skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem has so many facets it's hard to count. Where to start?

a) charging by subscription instead of by transaction. This is nice. This is a great idea for patron happiness. Unfortunately the patron isn't the customer at a ticketing agent. The customer is the presenter/promoter or venue. As a patron, I don't NOT buy Japandroids tickets because TicketMaster is the ticketing agent. This plan causes the ticketing agency to almost assuredly lose money or customers (price too low they lose money, price too high they lose smaller venues).

b) The "big guys" are also probably that artist's promoter, or they own the venue. LN/TM promote most big names and own a good portion of the venues. It's vertical.

c) No band wants their promoter or agent to deal with merch. Merch is where a lot of the money comes in at the venue, and they want as much control of that as possible. Most venues already require a certain percentage of merch sales be given back in settlement. The only way to make this work would be for the label or artist to sell the merch package ahead of time with a voucher for tickets to be used at the agent.

It doesn't help that ticketing a very large likely to sell out show is HARD. It doesn't help that convenience charges are accepted in the industry and quite frankly, if you're a venue that runs a hard box office with an online agent, you love that they charge a convenience fee.

The only real solution without major disruption by a major act leaving the LN/TM world is for TM to show final price, and have all the settlement be secret. I honestly would prefer to see the fees as they break down, so I know how much is going to the box office settlement.
With iMessage, your account isn't (solely) linked to your SIM card. It cannot be, because iMessage also works on devices without SIM cards (iPod Touch, Mac).

I do not think you can claim it fails because it still works after removing the SIM card. You cannot claim that SMS fails on the security front because you can receive SMSes without logging in to iCloud, either.
I think the place for a great disruptive startup would be at the promoter level. It's not something that you can just throw a lot of tech at, but at this point LN seems a lot more disruptable than TM.
I do notice that people invariably get hungry within hours of leaving a restaurant. Clearly restaurants cause hunger.

More seriously, it's not surprising that self-help doesn't produce instant results. People have widely varied and complex problems. It'll probably take a while to find the right advice, put into practice and see the desired results. Sure, there's a lot self-help gurus out there exploiting desperate people. But there's also a lot of genuinely helpful advice out there and people who benefit from it.
So you're saying that maybe a law could be passed to identify these kickbacks. Think of an ingredients list on food packaging, where all portions of the fee are accounted for up front.
I think perhaps an angle to this would be that venues that have received tax dollars should not be allowed to sign these exclusive agreements.
The follow up article in case anyone wanted to read it:
http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/writing-a-generalized-concur...
I was glad you raised the question, as I had the same thought as you at first. That just cutting and pasting some documents is not journalism.

I then read a tonne of definitions of the word "journalism" and to me. They pretty much all just say journalism is getting the facts out there, in any form. There's no requirement for a journalist to make a "report", for it to be journalism.

I would be interested to see more examples of journalism where no report was written.
It depends on if you're a consumer or a broker. If you're a consumer, sure, StubHub and CL will probably do the best for you, but that's because you're not a broker.

I'll definitely make some brokers angry by explaining this, but there are a few ticketing networks, the largest being TicketNetwork (TN).

TN is a SaaS play that costs somewhere in the $2500/year range, and goes up or down depending on which services you need. If I'm a broker I can simply get on TicketNetwork and list my tickets. We'll say I bought a ticket for $50 and I want to sell it for $100. I put it on the network at $100. TicketNetwork automatically updates it so that it's selling on your site for $100. Since it's on the network every other ticket broker has access to it, and they resell it for different amounts (standard is your price + 20%). So another ticket broker in my city would try to sell the ticket for $120 - they pay me $100, and I dropship it directly to the customer with a white-label packing slip.

There are about 800 brokers on the network at any given time and about $1 Billion in inventory. Some won't sell, most will. The affiliate payout in the ticket industry is among the highest, since it's super high margins. As a broker it's great, because as soon as you throw a ticket on the network you have 800 people trying to sell your ticket. But not just anyone can be on the Network - you have to pay a pretty penny for that opportunity, that keeps people like you out.

Where TicketsNow makes most of its money is in the selling. They have excellent marketing, great affiliates, and they are selling an absurd amount of tickets. They let you post your tickets on TicketsNow, but that's not where the real money is made, the real money is in selling other brokers' tickets that are much higher margins.
How is the fact that it works over WiFi a security issue ?
How computers work, from the atom up
Actually with his sloppy writing, I couldn't decide if he was dismissing Planetary Resources or Barclay's and the FT.
Here's my 1-item Admin Whishlist:

- Separate it from Django and put it on Github, so that it is not subject to the framework's release cycle.

