skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The internet is fun, so I'll bite.

> scummy and uninteresting business model

We make a sales communicate platform that integrates CRM + calling + email. <sarcasm> You're right, it is a pretty uninteresting business model in that we don't use some new-fangled financial instruments to cook our books -- it's just boring ole' monthly recurring revenue at a SaaS company. </sarcasm>

Scummy? Don't even know where to begin on that one -- but if you're in the Bay Area ping me. I'd be happy to sit down and entertain any ideas you may have that we run a scummy outfit. Seriously. I really would like to understand the context behind that statement. It's not something I take lightly as a founder.

> None of my email clients, on OS X, Windows, or Linux, will show that pixel unless I press a button or take some action.

Yes and no. You can set most clients to load images by default -- I haven't tested the default settings on all clients so I can't speak about what percentage that accounts for. I'd assume someone like Mailchimp/Marketo/Pardot/etc. may have published some interesting findings about this.

You're entirely right, however -- we can't do anything if a client blocks images. And that's OK. Tracking is a feature our customers love being able to utilize when they can, but they also understand that it's not entirely accurate.
I hear you there. Flask's code base is really easy to get into if you're curious how things work under the hood.
> You paid $20 to buy their songs, you can listen to those songs millions of times

What you’re describing is a gym membership. Sure, some members spend all day every day at the gym. In reality, most members come in rarely if at all.

If most consumers are like me, they don’t play an album millions of times.

> Oh and if you think artists get 60% you should go talk to one. While some indie artists may get that. Anyone who sells a fairly nice amount of CD's makes next to nothing on CD sales, some even lose money.

I didn’t say 60% of CD sales go to artists. I said more than 60% of iTunes music sales go to creators (which includes the label, writer, performer, etc.)

I also didn’t say I buy a lot of CDs. I only buy an album on CD if it’s not available of iTunes. When I buy a CD directly from an unsigned artist, it’s mostly profit for them, but in most other cases, the performing artist makes under a buck for something I paid $20 for.
They forgot to mention the "e" logo is now an eye, to remind you big brother is watching.
He may have been making some kind of joke based on the way they treat Al-Qaida like it is some kind of centralized entity and how everyone involved acts the same way.
Mathematics versus Computer Science
I doubt the city would be sued for this.
I just wish our local terrorists, the US Government, would do the same.
Under Snowden Screen Name, 2009 Post Berated Leaks
No more chemo: Docs say it's not so far-fetched
The closest that post admits to anything is "We do agree that we have over-stepped the line of flattery vs plagiarism. Please give us time and we will try and rectify this as soon as we get a chance.".

Everything else is kind of like.... No big deal. Egg in the face. Haha, we'll fix it.

They should have just been more clear, like, "Yes, we pretty much copied your design. We love what you guys came up with. It was wrong of us to blatantly steal your perfectly crafted masterpiece, but we just couldn't help ourselves... We are inferior."
It's not, I actually had come prepared to make one. It's the heavy-handedness that put me off. I was grooving pretty good to a song, wanted to interact more with the product, then all of a sudden the party stopped and I'm asked for my papers and justification for being there. Uhh, no thanks, man, I'll just try somewhere else.
Like alcohol and tobacco marketing?
It's certainly nice that you can study this code freely, but that isn't a good reason for anyone to use it. The restriction stating that "you can only use this to make mods of valve games" seems particularly ridiculous. For indie developers, there are plenty of free (as in freedom) replacements that are probably better to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines#Free_and_...

For one, a properly free game engine will allow you to develop actual games, not just Half Life and Team Fortress mods.
Phonegap 2.9.0 released
Yeah windows phone smoothly iterated from its early beginnings to where it is today.

Oh... wait.
When the facts are on your side, and the other side is spewing epic levels of bullshit, you often need to clear the air.
Well I guess all we need to do is just trust whatever the government tells us! It's not as if we've ever been misled before.
But Snowden offered them nothing new, so they must trying to avoid detection as much as they can.
Bing! Give the man a prize! I totally agree.
This ruined any credibility that blog post had for me:

"If major market FM stations paid the same rates as Pandora, based on audience, some would be paying thousands of dollars for every song they played. How much do they pay performers right now? Zero."

He's using industry jargon to pretend like FM radio doesn't pay out to artists. The reality is, he's being very deceitful.

I own a group of radio stations. We've paid out more to music rights than we've generated in profit over the last two decades. If the artists want a different form of royalty representation, such as direct royalties from radio stations (instead of getting a small downstream cut from the licensing companies), they need to abandon the labels and the status quo. Radio stations didn't arrange this formula, and I'd personally vote in favor of abolishing it tomorrow if I could. I'd rather the artists get 100% of the fees we pay for music rights.
Not unexpected from the US government, claim Al-Qaeda is benefiting from the leaks without offering any sort of proof beyond conjecture...

