skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Adblock Plus Now Blocks Malware Sites, Social Buttons and Tracking
Musicians make money from touring and selling merchandise primarily. This statistic is still quite interesting, it really puts it into perspective how little money there is for most artists to make on platforms like Spotify.
I rather preferred the aesthetic of "guardian.co.uk" to "theguardian.com". The "theguardian" logo is rather fugly.

It also seems a bit premature, why not wait for guardian.news?
A musician who relies on Spotify to make a living isn't a musician. In the music industry money comes from concerts, there's no way around it. Recorded songs are best thought of as marketing.
You simply don't know how this industry works. Pretty much every public figure in games gets abuse by being on the internet. It's why an article was written about it, because it's not just Phil Fish and it's not just something he 'did' to 'deserve' it.
This is not a PIH vs. VC funded startup issue, except that this seems to be part of an ongoing flamewar between people from both communities.

You can achieve the same balance and freedom with a part-time job, freelancing, as a PIH (although I don't think the OP actually earns passive income in the accounting sense) or some other work arrangement.

What's most important to have the kind of freedom that the OP describes is to first have a relationship with money that supports it.
That said, I wish there was more innovation in the genre, if that makes any sense.
It may be surprising to you that my customers actually don't care how many hours I want to work, but only about the value I deliver to them. I don't get to wave a magic wand and work 10 hours a week and keep all my customers, though I'm sure my competitors would wish I tried.

I think the argument here is that "value delivered to customers" and "amount of work required to deliver that value" are completely unrelated to one-another. To give two examples:

1. The biggest possible improvement you can generally bestow upon a small services business is a website (not even a fancy one, just a five-page Wordpress shindig with acceptable SEO.) This takes approximately two hours and $50 (I'm being generous.)

2. Video games are one of the most difficult software products to produce in terms of sheer SLOC, expertise required, and resources needed, and yet the value most customers assign to them ranges between $0 and $60.
One reason: The thing about changing the world is, most people (including VCs) think it is possible only after it is done. So in their view, changing the world does not make them any money, because they don't believe they will change the world in the first place.

And now: fuck off, downvoter Mafia.
Less as a competitive advantage
Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A_h2AjJaMw
I'm not a half-bad coder, and I didn't start until I was 15. I don't necessarily think there's an age limit (and it's definitely not 10!) but, as you say, there is a certain, innate wiring that seems to be required. You need to be the kind of person who likes to understand what makes things work. If you've got that, the rest will come with practice.
Lifehackers vote for “Happy Destination” to receive calls at €0.01/min abroad.
Nerd Road Trips
Ok, thanks to you and dan00.

I realize it has never been a problem for me because commits replayed when I rebase are always isolated in my feature branch and not pushed anywhere.

I suppose it would be a problem if I rebased from two different branches that were already public.

Also, I often work with "dependent branch". When a change has to be made that does not fit the feature branch "theme", I create a new feature branch from master, make my change, make a PR to master and rebase the dependent branch in the feature branch. It seems it does not cause any history overwrite too.
Well, that kind of stuff is all over the report.

We note that no one from MIT called the Secret Service.
The MIT Police contacted the Cambridge detective by calling him on his individual cell phone.
The special agent became involved because he accompanied the Cambridge detective.

Things just magically fall together. The MITs neutrality apparently extends so far that they don't even bother with what kind of police forces are strolling around on campus.

(Also note that, presumably due to their neutral stance, MIT intervened in court cases asking for the release of documents produced on Swartz and the case)
Leap Motion scam alert
I ordered 2 Leaps through kick starter. Well after promised shipping date I got an email saying the payment and shipping info was wrong. The listed data were correct but I confirmed them anyway. Today I get another email saying cannot be delivered and that I have to call. The subcontracted CSR said I would have to call another line with my old order info to reorder or get a refund, that this had been happening lots, and that he didn't give a shit nor could direct you to anyone at Leap who would. Buyer beware...
As someone in the US, I'm stuck in the "normal" two year contract cycle of buying my phone from a carrier.

