skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Total manufacturing/distribution costs for a CD are around $2.20 with a wholesale price of $6.50.

The labels still get the $6.50 more or less for a digital album (although that's falling) but they no longer have to worry about manufacturing a portion of their products (CDs are still 80% of the market.. digital is 20%) so at best they knocked off 20% of their manufacturing costs thus far.

So now for an equal numbers of units shipped the total cost is $1.76 per unit.

The labels also have to pay mechanical royalties to the artists.

So prior to the internet: $6.50 x 250,000 units minus royalties would net them around $700,000 gross profit.

But they would have paid $250,000 as an advance to the artists.

Net profit would be something like $450,000 on the initial $250,000 investment plus ongoing manufacturing and marketing costs.

If they hit it big, they get rich, but a dud might be a money loser or at best barely profitable.

The digital sales would boost their net profit by $110,000 for the same number of units sold, all else being equal. They would get a 2.24x return on their investment.

Keep in mind 250,000 units is now pretty good for a successful artist now.. the biggest album last year only sold 2.8 million copies.

Artists don't get the shaft anymore than any other business person does.

Labels are just VC.. they risk investing a small amount of money in a very large number of artists (a few hundred thousand) on a hunch that it might pay off. Most don't work out, but the ones that do make up for the rest.

80% of sales come from 50,000 albums pulled from the entire history of recorded music.. not very good odds.

The real problem is that nobody is buying music anymore. Period. Unit sales are dropping off a cliff.
not nearly enough information on it as I would like, but it's a start. For now it's a bunch of csv on stuff like Community Centres and Schools. I'd like to see hours of operation, directory of phone numbers, link to pictures, link to maps, link to transit grid...and other things that are useful. But it's a start.

Locations of public washrooms, fountains, banks, and where one can purchase transit tickets would be handy for any good-sized city.
A mandatory requirement for being alive includes at least knowing how to tie a bowline.
best part, this link: http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/design_quotes.html
I am not 100% sure SeatGeek is correct that they should open the marketplace... if they have the info, why not buy and sell tickets themselves? Thoughts? Or is there a risk in buying tickets; as in what if they do not sell?
I can't find it at the moment, but there's a very cool javascript sandbox system at Google Code somewhere.

I believe it creates an iframe with a separate domain, writes the js into it, and communicates via message passing/anchor etc.

The net result is that you can execute unsafe js, in a sandbox on your page and expose an API to it.
In case you missed it (I did), so has San Francisco - with so many local hackers this can only be a Good Thing.
http://datasf.org/ - it was posted on HN a month ago but sank without comment, so give vijayr his overdue karma: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=772966
Awesome! I'll try to integrate this soon.
I've always wondered why they don't build alarm clocks based on sleep cycles? We sleep best in 45min REM cycles, and waking up in the middle makes you feel groggy. When setting the alarm there should be a dial that has sleep-cycles printed on it, and you turn the dial to select how many you want. The clock will read what time the alarm would wake you up as you select each setting. Select as many cycles as you can get, while still getting up on time. Then simply tell the clock how long you take to fall asleep.
Seems like that group is MIA... Not having a meetup since June.... Sad really.
Perhaps it's deliberate? Can they really maintain their level of customer service if they get too big or grow too fast?
You don't mock things up in hand-crafted HTML/CSS? What do you start with? (Dreamweaver?)

(Sometimes my first mockup of a UI is monospaced plaintext in a draft email!)
I have that one. It's a good book, and learning about that gray area between kernels and your code, that is inhabited by linkers, loaders, the C library, etc... is very interesting.
Jung's writings do often give the impression of importing mysticism into science or of mysticism for its own sake, an impression sustained by some of his critics, supporters, and this (fairly good) article.

However, after reading most of his collected works, the overall thrust of his work seems the opposite -- to grapple deeply with the mystical and have it yield to the conscious, probing tools of analysis (if not quite science).

