alexophile

Many long before. Prior to Bernie, the classic stereotype of a redditor was a Ron Paul supporter and I'm sure it would still be skewing much more conservative if western conservatism hadn't completely degraded into nonsense. The demographics are evening out, but the dominant viewpoint is still a straight, white, college-educated male, which has traditionally been a strong predictor of conservative tendencies.

The demographics of reddit users probably do lean towards a more liberal/libertarian group, but r/politics certainly has no problem with bashing Democratic party members, employees, or appointees.

A quick search proves this out: there are tons of highly upvoted posts calling out Obama, Holder, both Clintons, Spitzer, Geithner etc. This is actually what fueled a lot of the fervor for Sanders - he brought together the disenchanted Paulite libertarians, lefter-than-Obama liberals, and anti-establishment independents.

But there's nothing about this tactic that prevents future action against AT&T. If anything, gp now has more advantageous legal standing as a customer and denied them the added revenue which was the point of the monopoly in the first place - especially if they still have to pay off the landlord.

I don't think opportunity is actually that difficult to describe, it seems to mostly be a product of labor markets. Either there's an untapped well of excess labor (like the post-war boom in Phoenix, AZ) or there are jobs in a high unemployment environment (like what's fueling growth in the bay area now).

In the case of Phoenix, they went from 99th in the US to 9th in about 30 years in large part due to the government building air force fields and pilot training camps. When everyone went back there after the war and realized they needed jobs, industry was happy to fill the gap because there was high competition among labor.

Similarly the bay has developed obviously because of tech, but for most of that early tech, the US government was the primary customer. Not just transistors, but before that, radio and telegraph research and operator training was done for/on behalf of the Navy.

That is all to say that the next step probably won't be fueled by some small-batch kickstarting program. People won't relocate en masse if they don't have long-term motivation. I think the best bet for inciting development of New Cities is mass investment by the government training people to do things like build and operate solar farms in the great plains, understand and combat coastline destruction in the gulf, etc.

If the government commits to buying clean energy and prioritizes investing in it's development, it can have a big say in where that happens and I think that's a great opportunity to rebuild dying old cities or start from scratch since so many people have abandoned those places already.

Obligatory "Wrestling Isn't Wrestling" plug - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYvMOf3hsGA

You should really watch the video because it's amazing, but the tl;dw is that WWE is a live-filmed TV show with stunts about an over-the-top wrestling league. The world in the league has magic and wizards and all sorts of outlandish fictional elements, but the show we're watching is a sort of meta-show about that world.

With that in mind, politics is taking on a lot of the characteristics of wrestling in that it's this meta show about itself that doesn't really resemble the underlying truth. The big difference though is that the underlying truth in politics is the real-life workings of government, not a magical world of wizards, undead, and feats of strength.

With regards to papering over reality in favor of a preferable narrative–an activity as old as recorded history–I think wrestling actually has a much more honest relationship with fiction and truth than most things.

If they were going to buy just a streaming service they should have bought Rdio. But–and this was kind of the focus of the article–Apple has an internal bias towards hardware. They saw a music-y hardware play with a huge markup and a ton of brand capital and went for it.

Nope they bought Beats Music too https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/05/28Apple-to-Acquire-...

I'm still having trouble nailing down the timeline on this, but it seems like, at some point there were two companies, both with access to the mosaic source and both rebuilding it from scratch. One of those companies had licensed it, the other hadn't. Obviously there's more to it than that, but in 1994, I can see how this would look to lawyers.

That said, I think public university research should all be public domain so we avoid this entirely, but there's a whole waterfall of other problems that come with that.

Also, as a graduate of UIUC, I'm curious about this bad rep. I know their entrepreneurship initiatives are pretty dismal but I still don't understand why that's a uni's job. All the cs/engineers that graduated when I did went straight into great jobs.

Actually the point was precisely the opposite. If you give marketing creative control of your transactional emails, you don't have to blast your users constantly to maintain their attention.

Yeah we like NPS a lot. Not only can you segment and specifically reach out to 9s and 10s, but you can dynamically fill your emails. So for example your standard footer could say "share for x bonus" if they're a 8-10, but "give feedback for x bonus" for <8.

direct link to that section: https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/guide#ch3-survey

He's not really deconstructing the word hacker in the sort of semiotic tradition that Derrida did in that he doesn't seem too concerned with what "hacker" itself actually means (or what meaning even is, etc), more so who has interest in redefining it in the way that it has been over the past 30 years.

