skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Back in the UseNet of the late 1990's, I always thought of this technique as "the pick-apart", and I found it a great technique for winning a battle of rhetoric. Fragmenting the discussion into 'sound bites' reduces coherence and allows for a series of disconnected snarky rebuttals. Snarky rebuttals being much cheaper to produce than a reasoned and thoughtful reply.

Of course the objective is to devolve a conversation - for the pick-apart is a form of trolling for flame wars. It's power stems from the frustration it instills in one's opponents via low quality arguments based on deliberate misinterpretation across many fronts and the fact that the number of fronts multiplies with a thoughtful response - i.e. when trolling the pick-apart is applied recursively. [1]

One can identify troll sign in the pick-apart because there is no priority to the counterpoints. The perfect pick-apart disputes each sentence rather than the overall ideas. Even at the micro-level, there's nothing but contradiction - just unsupported assertions of whatever happens to be opposite the most convenient reading of each sentence in isolation.

Now in fairness, the pick-apart is often a high quality post on most of the internet, because it at least entails some effort at writing [I forgot to mention one of the ways it wins arguments is simply by leveraging one's ability to out-type their opponent] and produces a maximum of snark. Snark being the primary coin of internet chat as entertainment.

Anyway, here on HN pick-aparts are pretty much noise due to the generally higher standard of quality found in the comments and the general distaste for trolling. Consider this editorial feedback, with the honest intent of improving your writing technique.

Good luck.

[1] The classic insurgent strategy in a Blotto Game is to open up additional fronts against any opponent with superior resources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blotto_games
Ionic Framework features you may have missed
I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a number that is not even scarce once its made. And until it is foss, you are just denying the users their freedoms to the stuff they are paying you for, and until it is sufficiently free it really isn't even a working product in my book.

Hell, even projects like Tizen vs Android and ZFS vs BTRFS vs XFS and KVM vs Xen vs Vmware vs Virtualbox are all bullshit jobs and unnecessary work reinventing the same wheel over and over to either satisfy a boss need out of the chief developers, the inability for the forerunner to accept others opinions into their project, or just raw license and legalese incompatibility bullshit.

It is, though, 99% bs. And every time someone tries to reinvent IMing after xmpp (without being able to, in a paragraph, describe the intrinsic flaw in xmpp you can't fix through amendments to the standard, and how their alternative immediately fixes them) it is just more BS. All the photo sharing websites, all the web apps, 99.99% of them are all bullshit because someone already did it before, and you just want to tweak a few knobs (which you could have easily done if all involved projects were open contribution and pliable to change and forking) and had simple results, but no, you have to start from scratch and spend a million LOCs reinventing wordpress. And you still write it in Lua! If you wrote it in, say, python, I'd be all over that because that presents a tangible benefit - "Lua is awful, I don't like it, and as a user of my software, you don't like it either, and you can't just patch fix that, so here is a replacement in python".
Structural Genomics: The Song
Indeed, I'd say it's more popular in Berlin than Coke.
If patent applications were version controlled with git, it'd be easy to check if those changes warranted a patent. No need to reread the entire thing, if the same examiner were checking it.

Maybe there should be a limit to the number of times to can refile a rejected patent and within a limited amount of time (like 6-9 months)
Agreed. Years ago, it took me a few weeks to see the utility of Anki, then I bought the iOS app to support the developer's efforts. I use Anki more frequently on Android however.
If you are averse to the price, sometimes there are sales you can check: http://appshopper.com/education/ankisrs but in the goodwill of giving back when you benefit, pay what you can.
Why not just ignore the bcrypt portion? "Intuitively" it seems to me like you could just un-concatonate the two strings and guess at them separately, working on whichever you know to be easier.
>> I watched the Interview, about how he think EarPod quality were poor

Do people actually think Apples earbuds (the current as well as the previous version) sound good?

I never liked the first generation ones because they didn't fit in my ear very well. I saw the presentation about the current earpods, and when I got my new iPhone I tried them out. They are a joke.

Don't get me wrong - they are about what I was expecting for pack-in headphones. Apple was known for their earbuds, with the white cord and white bodies. They are iconic.

But a few years ago, I went headphone crazy since I started working at a place with an open environment and ended up wearing them most of the day. I didn't buy anything crazy, the single most expensive pair I bought was $140 and I even bought a few pair used. But $50/$70 earbuds are just on another level compared to the Apple earpods and are really worth it if you use them a lot.
All your Bitcoin balances in one place
Ask HN: Is there anything like GPL for songs?
I haven't checked all the options about Creative Commons licenses, but even if I downloaded some albums published under any of the CC licenses, I usually never get what I get with GPL software. GPL software makes source code available and free to modify. I'd like something like that about songs. I want to be able to download a song and all the audio tracks, stems, etc that made that track possible. I want to publish a song and make people able to use the samples for their own productions, remixes, etc.