In the Jungian view, myth, folklore, archetypes, scripture, and dreams are common artifacts along the path towards understanding unknown, threatening things. Rigorous analysis (the article overstates this when comparing this to solving quadratic equations) can yield insights into what unknowns an individual, culture, or organization is grappling with and the progress that has been made.

Unfortunately, Jung did not lay out this kind of explanation in an accessible or concise manner. Some followers have improved on the situation: http://www.amazon.com/Maps-Meaning-Architecture-Jordan-Peter...

Hacking and startups repeatedly put people on the edge of what is known; a hacker's daily trade is in conjecture and hypothesis. When things work well, conjectures can be tested definitively, safely, and in small pieces; therefore the unknown can be conquered routinely. When that is not possible, hypotheses solidify into myth and legend, and progress can still be made. But a startup has to be able to break down and understand those myths over the long run, salvage what is useful, and discard what is not.
Gaia Online's Three Lessons For Free-To-Play Success
The run on sentences make this article hard to follow. The last paragraph of the article even says, "not the best explanation..." Isn't the whole point that this is supposed to be a good, simple explanation?

Wikipedia offers a much better walk-through of what it is and how it works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman
I would add a couple of other useful hitches: the taut-line and trucker's. Along with the bowline, I use these constantly for attaching adjustable-length lines to things and securing items to vehicles.
According to that article, this guy is "founder, director and sole proprietor of the Chronobiology Research Institute which he runs from his home". Forgive me, but my quack-o-meter just redlined.

Can you point me to something that has been peer reviewed?
Photoshop is:

An extremely good interface for editing and retouching photographs
Okay for doing painting and bitmap art creation
Mediocre for doing graphic design -- alignment and layout are frustrating
Abysmal for doing web design that isn't brochure-like

Omnigraffle is a terrific example of a general graphic design app that is suitable for web design.
I've noticed quite a bit more graphic details in their recent product pages and sign up forms. Turns out their new designers do indeed design in Photoshop:
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1821-work-in-photoshop-dont-s...
I've yet to use a web or desktop app that comes close to Excel. Zoho may be the closest, but Excel is the gold standard.
I think this is more because of the community in the Bay Area rather than how far Chicago is. Most of my non-techie friends from U of I did move to Chicago. Chicago seems to be a hub for all big ten grads to move to. My techie friends who did stay in Chicago tend to have crappier jobs than those who went to the Bay area.
The knots I use all the time: Figure 8 (climbing, mostly), clove hitch (pretty much anything), truckers' hitch. (Pretty much anything as well.)

Also helpful in everyday life are coiling / stacking skills you pick up when working with rope. For example, my headphone cords are never tangled. ;)
The Triumph of Good Enough Tech
I'd 2nd the bowline - very useful knot. I was once forced to learn to tie a bowline behind my back - seemed fairly useless at the time, but then a few months ago I had to tie something onto the back of the wetsuit that I was wearing - to my amazement I did it first time - muscle memory is an amazing thing.

I also 2nd the truckers' hitch.

And remember: if you can't tie knots, tie lots
Thank you. I dont understand why this is a big feature that needs press. Its just themes?!
I think he's right.

If you end up thinking about non-trivial tree of classes, like shape-circle-oval, square-rect-polygon, triangle - you're doing it wrong!
I don't know why, but it just does never seem to work. You can generalize it to a polygon, tho, and it would work.

What you really want from subclassing is interfaces (Set and List come to mind immediately) and civilized monkey-patching (you have a class, you want some of its behavior changed, so you override a method or two).
Where by "unobtrusive" we appear to mean "Kai's Power Tools".
"On Having Balls, Part II: Staying Hungry"
The original headline, the one I submitted this post with, is: "DreamScreen: HP Beats Apple to the Punch With Sleek Tablet"

While it's certainly not perfect it's still much better than the completely false "HP launches new digital photo frame".