I would've been willing to drop ~$650 on a bleeding edge phone, but I don't have the flexibility. I'm hoping to switch to T-Mobile the next time around so I can bring my own device and avoid a contract.
Yeah, beacause what we need is for government bureaucrats to make more rules, particularly regarding anything relating to the Internet.

I'll phone my representative, maybe he can sneak this in as a rider to a 2,000 page bill about abortion or gay marriage or funding the terrorists in Syria that nobody read.
As an investment banking analyst who was learning to code "on the side" for 6+ months and then finally decided to quit my job and learn to code full time in January, I can't agree more with this article. Learning to code part time doesn't work. You need motivation, and you need to dive into coding head first. Zach Shapiro has some great tips related to learning to program similar to this article:

1. Nights, weekends are bad
2. Forget codecademy
3. Have a real project you want to build

Check out the full article here: http://blog.zackshapiro.com/want-to-learn-to-code-start-here...
Here is a link worth reading if you're considering the social, political and economic changes of the last 40 years (it is written by Leon Trotsky):

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm

Essentially, increasing competition drives down profit margins in existing market sectors. Companies respond by increasing automation so that they can generate arbitrage profits against the "average" price dictated by the cost of the generation of a unit of the good by their competitors. The other companies catch up, however, and this process itself is deleterious since profit is generated by accumulating the surplus value of the labor embodied in a unit of the commodity. As this process reaches it's nadir, the economic character of society is marked by speculation, increasing international tension, and market crashes. Once the fictitious capital that has outstripped the value in the real economy is destroyed, growth can begin anew. Based on Nikolai Kondratiev research, these growth and contraction cycles operate on approximately 30 to 40 year cycles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

What's particularly fascinating (detailed in Trotsky's article) is how the growth / contraction cycles operate on human culture and thought. Thus 60 years ago, the United States could be a signatory to a Declaration on Universal Human Rights and today find itself denying that it's own citizens have a right to due process.

Anyways, I could go on, but I'd be rambling :)
If you attack someone and they fight back you're not a "victim". Yes, they might have been wrong to strike back out at you, but you're not a "victim".
Or sack staff who don't perform well, as happens in every other job.
Stupid question: What is a product product? Can you mention an example, just a simple one? :)
Decibel is a quirky place by any stretch. I've never seen a bar where the workers sample so much of the product.
In this case, the way to avoid fragmentation is not to merge but to standardize on the Docker APIs, just like Flynn does.

Docker's job is to guarantee interop between PaaS-like components, so that you don't need to lock yourself into a single monolithic PaaS. Everything you build on Docker will benefit Flynn - and Deis, and Dokku, and Maestro, and dockermix, and custom platforms at Ebay, Uber, Cloudflare, Mailgun etc.
Is providing poor service _unethical_?
No, because rohypnol doesn't cause a person to choose to do something they would otherwise not do. It causes the person to have amnesia and not remember what happened. To be a reasonable analogy, this app would need to automatically take their money, send them a cake, and drug them so they don't know why they have a cake and why their money is missing.
MIT asserts “no wrongdoing” in Aaron Swartz case
A guide to PHP Deployment with Capistrano
Oh, request-response maps (heh) well to lisps; I copied Ring's API for my project. My biggest issue I guess, is getting out of a Class and Interface mindset.

That said, do you have any advice for how to think about state in regards to web development? The database and its various assumptions were my biggest headache. What is the go-to library for Clojure here?
Never and ten years[1] feel pretty similar in month two.

[1] http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Thanks for your advise! yeah definitely going to do some guest blogging and will give Copyblogger a try.
Wwhat makes you say the guardian is UK-specific?

they had two domain names that they seem to put together under a single one. That seems to be a logical move.

http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/guardian-us-grow...

