skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real truth here is music is becoming cheaper and cheaper to make. A few grand worth of equipment is all that is required to generate most of the stuff you probably listen to, and if that isn't the case now it will be in what 5? 10 years?

Also think about the talent pool. The only longer line at the job fair is probably for playboy photographer.

Tons of people wanting to make music + low barrier to entry = Cheap music

The only thing attempting to hold this dinosaur market afloat is monolithic record companies, and their stranglehold on the popular genre seems to give them enough leverage to arrange a deal in their favor. Hence what we observe here.

What will likely end up happening is the next cost of music will become zero to the end user and bands and artists will find new revenue streams. Such as live performances, or perhaps product placement. Or does economics not apply to art?*

*I'm the weird guy who doesn't like music so I may be entirely wrong.
You claim that native Bengali speakers on the UTC would have designed the character set your way, the real native speaker way, instead of the bad design produced by these "mostly white men".

But the character set WAS designed by native speakers, by experts chosen not by the UTC but by the native speaking authorities themselves. The UTC merely verified that these native speaking experts were still satisfied with their own standard after using it for a while, and when they said they were, the UTC adopted it.

You go on about how the real issue is the authority of these white men and how the native speakers are restricted to a minor role as mere advisers, and yet the native speakers, as is usually the case, had all the authority they needed to create the exact character set that THEY wanted and get it adopted into Unicode. That's the way the UTC wants to use its authority in almost all cases of living languages.

Unfortunately for your argument, these native speakers didn't need any more authority to get the character set they wanted into Unicode. They got it. You just don't like their choices, but you prefer to blame it on white men with authority.
So would installing much brighter lights indoors help mitigate this? What does it take to illuminate a room at the suggested 10k lux?
As an aspiring mathematician and current math grad student, I am often confronted by students facing existential questions about life and the role mathematics plays in it. [For that matter, I also face these questions, just pitched a little differently]

I think I can summarize the existential angst into a single question: does everyone need to learn mathematics?

I waver on how I feel about this. On the one hand, the answer is clearly no. Not everyone needs to learn mathematics.

Recently, there was a post on HN that prompted discussion about whether or not going to college was necessary to achieve "the American Dream." One of the higher comments also said no. But not going to college limits the paths one can take forward. This is parallel to my current thinking about general mathematics education.

Being innumerate is bad for personal development. Numeracy is required for many professions while innumeracy is targeted and taken advantage of by news makers and, for lack of a better word, propagandists.

That aside, this doesn't actually answer the question of whether or not everyone should learn math. I suggest that there are reasons for everyone to become numerate. Becoming numerate in the American education system is thought of as a byproduct of the mathematical system. Learning the quadratic formula by rote does not contribute to numeracy. It seems plausible that having the mental faculty to understand its derivation does.

But I would also argue that becoming good at programming, physics, or chemistry (among others) also develops good numeracy. [I have thought about how "critical thinking skills," to use a buzzword, relates to basic numeracy. There are many studies, and the Math Wars is a battlefield]. In physics and chemistry, the quadratic formula might arise in the process of understanding something else. It doesn't bother me if a student sees a quadratic, knows there exists a formula to compute its roots, and then proceeds to look up/use this black box formula -- if the quadratic arose from good reasoning about some physical phenomenon (like finding orbits, or kinematics, or even making plans in games like KSP). To this, the author would reply that such a student is capable of understanding and perhaps even rederiving the quadratic formula on his or her own.

I suppose I could summarize my view by saying that I have conflicting thoughts on the merits for or against rote memorization in early mathematics... or for that matter calculus (which I'm currently teaching).
Good point -- except the financial crisis was caused in part by techniques and structures invented by other mathematicians and modellers.
The thing is, despite RMS touting it of course, most of the GPL is completely irrelevant to hardware designs. Please consider choosing a simpler license. For most design files a CC-BY-SA license will have the same effect and the intention will be much clearer. If you want to make explicit patent grants the Apache is actually a good fit. There is even a modified one aimed at digital fabrication which let's you specify that a certain mark has to be included if copied and fabricated [1].

GPL is good for software, HDL and circuit masks only. I have seen a lot of debate around what one is allowed to do with GPLed PCB footprints. Bit of a pain in the ass really.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20130718051941/http://jipel.law.n...
You typically view your licensing schemes as keeping honest customers honest. Also, violating licensing terms like that is not something that any serious company does. All it takes is one disgruntled employee to blow the whistle on your hacking and the 1) IT manager is out of a job and 2) the company is going to have an unwinnable lawsuit on its hands. It's not a risk professionals take.

