skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Obama administration has cordial relations with some countries that aren't very big supporters of civil rights, such as Saudi Arabia. For that matter, I haven't heard very much criticism of China or Russia coming from the Obama administration either.
Plenty of folks who are technically adept, dislike it as well.
I think the point is that Pandora acts as a discovery app. It plays you something and you think "hey I like it, I'll go buy it on iTunes".

Now I have no reason to believe I am representative (and in fact I would be surprised if I was), but 60% of the music I have purchased in the last couple of years has been as a follow-up to a Pandora play. Another 35% has been following a Shazam tag from a radio station, and about 5% from a movie soundtrack or something like that. Of those, Pandora is the only one that causes me to buy albums instead of solely individual tracks, which is an order of magnitude more money.

So I know for a fact that N artists got money from me that they would have never gotten if not for Pandora. That doesn't help the (100-N) whose track played and I didn't buy them; but, you know, I actually didn't care enough to want to listen to them again. Or, Pandora played them while I had the computer on mute (played is not the same as listened).

Now the legitimate question is, how many people are like me, as opposed to people who use Pandora without buying anything at all as a result of what they hear? I don't know the answer to that question and I suspect neither does Pandora (they have a "buy" button so they can presumably track that, but I only sometimes use it rather than just independently look for the artist on iTunes some later time).
What a bonehead I am. This is what happens when you say to yourself, "that was about 2 years ago" and you base it on 2012. My only excuse is that I was working on a system config & management product and that I'm having a busy day... I upvoted you for correcting my record.
Thanks a lot, this is awesome! Just about the right time. Will use the references in my paper :)
It’s Virgin Records, so quick guess: a lot.
> I expressed a contrarian view (basically questioning why this article is HN material).

It was contrarian; not interesting. (I think the article being on HN makes it HN material.) I find people around here not trigger happy with the interesting.
...deal with this problem in a humane and effective way...

Which problem exactly? Where the homeless sleep or the fact that they exist? Most municipal solutions I've seen to the former problem are repulsively violent, while it isn't clear that the latter "problem" has solutions.
He's fleeing to countries which won't fall over themselves to gain the favor of the U.S. and thus extradite Snowden. It might not be a coincidence that countries that would want to shame the U.S. would also not have a great civil liberties record.

Just because he's not publicly admonishing these countries doesn't mean that he condones their behavior. Perhaps he's a pragmatist who knows better than to bite the hand the feeds. Or perhaps he is much more impassioned about freedom in the U.S., his native land, sold to him as a bastion of civil liberty, than about freedom in countries that he cares less about.
As pointed out elsewhere, a "play" and a "play" here are wildly different. A radio "play" can involve several thousand people, while a Pandora "play" probably involves one or two persons.
I've always viewed Pandora, Spotify and services like that as discovery services. They let me hear the music before parting with a more money. If I find an artist that I really like I'll buy their album or some merchandise.

Given the breadth of music I get from Pandora there's no way I'd be able to afford every album of every artist I listen to on the off chance I might like them.

Also you need to remember that a lot of people won't have the disposable income to buy albums, tshirts or subscribe to satellite radio, so that money from Pandora isn't going to be replaced.

Yes it's not much, but there's more to it than that number alone.
It's a strawman, and a pretty easy one to get folks to give traction to. People love to identify hypocrisy even though avoiding it has a habit of being wildly impractical. I think hypocrisy gets a bad rap. It's avoidance is a common but subtle excuse for not doing shit that matters.

The idea that Snowden has only chosen to rail against the unreasonable privacy violations of the country he's a citizen of, and most familiar with doesn't seem surprising or unreasonable to me. The argument that if he hasn't put similar energies into calling out every other nation that finds itself in violation of these ideals, then he must be lying about his motivation is absurd.

Also, he doesn't say 'you' can't get a fair trial in America, he says that he can't get a fair trial in America.
The price to pay for perfect-forward secrecy
> Fry seems to talk in terms of "I just want to be left alone this lifetime."

There is a struggle -- not speaking for him but for myself -- between wanting companionship and wanting to be alone. I think my default state is, "I just want to be left alone", but every so once in a while all of the alone-ness (not loneliness per se, but all of the quiet and solitude and introspection and stillness that accompanies prolonged periods of being alone) kind of piles up and becomes too much to bear, and then I need to connect in some way with someone for a little while.

But, only a little while.

And, if I don't get to make that connection, then loneliness sets in: the feeling that I am no longer alone by choice, but rather that there is something wrong with me, something that is off-putting to other people. Then, I begin to feel unable to connect to others.