Crippling headlines after the submission doesn't make sense.
Image curls and embedded audio players are essential? These effects are modern-day animated under construction gifs.
P0f - Passive OS fingerprinting tool
Wow, looks like you signed up the very first day. My account is 938 days old.
We've never claimed to be a microblog. This has been on the roadmap from the beginning. It's very simple: we listen to users and implement features to delight them and make the service more valuable for them.
I think I'd be interested to know what the effects of an industrial sized system like this could have on an area such as for mass irrigation. Is it possible to extract too much moisture out of the region?
Non-essential and somewhat intrusive. Fun toy scripts, though.
Making your mockup interactive aside, I do like using photoshop to play around with color schemes. Changing css and refreshing the page is slower than just tweaking colors in photoshop.
PAIP has some great code and explains more how to do version a), how to move to version b) and finally reach version c). The process is typical in Lisp: you do a quick first version and then refine it where needed by adding features or by optimizing it at the right places.
Go to your city's rec center. They offer courses for under 200 bucks that will show you the ropes (no pun intended (ok pun intended)).
Agreed, one of the more pleasant surprises at Google was that almost the entire Apps UX team used Fireworks. Photoshop users eventually made the switch b/c they were in the minority.
Now I want to see a picture of Scoble's business card...
Maybe for the prebuilt themes, but paying for custom CSS is pretty standard.
By day 2, it was already obvious that it was going downhill and was going to be just like reddit sooner or later.
Google's ranking algorithm give's significant weight to keywords in the domain name.
This is skewed by bad inflation statistics.
Forgive me, but I can't see how to use that to read the file I have and create a file in a different format. Maybe I'm missing something, although most likely what I'm missing is the background to understand the documentation.

It's probably a useful package, but I can't see how to make it do what I need. I am feeling slightly embarrassed about this ...
Does Complexity in IT Drive Costs Higher?
I think it's a bit skeevy to start an article with "a square is not a subclass of a rectangle is not a subclass of a polygon" and end with "and maybe that's why Tornado couldn't use Twisted Python".
I believe that they since hired a couple of graphic / UI designers, who it seems use Photoshop a lot more
No. The non-posterous part of the site, he just edits up straight up html, and throws it on apache.
* when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.*

It's possible that the answer in the key was wrong. I spent a few years volunteering for RFBD.org, reading math & science textbooks a few hours a week, and many of the texts had answers in the back which frequently were not for the question in the front.
VCs like to hear that your market size is huge, because even if you take a fraction of it, it's still significant.

Look at the way you approach a problem, can you hit two birds with the one stone. What about 3?
If the rumors are to believe, there won't be any future TC50's.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/09/16/tc50-techcrunch50-founders...
Agreed...the Office 2010 The Movie thing is a bit weird. In general, while it's improving, I think Microsoft's marketing is pretty poor. That said, you are mixing preview sites for Office 2010 (again, I don't know why there are two - that is bad) and current services for Office 2007.
Also Notepad++ has such feature (instant document-wide highlight on selection). It's indeed quite useful.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
These are idiotic, and should all be done on the back-end -- either by your favorite image program before you upload your image, or by some server-side code -- and they add nothing of value to the website.

By contrast, check out the JS effects integrated into a site I did for a client: http://davidmckayphotography.com/ (I didn't do the site design or layout, just the photo gallery/JS bits).
I used to have the exact same problem and used something along these lines for years and liked it:
http://www.meijer.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=131845&#...
Does one have to know all of the pathological corner cases in language X in order to be allowed to state "I know X" without being categorically wrong? Does the fact that it is possible write funny little gotchas in language X make a point about the inferiority of X?
If they did that, they'd be sacrificing growth for a small amount of revenue. Apparently they highly value growth at this stage.
They're number 2, so they work harder?

EDIT: My comment was a reference to the Avis marketing campaign back in the 60's.
http://www.buildingbrands.com/didyouknow/16_avis_we_try_hard...
http://www.sleeptracker.com/
Which should be an opportunity, for a startup, not a liability.
I too was a night owl. Healthy diet, exercise, and something exciting to get me out of bed in the morning changed that.
As far as I can tell, the easiest way would be to install the library, and one of the applications using it that does what you want it to. The simplest one looks like jack_capture(1), "a small program to capture whatever sound is going out to your speakers into a file." Start capturing the data and playing the sound file at the same time, and the result should be a good copy.

