skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been using Spotify in the US in closed beta as well for over a month, so just wanted to give my two cents on these points. I will respond in order:

1.The ads on the free plan are obtrusive, but it's free. I didn't find them any more obtrusive than Pandora's ads. That said, I love the service and wanted to take it mobile, so I upgraded to premium, so I'm no longer hearing ads.

2.I didn't experience disappearing playlists. I'm sure this happened to you, just pointing out that it's not a super common occurrence b/c I'm on Spotify hours per day with plenty of playlists and haven't seen the issue.

3. Agreed. I miss my Beatles and Pink Floyd. However, the Stones' library is on there.

4. Again, I'm sure you're seeing this issue, but I use both Skype and Spotify on my PC fairly often and haven't had any issues.

5. In fairness, I'm just interested in a streaming music platform - not starting a movement. There are plenty of inefficiencies in the record label industry, but I'm. Just a startup guy, not an artist so it's not my fight ;-)

One issue I will add is that Spotify stopped streaming on my Droid about two weeks into my premium subscription. However, customer service couldn't have been more responsive and helped me fix the issue pronto.
If you have the paid version you'll never hear the ads. I find it hard to see why anybody would use the ad-ridden version.
Yeah, good point. However, if Google only uses the signals from my circles, I could be insulated from the noise :)
The story doesn't tell if all 18 million are French users. The tracking company Trident Media Guard could very well be operating globally. The ISPs reportedly only returned 900,000 identities which may be the French portion of the initial 18 million.
Second item in the left-hand navigation pane.
As an example, would you drive a car if you didn't build it from scratch? What if you buy it and it just works?

This is the way I feel with frameworks. At first I always wanted to code everything myself but I couldn't achieve anything because it was too much work. Then I started making websites on top of a CMS (I used CMSMadeSimple but anything will do really). It could do everything I wanted and really quickly, and at some point if there was something that I couldn't do in the CMS or there was a bug, I could easily dig in the source code and fix it myself. Just like a car, you can pop the hood and play around with the stuff inside, but since it's already built and working you shouldn't have to play inside it too much.
The Hacker Space Program should tackle the next piracy: 3D printing (Formally known as Reprap) [0].

[0] http://reprap.org/wiki/EndOfIntellectualProperty
It was also featured in Tech Crunch! Thanks guys!
I was just looking for some feedback on our new App.

http://techcrunch.com/tag/click-to/
What causes this issue? I want to know in the future to avoid something like this? Is it because you use custom ttfs or something?
Some invites:

cNqeAdBR4rnb4T9A ,
fE2ZrCLVNGfAJXKW ,
du4YaCBM337ZHnPL ,
e3NxdL5CnspC42ut ,
anFKrCMpD9X8ZJEL ,
dAXGZ8VTPE9Rk7Rx ,
bTE59B9TCWfHKBSR ,
cd4nHezZ9SafkmFh ,
cY4u7E7R2RrWMfca ,
fMHTqKLC6Z45nEn8 ,
dFKksMek8xhL2NS8 ,
eW8HBT75Ab5pDbSc ,
ca4AtNNmp9Cg77WE ,
c7BhhM9Z82rccnsd ,
dDrc38Ungxa9CxP3 ,
dfSV9B8MdwbAndmf ,
eW6gJwRrzc38TwEM ,
aB7UDYuM7cPzWB8Z ,
aXzrkNaULmeUzKnn ,
eT4Vy4cbA6DZSHPS ,
cpSAhfyD6fSZrUKu
I assume that there will be homework. You can't really learn without doing.
Same thing here. I don't have any MP3s any longer.

Kindle is doing something similar to my book reading. We ditched all paper books sometime last winter (they're now in the office library), and I'm actually reading a lot more because all my books are with me all the time.
In a reasonably ideal world, most normal jobs are actually useful, too... It's not as if only charity work is worthwhile.
[french citizen here]

Hadopi had a couple of effects:

* You know you've got 2 free warnings before you have to become careful, e.g. by subscribing to a VPN for a couple euros a day.

* Hadopi only monitors P2P; French movies and music massively migrated to megaupload et al.

* It has shown that many people are willing to pay a reasonable fee for unlimited media access, and that if majors won't take their money, then VPN and file sharing providers gladly will.