It is a damnable thing. I have tried all manner of approaches to "managing" it, to make it less pathological, but in the end I simply loathe the company of other people right up until I suddenly am desperate for it -- where it's too late and too difficult to get it because I don't maintain friendships and relationships the way that other people do.
People have a right to know what their government does in their name. It serves the civil liberties of the people by giving them truth about how their govt. is acting, and giving them the opportunity to speak out about it.
Given that they seemed initially to be demanding HK circumvent their own laws to turn Snowden over quickly "if they respect the rule of law," the latter might be more accurate.

I'd really rather they be saying the former and walking the walk.
The radio exposure is many many times more listens. They would be paid similarly if they got anywhere close to the same amount of exposure on Pandora (actually a lot more, Pandora pays a ton more than a radio station).
If one is careful you can even take steps to actively invalidate prior art. You don't need to just make a new standard either, we've already seen people get away with patently new ways to do the same old thing.

Look up Open Invention Network when you get a chance. The idea is to simply publish the general techniques you use to solve a given problem in a fashion that's easy to search, as a defense against people later trying to patent the same idea.
Test what SSL/TLS cipher suites a particular website offers
This is awesome. I will take [a single huge list of self-explanatory example snippets (with a few short comments here and there) for 95% of use cases] over [detailed walls-of-text docs pages spread across a hierarchy of topics] any day.
While I understand the topic i don't like this example. The article is about a wealthy guy who can travel the world racing cars.. who then got pissy at coming second.

The objective of a car race is to win.. especially if you have the best team and car. You should be somewhat dejected if you didn't. It is the nature of competitive events.

This article has first world rich boy problems written all over it.

A far better example of this topic would be a friend of mine. He started his own business. Worked day and night to get it running. He always said he would enjoy the spoils of his work. He didn't. He had more and more success but he got sucked into chasing ambition and achievement. He never eased up or stepped back. His life became chasing More. His wife left him. He continued to work excessive hours until he completely burnt out. It was only when he met someone else that he learnt to take a step back and appreciate and enjoy what he had created.

If i enter a race in my Punto it is going to be fun. I have little expectation of winning, I am there to say I did it.

DHH went to Le Man's to win. He didn't. This isn't poisonous ambition. This is missing the target.. much like this article. If he went to experience it, got caught up in winning and didn't enjoy any of it then perhaps he would have some sort of point.
> the programs were explicitly designed to stay within the bounds of the law

My understanding of this basis is that the government contends that pure storage of data does not constitute a search (not that I accept this line of reasoning). However, in a legal system that takes intellectual property very seriously, in what sense does it not constitute a seizure?
"It should be obvious why this argument is absurd, even in principle. Asylum seekers do not have the luxury of choosing states with perfect records from which to seek asylum. That is because no such states exist. "

http://justice4assange.com/extraditing-assange.html#ECUADOR
You do realize you just made up that 10,000 number out of thin air?
There is no problem. This spying is being done for economic advantage, not to "protect us."

This information is being passed on to American corporations. This is very old news.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/070200-02.htm
I've always taken it to be that it's a polyfill if it's somewhat elegant, or where a newer technology encompasess a superset of an older one and a shiv if it's somewhat hackish or where older technologies are made to stand in for newer ones. I am probably wrong.
Maybe if you squint really really hard you can see some legality to the individual components that make of the programs, but, according to the ACLU, the programs themselves are blatant violations of the first and fourth amendments [1], and I must say I agree with them.

Edit: Even the FISC itself thinks the programs are unconstitutional [2]. Now you may think the constitution itself is obsolete on these points, but there are perfectly valid methods of ratifying/updating that document other than to completely ignore it.

[1] http://www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-files-lawsuit-cha...

[2] http://www.ibtimes.com/fisc-will-not-object-release-2011-cou...
What sorts of websites are we talking about here? I understand that some websites have to transfer a couple of megabytes to be displayed (though most of that is media content anyway) but how does that end up occupying 100MB of RAM? That's roughly an order of magnitude more than I'd like a website to take, except for when we're talking streaming media obviously.
Teespring is growing
Who we are

We’re all about our community. Whether that community is Node.js developers, Hacker News’ young urban founders, or a local community charity doesn’t really matter. What matters is that there’s a group of people who care about something, and care about it together.

We consider members of our team, not just coworkers, but friends who we enjoy spending time with. Our team members set their own schedules, pick their direction, and move fast.

We focus less on titles and process and focus more on shipping a quality product and delivering the best experience to our users.

We're growing an average of 50% month over month, on track to do $1.5M in sales this month (for reference, when we joined YC in November we were coming off our biggest month @ $135k of revenue).

---
Engineer ---

Our engineers touch on all aspects of our app including backend and frontend coding, database management and optimization, and deployment and server administration. You MUST be comfortable iterating quickly.

Nice to know:

* Ruby

* Rails

* DB & SQL (MySQL, Postgres)

* Strong background in CSS and Javascript

* Git

* Linux experience, and setting up web servers with Nginx

* Comfortable with merchant processing integration (Stripe) a plus

Even if you don’t have experience with everything on this list, first and foremost, we are looking for passionate people with a drive to learn.

