skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I vehemently disagree with the authors taste in music, but she makes some good points.
Soundcloud is just a platform though, and if you live by the sword of constantly available unlimited new content all the time then you kind of have to die by it, too. Content producers change styles to chase trends, tracks get taken down and everything changes when more money and popularity is involved.
Enjoy free online content for what it is, but support a scene by buying releases/merch, going to events and spreading the word - it wont implode just because soundcloud changes.
50% more? iTunes is a premium service. Buy songs a-la-carte at $0.99 and pay more than you would for the whole physical album. Or am I out of touch? Back when I was buying music you could get CDs for $10 or a little more, and they usually had at least 10 songs on them...

It is a lot. Record companies don't want you to buy online, they want you to prop up their traditional multi-middleman distribution schemes, so they can go on paying a artists a fraction of a percent of profit from the record sales, and only after the band's high-risk "startup loans" are repaid.

Think of all the expenses that don't have to happen when distribution goes online, and yet the price stays the same (or goes up, now you're paying for the convenience.)
So it all starts with some guy having the genius idea to "rebrand" the internet. Now it is "The Cloud", a fancy term for 'server'. Then all the late millenials fall for it. "It's cool, it's in the cloud, I stream my <everything>". I thought it was fairly obvious that the cloud meant 'turn the internet into TV stations'. Which is a mostly completed process at this point.

Now it's the good ol' days of 2012 when there was still bait on the line. 2012? Companies have been trying to transform the internet for a long time, and users have been helping by refusing to:

a) pay for anything.
b) create sites/content the way we used to.

It wouldn't kill you to order an album, drop it in a CD drive and rip it. My apologies for implying hard labor.

You want your MTV.
> we support ACH

Since when? Obviously you know more than I do, but the top result on Google for "stripe ach" still says you don't.[0] I am halfway through building a platform that requires both CC billings/refunds as well as ACH debits with Chargify and if I can do everything through Stripe it would save me several hundred dollars a month.

[0] https://support.stripe.com/questions/plans-or-suggestions-ab...
The entire point of such a commit is to not be just a search and replace, but instead to have different behavior depending on the value of the error type. E.g. crash on network error, UPDATE rather than INSERT on specific SQL error.

Some changes simply cannot be broken into tiny atomic pieces. Often these are important changes for long term maintainability.
Ouch! Author here, I'll check with the team and see if we can fix it quick. Thanks for the headsup!
A banana reminder
Question for an RF engineer: Wouldn't a filter on the output achieve the FCC's (stated) goal?
> What do you think a farm animal (which at that point is a horribly inefficient energy converter) eats?

Pasture grazed cows eat grass, pigs can eat our food scraps, and chickens can be a great pest mitigant if allowed to graze fairly freely. You certainly don't have to get grain-fed animals from giant factory lots.
just be careful not to overdo it with sesame oil, because it can overwhelm a dish.
I have to say that I saw that one coming.
I would think it better that we have weapon systems that intelligently make an assessment as to whether their target is (A) a combatant, (B) a threat, (C) surrendered, etc... before engaging and killing them.

The alternative is indiscriminate death that we see in mass bombings, mine fields, artillery strikes, and drone strikes.
A couple of things all the 'experts' in how the government works here seem to have overlooked-

1) 'Quid pro quo' is a lot harder than it seems- it requires Zimmerman to commit a crime, then trust that Nestle will take care of him after. This is pretty rare.

2) Zimmerman does have value to Nestle, though, in the form of knowledge of USFS processes, like the renewal process. If he weren't hired by Nestle I'm sure he would be hired by another company for this knowledge.

3) If any corruption did occur, it was probably in the form of one of Nestle's senators tapping the shoulder of the director of the USFS, leading to direct or indirect pressure to not review the permits. This could be very subtle (i.e. budget is cut, word comes down from on high that something else is highest priority, and if it ain't broke don't fix it).
Olive oil's smoke point is highly dependent on the variety. Refined olive oil is just as useful for high-heat frying as just about any other. Extra virgin, on the other hand, is not something you want to cook with.