I'm sure that, prior to the leak, terrorists were having Skype conferences from their living rooms, while posting their activities on Facebook and exchanging bomb recipes on Gmail....

And then of course, the Boston bombing suspects were identified to the US government by Russian agents, and they couldn't prevent that attack. Either the NSA, CIA and FBI are staffed by imbeciles, or someone's lying to the people...
Demo of Safari’s new native push notifications feature
Notably, in the privacy vein, Zimmermann was also inducted in 2012.
I had the exact opposite reaction - allowing me to play songs for free let me experience the service, so by the time they asked me to sign up I was happy to.
How To Invest In Dope
People should be allowed to put whatever they want in their body. The war on drugs is a seismic failure that does nothing but propagate the prison industrial complex. The most popular drugs on these sites are marijuana and psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms that are by no means "hard" drugs. Making things illegal, especially drugs, doesn't make them go away. Your just pushing them underground where they aren't regulated.
My high school pot dealer refused to do any deals over the phone. I highly doubt terrorist plots were being hatched over Skype.
You know, like here in Brazil where people bribed the fire department to get a permit for a night club with not enough emergency exits, and when a fire happened 200 people died?
In the UK you cannot have unpermitted gatherings on your own property where the music being played "includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats."
I really like your new design!
What part do you find hard to believe? That a spy agency might have access to information that you do not? Or that spy targets would not make use of leaked information about how the spy agency operates? Or that a spy agency might not want to tell you how it acquired some information?
And this, gentlemen, is why you always read the fucking license.

Awful.
How do we know AQ and the other groups are 'adjusting'? What real evidence is there of this? If we know they are adjusting, then we know enough already.
So you should be able to pay 50% for an apple if you only want to eat it half? No you pay for 100% of the apple, regardless if you eat it or not.

It's the same thing, you don't pay for one listen, you pay for it becoming yours (as well as it being printed/shipped/profit for cd seller).
Definitely. By letting al-Qaida know that we know that they know that we're spying on them - irregardless of the PR benefits for the NSA - these rogue leakers have caused irreparable harm to our nation and will certainly be pursued with as much vigor as Mr. Snowden /hamburger
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to RubyMotion.
Yeah, they're nice until you have a flock of feral parrots. They cruise this city like a gang of harpies!

Since they live forever, you know your 'pretty bird' is deciding which bits of you to eat first. Talking is their way of testing if you're dead yet.
Since every article you read now says Microsoft is doomed, that its products are irrelevant, that PCs are in decline and being completely replaced by tablets, that Apple is the world's most (or next-most) valuable company and iPads and iPhones rule the universe, et cetera, then it's probably going to get harder to ding Microsoft for being monopolistic.

Also, integration is good for consumers when it ensure things just work, and Microsoft's approach is not fundamentally different from Apple's or Google's. Indeed, Microsoft is arguably less monopolistic than both of those.

Finally, it's extremely easy to set Google as your default search in IE10. It just requires an extra step, which means most people won't bother. However, it's not clear why Microsoft should give Google $1 billion to $5 billion a year's worth of benefits for nothing.
$20 Amazon Gift Card For Saying Why My Idea Stinks
OpenGL already has a mechanism for extensibility, and proprietary junk is only an inevitability if we allow it to be enshrined in open standards. There is no reason to accept proprietary DRM plugins in CDM, and there is no reason to accept proprietary shader languages.

The reasons are manifold, but here are a few:

- Standardizing non-standardness gives proprietary implementations an unwarranted air of legitimacy and blesses incompatibility.

- Proprietary plugins and extensions are more likely to have untested security vulnerabilities and widen the browser attack surface.

- Proprietary extensions violate the essential web principles of cross-platform compatibility, graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, and accessibility.
They have asked the simple question before, [Paraphrased] "How many Americans are you spying on?", and the NSA said it would violate our freedoms for them to even mention the number.
If you want to collaborate with me on this idea more than just posting here or on the blog, I'm mfergus48 [at] gmail
Our entire company (www.earbits.com) is built on the premise that more value can be created for artists out of streaming radio by using it as a fan acquisition tool and marketing platform for the artists and labels than by using it to sell commercials and ads. Without a doubt, the per-stream value created by the ad supported model is a relative joke, but despite my desire for artists to get more value out of streaming and the fact that Pandora is my competitor for listener usage, I continue to side with Pandora on most of these issues.

There is no reason why iHeartRadio should pay less than them because it's owned by Clear Channel. There is no reason they should keep paying ASCAP the same percentage of their revenue for royalties after someone as big as Sony ATV pulls their catalog from ASCAP representation. The Internet Radio Fairness Act was not about necessarily reducing royalties, but ensuring that all companies streaming digitally pay the same percentage of revenue. It makes absolutely no sense to me that everyone is focused on Pandora trying to reduce their rates to the same level as their competitors, instead of focusing on the fact that those competitors already pay less.