Maybe there are options already but I don't know them. I know of places like ccMixter, but why is not normal to publish CC songs this way?

Thanks in advance for you comments.
When I was stuck in a meaningless office job with too much time, I took to learning myself a perl (that was used for some login scripting so there was an interpreter lying about) using notepad to edit, and the windows cmd.exe to execute the scripts. One other (more senior) employee did get curious and asked me what I was up to, but I did have a script that was actually useful to get part of my job done, so I just showed that off. Then I went back to teaching Perl to play scrabble!
Yes, VS and SSMS open do help.

I keep RDCMan open on my 2nd screen, always connected to an administrative RDP server in the production domain, usually with Perfmon pulling occasional counts of IIS users and connections from our clusters. Sometimes I'll have ADUC or DNS or DFS or WSUS or SSMS up instead.

Half of my monitoring tools and error logs, and all of my ticket systems, use web interfaces. So do Sharepoint and parts of TFS and Office365. I use Chrome and keep a dozen tabs pinned, most of which are work-related. HN and Imgur are among those.

And then there's the spattering of Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel), and Lync and other chat clients, and Notepad++ and Snip tool and Fiddler and Putty and other utilities...

It's not hard to hide anything at all.
Can't remember which book this quote is from, but "Critical Path" and "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" are great food for thought:

http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Path-Kiyoshi-Kuromiya/dp/0312...

http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Manual-Spaceship-Buckminster...
Is a streamed/recorded song really considered a 'performance'? Isn't it just one performance? If one performance is recorded and replayed 14k times, how does that turn into 14k performances? I must be missing something...
Wow, well I just had a moment of self-reflection on what a Pollyanna I am...my first thought at reading the headline was, "Oh good, now people like Aaron Swartz can't be threatened with 15 year prison sentences, or (in other cases) become felons for violating certain interpretations of Terms of Service". And of course, it is not that.
I've added more, but in reading and re-reading it's unclear if I've really explained my point. I know who Apple is. I know who "Beats" is. The bare facts about who they are and what they sell does not explain the underlying issues that seem to have the techies in such a lather.

There must be more under this than the simple surface facts - that's what I'm not getting. The fuss seems completely out of proportion - there have been just so many submissions here.

I don't get it. I really don't get it.
Those are good questions but they don't necessarily support the conclusion that streaming is a net financial benefit to the songwriter. I did the back-of-napkin math once, and came up with this:

If a single fan would listen to your mp3 around 1000 times or more, you hope the fan will stream your mp3 rather than buy it, as you'd make more money that way. Otherwise you hope they will buy it.

As for the "discovery" benefit of services like Spotify, you have to factor in that Spotify also robs paid downloads. Why would someone download if they can stream from Spotify? So, in order for it to make sense, you have to ask if the benefit in music discovery makes up for the cost of losing album/download sales. That's a much higher bar than to just hand-wave and say "Well I buy some stuff I discover on Spotify!"
Click on the ? at the bottom right, then select Return to old Google maps lastly click on the classic yellow ribbon which appears at the top asking to remember your preference.

6 more months of classic maps then they will probably phase it out, sadly.
My new startup is focused on lettings fans more easily get money straight to artists: http://saycheers.co - feedback encouraged

So many times I've been jamming to a track and really had such good will towards the artist and would love just to "tip" them some money, but alas had no way to do it. Now we're building that way.
Manilla will be closing on July 1, 2014
I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a number that is not even scarce once its made.

Game engines are a counterexample. There are probably dozens of others.

I'm trying to figure out what people are arguing against. Would you help me understand? Let's assume your argument is true: creation of most proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Ok, so?
A wisdom in the crowd approach to sourcing deal flow is pretty interesting, would be keen to know how they do it.
Well, resolution to a situation where I'm pretending to work, from an ethical point of view, is to, well, stop pretending to work. I can do that by either starting to work, or stopping to pretend to work.

I now at least have a clear consciousness, if not productive output. And it is Saturday night after all. I offered him quality free beer of his choosing. He refused. I also linked him to this thread.
http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/
Why we in tech must support Lawrence Lessig
>Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense.

Only if you think of it from the "accomplishing tasks" perspective.