I hoped it would promote uncontrollable technologies such as darknets or F2F networks, but they've been way too inefficient to do that.
As I think you have realised some of your issues (ads and artist payments) could be solved by paying for premium. Premium customers also get access to some music that isn't available for free (and early access to lots of new albums).

I think the problem for you though is the music you listen to. I have never seen music start to disappear (and I listen to a wide variety of music). It's also not reasonable to expect artists such as the Beatles to be on Spotify. They've only arrived on iTunes after years of Apple trying to get them. There is no way they will ever let you stream their music for free on Spotify.

EDIT: And as jsherry said the Stones are on Spotify. I have a lot of their stuff in playlists and listen to them regularly.

I think the best way to use Spotify is in addition to iTunes. I use Spotify premium to listen to music that I would never buy. And then I buy music from iTunes that I regularly listen to or isn't available on Spotify (like the Beatles). For the price of one album a month I don't think that is a bad way to use the service and probably how the record labels hope it would be used.
Cool. How do you deal with the double slit experiments if there is no interference? Aren't you back to a fully deterministic worldview, from the observer's perspective?
Smile, You're On Everyone's Camera
They usually are recorded.

The last camp apparently was in 2007: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/CCCamp07/video/m4v/

(More events: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/ )
Ask HN: Are open-source websites possible/practical?
Suppose one has an idea for a web service that is universally beneficial and will make the world a better place. There is lots that can be done and myriad directions to go in, but it should be completely free (modulo hosting costs, that can be covered) and best run by volunteers.
For regular code open-source is great, but how about extending this to the full design and development of a website. Design, front-end, back-end all submitted by regular people.
Is this plausible, and how would you see it happening? Would it be better to use Rails or Django or what? Either way anyone could fork/clone the project and run it for free on Heroku/AppEngine (with test data) and then submit changes to the main project.
What I meant was Coca Cola probably sells more soda in places like fast food restaurants, gas stations and pubs than in supermarkets. And probably at higher margins, too.
You have to realize these are free codes, not the premium codes.

You might be entering the codes in the premium box, instead of the register your account invitation box.
I don't know why a company hasn't bought up all the ad spots with a short whispered message every ten slots that says "Ad free Spotify... brought to you by AwesomeCorp".
no need for a box. You put a camera after the second lens, and, if "things happen" between the lenses, the camera will fail to record what happens while the cloak is on. Not because the light has moved around the events, but because it has been split in two parts, a fast-moving and a slow-moving, leaving a short gap in time in which neither the fast or slow parts can interact with the events.

probable application: Magicians can make their tricks completely undetectable using a cloak while they do them (assuming they can do them in sub-microsecond time).
Chaos Season 1 Episode 13  
Chaos Season 1 Episode 13 Leasing is sometimes more of a personal and lifestyle choice than a
financial one. Many people are not comfortable with the idea of owning a
Interview: Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer Indicted
Here's a few more (I'm in Europe, but hopefully these work globally):

aBURyhWGFndUFhrm
bP8rnhwu8mEeFMPr
dGDccgGDWT88hDHc
aWh397SLVCykGF5r
ctMhkwPn65uYPu9e
fErYApAFhbpYRLHw
bA4AwyhstydP4XmA
bNDhq7R8Hb9cNf98
c4LRgTpcKEY6N6pX
eNWksBcyZUnMuWHu
bz9CxB5bfpHCBxVY
I'm not saying $200k is a low salary, just that the top end is higher than $200k.

You're not anywhere near the top end of the scale, but it's a relatively normally distributed curve and you're probably starting to move down the downslope of the right side of it :).
Not really, it's not a relativistic phenomenon.
I agree with your basic sentiment but not your example. Facebook are certainly changing things, but change is not automatically good.
Ubuntu switched their default UI from GNOME 2.x to Unity in 11.04, and after trying it out for a while I decided it felt clunky and awkward, so I decided to try out GNOME 3 from the official unofficial PPA - and man, I'm glad I did. The overall feel is just... more polished than Unity, and even more polished than GNOME 2.x. I like being able to bring up the overlay with a keystroke, then start typing the name of the app I want to launch, or browse the virtual desktop list, or pick an app from the dock. The Alt-Tab switcher has a big icon for every app I have open (like OS X), but if the app has multiple windows, they appear in a kind of submenu and I can navigate with the arrow keys to the one I want. I even love the notification system - when an app on another desktop wants the focus, an unobtrusive pop-up appears at the bottom of the screen; if I miss it, I can clink my mouse-cursor to the bottom right to see all the notifications awaiting me.

