skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say the internet has done more to support live music than to detract from it. If there was no internet, I may have gone to a few shows here and there when a big name artist came through town, but because of the internet, I listen to a much wider variety of bands and choose to support those artists by going to their concerts.

There's a totally different experience to actually being in a crowd listening to a band. I may have a (near) perfect recording on my computer or iPod, but there are many nuances that you miss out on when you listen to music at home.

From the artist's perspective, there's nothing like playing live. Playing in a studio is worlds apart from playing with your fans right in front of you. I know quite a few artists that love that, myself included.
I would love to be able to get my upvotes (stories/comments separate) in an RSS feed somehow...

Not at all an API, but since we're on the subject.

I like reddit's format, where you can add .rss to almost any url and it returns the same result as an RSS feed
If you’re using elaborately graphical screens you could do that in such a way as to be broken by a different screen shape, but it seems to me that with just a little work you can keep that from happening.

Oh, and the executable file format is Dalvik bytecodes; independent of the underlying hardware.

That's pretty much the reality of J2ME too, and that's not worked out too well according to what I've heard.
Type inferencing for Groovy in Eclipse: all sorts of Groovy goodness
Whoa, I forgot that and now remembered... thanks!
Fascinating. Can I drop you an email? Didn't see it in your profile. I'm shafqat at newscred dot com.
This. For Ringworld, Niven invented several coherent non-human intelligences that set titanic forces in motion, and explored what the results would be like to live in. For a writer to merely "examine ourselves" seems almost lazy in comparison, and not at all what's unique to science fiction. Dune in particular was so dominated by mysticism and politics that I think it would have worked better as fantasy set in ancient Egypt.
It means that people at slashdot are more likely to read comments on topics, as opposed to accidentally being driven there by clicking on the description instead of the title link.

(the entire description text of a story links to the comments page, its very easy to click it accidentally. Additionally, the comments are sorted, unthreaded, by number of diggs by default; unless you have an account and are logged in the landing page is completely incoherent. Compared to slashdots moderated default comment pages).
selling music in a form that makes it a "collectable"

That's the big one for me. Much of the music I listen to (in the IDM, ambient and electronica genres) is sold in limited run printings now. It's not unheard of for a run of CDs or Vinyl to only amount to <100 physical copies.

Ironically, that seems to make me feel more guilty about pirating the music when it's not available, although I suspect, as you say, it increases the value of owning a physical copy while decreasing the 'damage' done by piracy - I should feel less guilty that I had to download it.
Violins "go to sleep" if not played for a long time ...
I was chatting with a professional musician the other day, and she said something that caught my interest. Apparently a really good violin will, if not played for a few months, "go to sleep." It's difficult to say exactly what this means, but apparently its tone dies, it becomes "less bright" and, to the professional ear, "sounds sleepy." If played again regularly and frequently for a few weeks it will then gradually "wake up" and become its former self.

Theorists occasionally doubt it and skeptics demand double-blind tests. Practitioners laugh at them. Many have experienced it "first hand."

I hypothesised that the wood contracts and becomes "tighter" when it's left alone, and that the vibration of playing will open up the texture. She hypothesised that the glue will expand while playing, and when left alone will tighten up.

However, I've looked around a little and it's apparently a well-recognised phenomenon.

I would never have guessed, and found it interesting.

Compare and contrast:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22software+rots%22
Clickable:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22violins+go+to+sleep%22

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22software+rots%22
I've got no idea what you're talking about. Unlambda is almost self documenting code, it's one of the first times that I'm not using 'literate programming' because there is no need for it.

All these newfangled languages hide what is actually going on under the hood. Unlambda is refreshingly clear and totally transparent.

Until you've programmed at least one 50,000 line project in a language you shouldn't be commenting on how hard it is ;)
It's simply a bad take on Nietzsche's ubermensch. As someone pointed out he even uses the phrase 'will-to-power'.
Speaking as a (non-professional) violinist: Yes, this is a well-known phenomenon; and it affects cheap (~$10k) violins, not just really good violins. Also, it doesn't necessarily take a few months -- even a week or two is enough to cause a noticeable difference -- and the solution isn't merely to play the instrument (although any playing helps) as it is to play loud -- the louder the better.

The best explanations I've seen involve crystallization of the varnish (rather like how bread goes stale via starch crystallization), but I don't believe there has ever been any conclusive scientific study done of this.
Actually, we do have fair-use these days, it was added to UK law in 2004:

http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use

But, in most ways it is less permissive than US 'fair use'. There again, most of the US fair use rationale isn't codified per se, but based on court interpretation and precedence, and since the UK has nowhere near the level of precedence in that area, it's understandable.

