skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No offense to Armen, but being a "grammy nominated artist" isn't saying much judging from this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/56th_Annual_Grammy_Awards#Winne...

I can't even count how many nominees there are on that page. And that's just for 2014.

I have friends who play in various bands every other week in front of live audiences and guess how much they make?

It's in the range of ~$20 each per night. And that's for about 6-7 hours of "work". Or about ~$3 per hour. "The horror! They are certainly getting swindled!" I can hear you shouting now.

They have to load/unload all of their equipment into a van which takes about an hour. They have to spend $20 or $30 driving their gas guzzler to/fro the bar that's booked them for the night. Spending another hour in travel time as you don't want to take any sharp corners or hit any pot holes with $5,000 worth of musical instruments in the back. They spend about an hour setting up their equipement themselves, testing accoustics and such. And then they play for a solid 3-4 hours. For $20 compensation. Oh, and I forgot that they also get together and practice for about 8 hours every week on top of that.

But that's O.K. because they all have full time jobs and they just really love to write and play music for people.

That's why you should be making or playing music imho, for other people's ears and your own enjoyment. Not to write a few diddy's in the hopes of making a killer profit.
It is for the users. You have to make money somehow. And Mozilla is trying to do so while still maintaining respect for the user. If Mozilla didn't care about the user, they could throw in an Ask toolbar. Or add a PPI offer to the installer (which can pay $1 and up per install). Google makes a ton of money off their ad network to fund Chrome and then tracks all user typing in the URL/search bar by default. [This is proven and factual, but Chrome fanboys will downvote you on HN every time you state it.] Mozilla doesn't have that luxury.
It's another one of those new, alternative law groups that no one knows about except those seeking to use them.
I just read the first one 8718462, and I actually think it might be worse than the "photographs on a white background" patent linked to in article.
LLVM IR is not machine independent, and is documented specifically as not designed to enable portable IR.
UPDATE: Pandora's response:

"We love Bette’s music and certainly respect her advocacy for fair compensation for artists," a Pandora spokesperson said in response to this story. "But we must clarify an important fact: Pandora paid more than $6,400 for those 4+ million plays, based on our 2014 rates which are published publicly. In terms of compensation to the creative community Pandora remains by far the highest paying form of radio. Pandora pays songwriters a greater percentage of revenue than terrestrial radio. And Pandora paid 48% of our revenue in performance royalties to rights-holders in 2013 – more than $300 million – while terrestrial radio was required to pay nothing."
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobil...

Older rebuttals during the original Thom Yorke / RIAA campaign:

Forbes estimates Spotify royalties per listener are almost double those of terrestrial radio:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/17/spotify-r...

The artist doesn't see most of the royalties, the payouts from Pandora / Spotify can be orders of magnitude larger than the check the artist sees:
http://theunderstatement.com/post/53867665082/pandora-pays-f...
(This is a problem worth examining too, but it's a different problem.)

Tim Westergren makes some additional points, like Pandora's value for promotion is higher than terrestrial radio, and how many artists actually support Pandora's model:
http://blog.pandora.com/2013/06/26/pandora-and-royalties/
Very true. It's not exactly rational, but it always makes me sad when I realize that popularity of given language only slightly depends on quality of its design (Haskell seems to be a counter example, it survived years in obscurity and now seems to gain popularity).
In a way, this op-ed is begging the question, which could be phrased as: "Should a citizen carrying a firearm be regarded as an inherently threatening act that others are entitled to protection from?" Unfortunately, the author uses the conclusion to answer his own question: "The moral bravery political protest demands is no longer enough; to protest in response now requires the physical bravery to face down men with guns." In the society I know, only a tiny minority of private individuals would commit any kind of lethal violence in such a context. Basically, the author is (probably unintentionally) supporting his position based on people's known inaccuracies when estimating personal risk.

There is no question that any such legislation curtails the freedom of one party; the question is whether this is proportionate and justified. It will eventually come down to prevailing social norms. In this, the pro gun forces are already losing the battle of emotional impressions and imagery across much of the US. However, this is not uniform across the entire country. Also, as it is fundamentally a matter of perceptions and social norms, the "debate" has basically come down to both sides vilifying the other as somehow crazy or subhuman. The underlying issue is not the threat of violence in the public square. It's that this country has lost the concept of "loyal opposition" and real debate in the public sphere.
What is my middle name?

That's a fairly easy question as well. Every single person in my immediate vicinity knows it. My daughter who is less than 36 months old knows it.

