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CopThis - San Francisco

CopThis is the online retailer for music merchandise. We help fans discover and buy authentic gear from thousands of amazing artists; from the Beatles and Guns N Roses to Kanye West and Lady Gaga.

Who are we?

A diverse team of technical experts, fans, hustlers, perfectionists and friends. We love collaborating, moving fast and shipping products.

You

You aren't a rockstar. We work with plenty of them and they typically don't make great engineers.

You are a web or mobile engineer that can help us build great products for iOS, Android and the web. You are collaborative, enjoy working in a fast-paced environment and like solving hard, interesting problems.

You have a proclivity for building and a bias towards action.

What We Offer

Working at CopThis is a rare opportunity to solve problems for some of the worlds most talented artists as well as (potentially at least) millions of fans.

Daily interaction with colleagues who have built massively successful companies, products used by hundreds of millions of people and personally collaborated with some of the most successful artists in the world.

We recognize there are many paths that can be taken to becoming a great developer and value working with people from diverse backgrounds.

And we are competitive in all the normal ways Job descriptions say.

For more info email us at jobs@copthis.com

The author's theory allows not just for insincere entrepreneurs but also incompetent ones. No matter how strongly an entrepreneur believes his idea to be a billion dollar business, it's very possible that it isn't, even if he's able to convince investors (and himself) that it could be based on some superficial metrics.

I'm frustrated that Pandora is fighting to pay less to the people who make the music we all love. The rates are already tiny relative to other sources of income for song writers.

I'm frustrated that ASCAP was angling for an arbitrarily larger percentage of revenue from Pandora based on going for nice looking numbers (2.5% retroactively for 2013, and 3% by 2015 in according to [1]).

But mostly I'm frustrated that congress and the courts are setting numbers when the market is perfectly capable of working this sort of thing out on its own. Legislation of terrestrial radio makes some sense given that the airwaves are allocated for public use. Internet radio is over pipes the government has no control over, though, except when the bits turn into music. Oh, and only when that music is chosen by someone other than the user. What?

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/14/ruling-on-pandora-asc...

Say you were a shady Bitcoin banker with 5000 BTC in deposits, and you wanted to steal 1000 while still looking like you're on the up-and-up by implementing this idea.

First, you announce that you only have 4000 BTC in deposits. Then you build this tree, and at the very bottom layer you add a node with a -1000 balance. You pair that node with your (or a conspirator's) real node holding more than 1000 so that any node above yours (read: everyone else) sees a positive balance at every point in the tree. Everyone can verify they're in the tree, the numbers add up to what you claimed publicly, but you're now successfully running a fractional reserve! And the only way to uncover such a scheme would be to publish all of the balances for every account.

Am I missing something?

Edit for clarity: the node you pair with is your own, so that no real user sees the negative sum.

There are pieces of Python 3 that are syntax errors in Python 2. And there are Python 2-isms that are valid syntax in Python 3 but have a different interpretation. It's not as simple as importing certain features (which creates a sort of language version hybrid).

The idea to allow one project to switch between Python 2 and Python 3 for individual files is more interesting, but practically speaking would lead to sort of a mess.

I may be appealing to emotion there, but it's certainly not misleading (nor is your claim about Satanists, though I think the proportion going to them is very very small). It's true!

Do you disagree that it would be better for the $10/mo a subscriber pays to go only to the artists they listen to?

The projection graph does assume flat physical sales. But it's a stacked chart.

Paying to paying is not completely unreasonable, but imagine an airline using the average fares of its Airline Club members (who are often flying first class) vs the fares of average Americans. It's easy to inflate the number when the group of people you're talking about are rich and predisposed to being more engaged.

edit to your edit: It's not clear to me why you would be willing to listen to Spotify for free, but then buy music on the side. Anecdotally, I've never met anyone who does that consistently. I'd be interested to hear contradicting anecdotes though.

Beyonce's latest release on iTunes sold over 1 million copies in less than a week at a very premium $15.99 a pop [1]. And there's no need to pirate it, as videos of her best songs are already heading to VEVO/YouTube now [2]. It's a win-win, and Spotify's not a huge part of that story.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/101283857

[2] http://www.vevo.com/watch/beyonce/drunk-in-love-explicit/USS...

There's a Reddit thread between various users and keltranis, (one of the more senior coders Reddit ever had) explaining the code here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/td4tz/reddits_a...

And a quotation for those not wanting to click:

  *ProfDrMorph* 2 points 1 year ago
  So that means all posts in all subreddits (when browsing
  'hot') are sorted this way:
  1. all posts with more upvotes than downvotes with the
  order determined by age (newer posts are preferred) and
  popularity
  2. all posts with the same number of up- and downvotes in
  whatever order the database returns them
  3. all posts with less upvotes than downvotes with the
  order determined by age (older posts are preferred) and
  popularity (posts with a lot more downvotes are preferred)
  Because that's what the _hot() function implies if the
  sorting algorithm uses it as a 'key'.

  *ketralnis* 2 points 1 year ago
  Yes that's accurate

I think most people would call the rock stars cashing out "talented." Why not treat entertainment creativity the same way you would code? (Especially since both fall under the same copyright law?)

Are you willing to make the inverse (and I think more interesting) argument, that reducing their respective skin in the game would indeed make the world better?

I'd be interested to hear examples of professions where you think we want risk-averse people involved in inherently risky activities without skin in the game. Are these activities beneficial to society?