The UK fair use policy DOES offer some slightly more permissive commercial uses however, for example recent spates of youtube videos being pulled because a commercial song was playing on a radio in the background would be 'fair use due to incidental usage' under UK law.
To call IQ and the Wealth of Nations "controversial" is putting it rather mildly. Idiotic would be a more accurate term. It's not even worth debating this on HN.
You keep saying that.

I think a decent standard for any comment is to not repeat yourself without good cause.

The title is close to the format of an "Ask HN" without the prompt. Just speaking for myself here, but it was 4:30 in the morning when I saw that, wrote an answer to the question, then realized that it was actually a link to a site, read the article and had received an upvote by the time I got around to adding the bit about Stallman.

I figured there are two things wrong with removing Charles Stross from my comment, first that may have been the reason I got the upvote, second I think plugging Charles Stross where ever the demise of modern SF is mentioned is a good thing to do.

Misleading titles lead to confusion, conclusion, yes, we can do better and not post articles that have a question as the title, because chances are people will simply answer the question.
Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon: Review
OS mapping data: a new landscape unfolds
The author is British, and I think some of these points make sense in the context of the UK. You should see how screwed our privatized rail industry is - itself a kind of "natural monopoly". True capitalism would have the government stop subsidizing them; but then we wouldn't have any trains, and good people wouldn't be able to get to work. Too big to fail again, I'm afraid...
#140con: The Twitter millions create the story, says Stephen Fry
I've heard from long-time guitarists that the same phenomenon occurs with guitars. One particular codger who I happened to have a long discussion with insisted that the wood fibers slowly realign as a result of the constant vibration. He claimed that most newly manufactured solid-top guitars will start to resonate more strongly and produce a fuller tone after being played regularly for a month or so.
he's taking the terminology from this cartoon:

http://gapingvoid.com/2004/06/27/company-hierarchy/

so his choice of labels has a touch of irony and is a bit harsh. Basically, he's saying you can use more euphemistic labels -- self-actualizing; process-oriented; outward-focused/idealist, etc. -- but his labels represent the unvarnished truth, with a touch of bitchiness.
You can't guarantee anything of the sort. Nobody with any sense uses the Daily Mail as a prime source of informed news because its role is entertainment mostly via hot gossip which people, though clearly not you, enjoy. Please list major news stories where the Mail as reported lies and include a comparison with the record of the broadsheets in the UK.

As to this particular new item, the Guardian doesn't take your view.
“One giant container ship can emit almost the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50m cars, study finds”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-p...
and can we see your authoritative links showing that these ships are fine examples of excellent emission control with regard to toxic gases.

Best not to be bigoted and simply remain wary regarding all news items wherever they’re to be found. And no, I don't work for the Daily Mail.
True, but there's nothing to say future implementations will not be faster. Adding more execution units is "easy". Fixing an instruction set is not.
Trying out a bit of Android development is one of those things I want to try over my holiday (just need to get a device...) - how big a deal is testing an app on different devices at this point? At least amongst Google sanctioned ones?
Don't want your content co-opted? Here's an idea: keep it off the Internet.
No offense, but isn't this wrong discussion for you then?
About the NIMBYism: that was just one more part of the article that sounded like a press release from the US rare earth producers.

Basically, they want protectionist policies to avoid foreign competition and they want exemptions from environmental legislation. So just the same as every other business in existence.

Every business has its pet bogeyman to scare legislators (or to give legislators plausible cover for their actions). I'm sure China will play this role well for various groups.
They do that intentionally to prevent conflicts of interest and accusations they manipulate the numbers of their own sites.
I guess it would depend (like the advertising) on what kind of demographics the population consists of. Pop music, because it is specifically designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of people, would have terribly nonspecific demographics. The weirder the genera, the more specific the audiance (usually), and thus higher "CPM".

Where's the sweet spot? Serving music has got to cost much more than serving a jpg ad, but maybe less than or equal to a flash ad (depending on the song and ad of course). I could very well be wrong about that though.
sick in what way?

I think the primary characteristic of Card's writings is that he likes to explore the nasty, and a lot of the time he's apologizing for it. Ender's Game is about murder writ small and large, and the provocative question it asks is whether you can blame Ender for what he did. Hart's Hope does that with adultury; Pastwatch with slavery and cultural imperialism. Even when he's not that provocative, the world just tends to be nasty and not always in a very redeeming way. Kingsmeat and Unaccompanied Sonata may be the worst offenders.

Asimov's stories are about reason triumphing over puzzles, and Heinlein's are about facing tough decisions with a bold face. But Card's are about characters who wrestle with the guilt and psychological problems they inherit from living through twisted circumstances in a twisted world and can you really blame them for what they did?