The latest big news was about Snowden, hardly qualifies as a uk news ;)
They make it sound so easy. I'm holding down a full-time job and raising a son with my fiancee. I've only got 2.5 years experience programming, but I'm getting up an hour early to hack on side projects, hoping to get some of this mythical passive income that people talk about like its so easy.

I can code/debug for a corporate in my sleep but creating entire products on one's own is a whole different ball game. I'm tired of these articles making it sound _so easy_.
Hm, the only reason I want a new Macbook Air over an Ultrabook is that it has the HD5000 graphics which are way faster than anything else on the ultraportable market right now. Ultrabooks with HD5000 graphics still haven't launched. If you're going to install Windows on it you might as well buy a (way cheaper) notebook instead.
Thank you for sharing. If I were you, I'd call my credit card provider and initiate a chargeback request without delay.
Partially agree. I assume Apple wants to go down the truly portable route and offer an addon graphics card in the size and shape of either an airport extreme or apple tv/mini. This would allow someone with a mini to stack a graphics card under it and have the graphics card inbetween the mini & any other screen.
A musician who relies on Spotify to make a living isn't a musician.

How so?
I found this enjoyable enough to read that now I want to go to the restaurant. Too bad I don't live in SD.
How  to Set Your Team Up for Success
I read an interesting paper in Science about backing up data to DNA as a future archive scenario. At the time I hadn't realized you could just store DNA by drying it out and putting it on an index card, I had visions of cryo vats of test tubes :-). Such a system would be a 'write once' sort of solution.
Why do something interesting when you can do something boring?
Facebook Announces Mobile Games Publishing
Presumably if enough people like you complained, the staff that was causing so much trouble would be fired, and eventually people who had a good work ethic/customer service would survive?
This is from 2011. It's best to add a (2011) to the title in situations like these. It's a good topic and good info, but considering the speed at which music industry tech is evolving, the date of publication should have more attention.
> I haven't met a serious Android Developer who complained that fragmentation...

Yeah, but you'll meet lots of iOS/WP developers who complain about Android fragmentation :P
As long as the reviews aren't presented as being honest or real. If they are presented as honest or real, it sounds like fraud to me.

If I sell you a cinderblock in a box and tell you it's a computer, I think the government should have a say. Same situation if I sell you a book and tell you that Bob the fisherman from New Orleans thought it contained real original scholarship about Soviet central planning, and it turns out that his name isn't even Bob.
I've had friends who tried to go the start-up route and didn't pan out; so they decided to do some affiliate marketing with Google Adwords, that didn't pan out. Then they tried to build a SaaS for developers to help with their development, designers to manage their CMS. So far, they haven't seen a dime. The only one success story I've heard said Google screwed up his search result ranking, so it only lasted about a year of supplementing 15% of his full-time job income.

I'd love to hear some passive income hacker (PIH) failures, risk & reward, opportunity cost in terms of time spent on your own venture vs. spent on climbing the corporate ladder and vs. traditional passive income paths say, becoming a slum lord, dividend investing etc.
Great post, I am wanting to head down this path. I am really wanting to get Lisp in Small Pieces but is it super costly.

Maybe I will look at Let Over Lambda.
Developing software != 'coding'.
I'm not talking about comparing yourself to others as far as money or status. I'm talking simply on an individual level. For example, if you're a programmer you might compare yourself to John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, etc. Even on a more realistic level, a new/jr programmer might compare himself to the senior person in his group and think "Wow, I'll never be that good".

I totally agree with "If I don't make things as good as I can, why do them at all?" as I've thought along the same lines.
Or just 6,929,156 for one week of the year, around Christmas time...
Why do you guess that? I don't think there is any correlation between GUI vs terminal and cognitive load. There are simple terminal apps, and simple GUI apps. There are also complex and difficult to use terminal apps and GUI apps.
Is there an inherent disconnect in being anti-tipping and pro-pay-what-you-will? How is a restaurant letting you pick your own price for service with the expectation that you will be fair different from a humble bundle letting you pick your own price with the expectation that you will be fair?