In Turkey we have a variety known as "naturel sizma", which is what comes off the olives before pressing even begins. In contrast to other olive oil varieties, it's appearance is cloudy, and you can barely warm it before it starts smoking.
Because that's when it was ready. Our launch process is fairly involved -- getting all of the code out to production servers across multiple regions, updating the console, pushing the docs, and so forth. The last three steps for a big release are push the press release, push the blog post, and push the social media.
Absolutely not. Galera operates on synchronous transactions, Aurora operates at the storage layer.
>Very sneakily worded.

Hanlon's razor. Not everything is a media conspiracy.
Nine.ch hiring experienced Ruby engineer
> a random guy on the internet says something and you think it is true?

Yes, if they identify themselves and their company and what they say aligns with my personal experience.

> You don't have the foggiest idea what they are really doing with the data. All we know is that they are collecting the data without user's consent.

You never have any absolute certainty what anyone does with your data - all you have are hypotheses and probabilities. Who are "they" and what do you think they are doing?

If adtech companies cared whether you're behind a VPN, they would make or buy a list of IP's that are provide VPN services and match that list. That's a ton easier than implementing a STUN server that scales to handle traffic from every single person who views one of their ads.
And who is going to check that? On a rolling basis? May I please go there and check?
This article is interesting because there seems to be an assumption that there is some ideal the web should strive towards ("free exchange of information"), when actually everyone is optimising for their local maxima.

Google wanted to challenge Facebook and had a huge userbases on lots of different platforms...you can see the reasoning which would lead them to add everyone to an umbrella google social network. The Verge saw a way to make money with relatively little investment on their part - a seductive offer. Soundcloud (presumably) found a business plan with a clear path to profit and evaluated it to be the best option.

In the end, all of these companies exist to make money. Those that do stick around to be criticised, those that fail are irrelevant! Buzzfeed is a great example because it's so polarising - it's criticised for having low quality content, and yet it's extremely popular, a perfect example of something that people clearly do actively want to use. If you had an isolated choice reduce your userbase by 20% but increase profit by 10x, that's an easy business decision to make.

I just find it difficult to make sweeping criticisms of these companies and the internet as a whole - these are independent evolutions, each of which can be criticised on their own demerits. Of course the internet will evolve to consist mostly of what the majority wants - this isn't inherently good or bad.
It's linked in the article, here is more links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9960276
Show HN: Experiment of conversation-tree interface using HN API
Hello HN!

The other night I experimented a little bit with the HN API and with a conversation-tree interface.

While I enjoy reading comments on HN and Reddit, there are a few things I don’t like about the current visualizations, where every new level of comments is slightly indented compared to its parent:

- If you want to read the conversation where every item is the top rated reply, you have to read diagonally, going down and right. This doesn’t seem natural (though it feels natural now since I trained on that).

- Given an item, if you want to read the next top rated item on the same level, you have to scroll past all of the subtree of the current element. On reddit you can just close the current item using [–], but on HN there is no such option.

I tried to make an experiment with an interface where comments at the same level are at the same height in the page, but only one path to the leaf (one thread) is shown and the remaining tree is outside the viewport. For every item, it’s possible to visualize one of its siblings and its thread sliding in the whole subtree (actually only a path to a leaf).

If the description was not clear, you can find the running example here: http://hntree.ml

I tried to use it for a few days on mobile, and it seems usable.

Since it seems like a pretty natural way of visualizing tree-like conversations, does anyone know if a similar visualization is used anywhere else?
Do you find it easier/harder to follow a conversation with this UI compared to the standard one?
In Chrome right click the CAPTCHA image, click "Search Google for this image", copy and paste the resulting text search back as the results.
So what's their revenue model, if it's not being the new middleman?
Android Stagefright bug: MMS attack affects 'one billion' phones
Until we have a system on the internet that everyone accepts that allows for a collection of a small fee to access things (posts, songs, photos, etc) ads will never go away. Of course no one will ever agree on such a system, or even worse it will be owned by a big for profit company.
But that's not the FCC's problem.
Money is just a tool to separate the value of goods and services from the goods and services themselves, allowing us to trade and chain-link them - it's not inherently bad.