As a teenager, I thought that was interesting. I thought it was deep and morally provocative and philosophically enlightening, I thought the characters were even admirable. As an adult, I mostly find it tragic and morally hasty. I'd rather read about heroes and courage and reason and responsibility than guilt and pain and evasion.
> Music

http://musicbrainz.org/ is extremely good at this.
Will books survive? A scorecard.
It's strange to me that some people seem to believe that artists would stop making art without economic incentive. As if somehow, the prospect of being financially rewarded is the differentiator between creating art and not. As long as you are making enough money to be comfortable (or maybe not, for some artists!) there's no amount of money you can offer someone to make them a better artist.

Yet another similarity between artists and programmers: you cannot get someone to create something that otherwise would not have been able to by offering money.
It'd be interesting to see how much money Spotify earned for those million plays.

I know that's probably a tough number to come up with but if it is $200 or $2000 then we can start to consider things in perspective.

I think everyone here will agree that it is complete FUD the amount of damages the record industry claim from illegal downloads - and that it is apparent some (though again I suspect not as many as people tend to claim) publicity and additional sales is created from illegal downloads.

In this sense perhaps Spotify is almost a loss leader; barely scraping a living on the idea that it's users are more likely to go out and buy an album or go to a concert. If that's the case they need to be more up front about it; otherwise fall outs like this will happen.

Of course it could well be that they are just ripping off artists. who knows.
Are they sure that it's not just caused by the musician becoming used to the violin, thus producing better tone? Would the same effect occur if it were played frequently by one musician then tested by another?
I think you've been misled. That's an international company's website that is using "fair use" as a catch all term for similar legal concepts. I don't think that page is specifically talking about UK law (e.g. "The actual specifics of what is acceptable will be governed by national laws, and although broadly similar, actual provision will vary from country to country.") and I believe the 2004 date is just when they updated that page.

I coincidentally just attended a briefing on copyright given by our lawyers on Thursday and the basic message was that the exemptions are complex and incredibly tight and have gotten much tighter recently (particularly "non-commercial" is a shadow of its former self).

From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing

"Fair dealing is an enumerated set of possible defenses against an action for infringement of an exclusive right of copyright. Unlike the related United States doctrine of fair use, fair dealing cannot apply to any act which does not fall within one of these categories. In practice, common law courts might rule that actions with a commercial character, which might be naïvely assumed to fall into one of these categories, were in fact infringements of copyright as fair dealing is not as flexible a concept as the American concept of fair use."

The fact that "fair dealing" is a list of narrow exemptions in the legislation, rather than a general concept is why we're still waiting for new legislation that will allow us to legally rip CDs to put on our iPods while in the US a judge can decide that it is "fair use".
Tim Bray's RubyConf 2009
I actually thought "Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory" was "worse" than Unaccompanied Sonata. Still I wish he'd write more short stories like that...they're more engaging than the novels I've seen recently from him.
Do you have any thoughts about why there has been no challenge to the SQL syntax? We can easily imagine notations based on relational algebra and relational calculus emerging that could be interpreted at the same levels of an RDBMS as SQL, yet I've not seen anyone attempt it. A good PhD topic for someone?
> I have quite a bit of faith the Conservative government will undo a fair bit of the damage Labour have done.

Actually the Conservatives broadly support this particular bit of damage. In fact they want disconnection of filesharers to happen sooner: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debate/?id=2009-11-09c.6.8

Furthermore, the Tories are also in with Rupert Murdoch -- they're widely suspected of having done a secret deal with him -- so they'd be likely to go along with any new restrictions on fair use etc that Murdoch wants in order to turn the net into a locked-down pay-per-view digital newspaper. (Murdoch's plans won't work, of course, but that won't stop the Tories pushing through harmful laws).

So while the Tories will be better than Labour in some ways, they're sure to be worse in other ways: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Thanks for the nice words. Any way I can reach that Dutch team? I'd love to find out more about them.
Should be 100 in both.
I tend to think it takes a lot of confidence to give up when you should, too.

You have to be confident enough to believe you'll have another idea next (either better, or easier to execute...).
Im always suspicious of stuff like this about musical instruments (mostly inherited from my brother who is a successful musician and says a lot of it is bunk).

There is another famous one with Violins (I read it in a magazine so no online link, sorry) where they put various old and well respected violins up against a couple of cheap new ones (and a fancy new one that supposedly uses fungus to get an amazing sound) and asked some experts to pick them out in a double blind test - with the results coming out pretty randomly.