And it doesn't have to be a whistle-blower. It can also come up while you are trying to get support for a problem with the software. In the log files or something your colleague didn't know he shouldn't say.
I believe he's suggesting that caches should only be allowed to read from persistent storage and that values read from cache should not be assumed to be current. For example, if I read $FirstName, $LastName from some cache lookup for a user and then go to update $Address I should not write $FirstName and $LastName along with it as a "whole user update" sort of thing; just update the value that you need to.
Go watch the Selma (movie)? That incident (where news coverage sparked public opinion, leading to political action) provides a great counter-example to the idea that news/journalism is a waste of time.
Many languages are slow. (Or, more concretely, many languages have only slow implementations.) If C or Fortran interfaces are easy, speeding up the language shouldn't necessarily be a priority. But that doesn't make the language itself fast.

As for why this can matter: a big part of my job is designing and prototyping new statistical estimators. "Prototyping" means running them through lots of simulations to explore their properties in small samples. My two options in R are:

1. Program up the estimator in pure R, in which case the simulations can take days to weeks to complete.

2. Program up the estimator in C and write an R interface, in which case the simulations will run 10 to 100 times faster. (Depending on the exact operations used.) The code will take much longer to adjust if I need to change the estimator, which happens frequently, and debugging will take longer.

3. Program up the estimator and simulations in pure C, making it still faster but much more brittle.

This is a fairly iterative process -- I'll typically discover errors in the math as I run the simulations or after I've run them, or the simulations will reveal unappealing properties that need to be fixed. But once I have "good" estimator and "good" simulations, I write it up in a paper and am done with it. (Gross simplification of my actual job, but accurate enough.)

So the distinction between "R's speed" and "C's speed" very much matters, and if R were actually as fast as C it would make my life much easier.

Of course, for people who are "coding in R" by running data analysis in a script the distinction doesn't matter. But I already said that in the comment you're replying to.
Simply touching it is no big deal (in Argentina at least), but god forbid you stir the yerba, then you're in deep trouble.
I don't think sampling's even necessary. Presumably Spotify log every play. If they pushed their logs into BigQuery or something similar, it would be trivial to calculate the revenue breakdown the way the OP describes. 'Big data' is here, and it works. With 100 million users at 1000 tracks per month, we're 'only' talking about 100 billion or so rows to process each month.
What a Great Time to Be an Investor
Did anyone compare the data from this paper with the development of myopia in northern countries (e.g. Finland), where winters are dark and kids (and adults as well) would probably get only a few hours of sunlight per day (in contrast, summers are very bright)?
6 Things Your Resume Can Learn from Samsung Galaxy S6
This. I think one issue is that the music industry pegged the price of CDs at around $18. But that was for hit maker CDs sold to mass market listeners.

But there's a separate listener: the explorer. The value of any given track is exceedingly low, but these are the people you depend on for the discovery function. Personally, I prefer that role, but the cost before Spotify was exorbitant unless you were an industry insider.
Django security updates
There are parts of Brazil where people drink mate like tea. No straw, no gourd, no sharing, no herpes.
It's a good question, but it seems unlikely to be feasible given that "a well-lit office or classroom is usually no more than 500 lux."
I have a hard time believing that it's 20 times brighter outside than inside, but then again I have no issues seeing my phone's or laptop's screen indoors, while it's almost impossible outside (even in the shade) to see anything.
It's an interesting dilemma. If the Russians play hardball, it might cause the US government to directly fund an engine replacement. It might also cause the US government to pay SpaceX to make Falcon Heavy available sooner. Both of these remove Russia's leverage in the future.
> the notion of 'representative democracy' doesn't apply to news (at least in the proposed or present form).

I think it does. Serious news publications are de facto appointed representatives of the public, to hold politicians and officials to account, with their influence largely decided by the number of people who buy their newspaper.
smt88 hit the nail on the head.

Startups do not have much money. Even the ones that do should aim to keep their burn rates low. That generally means paying for a few experienced, battle-hardened engineers that produce results instead of picking up the cheap, green labor right out of school.

Training junior engineers is important -- they are the future of our industry, but hiring a junior engineer at a startup is a recipe for disaster. Most startups simply can't afford such an expense and it would be irresponsible to try.
I'm a bit surprised it didn't catch on as a carbonated soft drink outside Germany.
That would be an interesting spotify hack. Start recording 2 minute tracks. Would be a similar situation to 50s and 60s radio.

About your point with indie artists vs top 40- it seems to me to be a problem with fragmentation. Top 40 has much more overlap between listeners and casual music fans vs a much more curated play list for the indie music lover. So out of 100 casual music/top 40 fans the playlist is more or less the same. However two indie rock fans have a higher probability of having fewer tracks overlap in their playlist.
I don't think it says anything that no aliens destroyed us yet. If such aliens would exist and such an event would have taken place in our solar system, that would still have been a long time ago. I don't think it's fair to assume that that alien race would just go around and kill all planet with live like a child stamping on ants.