For example where I work, we are there even if we are not actively working to be available in case we need to immediately respond to demands of leadership. For example this week I had to answer an off the wall question about our project that they needed an answer to RIGHT NOW because they have a meeting with their boss in 15 minutes and anticipate that their boss would ask that question.

Yea.
I think that's actually the point.

On one side, we have low-wage work which is many ways the least-bullshitty. People at the bottom of the hierarchy are often the ones actually getting the work done.

Then, on the other side, we have the layers of HR reps and people who exist only to mind the hierarchy—in many cases, being very well-compensated to do so.

Between the two, there are few meaningful and well-paid positions left.
FREE Vampire Rules Book  – The Giveaway Spot
Depends on the traffic. You'd starve with 14K visitors for cat pictures, but could make a very healthy living of 14K visitors who want to buy home insurance or remortgage their house.
Very moving article. Makes me appreciate my own, living, mother quite a lot more.

I have a friend who lost her mother a few years ago. It's changed her in quite a few ways. I'm not sure if I should sned her this article. She believes in the power of literature just as much as the author, but I don't want to distress her.

Finally, I am really not sure what this article is doing on Hacker News.
Iovine (it's an i, not an L) alone is worth spending money on. If Apple is struggling with iTunes and looking to revamp it with an eye towards streaming, as has been rumored, a guy with Iovine's connections to the industry is someone you'd like to have on your team. Add in the fashion aspects the of Beats brand, the fact that Apple already sells their hardware in large quantities, the fact that Beats is profitable, and whatever existing streaming licenses they have with the labels, and the acquisition makes a lot of sense.
I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, the data could be useful.

On the other hand, the data was probably already useful through the world bank's tool. Furthermore, it's reasonable to assume that the data was only released because the people who had to make the final decision were convinced that the effort required to reassemble the data would be prohibitive. The fact that it's now all been released might have a chilling effect on future releases.
It loses messages all the time. It also sometimes pastes fragments of old messages in the middle of the conversatation
Two things GTalk never got wrong which are pretty crucial for messaging service.
The UI.. it was a total mess when they introduced it (lack of statutes, difficult to see who is available etc.) but those I have to admit improved recently.
>an API often requires more creativity than the implementation. Sure, the implementation is also difficult to do well, but making that implementation usable by others is no less a creative task.

"Difficult to do well" and "creativity" does not equal "copyrightable". Mathematical proofs are hard to do well and require creativity but are not copyrightable.

If the form is necessary for practical application, it belongs to the public.

>The "table of contents" analogy is backwards: you don't write the code first and then extract the functions into an API. That's how you get poor APIs.

You generally don't start writing prose before you have the overall structure fleshed out, either.

>Do you mean that their resulting code would not be covered by copyright? Consider whatever arguments you apply to defend copyrightability of the implementation, and try to differentiate them from the API case.

Perhaps you are right. Copyright may be the wrong tool for code. Patents may be the wrong tool for code. It may be time to set aside these grossly imperfect abstractions that were built for wildly different purposes hundreds of years before programming was conceived and think through something that fits this type of intellectual property better.
What ever happened to layers? I can't seem to find a way to show bike routes + terrain or bike routes + traffic or any other combination.
I know right.
Plus Gypsy Rain is wack as fuck.
Nobody gives a shit about this guy's music. Why the hell should the world pay him a retirement stipend for perpetuity.
Does anyone else feel that this deal tarnishes their perception of the Apple brand? I struggle to think of a brand of consumer electronics for which I have more contempt than Beats Electronics (and Monster Cable, who once manufactured all Beats products, between tricking the naive masses into buying hundred dollar HDMI cables…).

The cultural values of these two companies couldn't be much more different. While both are extremely image-conscious and fashionable, Apple has nevertheless built its reputation by delivering innovation and quality to its customers. Beats on the other hand has a built a reputation by selling very expensive headphones of highly questionable quality whose value, I would argue, is primarily superficial.
Why would you be happy for the Beats team of if they are actively trying to trick people into buying an inferior product at a premium price through celebrity endorsements?
That point gets brought up to imply artists are in the wrong, when it actually supports that Pandora/Spotify are in the wrong.

Pandora/Spotify are debt-financed. They literally cannot afford to offer their services at the royalty rates they are paying now, and are pressuring musicians to take less.

You can definitely create a service that is popular with consumers if you are debt-financed (see Napster 1.0). That doesn't mean that the service should exist, or that the songwriters should make financial sacrifices to make the service viable.
2005 http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-co...
> Does your company have the foresight to reward you

More like to they have the foresight to patent your ideas in their name, take your IP and restrict it via copyright, and then make fortunes off of it while the rest of the world withers in squalor.