For instance, I can't obtain my bread from the baker by trading my scientific publications with him, because he is not interested in turbomachinery acoustics. But a chain of value-trading is established linking funding companies, their customers, me, all the way to the baker using this tool.

He can continue the chain by purchasing a TV without needing to send X amount of bread to Samsung. Also, he can't store bread without going stale and worthless, but he can store money. Amazing invention! I doubt complex economies and products could be feasible without it.

As for the "wrong turn" of the internet, I think it's just the transition from amateur to professional, same as it happened with sports in the XX century:

> Before the advent of the Open era of tennis competitions in April 1968, only amateurs were allowed to compete in established tournaments, including the four Grand Slams. There was no prize money and players were compensated for travel expenses only [Wikipedia]

Nowadays people can (and does) live by practicing a sport or publishing content on the internet, so it is only normal that the strategy has changed into a more business-oriented focus.
Jeff Greenspan: From Anti-NSA Pranks to the World’s Most Exclusive Website
I saw one that was like some curves and lines and it clearly spelled out "dip", but apparently that was wrong! I really want to know what that one was.
Everyone is chiming in on this point, so I don't think I wrote it clearly enough. I would be willing to pay $1.50 for a song if it were through a known party, like Amazon Payments or PayPal. I've bought lots of music through Amazon. I'm not going to risk $1.50 to an unknown website. Additionally, my expectations as a consumer have been set to pay 99 cents per track, so to me, in the current atmosphere, $1.50 seems like it's too much, even though to the artist it might not be. The other issue I didn't touch on is DRM. Do I get the MP3 to keep forever if I pay? Most times, no.
Browsers don't support WebCL yet and their asm.js is single-threaded. And their auto-vectorization abilities also might be questionable. I don't see how it could possibly compete with things NNs running on a GPU.

"Fast" might simply refer to efficient algorithms implemented in C?
“First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado…Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired,” explains Stewart Butterfield, the boss of Slack, a two-year-old software company with a $2.8 billion valuation, quoting from David Mamet’s play “Glengarry Glen Ross”.

Except he isn't actually quoting from the play because that quote and the whole Alec Baldwin character don't exist in the play. They were added when Mamet converted Glengarry Glen Ross the play into Glengarry Glen Ross the movie. It's a really interesting story, actually.

http://www.avclub.com/article/why-iglengarry-glen-rossi-alec...
Does anyone else feel that there's something terribly odd going on when restricting something needs to be an extension?

IMHO it should be a configuration option, per-site, and off by default. WebRTC also isn't the only thing that applies to.
> up to
I tried to send a few images in google reverse image search and it works, so you can defeat the captcha by downloading the image and grabbing the best guess
Easy to Read List of FTP Commands That's Printer Friendly
But those weapons exist and research continues. They are just not used (at the moment).

You could argue that a state would own an AI and just not use it to direct attaks.
The Ultimate Guide to Data Quality and Business Intelligence
Privacy is not an absolute to be maximized at all costs. Do you have blacked out windows, or do you concede that the practical day-to-day infringement of your privacy is so minuscule and so easily mitigated by window shades that it's not worth the trade-off?
It's amazing that go-fuzz found 137 bugs in the standard library. The design is based on American Fuzzy Lop (http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/)

Dmitry Vyukov gave a great talk at Gophercon on go-fuzz and other dynamic analysis tools for go. Slides: http://go-talks.appspot.com/github.com/dvyukov/go-fuzz/slide...
Here's my experience with this sort of change: You have exactly one usage where you NEED the update. After deciding to make it you've identified a few other places where you can use the updated code.