---
Engineering Intern ---

We are always looking for fresh engineers that want to take on an apprentice position. Our apprentices work alongside our engineers and ship real code, not just “busy work”. You will be shipping code daily and affecting thousands of users.

All positions are full-time at our west coast office in SF! We would strongly prefer someone to be local but would consider remote for the right candidate.

Interested or have any questions? Send us an email at jobs@teespring.com.
Almost the same experience but with Love2D[1] instead of Corona.

After learning Lua I also suggest to take a look at MoonScript[2] a dynamic scripting language that compiles into Lua, you can think about it as the CoffeeScript of Lua.

[1] http://love2d.org/

[2] http://moonscript.org/
CSIE sounds great for a certain class of users.

For me, however, it seems like it would be impossible. My team has to manage 10,000+ physical servers. We can't possibly wipe and provision from scratch every time we change configurations.

In other words, if your servers are ON Amazon's platform, use CSIE. If you are RUNNING the Amazon servers, you need something else.
Shameless plug:

I've been working on http://busker.fm. It aims to be the fair way to stream music. We not only give artists 100% of album-sales, we encourage album-sales by incorporating discovery, streaming, and the purchase itself.
Excellent explanation! I'm in!
Hack Day prizes - please stop
Silent Circle Sees Surge in Business Following NSA Leaks
> while not coparable to XP

Still, in the tech world, half a decade is pretty close to eternity anyway. XP sure had a long life.
The Humble Border Radius
Lector - A news reader for people who want one simple thing
>I don't mean to sound contentious.. but, uh, why is OP surprised? Music access quickly becoming a commodity.

Because people want to be in control of social life and have their say and not just leave it to blind forces (from Gods, to Father Stalin, to the Free Market, to technology).

You say "music is becoming a commodity" in the way people once said "It was the will of gods for you to die in the ripe old age of 30".

No, music is NOT becoming a commodity. Business players, regulations and what have you are MAKING music a commodity.If people want to reverse course, they always can.
It's almost like he doesn't realize Pandora is paying him much much per listener than radio is. So much so that Pandora loses money anytime someone listens to a song. That's not enough though, run even more ads, pay even more than the already higher fees.
That's why I preface it with "lets assume" instead of "I know for a fact". These are what we call "words" and they have "meaning".
Perhaps. I do wish that he'd make his reasons clear, however. I something like that is what he thinks, then saying as much would be yet another good PR move; as it stands his actions are getting closer to being indistinguishable from that of any random spy.
In the parlance of our times: "Do you even lift?"
I have two cats, and they don't stink up the house. Use good litter, not that clay crap, but the wheat or corn based ones, and scoop every day into something like a litter genie.

It works perfectly, except when my older cat forgets to bury. The younger one usually takes care of that though.
It's not that hard to get Ruby running on Solaris. Email me if you need help.
You're attacking a strawman. The quote was not

>His exposing of classified NSA activity suggests that his true motive throughout has been to injure the national security of the United States, not to advance Internet freedom and free speech

it was:

>His failures to criticize these regimes suggests that his true motive throughout has been to injure the national security of the United States, not to advance Internet freedom and free speech

Maybe Snowden's intention was to hurt the U.S.; I couldn't say. But it certainly doesn't follow logically from Snowden not admonishing other countries.
"If the public land is the land between hightide and the water, shouldn't the public land be underwater during hightide by definition?"

Typically, there is some sand on the beach above the high tide line ("public dry sand easement" in zoning parlance). You're allowed to walk on this sand.

This isn't the case on Broad Beach or Carbon Beach. At either of these beaches, there is no sand at all above the high tide line. Just a large seawall of rocks.
The CAFC handles more than patent cases. It also deals with federal employee disputes and some international trade law.

The judges are appointed not just from the patent bar but all the areas of jurisdictional experience.

Today there are six patent lawyers and four others on the CAFC with one of each awaiting confirmation. There is a rumor that Obama's patent lawyer appointment is actually better than average, but we won't know for a while; the Senate isn't approving new judges much anymore and vacancies continue to accumulate throughout the system.

The CLS bank v. Alice decision this spring came down 5-5. The Alice patent was one of those egregiously bad, transparently fraudulent, and obviously invalid ones we hear about so often. It claimed a monopoly over most any kind of traditional escrow process organized by a third party over a computer network. The CAFC found it valid initially and then threw it out -- barely and over the technicalities of a tie vote.

The final decision was five patent lawyers in favor of validity and four non-patent lawyers joined by one patent lawyer finding invalidity. The dissenting opinions were particularly virulent and nasty in defending the patentability of everything you can imagine and wanting every bad and destructive monopoly to be found valid and granted repeatedly forever.