(1) http://www.notam02.no/arkiv/src
All of the New World's Airports.

Pity, really. I would've liked to see the contrast (if there is any) with the Old World.
My favorite knots:

** adjustable grip hitch

an easy to tie and very reliable noose-type knot
for when you need to adjust frequently

** zepplin bend

a very reliable way of joining ropes that's
also easy to tie and untie (but won't slip apart
on its own)

** double constrictor knot

grips anything you tie it around **very tightly**, exceptionally secure

** icicle hitch

when you know the direction of pull is going to be
mostly parallel to what you're tying your rope to,
then this knot grips even tighter
than the double constrictor.

useful for when hanging something from a vertical,
slippery cylinder (hence the name)

** ashley stopper knot

a bulky knot useful for when you don't want the end
of your rope to slip out

** alpine butterfly

an easy and secure way to tie a loop in the bight
They were selected by dice roll, that is why they stand out.
That's a very interesting thought and I have a gut feel he's onto something.

Last two times I used subclasses were in case of a C++ library that was designed very much like twisted (except it used threading a great deal more): there were events coming from epoll() and going to a pool of worker threads.

I subclassed this framework to create my own asynchronous network server. However, that got me thinking: wouldn't this have been better implemented using callbacks?

The other time I've used subclassing was in Java with the "decorator" pattern: I needed to extend the functionality of object foo, while still allowing any subclasses of foo to behave as they normally would. However, the Scala approach to this (mixing in traits) seems a great deal more elegant.
I think they should give the chance to choose a name for the url instead of just using the email.
Sounds like what I'm doing! Basically, taking more technically-inclined contracts as a web developer, even though I prefer the thinking and managing part of web development just so that I can pursue learning and enjoying life at my leisure.
I'm not sure I follow you there. Quite a few philosophers are mathematicians-- René Descartes, Bertrand Russel, and Kurt Gödel are a few famous examples. It's also not at all clear the world would have been better off if they'd chosen to be engineers instead.
If the puppet is to be believed...
Great, now I have a font as unreadable as my own monkey-scrawl! Fabulous.
Confessions of a Used PL Salesman: Getting the Masses Hooked on Haskell
I think it is all too easy to be dismissive. Powershell could just be another VBScript, but it is clear that it is Microsoft's response to the proven usefulness of a decent command-line on OS X.

Being Unix is not a prerequisite for the command-line being decent either. What makes a good command-line is consistency and power. For example the command-line on some cira 1980's lisp machines the command-line was the operating system. Then there is the command-line on OpenVMS.

I think Microsoft intends to get round some of the limitations you list by building commands into the shell and making the shell itself extensible. Parts of it look very unix/perl like: http://blogs.msdn.com/arulk/archive/2005/02/24/379732.aspx

Although I am skeptical, I'd welcome any move to make windows more usable and Microsoft has changed the game before in the past.

Market share is not always given to the best technology.
Ads? Why? For business travelers it's definitely worth paying a subscription for.

Even as someone who rarely travels on business, I see immediate value. When I'm picking up someone from the airport I try to schedule it so I get there just after they leave baggage claim. This would save me a huge amount of time if I can predict that the flight will be late. Here in a sparsely populated state like MN there are many people who live so far from MSP (our main airport) that they essentially have to plan their entire day around driving to the airport. Arriving after a 3 hour drive just to find that the flight is delayed by 2 hours is a total waste of time for them.

Selling directly to users/corporations looks like the way to go.
Nice.. but it is not "Unobtrusive JavaScript"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtrusive_JavaScript
Isn't "essential unobtrusive javascript" an oxymoron? Unobtrusive Javascript is by definition stuff where your site is still OK without it?
Better use this while you can -- this appears to be a re-packaging of http://www.yourfonts.com/ , which was free and then became a commercial service. (The template file especially is very similar.)