The Right Way (TM) to make that change, then, is to make only the change to the result type in the first commit (along with the pattern matching necessary to ignore it), followed by a commit for each place that the updated result type can be usefully used.

Change the code without changing the behavior: i.e. REFACTORING. Run the tests, verify you didn't break anything, then start writing tests for the behavior you wish to change, followed by changing that behavior.

If you think you're at atoms you probably haven't seen strings.
I may possibly be the best person in the world to comment on this particular statement. Given that: no, this isn't going to happen in the near future.

"Films on demand" - some aspects of this are near-future plausible given existing script, mocap and voice acting. Simple programmatic cinematography is just about possible, and AI editing is getting better. 5 years away, maybe, for sitcom / soap-opera equivalent lighting and cinematography. A LOT longer before you're replacing Roger Deakins, though.

"Photo-realistic" - photorealistic CGI films have been just around the corner for 15 years now and continue to be so. Proof-of-concept 15 second renders are doable, feature-length films with non-humans are doable (albeit with a LOT of human intervention), but 90 minutes of CGI humans is a lot harder.

"Characters" - moulding their appearance is almost doable now. Motion is a lot harder - we've got semi-programmatic facial animation but it's a bit rubbish. Programmatic body animation is getting there. Programmatic voice acting is a Really Hard Problem and I'm not aware of anyone making any significant moves forward in that area.

"Unique scripts" - no-one has demonstrated anything close to an AI scriptwriter at this point. It may well be that's a problem which requires strong AI to solve.

We might be looking at Hollywood being replaced completely at some point, but I doubt it'll happen in the next 20 years.

However, what IS a huge threat to Hollywood is the increased power of indie filmmakers with technological assists. I write about that sort of thing over on my blog at http://www.strangecompany.org/blog/

One filmmaker today can do things that would have required a crew of 20 back in 1993. The cost of filmmaking is plummeting. And that certainly is a threat to Hollywood.
exactly, this is the first thing that popped into my mind as well
Darkthrone captcha is broken.
I think the other business model is that of donations. The obvious example being Wikipedia, which has done incredibly well to not have ads or a subscription service and still be top 5/10 most visited site on the planet (I don't know what it's exact 'rank' is)
Tweet to Jeff Greenspan - maybe that will be his next self-directed project on he winds down his assault on the NSA...
That is correct.

However, only if there is effectively the API service in the middle, making your AGPL program internal. But if you are exposing an AGPL program (let's say a database) as-a-service, you cannot have an API service in between (unless you'd re-implement all the API yourself) and hence exposing directly the AGPL database, in which case you are bound by the license with respect to the users.
The most recent one looks like "Wood Pestilence", haha. But I can't find a band with that name, so it must be wrong.
Show HN: A webapp using OpenResty (Lua) to randomly decide where to eat lunch
Here's a radical idea: pay for the services you love to use.

The author mentions she pays for an NYTimes subscription presumably because she gets a lot of value from their content. I pony up the same for a handful of websites and services that I choose to support. It's certainly not a democracy but there is some logic to "voting with your wallet".

I hate ads as much as the next person but one thing I hate even more is a great service or product going the way of the dodo because there's no viable way to make something free forever.
These are really hard for me to even read. I've looked at a couple samples and I can't figure out what they say.
There's no such concept of Storage Engines/Plugins in PostgreSQL. So it looks more unlikely this could happen in short time.
I resubmitted this as it didn't get any attention or comments 3 years ago. I thought it was an interesting read and wanted to hear peoples experiences with or opinions on selling source code.
It's wildly different. Consider one thing: portfolio theory. Top VCs actually expect to lose all of their money on some (if not most) investments. While this becomes less true at later stages, the fact is everyone is hedging their bets and are diversified in a way (within tech). Assuming all of technology investing doesn't crumble at once, which it won't, so long as the entire thing isn't built in smoke, Morris and dreams.

