skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to Style a Fishtail Braid
That doesn't mean they're not part of the higher-end headphone market.
Completely fair point – I was reading "digital" in this context as something ephemeral, like a computer file (mp3s etc.), rather than a physical object such as CD, even though as you say CDs are digital too.
No money is going away. Say I have a factory today, and I have to pay x workers $7/hr. If my factory is big, that's a lot of money.

Now if I replace them all with robots, aside from the upfront and maintenance costs, I don't pay anybody anything. Now, a lot of people are going to say that the owner deserves to pocket the difference because he was innovative or reduced costs or whatever. But either way, notice the factory still makes the same amount of money. It just doesn't have to pay workers anymore.

So now we have a political debate, and you get all these people saying that those workers should just find a new job, and if they don't have the skills they're just lazy, don't deserve handouts, etc. I think it's sad that people think this way, but I'm not going to try to argue it because it's pointless. But if this side wins out, you'll find in the future that our country looks very 3rd world. A large wealth divide, lots of crime, little opportunity for advancement if you're not already wealthy.

So how do you stop that from happening? Well, the factory owner probably deserves something for being innovative, sure. But the people that lost their jobs do too. If we get to the point where the population is a lot larger than the job pool, you basically get to pick basic income or 3rd world. There's really no other option.

You can deny this all you want now - go ahead. If you want to do this, I'm not going to pretend I can convince you otherwise.

One more thing though - people have jobs today not because they inherently need them, it's because some entrepreneur needs to hire people to get things done. No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to, so if we get to the point where most jobs can be automated, then we have a mostly unemployed society. We can decide how we want to handle that, but we can't really stop it from happening.
Actually Fraunhofer did this (the creators of the first mp3 encoder).
Same problem for any graphical programming environment which doesn't provide proper software tools,
like diff's for updates, tests, coverage, debugging.
But nevertheless they are used and recommended very successfully.

Matlab Simulink is a very similar environment used professionally to a much higher degree.
There are extensions in some toolbox for graphical diffs, but who uses it? Who can review the diffs in a version control system?

And those systems are pretty hard to debug also.
In a 10Khz loop you cannot step through or set breakpoints and hardly do printf debugging.
Absolutely true. I think when people say that robots are going to replace low-skilled workers only the uninformed are imagining an entirely self-sufficient factory that only has one door that the raw materials goes into, and another door that the product comes out of.

What we really should be imagining is a factory floor where instead of 50 people on an assembly line, or instead of 20 waitstaff at a restaurant, you only need one or two guys who know how to replace parts on the robots
There was a case a block or two away from me where the person made the phone ring while the cop was there, which made it reasonable for the cops to enter and conduct a limited search. It was a sort of a clearing house for fenced electronics, if I remember correctly. So it depends a lot on the circumstances. If the phone had been off, I bet it would have turned out differently - though if you had a pic of the guy and the GPS said it was there an hour ago... maybe.
It probably wasn't dollar per dollar as the other poster suggest but at a certain point there was no assistance.
I don't think anybody realistically considers a CD "digital".
>> "company that makes pretty but lousy products whose price is only justified by the brand name"

Isn't that something people accuse Apple of doing? Maybe lousy is pushing it a bit but Apple has always been accused of charging high end prices for pretty but mid-range/mediocre hardware. I don't agree with this characterisation but it's one that's always been around.
If it takes 50 automation engineers to figure out how to automate a factory... once they figure this out, it doesn't need to be figured out again. (Not a big problem for them, there's always another problem to solve.)

But not only is the entire factory out of work... all factories doing the same task are.

If someone perfects a shelf-stocker, it doesn't matter that they needed the help of 1500 engineers... at that point, all grocery stores need far fewer employees. So does Walmart and Target. Even those crappy little stores hanging on by a thread... if they can scrape together the $50,000 for a robot, that's what they'll do.

These things only have to be figured out once.
Factually true, but as they created and own pretty much the entire market for $300 headphones, one has to concede they have the title of high end headphones... high end doesnt necessarily mean highest quality.
That math works fine, as we can verify by looking at the numerous prior societies that successfully did this. It's easy to overlook them, because they didn't call their workers "robots". They called them "slaves" or "serfs".
Or maybe "digital" means "mp3 delivered over internet" in this instance.
Me neither. They could be doing so much smarter acquisition for that money, or much less, such as buying Imagination, and creating their own fully integrated SoCs, with both CPU and GPU.
Want to spot the next bubble? Move to SV.

