hipsters_unite

Also, c'mon, if Facebook has your data then the NSA has your data... I wouldn't want any of this type of info on there.

There's a lot of stigma in music around making money, it's pretty weird. I remember a pretty successful alternative musician once telling me that you couldn't survive these days if you divorced being creative and being entrepreneurial.

Good comment. Yeah, the point about Rihanna is interesting but does skirt something pretty clear about the larger music business today - that there's been a dash towards the lowest common denominator in mainstream music. You hear it on the radio and see it everywhere in the culture, that what's being backed and pushed is tending towards homogeneity.

At University my mentor worked (and still works) at Sony, and this at the time was his big grievance - that the so-called 'indie' bands (in reality, larger alternative bands) were the ones being completely marginalized in favour of something that would be easier to sell on broad-demographic radio programming.

If you think about the UK radio market now, this makes sense - Global Radio owns everything, and it's the same playlist of forgettable pop music nationwide. I remember being in America a couple of years ago and finding a station that was playing things like Smashing Pumpkins, NIN and some modern math/post-rock stuff... apart from BBC Radio 6 Music (publicly owned) you just don't see that over here.

There's a big glass ceiling for musicians, and while it's not going away, it's still a difficult reality to face for those that are either semi-professional or say, tour a lot - in order to keep playing music they have obligations that stop them also holding down 'proper' jobs, and you see this taking its toll of great bands (off the top of my head, Reuben would be a classic example).

I honestly think that while this has every right to be here - and be discussed here - given the last couple months' worth of revelations it's pretty offensive nevertheless.

Obviously SIGINT for a nation isn't a bad thing per se, but when they infringe on the core democratic principles of the state they claim to represent then that's just a disgusting abuse of power.

I've found particular mileage in it recently during arguments over the UK porn law. Haven't used it this much since university...

Well, that's exactly it. I thought "oh, hacking and/or botnets?" then read the article and thought "why wasn't that called 'New Russian Server tech gains market share' or something a little less pugilistic?"

What a ridiculous article title. Generates so much discursive noise and adds nothing to the subject of the article.

I think he means a second chamber elected by voters. That's certainly what I mean.

I meant 'lobby' as in 'club' or 'group', and I agree. I'm all for an elected second chamber rather than the current system.

A policeman joining the police state lobby. Well, I never.

Exactly. When I learned to code I did it on a laptop monitor and did a lot of switching tabs and workspaces. As for keyboard shortcuts, rarely have I found myself blazing through anything quickly enough that what I'd probably think of as more esoteric shortcuts have saved more than two or three seconds of time. Then again, I suppose it's just a question of workflow.

I thought this current government couldn't sicken me further with its conduct in this ongoing fiasco; clearly I was wrong.

Ubuntu at home and for personal projects and OSX at work. When you're at work it's easier to just go with what the majority of the team already uses.

Exactly. I've got an Rdio subscription but I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. As a small label owner where we put in more investment than we've ever gotten out, it's crazy to see a thousand streams generating a couple of pounds given that those are all lost sales... but you think 'ah well, at least people are listening to it'.

Also, as a commenter below noted, pay-what-you-want is not new at all. Off the top of my head The Crimea shifted about 100,000 free downloads of their second LP after leaving Warners, quite a bit before In Rainbows.[0] As a second aside, I interviewed a pretty big artist a year or so after whose backing band knew Radiohead and, though this is hearsay obviously, they suggested the reason In Rainbows wasn't toured much beyond festivals was lack of tour support capital. I always sort of suspected that they fudged the numbers on sales/profit for that record, so that could be an indicator, who knows.

[0] http://www.thecrimea.net/products/502351-secrets-of-the-witc...

Yes, but £27,000+ minimum of debt for an undergraduate degree is still a lot of money. Plus cost of living is very high for most places in the UK where there's lots of employment to be found.

In the UK pre-Thatcher the highest rate for income tax was about 83% as memory serves. Since that was canned income inequality has gone up a lot[0], but (and the article I think draws out this point) it's wealth inequality that really institutionalizes the divide.

[0]http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jun/27/century-...

I was wondering about this, sites like LyricsFreak and all the others have been on the internet since I was in primary school. I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. Plus for annotation there's better projects like hypothes.is

The Rails 3 Way was the book that cracked it for me. Hartl's tutorial is a great start, but Obie's was the book that actually hit the 'why' on the head.

For most jobs in the UK I think this will still be the norm. The last application I wrote was exactly like this - Letter with 2-page CV, GitHub and links in the footer.

It's absolutely shocking timing, they should be ashamed of themselves. What's concerning is if they don't put it into a bill but rather chop it up and just push it through piecemeal on ministerial initiative.

Yep, tried reading and then gave up because the menu was too obtrusive.

shameless plug! Yeah, I go there for Bootstrap Business Club and it's a good space.

Manchester are on it. Free wi-fi in a number of places and MadLab. As a resident I'm not that surprised :)

To be fair to Udacity, I did the CS101 course to get a reasonable intro to CS concepts and found it really useful. Doing CS262 now, and it's all very applicable to understanding the deeper workings of the code.

I visited CERN a few weeks ago and totally lost it when I saw that first NeXT workstation. So awesome.

That was exactly my first thought - I use rubular all the time and it's a great scratchpad for regexes.

Yeah, I had thought that was a done deal... clearly not.

I've thought this for years. Something like Flattr, except, y'know, that works and people use.

I guess it depends what you're doing with the video... most of the time I'm happy to use vimeo - as then you get stats etc through their player as well as discoveries through that site as well.

How is this better than using Vimeo (or YouTube, for that matter)?