Don't you?
It is for the sake of users, like the parent said. We want Mozilla to make money. As it is right now, they produce all this free software and don't make a cent from any of it. That can only continue as long as they stay in Google's good graces to fund them, and as anyone with a popular youtube channel or dependence on adsense or as a user of any of the dozens of products they have shut down (like Google Voice third party apps in the next week) they are a fickle company to work with.
> This attitude involves fashion and trends trumping all other considerations.

90% of the complaints I see about things being bad now because of "fashion and trends trumping all other considerations" seem to just be people applying who are themselves putting fashions and trends above all other considerations -- its just that they found a fashion or trend that they favored several years ago and are upset that the rest of the world doesn't still favor that fashion/trend.

And that's not entirely unreasonable -- or necessarily detached from personal productivity. Something that is a common trend in a field where productivity is relevant is almost certainly also useful to some subset of the market. Likewise, compatibility with expectations driven by trends external to the field can make new fashions also more productive to the mass market, even if they aren't more productive to the subset that the prior fashion "clicked" with well on a deeper level.
Rabbits are arguably cuter than swans and yet you can get rabbit to eat quite easily.

In fact they're so cute when the French wanted to boycott the World Cup in 2001 because the Koreans eat dog the Koreans countered with "And you eat those cute bunnies". (or so I was told)
Too bad they always have to NIH things (though I guess in this case there might be legitimate reasons to do something different than the level of LLVM IR).

I'm going to guess that in this case, their reason to not go with LLVM was the most compelling one possible: When Microsoft was designing the .NET toolchain, LLVM didn't exist yet.

Given the timing of when it came out, I wouldn't even be surprised if LLVM wasn't at least partially envisioned as an open-source answer to .NET. In which case there's a hint of NIH behind LLVM, with Mono being the non-NIH open source option.
Ironies of Automation  (1983)
While I agree with you that anti-patent rhetoric often spawns ridiculous headlines with unread articles beneath them, do you not feel that Amazon's patent in this case is a little odd?

Here's the abstract, for those who tl;dr'ed the article:

"Disclosed are various embodiments of a studio arrangement and a method of capturing images and/or video. One embodiment of the disclosure includes a front light source aimed at a background, an image capture position located between the background and the front light source, an elevated platform positioned between the image capture position and the background, and at least one rear light source positioned between the elevated platform and the background. A subject can be photographed and/or filmed on the elevated platform to achieve a desired effect of a substantially seamless background where a rear edge of the elevated platform is imperceptible to an image capture device positioned at the image capture position."

It appears that they've managed to patent the idea of setting up two lights, a white background, and a small pedestal for the object to be photographed. Isn't it a logical certainty that this has been done before? How is this an innovation worthy of legal protection?
The notion that the government ought to not be allowed into your computer, ever, doesn't seem grounded in either reality or historical precedent.

I didn't intend to argue that. I'm saying that strong anonymity OS's like Tails will force governments to do dragnet surveillance using compromised hardware in order to track suspects down. There is no way to tailor surveillance to an individual using Tails, because it's set up to hide your IP address at the OS level (assuming Tails is implemented correctly).

Assume child molestors begin using Tails or whatever environment that prevents FBI browser exploits from working. What then? There's one recourse: the government can set up your network card to monitor when you're using Tails for unlawful activity. And since it's very difficult to come up with a "footprint" of an individual Tails user, i.e. some way to monitor or attack one specific individual, this is likely to force the government into monitoring all activity. This can be done via compromised hardware, like a network card, which can be remotely configured to monitor memory for specific trigger conditions like "user is running Tails, and main memory contains specific terms for underage children."

Sure, it sounds unlikely right now. But this is the general direction that technology has been headed in. How much ground should we concede in this debate? Is it ethical for a government to be able to subvert someone using strong anonymity tools if it forces them to broadly target everyone using such a tool?

More broadly, what mechanism should we approve of the government using to inject your computer with code? If the government has DMA access to everyone's computer, then that hardware could be configured to monitor which operating system you're using, and only triggered into actively targetting you specifically when certain conditions arise, such as using a strong anonymity tool, or a certain specialized browser that child pornographers also happen to use. Should the government be allowed to be proactive in its hunt for offenders? Are we comfortable with a hardware device watching which OS we're running? There are a lot of issues that seem worth thinking carefully about.
Love the story, thanks for sharing it.
China may build an undersea train to America
Software Collections
Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail
Outreach/SummerOfCode/2014/Projects
If you're looking for a very straightforward 64-bit port, [I'm the author of] https://github.com/pcarrier/cdb64
Entertaining relationship jokes
That's a funny joke about a relationship story!
Not sure I follow. Do you think the World Bank will now hesitate to release their data because someone scraped it?

They have an open data policy, using CC-BY [1], so unless this scraping effort took data that wasn't covered by that it should be ok I think.