Compulsory rates that work for these companies are the best opportunity for independent artists to participate in this market. If you force these companies to secure direct deals with labels because the compulsory rates are not equitable, you will get what just happened with iTunes Radio. They will forge sweetheart deals with the major labels and treat indies like a nice-to-have group of second class citizens.

The artist community should be working harder to increase royalties paid by the companies already enjoying massive discounts. The artist community should be interested in making their music as easy to license as possible, a la compulsory licenses. If you make the rates unsustainable, and even worse, push the revenues through label accounting departments, artists will be left in the cold and have most of their share kept by labels.

Pandora has definitely gone about this in a way that hasn't worked in terms of PR, but it is unfathomable to me that all of a sudden everybody on earth forgets that the person on the other side of this issue is the RIAA. Nothing the RIAA has ever done was good for consumers or artists. Why on earth would it be now?

Pandora pays more royalties than any other type of radio broadcaster. It's time to make other companies pay more, while finding a rate and system that works for everybody and doesn't require direct licensing. Any other situation does not bode well for artists.
This is great. I just submitted a pull request to node-usage to add OSX support, so hopefully we'll be able to run PM2 in both production and local development soon.

https://github.com/arunoda/node-usage/pull/5
Ask HN: What is the best CMS for a content+app (50-50) type site?
A search on CMS yeields thousands of results. What is the most popular (& good) CMS these days? specifically a CMS that supports mobile devices and works well with a website that includes lots of content & apps.
So.. I got an "A" rating but not 100% in all categories. Is there any way I can improve on this (nginx)?

I have a lot of users with older browsers so that's really important, not sure if that matters.

ssl_ciphers ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:AES128-GCM-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH;
If I'd been able to listen for longer than 10 minutes so I could get a feel for how well the selected songs match with what I want to hear, I would be too. But they're not the only service out there offering free music, and besides, "free" isn't enough to entice me to do anything anymore. I get into my local movie theater for free because I'm friends with their their HR manager. I never use it.
You have to strike the balance between right and smart somewhere.
"So, the way to go with BEAST is to force RC4 with TLS 1.0 and earlier, some CBC suite with TLS 1.1, and GCM suites with TLS 1.2."

Is it possible to configure nginx like this? From what I can tell, there is no way to select a cipher based on the protocol.
He said "performers". If your radio station pays performers, you need to fire your accountant.
Google has employees. Some of them are gay. If 15.4% of the San Francisco population identifies as GLB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United...), we could probably assume that a significant minority of Google employees are gay.

This is an issue of direct relevance to many of those that work at Google. I think it's fine for corporations to take a stand on social issues that directly affect their employees.
Looks like some of the SSE work in the mathlib directory is unimplemented or unverified in POSIX environments, or else implemented only in C. Not sure how crucial or not that would be in the big picture of things though.

I'm sure it'd be fun to play with, but the license makes it a non-starter for any serious work.
I did not find it confusing. Then again, I did understand that there are different royalties being compared here and that those royalties are paid out to different people.
When I was a youngin, we took to the woods outside of town with generators, kegs and a couple of live bands. It certainly wasn't as hip as this party but when you get sick of getting busted in the city, you get creative. We hung lights in the trees and constructed stages for the bands.

Now I am 40... You kids need to get off my lawn!
When you go to the DMV, you mentally prepare yourself for an experience where you will, at some point, feel like you're in a Monty Python skit.

NSA has been taking lessons, it seems.
>>You have to trust that a hot wheels toy car won't have a secret hidden camera transmitting back to the government

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Kinect/PrivacyandOnlineSafety

Weren't these the guys signing onto prism in what? 2007?

Stallman is extreme in his views. This has always tempered my respect for him. Gotta say though, he seems less extreme and more insightful given recent revelations.
For those curious, the newsletter this was announced on is Nonsense NYC (http://www.nonsensenyc.com/). I've been unsubscribed for the last year or two, but in years prior there have been many very interesting items every single week. Everything from knitting to robots (battlebots!) to things like this and more.
Cool! Any plan to hook this into Tent or something similar (if that would make sense)?
“If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.”

- Terence McKenna
This is quickly turning into a book press stop! I wanted to be an immigration lawyer -- obsessing over my GPA for the first couple of years at UVA. It all changed when I walked out of an LSAT prep course one Saturday morning to get waffles at Waffle House instead.
Responding as I read:

Yep, Pandora is pretty cool, and the genome projects is really cool, I'm looking forward to finding out what it says about my own songs, and I'm hopeful that my songs will be recommended to people who will have a real affinity to the songs. I personally like Pandora (as a concept) much more than Spotify, because in Pandora if they want to hear my music again, they have to actually go find the cd and buy it. In Spotify, I'm basically screwed.

