Ideas and information are easy to copy/reproduce.

So we built a fake framework on top of something plentiful and cheap to copy, to make it more expensive so some people can make money out of it.
What I've Learned from 10 Years of Personal Projects
I love the simple Ruby version (it was added to Github)

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
counts = Hash.new(0)
STDIN.each_line { |line| line.downcase.split.each { |w| counts[w] += 1 }}
counts.sort_by { |k,v| -v }.each { |k,v| puts "#{k} #{v}" }
> I understand the need to get paid more, but I am not sure killing Spotify is the solution.

If Spotify doesn't compromise, killing it would be the only solution, but this union doesn't have the power to do that initially. But this will never work because you have a infinite stream of new musicians wanting to be listen without receiving money for that.
The US Constitution set copyright originally as 14 years, extendable by another 14. This sounds about right.

I think artists would not be dissuaded from working and would monetize the roughly the same with 20-30 year copyright terms.
Meanwhile, I have spent quite a bit directly to bands using band camp, buying music and vinyl there.

In the end, if Spotify is not a sustainable business model for you as a musical artist, maybe it is time to look for alternatives, especially those where they do not directly compete with mega-acts?
> There is no protection against stupidity, just a hope for cure in form of education and knowledge.

You could say the same about the war on drugs.
My suggestion is that if you plan to open a business, go to Portugal instead of Spain.

Spain is increasing taxes and they already were pretty hefty for Limited Liability companies.

Portugal is similar on paper but it's easier to start, and their tax agency is not nearly as punitive and arbitrary as the Spanish one.

And you'll have sun (in the south), contained prices and polite Portuguese, which tend to speak decent English, in case you need hiring.

Portuguese infrastructures and utilities are still far below Spain, specially roads and highways, but Portugal is slowly improving while Spain has been declining for a while and it's basically walking to a cliff.

Goin on a Travel to Spain is pretty easy too.

I'm Spanish, if anyone thought I was advertising my country.
Those niche bands will put their music for free online until they are well known to get their fans pay for the music, as they did in the 90s and 00s.
“Threat Modeling Isn't Just for Security”: Podcast Shorts
buy another set of wheels. swap the entire set twice a year. usually the shop will charge you less to swap a whole wheel than to swap the tires themselves (less labor). if you have a small apartment, the unused set can make nice stools for guests. if that aesthetic isn't for you, there are things called "storage units" that you can rent to store things you don't want to keep in your apartment.
Sure. I agree with your broader point. But a lot of companies don't have the time or inclination to conduct useful interviews (take home assignments, project deep dives etc). So they simply ask a bunch of leetcode questions and 1-2 system design, "behavioral" questions, and expect you to give perfect answers. Conversely, if you are in a situation where you want a job at these companies, then you do leetcode. As an anecdote, I like solving programming puzzles (advent of code, ICPC problems etc) but couldn't clear FANG without leetcode. I despised leetcode because the puzzles/problems there are uninspiring as compared to ICPC problems. Of course, software engineering has very little to do with any of it :)
Such is the illusion we all have trained into ourselves.
What is the average number of streams per user on Spotify? According to Last.fm, I listened to 55k songs last year, vast majority of it through Spotify.
I know a few small business owners that have said if their staff unionized they would just close the business.

These aren't bad bosses or people who don't know how to run a business. They just know if their staff unionized and the rest of their industry didn't, they wouldn't be able to compete on price or keep the necessary number of staff.

I think it's easier to pick on Amazon or bezos than it is to deal with the political forces that you've mentioned, or come to terms with needing to unionizing a whole industry before it would stop hurting small businesses.
I was thinking that musicians could create a platform themselves and avoid the parasites but at this moment you still have the mobile store parasites that will tax you even more for each sale so before musicians can do soemthing about it we need to fix the mobile app stores or make the PWA music apps have same features as native ones(I have a feeling that Google and Apple will fight hard against losing this big source of money)
Cricut Wants Users to Pay for Unlimited Use of Cutting Machines They Already Own
many of the demands listed, while well intentioned, are ill considered at best.

Take the first demand for instance, pay $0.01 per play. on the face this sounds fine, until you look at the economics of this. Spotify Premium is $9.99, that means for every premium user there is only 999 plays per month at BEST if you don't consider any other overheads, before that payment is exhausted (not including things like discounts for 12 month plans, student and family pricing).

This is not to say artists shouldn't get paid more, but how many people would take say a 10x price increase to fund this level of payment?

That's not to mention they also want to remove the income stream of artists paying for increased plays on the platform (pushing more cost to the user)

again, the demands may be well intentioned, and many should just be adopted such as crediting all labour for a recording, but obviously no-one has looked at the economics' it would take to actually realise the level of payment being asked for here and thought about if consumers would be willing to pay that price.
> 90% of them are just shit at their jobs.

As the joke goes, "What do you call the person who graduated last in his or her class in medical school? Doctor."
> Pay us at least one cent per stream

> Spotify generally pays between $. 003 and $. 005 per stream

Is Spotify making so much money that paying 3 orders of magnitude more money per stream is a realistic option?
Nit: It's nowhere close to all the music ever recorded. It's barely most of the mainstream artists.
> if we #abolishcopyright cost of living across the world will drop dramatically

I sincerely doubt that. Food and shelter won't magically cost less because there is no copyright.
International sales are counted as exports (not subject to VAT) and domestic sales thresholds for VAT are typically $80,000+/year

Of course, this varies by country, but its possible to incorporate your business in a country where this is the case.
Clearly it is as artists are not starving and can pay for their rent, lifestyle etc.

They just simply ”want more”, and who wouldn’t, but free market and supply/demand disagrees with them. If artists don’t like Spotify’s offering they can pull their music out of the service.
Yep. This is especially true in 2021, where diversity hiring and affirmative action on racial and gender lines are at an all time high.

I am not saying they are wrong. But the argument that white (and asian?) males have an inherent cultural advantage that's so outsized that significant differences in hiring/promotion/outreach standards cannot overcome it, is bogus.

Qualifier: Arguments around lack of maternity accomodations and an inherent class divide are completely valid. I am not referring to those.
Let's be honest, you aren't required to use a record label. Record labels just advertise, which definitely blow up some musicians.

In contrast, take the rapper Tom McDonald, his music actually hit the top 100 charts[1][2] and he's not signed to anyone. Just him and his girlfriend creating music. Was trending as the #1 download on iTunes for a couple weeks, etc.

Artists make a deal with the devil, make more money, then complain. Yet, with today's ability to distribute - it's not required.

I do think there should be an update to the spotify payout system, but Spotify doesn't have negotiating power; they need the record labels. With the record labels Spotify can get improved music, etc. Spotify is paying for the privilege that's why the smaller artists aren't making very much (the premium payments go to record labels).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_Woke\

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6JUNFAJ9o
Note I didn't say "should be completely unscheduled". Schedule 1 is extremely strict to the point of making medical research virtually impossible. We've known there are major medical benefits to many substances on schedule 1 for decades now, yet the government definition still declares them the opposite, which at the very least is a lie.
not to mention the injustice of having to pay for seatbelts!

sometimes safety isn't free.