[1] http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:...
Cloud native software: key characteristics
"And until we can automate all the dirty work, the hard laborious work, these aren't 30,000 people working white collar desk jobs."

Wanna guess what will happen when we start automating those jobs? Hint: riots about 'the machines are stealing our jobs'
Given that 3/4 of these artists were active in the 1970s, and one has been dead for 30 years, I wonder if maybe you've considered that your musical opinions are not generally in line with those of the people who consume streaming music.
I have difficulty cooking meat by sight as a result of my color blindness. I wonder if these glasses would help.
Bucky talked a lot about a world where there was enough food to go around, people were educated, and many jobs were being automated. I assumed he was party inspired by the Green Revolution/Norman Borlaug. On top of this, Bucky lived through an education transformation, going from a society in the late 1800s which had a global illiteracy of 85% to a complete flip to 85% global literacy--in his lifetime. He talked about this a lot. He also saw that many jobs, even in his day, were being automated, i.e. that humans were no longer required to be "muscle-reflex" machines. A lot of these ideas inspired that quote.

In a world where our political, financial, and corporate infrastructure supports "doing what needs to be done", in terms of benefiting all of humanity, we can then apply the "earning a living" quote. But only when we have a system setup to support the last sentence in the quote.

If you are not one of the "one in ten thousand..." then you should be studying or preparing to develop your own breakthrough that benefited humanity and become a "one in ten thousand" in the process.
>Search quality evaluation can't really be done without humans in the loop.

I wasn't talking about search though. I was talking about the map rendering.
My issue with Chrome's UI is that it is inflexible. I agree that the content area is important; as such, my firefox displays much more content (while also displaying more useful icons IMO).

In Chrome, you take what Google gives you and you better like it. I'll admit, it's not a bad default.

Firefox, however, allows addons to fundamentally alter the appearance of the webbrowser. I can add stylish themes that do all sorts of awesome things. I can use vimperator with "set gui=nonavigation" and reclaim even more space for content.

This fundamental difference is the reason I think Chrome's UI is bad. Firefox, you can customize the gui to be good for any definition of good. Chrome's only works if your definition of good aligns with Google's.

Also, for an example of when Chrome's UI fails, simply try and half-screen it on a 1080p screen with 30+ tabs open. All the tab favicons vanish. There's no way to search for an existing open tab (akin to firefox's % Location Bar Search character[0]).

If you'd like, I could show you my firefox and chrome running side by side with firefox having dozen's of more pixels of content-viewing area. Even if you don't like my setup, the fact that I can change it at all makes it an obvious win for me.

[0]: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search#Location_Bar_s...
5 years ago I worked as a consultant at a large enterprise software company. There were definitely large periods of time (months long) where I was averaging 3 hours a week of actual work. Insane, insane work hours. There would be a 5 person team (Analysts, QAs, developer) spending 5 weeks on a release that consisted in 45 min worth of text changes. I don't usually hear people on HN talk about not having work to do. I guess it's different at start ups. It's just fucking unbelievable to me though that I would get paid so much to do so little. And I feel like some kind jerk complaining about it.
Yeah, it is a damn tough question. Criminals have more tools than ever for operating under the radar, so restricting agents to traditional rules for investigation & surveillance seems like a mistake. But on the other hand, how do you grant increased surveillance capabilities to counter increased covert capabilities, without ruining privacy? Basically, it's like privacy is caught in the crossfire.
Thanks for the details. I missed Killer Queen at California Extreme 2013. Are you going to California Extreme 2014? :)
It's really easy to spot people with agenda's who don't actually read the articles isn't it? :)
Psy and his record label reportedly earned $4m from the 1.23 billion views on Youtube. That's even after Google took a 50% cut.

This works out to 0.325 cents per play. How does that compare to the rates from these other services?

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/01/gangnam-style-music-v...
This tutorial itself has a zip file of non-trivial examples, if you scroll down to the last section.
To be accurate though, Mozilla has a lot more leverage there any of the analogs you mention.

Mozilla isn't getting handouts from Google. They probably deliver more revenue to Google by setting it as the default search than any other partner Google has. iOS/mobile Safari is probably the only other contender.

Finding ways to diversify is good, though.
Not bad. RSS feed? It says "send pull request", but I don't see a github link or any contact address.
I had a discussion about this with someone on the Mozilla IRC, and the argument seems to be that users still have the option to add DDG on their own, so it's not being treated as optional. Users still have the option of switching.

I'm not a big fan of this argument, and I argued that DDG, or another privacy conscious search engine (though DDG is the best I've used), would be very much in line with Mozilla goals. I'm sure many users are still unaware of Google's practices (whether those practices are inherently harmful or not), and exposing DDG as a search option would be a means of raising awareness.