There is a huge market movement in the IP industry not just because of how it is an obvious quick buck today to just sue everyone and put money down the legal black hole, but that in the long run when the means of production are wholly automated, you rule the world if the men with the guns give you exclusive rights to those ideas.
Well, Android is similarly network-centric.
He may be Grammy nominated but that doesn't mean anything. 14,000 plays isn't very much at all. I've seen unsigned indie artists with more plays. The amount of $4.20 also strikes me as a little strange. I've had music on streaming services and the payout is generally around $0.002 per stream. $28 isn't much better than $4 but it's significantly more.

His problem seems to be that people aren't listening to his music anymore, not that he's getting screwed on payments.
For me it's the fact that my android phone notifies me about a new chat 5-10 minutes after I finished(!) the conversation on my desktop (gmail, webclient).
It's really annoying. My phone beeps, I think: "Oh a new chat", look at the phone, "oh, it's just that thing from 10 minutes ago".
I got hooked on Yerba Mate at a former employer - they kept it stocked in their meticulously curated kitchenettes. Occasionally I'll see it at a bodega and pick it up again, but I haven't found a reliable (and close-to-the-office) spot to pick them up quite a while. Stuff is fantastic.
I wouldn't assume anything about the contracts either way until the details of the deal are announced.

EDIT: Actually, I might lean toward thinking the contracts are transferrable, given Beats built its streaming service by purchasing MOG.
That sounds like a ton of money given that it doesn't even begin to represent the amount an artist could make when you combine that with live performances and rights for it's use in movie or TV.
Imageboard with colored categories
It doesn't, or at least doesn't yet.
Are you talking about the Sony Xperia E1? Comparing to the two[1], it has twice the RAM and more+faster cores than the ZTE Open. Also, isn't it like $169 or something?

[1] - http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5966&idPhone2=...
I'm glad tha Apple maps is steadily improving. There needs to be competition so that free services will compete for users by improving the user experience.

I think iOS 8 will include major updates to Apple maps that will integrate transit directions. Apple recently bought the mapping company Embark along with a few other transit-related acquisitions.
Usually phones work fine in emergency situations like that.
Hmm. Alibaba reminds me a bit of a '60s style diversified conglomerate: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conglomerate_(company)
I'm very interested in all learning software. It's hard to see what your software does different than the others though. Do you have screenshots, videos or something like this?
I'm just trying to understand, why be at work on the weekend or after hours unless you need/want to get something done? (Man, I wish HN had a private messaging system, because I usually have questions that interest me but aren't really appropriate to ask publicly. Thinking of writing one...)
What would happen if someone who isn't colorblind wears these? Do the reds appear even stronger?
The gradual disappearance of the terrain mode is ironic, given how their ads always seem to show happy young people on outdoor adventures...
To add to jessriedel's comment [1], the recently established Simons Institute at Berkeley [2] is another example of what is soon becoming a top research institute in CS theory, seeded with 'just' $60 million. There are also the Kavli institutes [3], but I'm not familiar enough with them to judge. (Warning: personal opinion ahead) And then you have, on the other hand, the chronically-underfunded and academically controversial Santa Fe Institute [4].

The key, it seems, is to keep the institute mostly private and independent, but with enough links to some established research university to lend it credibility, resources, academic/peer feedback, and long-term sustainability.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725377

[2] http://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/datascience/simonsaward

[3] http://www.kavlifoundation.org/institutes

[4] http://www.santafe.edu/support/the-history/emerges/
While I'd agree with that sentiment for most sold software, there's another aspect to consider. There are some jobs that don't ever really go away, and software is one of them. It's similar at times to the traditional "trades" such being a plumber or electrician.

So while "proprietary" (i.e. closed source or limiting who has access to it) may not be the precise description, a LOT of software is (and will be) "in-house" stuff. This is because while commodity solutions are great in many way, the are general tools, and will never map exactly to the current task and needs of a business.

Just like how the plumber is happy to buy common solutions to piping problems (e.g. standard sizes, common specialized parts that solve problems that show up all the time), a software engineer can pull from Free Software as his "standard parts". In the end, though, because every need is at least slightly different, a business will always need to hire somebody to put those parts together - just like they hire an in-house plumber or other specialist.

A consequence of this, though, is that all that specialized work is not going to be particularly useful outside the place where it was originally used. The occasional useful features can be pushed back upstream, but that still leaves a lot of glue around.

As time goes on, and the collection of "standard tools" grows, I expect the ratio of "glue" to "useful new feature" to increase.