It's a funny thing; I once thought the way to clean up medical malpractice litigation would be a board of expert judges or advisors who knew when the science was real or just made up for the case. In fact, now I see that system would be even worse. There might be fewer decision made by juries on the basis of gross scientific illiteracy, but the new judges would become throughly corrupt and abuse the system mercilessly. In fact, every kind of special purpose court is probably worse than the cost of ignorance and random wrong decisions that generalist courts make.
Pandora apparently pays 12 cents per 100 plays. At that rate, they are paying out $1200 for a song with a million plays. If the artist only gets about $16 (under 2%) out of that, where is the rest of that money going to?
I've had a question about PFS for a while now: How 'expensive' is it to implement?

First up, let me state for the record that I don't have personal experience with running SSL on a server. But back in the day, generating a public/private key pair for PGP was a semi-expensive operation. Definitely not the kind of thing I could imagine running on a per session basis.

Since PFS requires per-session public/private key pairs, how "costly" is it?

(I understand that the goog uses ECDHE, so I guess I'm asking for a general feel for how quickly and efficient this compares to RSA key generation.)
While I don't think that the author of the piece meant it this way:

If I believe in Karma, arguably I believe that the best thing I can do is to fulfil my station in life as I aspire to break the cycle of rebirth. It's definitely worth remembering that Karma existed in a society that did have, and still does in some ways, a very strong caste system where the good of the society was often seen as a consequence of everyone doing their assigned role. Notably, in the Bhagavad Gita, one of the arguments that Krishna uses to convince Arjuna that he should fight against his own family is because it will fulfil his verdic duties - in this instance his station in life as a warrior.
Looks like the answer is probably "thousands" [1] of listeners per radio station. The back-of-the-envelope is that the top station will have 1% of its metro area listening at a time (metro areas as defined here [2]).

Even the 100th largest metro area would typically have 5k people listening to a play of a track.

If you assume 5000 people listening per play at 18797 plays, and then calculate a cost PER LISTENER (at $1373.78 royalties paid) you end up with $0.014617 royalty per 1000 "performances" of the song (counting every listener's radio as a "performance"). AND, when you multiply that back out with the number of "performances" on Pandora, you get....$16.94.

Considering WAY more people probably heard the song on the radio, possibly by a factor of 5 or more, this is a HIGH estimate; actually doing the math would likely come out with a much lower equivalence, but it's the right order of magnitude.

I am all about protecting artists rights to earn, and for buying music that I'm listening to. As the parallel comment by smack_fu mentions, though, this is really about the insignificance of the Pandora market size more than anything else. That and the inability of a particular blogging artist to do enough basic math to realize the royalty per performance is higher on Pandora than it is on the radio.

[1] http://www.radio-media.com/song-album/articles/airplay66.htm...

[2] http://www.arbitron.com/home/mm001050.asp
But that would require the local government to allow forms to be submitted online. Which mine hasn't :(
I believe this is true, but Wikipedia reports that half the force that bombed Dresden was USAAF. I'm sure their commanders didn't shirk the responsibility.

Anyway, if you don't find the USA's involvement in Dresden horrifying enough, we can always bring up, say, the Tokyo firebombing – a 100% all-American operation that killed 100,000 on March 10, 1945 alone.

World War II was horrible on a scale that defies description today. There is plenty of horror to go around, from every theatre of war.
It's weirder than being a spy because presumably a spy wouldn't have made the whole affair public. It looks more like he got himself in over his head and now is being manipulated by others.
Is cryopreservation still relevant if we can build digital brain models?
Yes, most definitely.

I never really realized it until I got married. Going from only child to being married to a big, loud, Italian family was hard. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, usually by 1pm I'm down the street going for a walk.
My, doesn't the Haskell example look just perfectly horrible. Is Haskell really that bad when it comes to, you know, everyday programming and stuff?
Notice that the chart in the article shows that Spotify is paying 8x what Pandora is. 116k plays for $12. And that this is 40% of the songwriting payment only, since it's a member of a band.
I've seen this argument quoted a couple of times and blindly accepted it as a traditional Fermi-style attack on the problem. This is the first time I've pondered the implementation.

Schneier's argument that 3.2K is a limit is perhaps not the best one? Dilution fridges let you into the millikelvin quickly. Optical cooling can readily reach nanokelvin. Power dissipation remains a significant problem, but the power requirement is reduced by ~10^9.

From the quantum-computing side of things, it's not that crazy to imagine a 256 bit quantum computer, especially if you have a GDP-caliber budget. Researchers worldwide are working hard on the relevant technological precursors.
Tesla Takeover Turns Tenuous Given Valuation: Real M&A
If you want to get into OCaml, O'reilly is releasing a new book about it next October, with an early release eBook available since earlier this week:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024743.do

I haven't read it, but heard very good things about it from friends who did.
I'm hellbanned
and my butt is itchy.