Most of the requests here would be done by the end of the year.
Thanks for the great insight guys! Are the promoters/venues adding these fees because their Ticketmaster contract forces them to do it? Or are they doing it because the industry allows them to do so. What's their opinion towards it?
I don't know anything about the author, but sounds to me like he's a person who's not in a relationship and almost certainly doesn't have young children. Many of the things in his routine would be nearly impossible to do for a person who's in a "family"
Anyone have any more info on this? I have an idea for a similar service with a bit of a twist, but I've been put of as I thought this type of thing was against youtube TOS.

Also, I've queued up and played a few tracks, but not seen any youtube adverts, have I just been lucky or is there some way of removing them?
Because I received messages that were not meant for me. I got this iPhone from someone who removed his SIM card from it. And then I received messages for him that should have been delivered to his phone (the phone he put his SIM-card in).
Let’s try something big together, Let’s open source Space
I had the same thing happen at Georiga Tech years ago. My calc professor had the class buy a rough draft of the textbook he was writing. That wasn't as egregious as the situation described here, we could share books. The books were worthless at the end of the semester, though, since he'd have a new iteration out by then.

The book was as terrible as his teaching.
I did not login into his iCloud account. How would I? I did not have his apple id credentials.
This Week Is First Milestone in White House Roadmap for an API Digital Strategy
He mentions regularly helping people and then doesn't mention it in the context of how Buffer makes people happy. It's probably assumed, but worth saying: if you're working at a startup, one of the best (maybe the best) feeling is your users telling you how your work is helping them.

It's easy to get caught up in other stuff or forget, but talking to your users/customers and asking them how you're making their lives better is often very revealing and rewarding. It might feel scary/weird to ask, but the answers are awesome.
I would love to see the textbook industry disrupted.. but how? It's so ingrained in the system. Textbook rentals are a start, but still expensive.

I even knew some college students that looked "down" on buying used books, like you were buying someone's used underwear.
It's one thing to take care of your own children. It's entirely another to change the law to "take care of" everyone else's. The second requires far greater justification and consent from those who would be affected by the law (those 17 year olds who are a year away from voting, for example).
That's precisely why it only makes sense to measure results not individual productivity.
Every time a headline ends with a question mark, the answer is NO. (Sorry, I can't remember the sourcce for this quote).
> Google might just as well hire you

I interview with them every once in a while. Unfortunately, the opportunities for engineers in São Paulo are very limited.
Custom editions and packaged access codes are the last futile attempt that publishers bookstores and professors have against cheaper Internet alternatives. The one thing your writeup didn't touch upon is digital textbooks- which the publishers actually love since eBooks are usually rentals, so the secondary markets like Amazon and AbeBooks are cut out.

I am from SlugBooks- a web app that compares prices between the college bookstore and online options for ~800 universities in US and Canada. This topic hits close to home. We've been watching bookstores and publishers do this for years, and it's only getting worse. When professors assign customized or packaged books, it becomes nearly impossible to save money through sites like Amazon.

The most surprising thing is how many professors eat up the bullshit that custom editions actually help. They're supposed to be champions of critical thinking. Profs WANT to save students money - that's why they opt for custom editions (since publishers tell them it will save their students money). It's just sad.
As a side project, I've been working on a site, http://asterank.com, that attempts to rank asteroids by their economic potential. These calculations take into account things like the energetic cost of reaching and extracting material from an asteroid. Open to any feedback or pointers.
While people are giving advice on burn.fm, there was a similar project submitted here just a few hours prior that may also be of interest called YouFM.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404007
I have never once clicked "I'm feeling lucky"
Type the full domain a few times and it will start defaulting to the domain instead of a search.
I could go on about the cognitive friction of javascript itself as a language but that's another discussion, but yes, I would almost certainly use javascript for this. I'm not really talking about this specific example, but a myriad of other examples where using transitions and other CSS features do make sense.

My favorite example is the way transitions handle height/width properties set it auto, in that they just don't. If you do decide to change the height of an "auto" sized item and want a transition you instead have to set it's current height explicitly (in Javascript) first, then set it to the height of the to the height of the new content (having calculated that somehow. What is worse you can't have the transition turned on, because setting from auto to X with the transitions on will cause a transition 'blip' from 0 to X.

The fact that this very simple and obvious case (that of changing the contents of something and having the height transition smoothly) was not addressed in the transition specifications is exactly what I am talking about.
I've never felt that great during those times I've had to regularly be up early school or work.

Perhaps it's because you didn't voluntarily choose to wake up at those times. You had to wake up early for tasks that you had to do, even if unwilling that day. With little time to get ready, you'd also feel rushed.

With your happiest schedule, you have more control over when you can start working, and you also have a decent amount of time to get ready, so you feel more relaxed. Your happiest schedule also includes daily exercise, socializing, and entertainment.
"The promoter does this so that they can advertise low face values (appearing fan-friendly) while maintaining margins."