Small companies that have $0 revenue (much less profit) getting bought for billions smells like a pyramid scheme to me. At best, it's creating value where none exist, just like the market crash where people were bundling bundles of bundles of debt. Here, companies are selling potential for potential for possible revenue.

Don't have a viable business model? Just get $200M in investment and figure it out in a few years. Problem solved!
Yes, I think we should have a basic income guarantee, but that only solves the problem of persistent hunger and homelessness.

In order to provide a dignified living for a large number of people, wage earners need to take over decision-making in production.

Under the current organization, automation and "labor-saving" means more profit for the owners while the mass of people struggle with unemployment, poor education and poverty.

If workers made decisions about their own workplaces, labor saving could actually mean less labor without a reduction in wages. Or the surplus profit could be directed to benefits like higher education for the workers.

The classic union model has been successful to a point, but has often suppressed by police violence or legal machinations. While I support unions wholeheartedly, I also think new organizations should be started on a democratic, cooperative model. That way the problems of equity are solved upfront, rather than trying to expropriate powerful elites after they've gathered up the profit.

As the power of cooperative enterprises grow, workers will be in a position to directly antagonize traditional businesses. Some means include consumer boycotts, workers refusing to work for anti-democratic organizations, and pressuring the state for favorable legislation.

This is a long struggle, but I think the alternative is roughly what Gates described: Meager wages, extraordinary unemployment, and Oligarchy.
Well, the application certainly starts from a file...
It doesn't matter if you're paying for sound quality, fashion, or the brand name. They cost $150-$300. That's higher-end.
You're being pedantic. The author was clearly not talking about media formats like CDs, which store music digitally as an implementation detail but are still a physical object that you buy just like records and tapes. It seems pretty clear that the author is talking about music whose primary form is purely digital, like MP3s that you could download on your computer and transfer to your iPod.

Put another way: Anybody can tell you what a CD looks like — round, shiny, flat, about yea wide — but nobody knows what an MP3 looks like, because it is a purely digital format. The difference of physicality is the salient part here.
I don't think it was exactly dollar per dollar but it was some type of decrease as you made more and stop at a point.
I don't see why so many are jumping onto conspiracy theories. Truecrypt, like the page states, has become redundant with built-in OS offerings. While it could be used for other things, the main reason/drive behind its development was the Full Disk Encryption feature, which has only ever worked on Windows, and has only ever truly been "necessary" for Windows XP users. Windows had bitlocker for FDE since Vista, Mac OS X had FDE built-in with Filevault 2 since Lion, and linux since installers started shipping with dm-crypt built-in. Like it or not, with Windows XP being obsoleted there isn't much drive left to develop something like Truecrypt. Just use the built-in OS features.
Two companies that succeeded at selling overpriced, under-featured hardware to consumers mostly based on the brand name? A match made in heaven. :-)
I appreciate the realism you bring forth.

Nonetheless, I don't think people are talking about lights-out levels of automation (which exists, but is horribly complex for reasons you've mentioned).

Realistically, we're looking at robots that are going to take over a ton of jobs. The new-fangled example is the Fully Automated Cow Milking Machine, which will be the bane of milkers everywhere within the next few years.

http://www.lely.com/en/milking/robotic-milkingsystem/astrona...

Sure, its a $200,000+ piece of equipment, but costs are going to drop and it will eventually become commonplace in farms.

Similarly, lawyers have already lost a ton of money to automation. Creating a company no longer requires consulting with a lawyer... instead you can purchase a 1-2-3 piece set from a website.

http://www.legalzoom.com/additional-business-services/s-corp...
Yeah it could be a gag order from a secret court. maybe they folded because they were forced to compromise the code...
Just checked and you're right. It's something I use on Spotify all the time but I guess I've never noticed on Beats - mainly because I'm listening to new curated playlists mostly so shuffle isn't a big deal there.
Obviously "high-end" refers to how much people pay for them, not the objective sound quality of the headphones.

But I guess using the obvious interpretation wouldn't let you seem smart by shitting on something popular.
Sorry, silly question, what's "y/y" that keeps appearing in this report?
Scientists induce visual hallucinations by stimulating brain
Right, he seems to be saying that instead of a minimum wage that corporations have to pay, there should instead be something that looks like a minimum wage to employees, but where employers can pay as little as they like and the government will make up the difference between that and the minimum, but if you don't have an "employer" or they don't certify that you've "worked" sufficient hours, you don't get the subsidy, either.