It took me a while to make it recognise my preferred keybindings, and I've had to resort to poking through gconf-editor and dconf-editor to make it respect my personal preferences, but overall I really like it, and I'm looking forward to seeing where GNOME 3 goes from here.
2011 Software Vulnerability Trends: Down but Dangerous
Good point. There was a Like button on the previous design of Fiestastic, but I ended up getting rid of it. I also have other ideas to make Fiestastic more viral / shareable and to make users come back to the site, but first I want to focus on making the core experience as great as possible. "Too many things and too little time" :)
Is Google+ More Facebook or More Twitter? Yes
Thanks, We like it! any idea on what we can do to make it easier to use?
I have some:

csDw8FGqsBExdaPd ,
c9SgW9SeERuEHtVH ,
cHX7nr9H7MrwUSV6 ,
fk5sHe3RcYcAXC9p ,
dkp9fMTxDbm4tbBu ,
dubEctcsG4wJXBhT ,
ffCuwWFccLPDBZWm ,
d3PzSKbp7pGNZUw8 ,
beRzRYbdcGLASec2 ,
bYEwx73GHZsN2Ynq
FYI, it's a 3500 attendee camp. It is also almost sold out (presale currently), so if you plan to attend and don't have a ticket, now is a good time.
Edit: Sorry, I am out, didn't think my ~60 invites would go through that quickly, hopefully those who got some are enjoying the service.
yep, thanks. i figured it out.

you have to start here: https://www.spotify.com/us/invitation/
Sorry, I wasn't clear that that I have a UK account so the disappearances happened over a long period over a year ago.

My bad about The Stones. Maybe they were there that xmas.

I suspect that the issue the small independents have with Spotify is exactly linked to Artists' fees. Selling small amounts of CDs is actually worthwhile for a small artist - being on Spotify isn't.
I think you should write a micro-framework. I feel the same way about ORM. It's completely irrational on my part because I'm extremely comfortable writing absurd numbers of joins using crazy criteria for my day-to-day at work, and have some cognitive dissonance because here I am, about to let a library do all the heavy lifting for me.

The end result is in order for me to accept ORMs I had to know the pattern. To know the pattern, I had to write a simple ORM layer on my own. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't as good as SQLAlchemy, by far, but it gave me enough insight to appreciate them, and to know when to use them. By all means, keep using CGI, but leave it to the small projects.

And yes, you're too used to PHP. Branch out, it's more fun.
Very interesting read. Although I would have preferred if they hadn't said the ending at the beginning of the article.
>It's not only the leaves who suffer. The constraint propagates up as well as down. So managers are constrained too; instead of just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_eleph
Doesn't Wikipedia work like that?
I also read about it on www.lifehacker.com and I am simply impressed by the variety of possibilities it provides me with.

Here's the link, check it out: http://lifehacker.com/5820982/clickto-pipes-text-images-and-...
My bad about The Stones. To be clear this is my parents' taste in music rather than my own but lack of their favourite artists was enough for them to dismiss Spotify out-of-hand.
Why files need to die
Is there a site that compares (up to date) catalog sizes of the different services? Rhapsody used to have the largest, but I couldn't abide their website. Rdio has a great site, but their selection wasn't so great. Mog has been a decent compromise, but I'm interested if Spotify has a larger library.
Possibly only for paid accounts?

On the Mac app, the 2nd item is "Play Queue". "What's new" is first and "Inbox" is third.
The "disappearing playlist" the parent refers to is a licensing issue, not a technical one, as far as I could tell. When I was in the UK (now in the US), whole artists catalogs would go missing all at once. I eventually stopped paying for the service because of this (it wiped out about 10% of the content from my playlists).
no problem ;)