I'm not trying to be difficult or argumentative, I'm genuinely wondering. I'm pretty anti-tipping and pro-pay-what-you-will myself, and I'm just wondering if I'm fooling myself now.
I've never understood why I need to pay the wages of restaurant employees directly, when just about every other business seems to figure out a way to fund employee wages by selling products or services.
In practice enforced privacy is rarely used in languages other than Javascript. In Java, C#, Ruby, Python, PHP advisory privacy is the default.

You would enforce privacy when you need to run untrusted code in same process (like the Servlets model), which is not the case in any Javascript application.

Enforced privacy in Javascript is also very inflexible, disabling many ways of extensiond and reuse and encouraging god objects because you cannot fine-tune the access - other internal "classes" are just as unpriviledged as some random application code.

So in my eyes there are plenty of downsides for no visible upside - in all other languages the developers seem to play well and not write code to access privates. Maybe that's due to incompetence though.
Skinning. Imagine if half the PC manufactures shipped windows with an OS X skin that the user couldn't turn off, and another 15% of the market shipped a DIFFERENT non-native skin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Sense
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TouchWiz
I am a developer and I prefer developing on my macbook by FAR over windows and I prefer it a lot over Ubuntu et al. Right now I still have my desktop PC taking up space and clutering my desk just so that I can play a few games. I'd rather sell it and for less than what I get for the whole thing buy a thunderbolt GPU and game that way.

Your argument is invalid and only considered from a 'I want to game' point of view, not from a "I prefer a Mac and would like to play PC games without a 'proper gaming machine'" point of view.
Indeed; coding is akin to music, art, etc. in that it's not so much you learn to do it, but it's just what you do as a result of you being you. Sure, learning is necessary to grasp the tools and make them do what you want, but once you have enough tools to get started (editor/compiler, guitar, paint & brush) you just run with it. At age 10 Dad brought home a terminal and had me type in a 3-line program; ran it once, and immediately wanted to change it, already grokking loops and output formatting. Programming as "work" isn't so much a means to an end as someone funding my needs so I can do what I can't stop myself from doing: code.

I half expected the article to consider the sheer scale of the programming stack: today, the conceptual layers from NAND gates & machine code to graphical resource editors are so numerous and complex that I can scarcely comprehend how any student of programming starting out these days any later than grade school can absorb the material in any sensible timeframe.
I don't disagree with anything you said, which makes me think I worded my response incorrectly. I was using the author's term "true privacy", but what I meant is traditional privacy that, when not explicitly attempting to circumvent it, will generate some negative action, such as a warning or a compilation error. My problem was the author's blanket assertion that this type of privacy is bad and should be avoided, even if it is available.
Sure you can. However, I already own a MacBook which I use for everything except gaming, for which I had to buy a PC. As soon as these external GPUs become available commercially, I don't have to buy a separate PC for gaming anymore, just a nice GPU and the case, which actually _is_ more cost effective bottom line, assuming that I need my notebook anyway.
I agree, it's crazy. Seems like a slam-dunk case of false advertising if you say something costs $X and then you actually charge $Y.

If a restaurant wants to charge more so they can pay their staff a wage that doesn't require them to live off tips, then great! I'm all for it. But then they need to list their higher charges, not just tack on an extra 18% (or whatever) on top of what they advertise.
Two Cameras in every NYC Citi Bike
The problems are greatly exaggerated. I imagine there's little difference to the "fragmentation" problems developing for Windows.
It's not traditional to do it every time, nor even every visit, and I've barely ever done this myself.

I think it's fairer to say that traditionally you can tip the staff by buying one for them, but it's not something you observe happening all that often.
Offering a free dessert and then charging for it is outright fraud.
I didn't really start learning to code, even though I had a year of CS under my belt, until I found a problem that I wanted to solve. I was using Audiogalaxy to download music over a 56.6K modem and I wrote a program to monitor the download folder and move any file after it was completed in order to prevent automatically sharing/uploading it to other users.