So, like a basic income, except that you have to swear fealty to an employer to get it. I see one of two possibilities:

(1) Either the restrictions on qualifying employment are tight enough that it serves as a subsidy for select existing operations and a competitive disadvantage to new business with smaller scale (because of compliance costs) or new models (because of regulatory assumptions), or
(2) The restrictions on qualifying employment are so loose that this is basically unconditional basic income with a whole lot more administrative costs and failure modes that exist just to satisfy the desire to create an illusion that it has something to do with "work".
> We have it backwards. College should be for people who know exactly what they want to study/do, not for people who have no idea what they want to do.

That much I agree with: you should know exactly what degree you want to get before you enroll. College is far too late to explore your options.
http://www.hbs.edu/recruiting/mba/data-and-statistics/employ...

Link to the data.
Apple counts every duplicate radar as a vote for getting the issue fixed, so at least your filing of these wasn't wasted, assuming they were good issues.
Get rid of all the welfare. Sure.

But quite a bit of that was paid for through personal income tax. So you're not saving anything there... it will be money you no longer have to pay for universal income with.

When you do the numbers, no matter what you cut, there's not enough to go around. You either make it not universal (in which case what little political support there is evaporates) or you make it so low that it's not enough for someone to live in a cardboard box eating Chinese-melamine-poisoned dogfood.

The math doesn't work. Your taxbase is eroding at a faster rate than your employment.
Hmm. Is it possible to extract that "libstagefright" stuff from Android and port it over to generic Linux?
The most interesting reveal from Tim Cook's quote is that he only mentions the music service and the talent, not the headphones.

That's super interesting. It basically means Apple looked at this like a typical Apple aquihire / component technology purchase (of the service), that just happened to have a multi-billion dollar profitable accessories business attached to it. That makes it a very unique kind of deal.
> I don't understand why Apple would buy a headphone company that makes pretty but lousy products whose price is only justified by the brand name

My wager: demographics. Apple's customer base is greying [1]. Beats likely has a younger centre of gravity. I'd also be willing to bet Apple has less penetration amongst black Americans than does Beats.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230179/Apple_s_bigge...
I think a lot of people would still argue that. I've seen a lot of talk in the press about how Cook is still under pressure for not releasing any revolutionary new products after Jobs' immediate pipeline.
Not to mention the iPod spent a huge amount of time at >90% market share for MP3 players.
Is music even still important to Apple?

The iPod is in a longterm decline. Low margin music streaming has replaced purchased mp3s. I think music has changed from the main event in the Apple ecosystem to a minor attraction.

It seems like Apple is looking backwards and defensively, not forward and offensively on this one.
Anyone have key fingerprints for pub keys used for the 7.1a vs 7.2 signing? Preferably pub key from a while ago I guess.
>> "Jobs would've already made a subscription service"

They already made one - iTunes Radio. It sucks. Also Jobs was strongly against music streaming as he didn't think people wanted to rent music.

>> "Basically it's not really a move Jobs would've done"

You knew him well did you?
Yes, Beats is considered to be "high end." Beats are seen as a symbol as status for kids. Owning a pair makes you "cool." It's similar to how many kids want an iPhone or a pair of Jordans.
Yes, it's definitely easy to cry doom, haha. But what have we seen since Jobs? Iterations of successful product lines. Faster, thinner, better battery life in general. But where's THE AppleTV that the media has been rumoring about for years? Or the wearables that grab headlines every day?

I'm sure there were plenty of products (AppleTV, smartwatch) in the pipeline before Jobs passed away. The question is, outside of those long-rumored about products, what next? This purchase of Beats just seems like a bad omen of acquisition rather than invention.

Maybe I'm wrong and the Apple-Beats combination will create a new product that changes how we look at headphones. Maybe I'm right and Apple is losing their vision. Only time tells and either way, it'll be interesting to look back on these crazy decades.
Bezier-curve-editor
> It's weird, the industrial revolution definitely reduced the amount we work. Two day weekends and forty-hour work weeks were not possible before the rise of machines (and also unions).

Actually, long year-round work weeks generally weren't possible before the industrial revolution; the industrial revolution made them possible, which was among the problems facing the concentrated industrial labor force that led to the rise of unions, which then led to limited working hours.
Please kill the 64kb limit. You're just blocking little tutorials and samples, the starting point for most people.