That's why the fact that there are real revenues and profits driving everything this time matters. Most companies show promise to bring in cold hard cash, if they're not doing so already.
A CD might have 10+ tracks on it, but it's a fixed bundle of 10+ tracks chosen by the artist, so of course the per-track cost on a CD is going to be lower than for individual tracks.
Ask HN: Is it worth building a map overlay creation service (heatmaps etc)?
A while back I made an iOS app that displays crime data as a heatmap.

There were relatively few tools for producing good quality overlays, especially with large datasets. Google maps overlays are great but limited to ~10,000 points which forces you to summarize and split the data.

I made a few apps that pull the dataset from S3, create the heatmap overlays (100,000+ pngs), optimize them, zip into batches and upload them back to S3 for the app to use.

I've looked recently and there still aren't any easy ways of producing overlay images - there is openheatmap but the images it creates are fairly ugly and the user experience appears to be pretty poor.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uls195x89r57rh7/ss_3.5_all.png?raw=1 is an example of the sort of heatmaps I'm producing but it would be simple to produce more overlay styles.

For v1, I’d make a user friendly way of loading data and demo the overlay on google or apple maps. Producing the images takes a lot of processing so eventually I would autoscale but for the POC I was planning to limit it to a fixed set of servers.

I could offer apps that let you pick your dataset and see your overlay in a real app. I'd also provide code for iOS, Android and web.

I was planning to charge (S3 + bandwidth) * a small markup initially but this could be plan based later.

I'd expose an API so it could be automated.

I'm not sure how to work out if people would pay for this service - it's a fairly niche thing but I would have used it for my app had it existed. I think it could be useful for journalists or anyone plotting large geographical datasets.

I'd estimate I could get a functional and acceptable looking MVP up in around 2 weeks.

My question is this really: is it worth, or how do I work out if it's worth, building this service?

Thanks in advance for any advice or opinions!
http://metalcaptcha.heavygifts.com/api/newCaptcha.php?rnd=0....

First one I got :)

Heh, they're not shareable :(
How machine learning can help to increase the productivity of a digital marketer
Is it this broker usually the property mgr. to begin with?
Approximately nobody outside the tech industry uses VPNs to hide their real IPs (the number of people using VPNs, period, is relatively tiny compared to the overall population of the internet); approximately everybody who uses the internet uses HTTPS.
Despite Tony Blair pushing through changes to allow corporate bodies to use defamation laws, it's still pretty rare and an uphill struggle. The McLibel case showed how dangerous it is for a company to resort to that sort of litigation.

They spent millions, had an array of hilarious 'mom & apple pie' witnesses flown in from the US and managed to lose on many points (but not all) and were left with a useless judgment which they can never collect on as they were stupid enough to sue two people with no assets or any prospect of having any.

They did however, become a laughing stock in the legal world and have an array of TV programs and plays, mocking them mercilessly. Plus some of the, till then, unproven, claims of disgusting practice ended up being proven and therefore repeatable without risk - which was not the case beforehand.

Defamation actions are never a good way to go. Even winning one does not generally help you much.
I feel old. This article begins by pining for the good, old-fashioned 'net of 2012. I know that I'm not the most attentive person on this topic, but honestly I don't feel like the big picture has changed much in years. Services like Twitter started up, grew wildly, and then looked for some way to make money for pretty much that whole time. Social networks sprout up; some make it, some don't. Big companies do some cool things and some cruddy ones. Lean new browsers burst onto the scene and then gradually bloat. Advertisers find new ways to intrude into formerly pristine conversations. (The rise of clickbait sites isn't even remotely as disruptive today as the rise of spam and sporge posts was to Usenet, just for instance.)

So I suppose my point is that I don't see any reason to think that the sky is falling today. Yes, some beloved sites and valuable modes of interaction are changing. But it's not the end of the internet: this has been going on since the beginning. We'll adapt, as we always have, especially if folks who care about creating vibrant communities and rich flows of information keep finding ways to innovate.