Yourfonts.com might take exception to this.

(Edit: I had the URL wrong.)
Techcrunch create rumors and controversy to get links, mentions and pageviews? Never! Maybe there won't be a future TC50, but what about a TC60 or TC100? Haven't they run that gag before?
Other blogging services don't have Posterous' remarkable ease of use. The prior lack of themes has been a turnoff for potential users--now that they're here, it's a no-brainer for those folks.
Does maintaining your product for years feel like a routine programming job?
I suspect that for most entrepreneurs, building the first prototype doesn't feel like routine programming. Its their idea after all.

But what if the product turns out to be successful and you work on it for years?

Does it still feel the same way? Or is it more like any other routine programming job?
Is there a greasemonkey script to automatically hide every HN headline with a number in it?
Music publishers: iTunes not paying fair share
I don't consider Carmack to be an expert on creativity, of all things.

His game ideas can be summarized thusly: DOOM.

The best id game, the original Quake, had both John Romero and American McGee as designers, among others, AND Trent Reznor on sound effects.

Without them, id did... DOOM 3.

What Carmack is really referring to is the gruntwork of things like writing multiple rendering pipelines to support the nightmare hodgepodge of consumer 3D hardware, trying out WELL-KNOWN rendering techniques (invented for film) in games as hardware improves, and so forth, which sometimes is just tedium and sometimes requires hackery like fast stencil shadows/sqrt/bit-twiddling tricks. Trying a bunch of methods to see what works on limited hardware is a process of discovery.

You cannot brute-force creative ideas in general in that manner.
Jason Birch, with/for the City of Nanaimo has led the way here for a few years:

http://www.jasonbirch.com/nodes/
http://maps.nanaimo.ca/nanaimomap/
Whoops, you're right, it's not.

I'm currently working on a new version which actually would be.
> Another interesting surprise is that CDs are still bringing in close to the gross $ volume of cassettes at their peak.

It's not. The graph does not adjust the dollar amounts for inflation. (Or if it does it doesn't say so).

So the tape sales were more than they look.
It's great to see multiple open data formats being supported. But I expected more "meaty" data, such as:

http://crimemapping.edmontonpolice.ca

The cynic in me believes that the police will use this somehow to increase their funding. But it is great information to get into the hands of citizens. And it's worth visiting just to see the "don't sue us" click-through agreement!

But why is it so painful to open up transit data? Are there any good examples of accessible transit data?
So I Got A Call From An App Store Reviewer
Twitter plus bubble equals twubble, er, trouble
Would be really sweet if there was any practical way to use new fonts on the web, IM, or email.

I like it because it involves printing and scanning. Web apps that involve physical stuff are fun.
I wish I had time to read and learn new things, but I feel antsy when I read books anymore, like I could be making things and pushing my product. Seriously, I feel like I only deserve to read when I'm on the toilet and can't really do anything else. I think I need to relax a bit.
Good comment. I liked to consolidate my troops in an area that gave me access to lots of places - like Western Africa or the Middle East. Then, you strike at wherever people leave alone. Getting that flexibility instead of getting locked into plans is key.
XSS support isn't a feature.
100% - 90% is still 10%.

Saying there's no "dark" market is like saying there are no desktop OSes bare Windows.

But, there is one or two, you know; and it bites.
Christian Kirk Cameron(the banana guy)giving "Evolution of Species"free!
The superior use of OOP
Scribblenauts Caught Being Accidentally Racist
You know those plastic pictures that change based on the angle you're viewing them at?
Are you thinking of caja?

http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/
Where is the Politician's Noose? that would be the most useful, imo.
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/font-face-typekit-an...

Its coming, slowly.
http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/

It's not an iframe, it's a capability-based filter which provides more security than an iframe can. A lot of sites use it now that it's reasonably fast...
Not really understanding why a bizarre homebrew solution was better than Thrift...?
I learned that TechCrunch will spam their RSS feed all day for a week, causing me to unsubscribe :(