It would be far more likely that they would be at least as sophisticated as humans, with emotional and strategic reasons, complex governments that change every now and then etc. By now they would probably be entirely different people from back then, just as our ethics evolve and and human empires rise and fall over a few centuries.

I don't think it's a very likely theory, but I don't see a general problem with it.
Why is the GPLv3 better than Apache 2.0 for HDL?
I, on the other hand, started using a computer heavily about 5 years after getting my first pair of glasses. Some of it is just genetic and not all myopia is preventable with just more time outside.
That's true of Argentina too (and most likely anywhere where mate is drunk), it's called mate cocido: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_cocido
Show HN: Python-gist (v0.2.0) for working with gists from the command line
I've not experienced that. I see the indentation more than the parens, in terms of looking at scopes. Browsing through the source code with the cursor highlights matching parens and directly shows which expression you're in.

I do agree partially about the math, though. (+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7) is easier to read for me than 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7, but most mixed-operation expressions are easier to human-read infix.

S-expressions are also more explicit, eschewing punctuation for an AST representation of code. For example, a[2] becomes (aref a 2). Yes, this explicitness is more verbose, but because it's more regular I'd say it's easier to read when things get complex.

However, once you taste the ability to programmatically generate source code right in your code itself, and that becomes part of your common workflow, the benefits of AST s-expressions blow away any of these relatively minor downsides. You can code in an idealized representation, then macro that ideal into actual executing code.
SBT has issues (I'd say performance primarily), but works really nice for what it does, IMO. Virtually no configuration required (for a simple project you only need to specify dependencies and maybe import IDE plugins), scriptable in a full JVM-based turing-complete language (Scala), sane per-project dependencies (packages are cached globally for the user, but whitelisted classpaths are dynamically generated for each project), and a consistent design (SBT plugins are really just library dependencies of the build itself, for example).
Lawn Love (YC S14) Is Hiring a Full-Stack Engineer in San Diego
Lawn Love is hiring a full-stack engineer. We're a small, nimble team working on bringing 21st century convenience to the $74B lawn care market.

The current process of finding, scheduling, and managing your lawn care is unduly painful, and quality is all over the map. We're adding a layer of tech-enabled-ease to the mix, which both dramatically improves the customer experience while helping our service providers earn more.

You'll be engineer #3. This means you'll get to work in a ton of different areas, have direct influence on the product and help define our culture as a company.

Here's what you can expect from us:

- Great compensation and real ownership (both equity and over the product).

- We'll make your life easier with great benefits (full health coverage, un-metered vacation, regular catered lunches).

- New gear and whatever else you need to be productive.

- We're well funded by great investors and are growing quickly.

Our requirements:

- You love working hard, not just for financial rewards, but for the opportunity to grow personally.

- You are intellectually curious, and you get stuff done. Results are what matter to you.

- You can traverse the LAMP stack like nobody's business.

- You live in (or want to move to) beautiful San Diego.

We'd love to hear from you at jobs@lawnlove.com. Resumes are cool, but we're much more interested in seeing what you've built. :)
I'm an academic scientist and I must confess I have never heard any other scientist say that they don't know how or where to put their data or code. But in my field, genomics, depositing data and making code available on a web site are expected.
I totally agree, but once I zoomed in on the original the macroblocks stood out like a sore thumb, and it was obvious that much of the "detail" revealed by the supposed zoom and enhance procedure was just macroblock borders.
So far, all our evidence and understanding says that an intelligence that builds practical spaceships capable of going to and influencing other star system existences nowhere, that humans will likely never build such things and plausibly no other entity can either.

Life as such might be common as mold in cosmos but utterly unable to move from star to star or even broadly choose it's "destiny".

- And simplest hypothesis is that if these Martians existed, they wiped themselves out, as it human beings seem on the way to doing. What are the odds?
Not sure why you were downvoted, this has been well-documented e.g. by Beevor.
Big companies recruit where they know they will find talent (especially for internships). Unfortunately this means name matters more than content. Regional firms also like to hire from the biggest-name school in their vicinity.

That said, CMU, Cal and a handful of other schools with noted CS programs are bigger names in the west coast tech world than most of the Ivy League.

Source: Six years working at different jobs with people from the same seven schools.
So, really don't like Goldman, huh?
Agreed, and I had played over 200 hours of KSP before I really got a handle on rendezvous, and had many failed attempts before intuitively getting it, and it becoming easy.

After that point no maneuver was daunting in KSP, just something that was a matter of time and making sure I quick save occasionally.
These goals sound very similar to BitC. https://www.bitc-lang.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitC
Chrome and Chromium are not Blink. Blink is the rendering engine alone. Opera uses Blink.
Perhaps more surprising is that this was attempted in Argentina in the mid-2000s by Coca-Cola. They introduced a soft drink named "Nativa" based off mate with a huge ad campaign to go with it (the slogan was something along the lines of "there's never before been something so ours"). It was a complete flop, and the unsold bottles were removed from the shelves merely weeks after launch.