Normally tptacek would be right here to shill for himself, but I don't see him around, so I'll say it for him:

If you're interested in learning about the ideas in this piece via practical attacks you perform yourself, you should definitely check out his company Matasano's Crypto Challenge:

http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/

I've gone through the whole thing, and I can report that it's incredibly fun and incredibly enlightening. And you won't have to read a book to figure out that what Thomas is talking about here is legit.

The copyright here is essentially nullified by the compulsory licensing. Without congress, Pandora would have to negotiate directly with the labels (see Spotify's much higher payouts and upfront licensing fees), and with congress, the labels can't even take their music away from Pandora if they don't like the price.

If, simultaneously, congress removed the compulsory licensing radio had to pay (or, alternately, raised it to match Pandora's on a per-listener basis) and the FCC also removed restrictions around Payola, record labels big and small would probably be happy to subsidize the difference for radio stations because radio (unlike Pandora) is super-effective at advertising higher-revenue-generating products like local concerts and physical CDs.

Why's the price matter? Any store that buys merchandise it can't sell at a profit is making a basic business mistake.

Separately, to your point about unfairness, I suspect that both radio and internet streaming prices are lower than what the market would set if the government didn't intervene.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you claiming that what's stopping the average artist from selling as many records as Justin Timberlake is collusion among the major record labels?

If I told you there was an e-commerce company without a profitable year in over a decade of existence despite federally-mandated price ceilings placed on their suppliers, you'd be incredulous. If I then added that the same company was lobbying in Washington to get the price ceiling lowered, the pitchforks would be out.

But then mention it's a company selling music, and people shrug, "Oh, well music should be free anyway... The artists should be happy they get anything."

These changes seem like an excellent step. But it's worth noting that even under the new proposal Aaron would have likely run afoul of the "access without authorization" component. I'm also not sure the new language around repeat offenders would have made a difference given the plea bargain, but I could imagine it would have made the maximum sentence sound less scary.

In addition to the two changes listed by Ars Technica, there's another tweak making it clear that the court should consider the "fair market" value of the information, which I guess for JSTOR would have still looked quite high.

You can't. The right way to spend the 3 minutes is to read the docs. [1] [2]

Also, just because it doesn't work the way NPM does doesn't mean it doesn't work.

[1] http://golang.org/doc/code.html#remote

[2] http://golang.org/cmd/go/#hdr-Remote_import_path_syntax (linked from [1])

"Golang dependency hell in Haunts The Manse game" is not only a very editorialized title for this link, but it's also factually incorrect. Here are some choice quotes about the codebase that have nothing to do with dependencies in Go:

Syntax errors:

  "Firstly, the source simply doesn't compile."

Performance problems:

   "...it's horribly slow."

Bad version control:

  "... the original code [has] ... potentially significant differences"

Those sorts of mistakes seem consistent with the type of coder who wouldn't set aside the 3 minutes it takes to understand Go's dependency system and either use it correctly or build a super-simple makefile to pull the correct versions of code from elsewhere.

Also, pedantic but worth noting: Golang is not the name of the language.

Not to start a language war, but this blog post demonstrates two things Python got right that Ruby got wrong.

First, in Python, there's only one way to express a boolean "and". The && operator is left out.

Second, this post demonstrates a danger of allowing assignment via '=' evaluate to an expression (granted with less weird precedence rules it wouldn't turn out as bad in this case).

Near the bottom of this article is an interesting post mortem of RethinkDB's transparent salary policy. When it was posted years ago [1] folks here took pretty kindly to it, though some were skeptical [2].

I'm kinda disappointed (who doesn't like to know?) but also not very surprised that it didn't work out. Negotiation doesn't work super well if the other players have complete information about your strategy.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100722162634/http://rethinkdb.c...

[2a] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210336

[2b] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190533

The fascinating tl;dr: The British lost their English accents around the turn of the 19th century. As far as rhotic r's go, Americans still mostly speak the way Brits and Americans did in the 18th century.

One solution to the fmt.Println problem is not to use it at all. There's a built in println function that works alright for debugging messages and requires no import.

http://play.golang.org/p/y5XX4RDTW5

I'm not sure why it's possible to change the division sign, but using a colon (":") to indicate a fraction is confusing given that it's generally used for odds.

  ( 0.1 + 0.2 )/( 1/3 * 12 ) = 3/40
  3:40 = "three to forty odds" = 3/43

The New York Times style guide recommends periods after the letters if you pronounce the letters individually. [1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Pronunciation-dependent...

This is a good opportunity to remind people that reading the title of a patent and looking at the pictures does not suffice for understanding what's actually being patented. You should get in the habit of actually reading the claims, since that's the substance of the patent.

By my reading of the five claims here, in order to be sued for this patent, you would need at least three sections of hair in your combover process (back and 2+ sides), you would need to comb over the back part before the sides, and you would need to put your hand down on each combed section as you applied hair spray.

Also, this dude would have to catch you doing it.

Deep within the 1000+ comments on the accompanying reddit thread is a really interesting fact: Reddit is not (currently) profitable. [1]

I was already a reddit gold subscriber, but the fact that at the moment they're literally running into the red to provide cool stuff like the Obama AMA makes me want to subscribe again. Anyone looking for a reddit gold account?

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time...

The tl;dr of this article is that the author summarizes some really interesting leads on automated letter spacing, but so far hasn't come up with a winner. There are a number of loose ends in there that might be interesting for others to pick up and run with since he's made much of his code available.

Most promising to me is the concept of bubble kerning, which not only appears to work in the limited testing the author does here, but also meshes with my intuition about how to space letters.