Onward... to paraphrase, "We don't want to cut royalties by 85%, we want to GROW total payments to artists!" is a bunch of doublespeak. Growing total payments is not the opposite of cutting royalties. He could have every intention of "growing the pie" to make up for the smaller pie slice, but if his starry-eyed intentions to grow the pie don't pan out, it still means a cut for the artists. Guess what, a really great way to "grow total payments" is increase the pie while keeping the pie slices the same, or increasing them.

Purely as an aside, performance royalties confuse me. I paid between $50 and $300 to my session musicians on my EP and considered it work-for-hire. I'm assuming that means I don't have register them as session musicians at soundscan, but I really have no freaking clue. I don't even know how to get hold of half those musicians now.

Anyway, organizations like pandora like to confuse discussions by bringing in performance royalties - for instance, an artist might have a complaint that is specifically limited to the inequity of the songwriter royalties. Responding with "you are forgetting about the performance royalties!" is completely irrelevant. The law is that digital radio pays performance royalties (through soundscan) in addition to songwriter royalties, and (US) radio only pays songwriter royalties. That's not the artists' fault! If an artist has a beef about songwriter royalties, hitting them over the head about how unfair it is that they also have to pay performance royalties is intellectually dishonest.
> The royalty rates perhaps aren't what the content creators would like them to be, but complaining about that when the term lengths for copyright are so outrageously generous just smacks of greed. For most working people, you get paid for your work once, and not for the rest of your life plus an additional 70 years.

This is a non-sequitur. "Musicians are paid royalties for the rest of their life plus 70 years, therefore they should not complain about how large the royalties are." Obviously if our top musicians earned $10 over a 120 year period they would rightly complain about wages. Also obvious is that a $2 million per year royalty due for a song whose composers died nearly 100 years ago is excessive and wrong.

What is not clear is how to pay musicians. Since you seem to care about this problem, suggest something.
I've been wondering this exact thing. I generally use darker schemes as it's easier on my eyes, but am forced to use a lighter color as a result of not being able to read the window caption.
Performance fees aren't the same as royalties you mope. Sounds like you don't know what you're doing with all those stations you own.
Atlantis is significant because it's the first market of its kind to support Litecoin, a lesser-known scrypt-based bitcoin alternative.
> Our entire company (www.earbits.com) is built on the premise

... that pay to play is okay.

I agree with your company's business model.

The rest of your comment is informed, but you should lead with less bullshit lingo.
Abhorrent conduct can also have benefits: News at 11.

When the CIA stopped(?) waterboarding suspects, I bet they got fewer terrorism leads, too.

There are some lines we never should have crossed.
Fitbit data to Statusboard via Fitboard
First Python / Flask project - connected Fitbit's API to Statusboard on the iPad. Source is on Github - feedback welcome!
By "scummy" I am talking about the same thing as the other people in this thread talking about "poor taste", "ethics", and "morality".

Surreptitiously tracking users without their knowledge or consent (and I mean the end users, not your users who are paying you to do it) just isn't something cool to brag about, any more than robocalling people at dinner, or a thousand other things that are nevertheless legal and make monthly recurring revenue for those who do them.

Not saying you shouldn't be able to do it; a lot of unseemly and faintly repulsive things happen in the name of marketing. I'm just saying it's kind of a lame thing to do in general, and it is pretty off-putting to read a blog post that basically says, "Look how rad we are for tricking all these people and tracking them without their knowledge!"
It's generally fairly easy for an ordinary person to find someone's identity with just their number, completely bypassing any sort of warrant/subpoena system. If I can do it, I'm sure the NSA does as well.
Yeah he said performers, and that's exactly the part he's attempting to be deceitful about (as I said, he's using industry jargon to pretend that FM stations don't pay out to artists). He intentionally blends that right into the conversation about how much radio stations pay for playing songs, and what a play is worth. Blatant case of Westergren being scummy in attempting to pave over Pandora's own sins.
redis (with persistence) or a serialized user config field in a database. It's not overkill, because you'll likely wind up needing to store more user-specifc data in the future.
They stopped you right in the middle of a song?
It still doesn't make your arguments valid. You yourself are saying that you are comparing 'tracks' vs spins.

Like I said, the UTILITY of both is very different. CD/iTunes track you can copy to other devices, listen offline. Heck, you can even sell your CD. On Pandora you can't even select the song you want to listen to. Because of the fact that you are forced to listen to some songs, average value of song has to be lower. On top of that you get lower quality. You have to listen to ads.

Furthermore, your spending habits are representable only for you and I still believe that you can't just assume that average person plays track they bought only 10 times over the lifetime.

Finally, you cannot forget of all external effects of 'discovery service' that Pandora is. Pandora not only is not replacing iTunes and other ways of purchasing the music, but is helping to increase the sales by exposing you to new artists you would never hear or normal radio.