Please, please, please do not read this as "make it bigger".
Gross. It's not a "templating engine" if you have to convert your HTML to a JSON data structure, like in the example.
Yeah, that was their response to my ticket as well. Shift-Escape saves some time, but it's still a useless feature that provides nothing but annoyance.
Forbes.com 4/21/2014 @ 10:59AM - "Why Square Needs To Sell Itself--And Do It Quickly" http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/04/21/why-squ...
A Lexus is a re-branded Toyota; it's still high-end.
This is not so much the case in rust because you only increment the reference count when you're passing around copied refs to an item. If you instead borrow a ref counted item, you don't need to increase the ref count - because rust will statically enforce that the borrow lasts less time than the item it borrows from (which is enough to keep the item alive). With good coding practices, you can eliminate the large majority of ref count increments/decrements.
Not really true - Sony and Sennheiser (as well as AKG and other less known companies) had the market covered already.
I get a little kick out of things like this because I just know Steve Jobs would flip shit if he were still alive. I really don't see how this is a smart move for Apple. I'd love if they prove me wrong, but I don't think they will.
I agree. I think the music industry connections are probably more important than the headphones themselves. It's the brand and the associated people.
All this is based on the fact the the effectiveness of automation at a given price point is growing.

If I replace 100 employees with a machine that has a TCO of $100k yr and I was paying them each $30k. I am $2900k ahead, should the government require I supply $15k basic income for 30 people I would still be $1640k ahead, not to mention less overhead for HR, recruiting etc.

The real trick is in distributing this burden so the businesses benefiting from the automation are paying it.
I totally agree. The question I ask is whether Beats is the kind of headphone that Steve Jobs would personally design and use. The "steve" test seems to guide everything else they build, so why not extend to headphones.

The way I see it, the answer seems to be "no." The headphones are bulky, the logo gaudy - just not Steve. The advertising - think of the superbowl ads that rankled Seattle fans - just not really Apple's style or ethos.

I can't underestimate Apple - they are a wildly successful company, and may well see something great that I can't. Guess we'll just have to see.
More streaming vs purchasing mp3s doesn't mean people will be using headphones less.
Wouldn't increasing the progressivity of taxation improve redistribution without removing the efficient incentives that capitalism provides?
That men always worked more then today's men is a common misconception. The Industrial Revolution 80 hour week was a local (if not global) peak in the time series.

Unfortunately data is sketchy, but there are accounts of 9 hour workdays and dust till dawn workdays with breaks. In contrast at 80+ hours of work you would not even see the sun. In the winter more so to a point that it is true even without weekends and breaks.

Further reading: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
It'd take 50 automation engineers a year to figure out how to automate a single step in a factory... just in time for the product redesign that may make the step irrelevant.

These things may have to be redesigned from scratch every time a product is updated. iPhones don't have all of their screws, screens or cables in the same spot from revision-to-revision.

You can only automate product development when things barely change.
I am a developer in the US at this point but am returning back to India very soon. This seems like something only for the US/EU area, right?
Yep. Leverage the new "selfie" trend to get a news story placed about your product = classic PR maneuver.
Wow. Could this be used as a form of biofeedback when trying to learn (or improve) complicated movements in sports?
Bright Lights, Big Data
I think the idea is that Beats expanded the market for $200-400 headphones. Yes, Sony sold headphones in that range, but they didn't sell them to every high school student who wanted to look cool.
"But they didn't go through and parse the code like we do. It couldn't tell you who else uses this particular function or repository."

It may have, but perhaps didn't present the UI for external users. Our internal version of Codesearch based on Grok (http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/121010.html) is far more powerful and works just like an advanced IDE -> find usages, callers, implementors, overrides, all kinds of auditing/analysis layers too.

Some Googlers practically live in Codesearch rather than use the local IDE indexing :)
In the article, Tim Cook says, "It's the people. It's the service."

Are you saying you don't believe he's telling the truth about their motivations?
The URL should be:

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=45809
> Based on my own experience, I disagree entirely. All the employers I've talked to would rather hire and pay more to the guy with 4 years of experience, hands down. I'm sure it depends on the job and the type of company, but 4 years is a huge head start. When the college student graduates, the guy who didn't go to college will be his boss.

Ah, but that's not the question. You won't have 4 years of experience during the hiring process; you'll have 0, and no degree. In that situation, 4 years after getting hired, where will that put you relative to someone who gets a degree?