For what it's worth, I think a similar study of the flattening of hippy culture into a one-dimensional caricature, could be quite relevant. A counter-cultural segment is stripped of elements critical of the mainstream and repackaged, undermining the validity of the original movement.

That said I think the author does sort of mix and match between the mainstreamification of a counter-culture for profit and the role technology plays in extracting huge amounts of wealth from the reformation of commerce and funneling it into the hands of relatively few.

I don't think human curation is "back" per se. There's just a difference in expectations.

When I listen to a radio show or a new playlist from a friend, I have a general understanding of their tastes and the taste of the audience that has elected to receive these recommendations. Arguably, the biggest thing here is that decision - you've subscribed to this person's taste and you are predisposed towards justifying that decision.

With a recommendation algorithm, it is reaching much higher, trying to give you personal recommendations. The relationship is more confrontational. I'm much more inclined to think "why this" when given an algorithmic recommendation, trying to reverse engineer it, instead of trusting a person's taste in curating a selection based on much broader criteria.

So I strongly believe in public schooling and the importance of education access for everyone, but I think this piece glosses over a few important links in the chain of events that lead to his success.

1) His father has a phd from MIT and founded a semiconductor manufacturer when DJ was 12, then went on to later become a VC.

2) The community college in question is De Anza College in Cupertino. This isn't just some random school that gave him the education to enter the previously unapproachable world of tech, Steve Wozniak went there.

We're still a long way from decoupling education and class. I think it's good that this case is being made, we just need to be more realistic when we talk about the successes we're seeing.

> But one executive involved in the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deals were private, said that participating artists were being granted shares in exchange for their good-faith efforts to supply exclusive content

I think the problem with an artist-owned platform is that I actually want the platform to be agnostic in terms of what is actually surfaced. When I open Rdio, I can see what's popular amongst everyone, my network, or just me. I don't want that to be affected by the owners also being the product.

What really concerns me is the double-talk.

> “I just want to be an alternative,” Jay Z said. “They don’t have to lose for me to win.”

But the strategy is clearly going to be largely based on exclusive content. This doesn't mean Rdio and spotify lose, it means the fans lose because they have to spend the time and energy they would normally put into enjoying music towards weighing the different streaming options.

I guess Jay said it best: "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man." That's the artist that owns this "artist-owned" platform.

Hi there, I helped put this guide together and this is totally something we have in mind pretty much all the time (when you tell people you work for an email startup, you're kind of forced to.) But this is actually the kind of email we're trying to prevent. I usually refer to it as "The Other Spam."

I've had multiple users of ours talk about how they tried starting newsletters to resurrect dropped users but got more unsubs/spam reports than renewals. Some even got hit up by their ESPs for a spike in spam reports affecting their domain credibility. There should probably be a more prominent section on this, but we do talk about it in our blog a lot.

Here's what I usually say:

1) Always have a separate opt-in for product updates, off by default, ideally with some sense of frequency. Failing that, send product updates only to paying/active customers.

2) If you have an onboarding drip campaign, once it runs its course, if they haven't engaged, let them go.

3) From there on, all other communications should pretty much be transactional, sent to the opt-in group, or based on some pre-qualification that the user is still interested.

These are all things that we try and make really simple in our product and exercise ourselves. Part of sending better email is just not sending the shitty ones.

On the personal side, I also just add tags to my email address when I sign up for something knowing that I'm just poking around so I can easily filter their follow-ups. I also appreciate this from a lead validation angle, because I can filter email addys with a + in them from our funnel metrics.

Something worth noting: if you have good content, the placement is super easy, so if you find a good writer, get more than 1 story from them. Maybe a press release, an interview-with-the-founders kind of thing, and a top-howevermany things list comparing you to some others in the space.

Once you have an arsenal of content, find sites like forbes, techmeme, and the like that publish non-staff writers (they usually have a "write for us" link somewhere) and reach out to some of the independent writers. Do a little googling and see where else they publish.

Once you get an article up, push it as hard as you can. Blast your friends and family to like, share, upvote, and whatnot. If you don't have friends or family, buy some. You want that article to look valuable (and it should be if you spent enough money on it) because this will be the foundation of your relationships with other bloggers.

Shameless plug: these first couple steps are what my company does - email's in my profile.