I'm an Argentine who enjoys mate. While in Germany I tried a Club Mate and found it disgusting. It may be an acquired taste though, much as plain mate is, and I'd gladly give it a second chance if I could get my hands on some.
http://seafile.com/en/product/private_server/
I've been using it for a few months hosted on a vultr vps. All files are encrypted on the clients, and there are no limits. From what I've seen, it doesn't fall into the upgrade issues that owncloud has seen.
REBOL's syntax is pretty much Lisp without the parentheses. Very pleasing to read. Example here: http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/recipes/0057.html

Another one that sort of resembles Lisp in ALGOL's clothing, is Dylan: http://opendylan.org/
What best practices would prevent Putty from connecting? Afaik, I'm using most best practices on my own server, and I can connect with Putty just fine.
Actually there's a moisture level that is ideal for climbing on rock. Chalk just helps climbers stay near that ideal level.

In fact there's a high level climber who's sweat glands do not work and to compensate he has to bring a water mister around with him so that he can climb.
How to convert a USB charger into a tiny Linux computer
Ah, I see. which "seven schools" specifically?
I have wondered why the eye stays elongated. My quest for answers has been from dubious sources on the internet and so everything said below is suspect. It is all based on reasoning and thoughts from potentially bad information.
I read that the eyeball is a sack filled with a viscous fluid, and therefore, its shape is determined by the eye muscles. I determined the viscosity of the eye fluid is thicker than water, but less than motor oil. The idea behind the eye muscles is that near work puts tension on the muscles and they stiffen up and thus elongate the eyeball. So now I wonder why the eye muscles don't relax. Surely, a good night’s sleep or two would do the trick. Could the eye muscles return to their proper position by not wearing my glasses and spending more time focusing on distant objects? After about 3 years of experimenting with this thought, my vision has not improved. But I work indoors in front a computer everyday with glasses on. I have read the eyes muscles lack any counter force to pull the eyeball back into shape. Perhaps the eyeball shell has grown deformed and it is stiff enough to hold the shape. Maybe the eye socket determines the shape. Maybe the eye muscles have nothing to do with the shape. I would like to think that there is some corrective measure built into the eye system. Otherwise, it would seem everybody's eyes are on a one-way trip to becoming myopic and only the speed of this transition can be affected. I know that for me, I wore my glasses all the time, even when I was reading. Looking back, when I was first diagnosed, I really only needed them to play baseball at night under the lights. I sort of wished that was the only time I wore them. I wonder if my eyes could have corrected themselves. Now it seems too late, because I need to wear them just to read a computer screen 18" away. I have also read that wearing glasses forces your eyes to focus at a close up distance. So wearing glasses is like doing near work all the time and thus puts you on the fast track to becoming more myopic. After all this rambling, I guess the real question is what is keeping the eyeball in the wrong shape? If this were known, then maybe one could figure out how to fix the condition. As a final note, I have also read that maybe the eye ball is not elongated, but that the cornea is not shaped correctly.
What it looks like on my vertical monitor: http://i.imgur.com/mzGr6Da.png

ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY CHROMIUM.
Starbucks' Schultz wants to bridge cultural divide
Such as not supporting XHTML until IE9.
Hi. Rich from HipChat here... the sed style replace is available in the web client now. When we released the beta it wasn't there, but we've added it back in since then.
They just don't have much music. I tried spotify as a youtube substitute a few months back (at a friends house). Turns out they don't have a single song I searched for (all available on youtube, well known genre classics).
I straight-up like autotools, even though it's a bit warty.
The reason he's so touchy about it is he's a narcissistic annoying prick. He only did it for attention since people pay attention to bullies, and it requires no work or intelligence unlike being paid attention to for contributing constructively. Call him out as an obnoxious bully and his ego can't stand it.
Ask HN: Dealing with office gossip
A few developers at my place of work have lunch together. It's a pleasant diversion from work. We usually make a point of discussing non-work related topics. It started with 2 of us, and other people ended up joining us over time.

However one of the group (who I always suspected of being a douche but haven't worked with directly) has turned the last few lunches into a gossip fest about a another colleague (who doesn't attend lunch and doesn't work with the rest of us). I strongly suspect that this collegue is more competent than him, and this drives his hostility. It's suddenly become a fairly toxic environment Whas the best approach to extricating myself from this group without becoming a target myself?
Solving Pentagonal Peg Solitaire Puzzle with Picat
It's sad to dismiss cancer patients' attempt to hang on to a shred of normalcy as "silly". If you just got handed a death sentence, far be it from me to tell you your small personal desires are silly. These people need all the medical and emotional support they can get.