My brother's main area is brass instruments (though he has picked up the violin in the past) and there is all sorts of similar ideas there: I think the main one is that the brass "adapts" to the player and no one else can lay an instrument as well as it's owner. My brother is convinced this is a bit of psychology mixed with the fact that the player is used to their instrument (which of course varies slightly from the next).

He says when you meet trumpet players at the top of their game who can pick up a brand new instrument and play it just as well after a few minutes practice it throws things into perspective :)
check out http://developer.echonest.com/
That's really not surprising. For all the teeth-gnashing over the gender gap in tech fields, most general-purpose blogging and social-networking services seem to have majority-female user bases.
Ian McDonald's _Brasyl_ is up there. Hard to find but worth it. Does suffer from the "quantum effects are magical pixie dust" disease but this can be overlooked.

Charlie Stross, _Glasshouse_. Yes, _Halting State_ is good too, but in _Glasshouse_ Stross manages to get his temptation to wink at the reader under control and as a result writes a classic. Has a funny throwaway bit about DRM, too: "For some reason the ancients encrypted all their records and threw away all the keys, that's why we don't know anything about them..."

Ken MacLeod, _The Star Fraction_/_The Cassini Division_/_The Stone Canal_/_The Sky Road_ (Fall Revolution Series). Yes, there sure are a lot of Trotskyists! in! Spaaaaaace! but there's also serious exploration of how technological change affects social structures on the personal and political level. Overview from Reason magazine
http://reason.com/archives/2000/11/01/anarchies-states-and-u...

and that's just things that unambiguously classify as SF. If you make things a little broader, then you can include novels like the 2008 Hugo winner, _The Yiddish Policeman's Union_, which is classic Michael Chabon applied to alt history.
Sooo... when can I launch a quantum EC2 instance?
Sure. And to quote a line from "Wicked" (Awesome musical), "There are seldom few at ease with moral ambiguities, so we act as though they don't exist".

Classing things as strictly "bad" and "good" is too simplistic for most situations. Most things have elements of good and bad.
You're confusing the outer manifestations of a sick mass market distribution chain with an inferred cause ("people don't read for pleasure as much as they used to"). We're actually living through the golden age of reading right now -- HN is symptomatic of this; can you imagine HN existing in the pre-web or pre-usenet era? -- but there's a lot more noise in the system, and the existing distribution networks are crumbling in the face of competition (just as with the record and movie businesses before them).

Borders and B&N aren't healthy businesses. And as for the mass market paperback distribution ecosystem, it nearly collapsed completely back in late 2008. But that doesn't mean there's no demand for the product; all it means is that some intermediate stages in the supply chain are borked. (And no, Amazon is not the answer -- at least, not from the writers or publishers point of view. Shudder.)

Of course F&SF and Asimov's are showing declining newsstand circulation. What's interesting is that they're both on the rise in ebook editions ... and nobody's talking about http://www.tor.com/ and their fiction-publishing habits (which, ahem, pay rather more than the traditional monthlies, suggesting that there's money in the vertical integration/social network model they're pursuing).
A lot of people use the daily mail as their primary source of news (I'm not sure what informed news means).

Hacker news is a site full of smart coder/developer types, but I think most of them are not UK based so won't know what an unpleasant paper the Daily Mail is.
But that 'competent sysadmin' is usually a founder. Surely. And founders never sleep...
A teenage perspective, where computer-based reading loses nothing and gains everything. I assume an open or hackable system, which any sensible user will take advantage of.

Readability: Change font, size, aliasing, and spacing to your liking.

Convenience: access millions of books using search

Annotation: Text editor or some kind of application.

Cost: free

Social flags: You can still tell people what you're reading. Bookshelves are nice decoration. But I bet OLED wallpaper or paint isn't too far off.

Aesthetic: A book is a brick of paper. At least CDs are shiny.

Sentimental value: Any object can have sentimental value: clothing, sports equipment, obsolete hardware.

Rarity: If text is not online, it doesn't exist.

Single Mindedness: Distraction is always a problem; learn discipline or face the consequences.

Religion: Torah didn't switch to the printing press.
Better than who?
But there is research that indicates that people at the top in business organizations do rather frequently have some of the traits of sociopaths. Cartoons frequently use somewhat exaggerated language that would be deemed "inflammatory" in any other context, so I'm cool with that.

And thank you for the reference. That helps explain some of the article.
Tax information would be HUGE. I would also like to see an API for general government records.

For example, if we had voting records, we could finally stop hearing all this "but you voted on -----" "no I didn't go back and check the record" "no look you voted on ----- which is basically the same" "shut up I served in the war" "yay war" stuff every election. We could just look it up and say "hey look you did". The Times "Congress API" is on its way to this, but last I checked, all it had was the attendance records.