I don't quite understand the rationale behind it.
> And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very heavily so the wealth can be spread

I think this is always going to be problematic because once wealth gets concentrated it's going to be very hard to redistribute it, short of some revolution or coup. And I sense that this is going to be especially hard in democratic countries where there's a very close nexus between elected representatives and wealth holders; US, India being prime examples that I could think of.

An alternative is to have systems and institutions such that wealth concentration doesn't even happen in the first place. Also I believe wealth gets concentrated by systemic and institutionalized transfer of wealth from middle and poor class to a selected few rich and not because those who are wealthy are geniuses or are contributing proportionately to society.

I can think of a few examples of systemic, institutionalized wealth transfers that are happening right now.

1. Riding on others hard work: A labor working in inhuman conditions with peanuts for wage producing textiles which are sold with profit margin of a few thousand percentages.

2. Privatizing essential services: Poor/middle class persons having to pay out regular health premium and still live in fear of getting their claim rejected and end up paying through their nose for smallest of diseases, medicines.

3. Rent seeking: Natural resources (oil, spectrum etc.,), licenses, monopoly, forced software contracts, patents and such.

4. Crony Capitalism: Govt bail outs for failed private institutions that have caused massive financial crisis which in itself was a wealth transfer from poor to rich of a scale that was perhaps unheard of.

5. Crony Capitalism: Tax payer's money getting transferred to weapon's manufacturers and private military contractors who in turn are going to protect the interest of private oil corporations.

6. Riding on others hard work: Illegal or institutionalized collusion among private corporations to suppress the wage by not allowing free labor market.

7. Resource transfer: Government snatching massive tracts of farming land from the poor farmers and giving them away to private corporations for pittance.

9. Erect massive blockade to democratic institutions so that the common citizen, for whom they were meant for in the first place, will have no choice but to resort to middle men and shell out huge sums. Courts (lawyers, out of court settlements etc.,), parliaments (lobbyists) etc.,

If I look at the list of wealthiest people, rent seeking behavior and riding on cheap labor jumps out!

Sure, they probably deserve to be wealthier than above average, but does the wealth they have accumulated is proportional to their social contribution?

The intersection between those who have contributed to advancement of our civilization in whatever small way and the rich people is almost an empty set. That's a clear enough indicator that those who are very wealthy really don't deserve it and in fact snatched the wealth from others to start with!
Probable cause is an under-appreciated term. Every American should know what it means. You'll see actors in movies and TV say to other actors posing as police that they can't enter their home without a warrant and that's not true.

Police can enter your home without a warrant, all they need is probable cause.

What is probable cause? Probable cause is when a police officer is 51% sure that a crime is occurring. So if police are 51% sure a crime is occurring in your home, they can enter, and you can't stop them and anything illegal they see in line of sight can be used to prosecute you.

Police can only go to the place where they think the crime is occurring, so if they have cause to think someone is doing something illegal on the first floor of your house, they can't climb the stairs to the second floor to find illegal drugs in your bedroom closet. Probable cause doesn't give police leeway to search your entire house just because they saw someone smoke pot through the kitchen window.

Having said that, when I say police can only go to the 1st floor, that really only means that they'll have a lot of trouble convincing prosecutors and judges that anything they found on the second floor will be admissible, they can physically go up to your second floor and you should not stop them.

What police will do is try to use line of sight to find anchors to get deeper into a house. So if they barge in because a suspect ran into the living room, they'll try to find other things that will give them 51% probable cause to move further through the house.

tl;dr: Probably never try to physically or even verbally stop police from searching your house, car and person and property. They don't need a warrant, they just need to think something is up. The movies and TV are not reality.

Source: Some administration of justice classes in school, experience with police.
1. go here http://www.cgdev.org/section/publications?f[0]=field_documen...

2. click on the link to "We Just Ran Twenty-Three Million Queries of the World Bank's Web Site"

3. click on the "Data & Analysis" tab

4. scroll to the bottom and there are download links to harvester_parameters.py, harvester.py and unloader.py

BUT i can't seem to actually download them, as there is some redirect that fails :( i tried creating an account on that site as well. anyone else have any luck?
Welcome to most software with academic papers published about it.

It's pretty typical to find papers written about a piece of software or a software technique with impressive claims and the software is totally unavailable to the larger academic community (neither in binaries or source).
$0.00 to cash flow in one month(my challenge to freedom)
I'm in the U.S.

If I open https://maps.google.co.uk/ it shows the UK.

I expect there are people in places outside the U.S. who would be frustrated by maps.google.com showing their current location, so it isn't an easy thing to solve for everyone.