Everyone please vote this thread up, so the invites are publicly visible to all hackers! Let the HN Community get first dibs on the Sportify Invites!
Check out a HP G60 $320-400 or search for your preffered brand on Amazon I found a few Thinkpads used and new within the specified price range. Have fun choosing a laptop.
Is Your Startup Solving Problems?
IBM Lotus Sympony joins Apache OpenOffice.org
Built-in AI. They didn't specify the difficulty level, but knowing Civ games (can't speak for FreeCiv though), difficulty levels only tweak handicaps and not the AI algorithms, so the correct choice would be the difficulty level that has no handicap or bonus for the AI.
Real cats interact with their surroundings. A lot. They breathe and meow, they emit organic molecules that smell like cat, they charge up with static electricity (electric fields) and then run around in circles (magnetic fields)

I actually laughed out loud; thank you for this lucid description. Fantastic way to start my morning.
A friend just suggested them to me this morning! I definitely will be in touch, very likely it will be held there : ) Thanks!
I will recommend Wix Lounge, it's a free workspace that also
has tech and design workshop, your goal fits well with what they do. See:

http://www.wixlounge.com/
http://blog.wix.com/2011/06/the-wix-lounge-nycs-hot-spot-for...
It's worth emphasising that Richard Smith is talking only about biomed. Academic practices vary widely.

Julia's dictum in 1984 is maybe relevant to overcoming cultural inertia: if you follow all the little rules, you can break the big rules. Likewise, it helps to eliminate trivial objections to your work when trying to get past gatekeepers.

Of course, Julia and Winston didn't get away with breaking the big rules...
(A good read, thanks!)

It should be obvious to others who the "major business in the MP3 industry" was when you see the product he was re-selling: http://www.sofamoolah.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/1p.jpg

What's not clear to me is how you could (according to the final paragraph) "lose a lot of money" when you seem to have had minimal overheads and (according to part 1) you were making a profit of $40.75 per unit.

Naturally you had some unsaleable stock left over, but at $2100 shipped per lot of 500, did this really make much of a dent in your final profit from the venture?
The selling point of these referred frameworks is the time to market. Do it in a way we know it has worked for so many people so far, and the framework code glues pieces together to make it good for you. Make it good for you until a particular reasonable scale.

No framework can claim to be the best fit in all the several dimensions on which they can be measured, one of which is, "time to market", today of all time.

At scale everything breaks down and need a custom implementation. If anything the framework needs to be good at, it is, how well it allows itself to be replaced and with how little effort.

Twitter is gradually moving all it's components into the "best production platform" JVM today. I don't think any body can provide convincing argument that building it on JVM right from the beginning would have been a better solution.

Outgrow a framework and roll your own at the points that are critical for your application. Do the common things like, sending emails etc, in a standard way and let it be handled the reasonably right way.
As I said: I wanted to pay for it but baulked when my playlists started to disappear.
Thanks. You = the man.
> Does anyone have a guess as to why they are doing an "invite only" style opening here in the US?

They're not - you can pay for a premium or unlimited subscription right now. I've just purchased one for my brother in NY, so I can share playlists with him from London.
For once I've got invites to share -- instead of the other way around, which was the case for Google+ etc.

List your email and I'll send you one (I've got 10).

Edit: I'll just paste them:

dcCX5xfxB7szb2E9

eZwUPA3C8yBDJkyb

aNmdgpGRXxu7yk8f

cRDyA6twLGzXmsAG

d6q78ywcpeuUEyXK

cqfg9pq8483zUYtN
Don’t Be an SEO Cookie Monster
User Generated Content Marketing Strategy Tips
Any angel investor or VC firm resembles wall street. As I'll explain, this is a meaningless assertion:

- Suppose there is high risk. Any investor, whether it's an angel, VC firm, hedge fund, etc., is going to very likely use a scattergun approach. That's just how the numbers must work when you're looking at high risk investments. An exception means that someone got lucky.

- Take a mom and pop business. Suppose it needs capital. The typical approach is to get a bank loan. This is similar to selling shares to a VC but with different terms and a different distribution of risk. Just because something like a farm lends itself to loans and something like a video game for the iPhone lends itself to VC funding doesn't mean that the two businesses are fundamentally different, just that the cash flow and risk result in a slightly different form of cooperation between the individual(s) and the financial firm.

- "Traditional venture capitalism" was simply a more risk-averse type of financial firm. They let angels take the big risks and reap the big rewards and settled for bets that looked more like a sure thing (but still riskier than would have made it suitable for other forms of funding).