I don't understand how this is legal. I'm pretty sure my local grocery store wouldn't be allowed to advertise tomatoes at $1/pound but then tack on fees so I end up paying $2/pound.
That's a very nice beginning, I love being able to interpret Lisp in the browser!

Your interpreter would be even more awesome if its interface was a file buffer instead of a toplevel. But so far, great work!
Well the fees are actually not really "kickbacks" but really just normal fees with standard crazy markups that are vague on who actually gets the money. They aren't required to list out who makes what money on things. They are just not allowed to lie and commit fraud and they do make sure to stay inside those bounds.

"General processing fee" is really just a processing fee as it sounds (but it doesn't say who gets the money, why does that mater? they are not committing fraud by claiming something it isn't).

They have a right to tack on any fees they want and you have the right not to buy it. They could put a fee on there at checkout for making a purchase on a full moon. Whatever, it doesn't mater. Now if they are charging you for fees after you make the purchase of a product or service, you do have some consumer protections but not when they are tacking them on up front.

You are buying a ticket and how the money is used isn't really something that isn't provided. Your only real right as a consumer is to buy or not buy. If you want more info about how money is spent and they won't provide it you have the right to not buy it but you can't force private businesses to be publicly audited.
So you are essentially a search engine for textbooks?
I'll start considering links to nextbigfuture as blogspam unless they contain links to the presentations (and referring material) from NASA servers.

edit: Sorry. I mistook the first link for a cluster of tags.

I'd like to offer help making the layout clearer. I made a couple observations on the Disqus discussion on the page.
Didn't Google just shut down a couple of sites that ripped MP3s from videos? I guess this is different because it only streams?
The reality is that people stop buying books that aren't useful. I knew a lot of folks in grad school who just refused to buy books for classes that didn't use them for weekly problem sets. By and large they got away with it.
"People wonder how girls could invent anything this technical"

Errr...what? I know it was a girl who said that, but jesus that sounds like a sexist thing to say.
Can you acquire customers on your own? If your product truly solve a problem, it doesn't need someone with "strong connections"
The author, Seth D. Bergmann, originally wrote the text using Pascal as a base language. Code used in the text can be found for C++, Java, and Pascal here:

http://elvis.rowan.edu/~bergmann/books.html
The 1950s/60s NERVA program that the blog post mentions in passing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA

Project Rover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rover

For hard scifi buffs, check out Stephen Baxter's space-program-alt-hist novel Voyage, where (among other things) NERVA is revived for a manned Mars shot.

I'm kinda surprised to see this; I thought that public acceptance of nuclear-related programs would be at a low, after Fukushima. Heck, I remember when people were kicking up a fuss over Cassini's RTG back in 1997.

Are we going to revive Project Orion next? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propul...
If you're coming in as a programming novice, "each" and "for" constructs should look equally as foreign, so you may as well teach the standard conventions. It takes longer to unlearn something, than it is to learn.

>You aren't creating programmers, you're creating good little Rubyists.

You should be creating good Rubyists, if you're using Ruby to teach programming.
No - note the article isn't actually a CNBC story but is syndicated from some 5th rate website.
The algorithm that runs the world
Interesting distinction between idioms and mores. ( I was not aware of it.) However a difference between social mores and technical ones is, that technical mores can acquire meaning since more time is spend to optimize the preferred way.
Awesome idea, would be perfect if I could change the quality settings though.
Honestly I believe going to the gym every morning M-F is the single biggest improvement to my life. There's something about forcing your muscles into "adapt or you'll fail" mode that has amazing downstream effects on energy levels, eating and digestion, sleeping, etc...
each is definitively transferable for many languages.

Javascript has Array.map(), which is almost the same:

var numbers = [1, 4, 9];
var roots = numbers.map(Math.sqrt);
/* roots is now [1, 2, 3], numbers is still [1, 4, 9] */

C# has IEnumerable.Select():

IEnumerable<int> squares = Enumerable.Range(1, 10).Select(x => x * x);
/* squares is [1, 4, 9, 16, ...] */

Python has map(), which isn't OOP but accomplishes mostly the same:

names = ["mary", "john"]
caps = map(lambda name: name.upper(), names)
The first link is to the 24 page presentation from the NASA FISO (future in space operations archive). What is your problem ?
It's the first line of the post.

http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Borowski_6-27-12/B...
Yep, kayak for textbooks. You can either search by book or search by school/course. If you really want to get angry, look up MATH 203 at Medgar Evers College in NY. A textbook with a list price of $174 is being sold for $330 new, $240 used - available from online sites for less than $10.