This sounds like a good idea until you think about where that money goes. The reason PACs need money is for media buys. I would be much more comfortable with a 10k ad buy to oppose Lamar Smith if the mechanism for turning that money into influence wasn't owned by a handful of companies, all of which give much greater sums to represent the opposing side.

In the end, the problem isn't the PACs as much as it is the fact that the process takes place on private property. It's like two armies showing up for a battle and each having to pay a fee at the door to somebody who was then allowed to spend that take on weapons for the side of their choosing.

I imagine the difference is in how you listen to music. Having been a staunch evangelist for Rdio, I've found that the people that really fall in love with it are usually album listeners. If you prefer to listen in more of a radio type setting, Spotify would probably be better due to the improved playlist functionality.

So I guess it comes down to whether you're trying to discover in the sense of finding new artists, or just finding new music to listen to in the moment.

"Apple built Keynote because everyone hates PowerPoint."

While I believe that's psychologically sound, Machiavelli's advice was specifically for a singular figure head to maintain order and control for as long as possible (i.e. indefinitely.) Normally, this is exactly the situation a CEO is in, but if he's announcing that he's leaving the company, his goals may differ from those of Lorenzo the Magnificent (as I imagine Machiavelli would have offered different advice to Romulus Augustus.)

I don't know if this still goes on, but the guys at turntablelab.com would have live DJs in their office and a video chat (forget what service it was on) on mute. It was especially cool because most of the listeners were also DJs that bought from TTL, so you could talk shop and learn a lot while listening to sweet tunes.

That false comparison has always bothered me. Preying on the weak for fun instead of profit doesn't make you right, it makes you sound like a sociopath.

>Try to keep your paragraphs to a maximum of 3-5 sentences long

I kind of recoiled in horror at this one. Whenever I'm working on my own resume or helping someone else with theirs, I go by one simple rule: your goal is to get the person reading to the END without going pffft. That's it. If you can get them to the bottom of the page without losing them, you'll be one huge step closer to an interview - if, along the way, you've proven that you're at least minimally competent, you've done everything a resume is meant to do.

One thing I did that caused a notable increase in responses was to put a dotted line down the right side, with horizontal lines at each break (school, work, volunteer) leading out from it. People were more likely to get to the end if they were following a little dotted path. And if someone reads your whole resume, that's a pretty good start.

Surely, but if a journalist does even the slightest bit of homework on his past interviews they could very easily upgrade to something like "I know you've said you focus on the team rather than the idea when selecting applicants..." and go on to ask something more substantive or insightful - or not.

They could even follow up with something like "how do you know" or "were there some specific failures that lead to this policy" and then they could at least have a conversation. As it stands, I could do a comparable interview using b-roll.

semi-related: do you ever get tired of interviews that amount to "So what do you look for in a company?" "Well we look at the founders, more than the idea."? I'm always impressed at how genial you are in answering the world's most predictable questions in these interviews with big business outlets.

I think there's a really strong disconnect here that is really common around HN - basically, do you really want to change the world? It seems like people have a tendency to answer "yes" to this question because the alternative makes you look dispassionate.

This line of thinking makes the assumption that ambition is a necessary prerequisite for efficacy. I'm not exactly in a position to qualify this statement, but I would guess that the people who make the greatest positive changes in the world weren't necessarily setting out to have a huge impact, they were just doing what they knew to be right.

Because everyone loves statistically unproven case studies, I offer Penny Arcade. PA launched a webcomic in 98. Five years later, they launched Child's Play - a charity that has raised ~$9M to fund research and facilities for children's hospitals.

When asked about it, Mike mentioned that, when they started Child's Play, neither of them were parents so they didn't know how effective their efforts would be, they just knew it was the right thing to do.

People sometimes guffaw at this, but I can't recommend Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land enough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEVGQKwKeCc They skip over several centuries of shifting and tweaking between the triad and the modern (western) major scale, but it's a great visual answer at least to your second question.

>whether it is a good idea to try to introduce students to the acoustic/mathematical derivation of the scale

I did this when I was teaching my roommate about theory, but he has a degree in math, so it seemed like the logical approach.

That said, teaching theory is incredibly good practice, so I like to do it whenever possible, and in my experience, the best time to explain the mathematical foundations of music is when they start to ask questions about it. It's like the matrix - if they're not ready for it, it's just too much.

I've always liked the pyramid analogy (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundame...) - once you have quality content, you can build traffic by using higher order strategies. The better you are at creating the former, the less you have to rely on the latter.