- I don't think you have made the case that any of this incentivizes flipping, or that flipping is "bad". I'd argue that to the extent that firms exist b/c they can be flipped, that is innovation that would not have happened if the financial structures didn't exist to match investment dollars with innovation and entrepreneurship -- startups get acquired because an acquisition offers better value and/or lower risk to the acquiring firm than trying to develop the equivalent thing in-house. If you're stretching this into an analogy about elaborate financial instruments, I think it's quite a stretch.

I think that what you're actually seeing is a bit of a credit bubble around startups that resulted from the destruction of many of the risky (but well known) wealth creation instruments that Wall Street had been using. Of course, more investment means another "layer" of startups will exist with another "layer" of risk characteristics. Yes this is similar to wall street, but it's a consequence of the basic laws of economics and nothing else.
Considering the amount of invites available (almost every premium subscriber has 50+ invites) I doubt it is more than a marketing strategy.
The 3 Components of Inbound Marketing
I was like you, so I eased myself into it, ie:

Raw PHP -> CodeIgniter (PHP) -> CakePHP -> Ruby on Rails

The reason this worked for me is that the CodeIngniter MVC Framework is so lightweight, well documented and well written that you CAN understand what's going on behind the scenes just be reading the source code.

In fact CodeIgniter is still my most used combination for web apps, CakePHP is a weapon of choice for bigger projects or when I want complex ACL and/or the kind of automatically linked MVC structure that Cake provides.

I'm still relatively n00b at RoR, but I suspect that will replace Cake in my arsenal once I'm better with it.

Hope this helps you.
As of mid 2011, for £1K you can buy a PC with 24 GB of memory and for £21K you can buy a server with 512 GB of memory.

I'm not sure where he gets his computers from but those prices seem to be at least a few years away.
I just posted the exact same question as a comment on the blog :)
Something fast, light in weight, and screen doesn't matter as long as it is not 10 inches.

I'll be willing to purchase it locally (Walmart, Target, etc).
Yeah! I forgot about the lifehacker article. Can I ask what you've been using it for?
Agreed. As I recall small labels started removing themselves as they weren't making any money from it.
Its awesome that you would take the time out to set up some free classes but I think you would need to move some things around in this syllabus.

Basics of Graphic Design - Great starting point. No arguments here.

Learning HTML (html5) only - I dont agree with this. HTML5 is not that widely adopted yet to be a sole basis of HTML learning. It often still requires JS just to make it render correctly across all browsers. Using the HTML5 doctype and teaching HTML5 as what-is-to-come is great, but it shouldnt be the basis. Especially if you are looking to teach cross-browser compatibility and best practices.

Javascript/JQuery - Sounds about right.

Databases / MVC / RoR - This is where you kind of blur the line between teaching "Web Design" and "Web Development". This should be an optional split. If you want to continue learning the development side you go this route, if they want to stay design side, go a different route. There is really no reason for a designer to know about how MVC works.

Deployment - The basics of deployment would be great for everyone but advanced RoR, Django style deployments shouldnt be apart of a normal course.
They've got servers in the US too.
Ask YC: How do you deal with accounting/taxes/book keeping?
I basically want updated answers to this question:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163270

I hate paper work as well, with a passion. I almost always end up paying late fees for everything. I have an accountant and I have to send him a spreadsheet of transactions 4 times a year. I end up pasting my bank statement into Excel and annotating it with categories--it is surprisingly painful.

Being in New Jersey and often working in New York, I have to worry about taxes for two states. While so far I have been a computer consultant, I am now importing somethings and soon may have a web-app. All this complicates my taxes further. To keep things simple, I have my accountant do my personal taxes as well. For some reason, my accountant makes me feel like they are doing me a favor.

What do you folks do? Does it make sense to shut down my current corp., and start a new with with clean slate (make sure there are no outstanding issues: taxes, registrations, fees, paperwork, etc.) and record everything in quicken online and turbotax online? Are there tech savvy accountants who can lessen my pain? I have seen some ads which claim to offer 'outsourced accounting department' services...do I need to look into those?
excellent! thanks man
If we view "flipping" as simply big companies paying for features and/or people that they would have spent more time and/or money building themselves, then why is this bad? Seems more sensible than the offshore outsourcing model that big companies have tried previously.
On the recent THC release on the Vodafone femtocell