There are over 16,000 classes across the country that can save >$100 on their books. Haven't run the numbers yet but the use of custom materials/access codes has EXPLODED, which prevents savings.

We are diff than other comparison engines bc of that course search component. Most students don't realize how easy it is to save (it's surprisingly daunting for students to do this the first time), we facilitate that process.
I had one college course with a custom edition and we still had the option of using the regular edition, (all the page numbers were the same the custom editions only difference was a lack of extra chapters that we weren't going to cover).

The custom edition was cheaper than the regular edition and this is the only reason the professor did this. The book didn't seem to have very many used copies being sold as it was an advanced class and people were more likely to keep the book than sell it.

Just providing context to how a custom edition can be cheaper if the professor does work.

I've also had many professors write their own book and give it for free in pdf or let you buy it for $20 at the university copy center already bound with the option of buying supplemental books that they thought were of good quality.

Maybe my engineering department was different but it seemed most of my professors tried to work to help the students not have to pay large amounts.
I'm going back to teaching this year after being an administrator for 13 years and stories like this just make me mad. I'm committed to join others that make their material available for free (under a creative commons license) and encourage colleagues from other institutions to do the same. The good news is that I soon will have completed a textbook for introductory linear algebra. The not-so-good news (for most of the HN crowd) is that all I write is in French. Fortunately, there are already free textbooks in linear algebra available in English. If enough of us make a stand, within 5 years there might be enough material written to shame anyone showing this kind of disgusting behaviour.
I think you're pretty much putting words in his mouth. He didn't say a single word about energy balance. He just said "burning water", which is badly formulated and unclear, but does not exclude using an external energy source for the hydrolysis.

That energy could come from solar panels as you mentioned, with the drawbacks you mentioned. But it looks to be a good enough method.
Very, very commonplace even 25 years ago when I was an undergrad.
Verdict in Apple-Samsung Trial May Echo Through Tech Industry
Pretty much everything surrounding tertiary education needs disruptive companies to come in and restructure it - but particularly the dodginess around textbooks / school bookstores.

On the surface the conditions even almost seem ideal - you have an existing oligopoly where each player has huge overheads and then on top of this add huge markups. You have a somewhat captive market (the students are entirely captive, while the professors are generally pretty free to choose the books that they want), and a product that's targeted towards younger, educated people (people to whom technology isn't a huge burden).

The only thing that's really standing in the way of someone shaking things up is in convincing the professors that your option is better than whatever's being offered by the incumbents. I really, really hope that at some point soon someone takes on the publishers - with a serious product, they'd have the potential to win, and more importantly, to do something useful for making education more accessible.
I disagree with you. He basically recommends a sleeping pattern, having fun, exercising, learning, helping others, finding ways to win. Which of these is impossible for people in a family? If many of these 6 things...lets say 4 of them... are nearly impossible for people in families then you'd think people in families would all be quite unhealthy.
I had a professor, way back in the early 00s, who was helping solve this problem. We had no textbook in the class. Instead, our readings were all recently published papers. On the class website he linked to all the papers so we could download and print them if we wanted to. He also negotiated with the author of each paper for the rights to reprint the paper. You could buy the "textbook", which was just a bound photocopy of the papers, for $10 (the cost of printing).

If more professors did this, then the problem would be solved.
Congrats on the launch! It's always interesting to see different executions of the same idea - I had actually launched something very similar earlier this year: http://www.deskamp.com

I read the other day that most teens listen to music through YouTube, something like 64%, so there is definitely a market out there for YouTube music apps.
I always find that I'm most productive at work after 11am or so. At home, most productive after 9pm (about when my kid goes to sleep)
Create icons for Windows 8 styled apps using Segoe character map
They have a way of getting around this protest: if you travel to the venue box office and buy tickets in person, you'll get tickets at face value. So it's possible to get tickets at face, but it's no secret that a substantial majority of buyers prefer to endure the "convenience charge" associated with buying online.
Sometimes the producer has to insert something in the middle of the queue, is it possible to make this queue lock free?
I know almost nothing about battery tech, but I suspect this device will decharge about as fast as it charges (corrections welcome).

If so, you could slowly load a huge battery at a pumping station, or a car-size one in your home, and use that to quickly charge the ones in cars. The energy loss in such a setup could be prohibitive, though.
The only difference, aside from having one app do sms and internet text messaging, is that if I don't have iMessage I have to buy an entire phone or computer to get it, while if you don't have gtalk or similar all you need to do is install one app and register an account should you not already have one.

With iMessage, I can talk to maybe one or two people that I know. With gTalk, I can and talk to them all, even those on iPhones.

iMessage is not revolutionary. If anything, it's a step backwards. We've had BBM as a vendor locked message system for many years already.