It wasn't as technically difficult as most CS homework, but it was the first time I started thinking about programming as a tool to solve an actual problem I was experiencing.
The MIT report on aaronsw
Good writeup! For a home workstartion setup this would be pretty ideal imo..it would possibly also reduce heat as the load is moved from the internal GPU to an external one.
Windows only kills this though, as i can use my old windows rig from 2009 with a somewhat recent GPU (core2quad 2.8Ghz + HD6870) which still plays basically every game without breaking a sweat.

For my work setup with OSX something like this would be great!
I agree that the website reflects the language, but my take is the opposite to yours (and allow me to be a little mean):

The new Scala website perfectly embodies the philosophy of the language which says that if you squish together many concepts and elements, each of which is good on its own, then the result simply must be good as well. ;)
Yeah, um, this assumes each stat to be the sole source of income, and to compare to minimum wage we must assume 40 hour work weeks.

Anyway, if you can't make it as a musician, I guess you have to do something else productive. Corey Doctorow gets it when he describes himself and other people who make a living in creative arts as being in the 0.001%, the extremely lucky few who get to have that as their career.

All professional musicians could disappear tomorrow and we'd still have enough great and varied music to listen to for all of anyone's lifetime and also have massive amounts of high quality participative music making by non-pros.

Incidentally, I'm a semi-pro musician myself but I long ago stopped fighting the I-deserve-a-living-as-a-musician battle and switched to figuring out how to be sure my contribution to the economy actually mattered.
>It also makes it so that my receipts, credit charge email alerts, and monthly bill all reconcile. Otherwise you can have a transcription error when the server or restaurant owner misreads (or mistypes) the manually written tip line of your receipt.

To make sure it reconciles correctly, make sure you fill out the Total line legibly/correctly, not the tip line. That's generally what systems have you input at cash out, and they calculate the tip amount from that difference. The vast majority of mistypes/misreads stem from the Total field being left blank and the manager does the math on the fly, or the customer didn't do the math right when they wrote in the Total (so they end up tipping $4.50 instead of $3.50, or $1.50 instead of $2.50)[1].

[1]Restaurant manager for two years.
I think so, you are not doing your job, yet taking the pay for it.
On a visit to China many years ago, waitresses would regularly return or refuse tips. However, on a more recent trip, they would expect or even ask for it. Bad habits are easy to pick up.
Could you please define the terms "term" and "defining" before we proceed further?
PHPlist? You can run it on your own server.
// Some example methods which might spend waiting for other
// services (calling the database, sending emails).

def getEMailForUsername(username: String) =
future { DB.Users.find(_.name == username).get.email }

def sendPassordRecoveryMail(email: EMail, message: String) =
future { SMTPService.send(email, message) }

// Future/Promises API:
def resetPassword(username: String) =
for {
email <- getEMailForUsername(username)
result <- sendPassordRecoveryMail(email, "some message")
} yield result

// Async API:
def resetPassword(username: String) =
async {
val email = getEMailForUsername(username)
val result = sendPassordRecoveryMail(email, "some message")
await(result)
}

@smegel:
I don't see any “callback hell” or “code that does look like spaghetti” here.
By the way, I'd love to see a link to “Scala's synchronous API” and that mystical “far less attractive callback based API”. Or are you making things up again?
Did you read the top of the article? He opened with a section about how hard it is to actually reduce profit because many/most places don't have any! I agree that in many industries, this is an option, but I don't think most restaurant owners are rolling in cash.
The key word is distinct. Samsung could have made 1 model of phone, it doesn't mean that one model wasn't much more popular than any other android device. Not every model of Android device has the same sales figures.
>> If?

LOL, I know, UK bad food etc etc...

Actually some of the best food in the UK is to be had in pubs IMHO. Also some of the worst, if you just pick one at random you might get either end of the spectrum.