aston

You may be interested in this newer paper, reconciling the work of Killingsworth and Kahneman & Deaton. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

I don't think you want this, but just in case you do :)

    def encapsulate(mod):
        import types

        out = types.SimpleNamespace()

        def replace_global_scope(f):
            # via https://stackoverflow.com/a/1144561, but tweaked for py3
            return types.FunctionType(
                f.__code__,
                out.__dict__,
                f.__name__,
                f.__defaults__,
                f.__closure__,
            )

        for name in dir(mod):
            val = getattr(mod, name)
            if callable(val):
                val = replace_global_scope(val)
            setattr(out, name, val)
        return out

You might like Go-Chainable: https://github.com/neurocollective/go_chainable

gron outputs Javascript!

This is like when you walk into a super complicated legacy code base and immediately have the one magic architectural change that will simplify everything...once you rewrite it from the ground up.

The music metadata situation is pretty bad, but the source of the problem is not really carelessness or greed or avoidance of responsibility (although those are all true). The true source of music metadata complication is the insanely complex copyright regime that music operates under. It's a legacy codebase about a century in the making that is constantly being patched up by congress, mostly by trying to change who is being protected from whom. (Among the folks favored at different times: labels, publishing companies, performing artists, song writing artists, radio stations, streaming music services, live venues, ...).

Perfect compliance with these laws is effectively impossible, so everyone is just doing the best they can. And any attempts congress makes to change how things work end up being gigantic legal battles because it's a zero-sum game and the more money in the "right" hands (e.g. these artists being ripped off) is less money in the other "right" hands (e.g. the unprofitable streaming service we all love).

This is a great example of what Marc Andreesen called the Moby Dick theory of big companies [1]. Paraphrased, the behavior of any big company is largely inexplicable when viewed from the outside. And from the inside, too!

[1] https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part5.html

Should lawmakers resist? There's no lack of housing and infrastructure projects worth spending on, state-wide.

Blake Ross (co-founder of Mozilla) has a great post about his journey with Aphantasia here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...

A nice video explainer involving the authors of this paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCrtk-pyP0I

Spotify skipped their lockout period, with pretty boring results.

Here's the simplest way to understand where your money goes (assuming you're a subscriber, otherwise where the ad revenue earned on your eyeballs goes): For each song you stream, that artist gets a fixed fraction of a cent. Unless you listen to an atypically large number of hours of music each month, there will be leftover money. That remaining money goes into a pot allocated across every artist on the streaming service in proportion to their total number of streams.

So, roughly, the policy as it stands pays the biggest artists—or, really, the labels of the biggest artists—more money. Those big artists and labels are powerful enough that the chance such a change will be made is basically nil.

The reality is a little more complicated because the fixed per-stream rate is set based on the total number of streams, but to a first order approximation this is it.

Your dates are sorted incorrectly. W2010 happens before S2010, etc.

The distribution by batch is pretty interesting:

   S2011 10
   W2012 10
   S2012 9
   S2014 7
   W2013 7
   S2013 6
   W2016 6
   W2015 6
   S2016 5
   W2014 5
   S2010 4
   S2015 4
   W2011 4
   S2009 3
   W2008 2
   W2007 2
   W2017 2
   S2006 2
   W2009 1
   W2018 1
   W2010 1
   S2008 1
   S2005 1
   S2007 1

What I wonder is, which way does the arrow of causation point? Did the success of these companies lift the entire ecosystem? Or were macroeconomic factors the dominant driver of capital entering this market, and those three batches happened to benefit?

edit: There's another possibility here, which is that there are two curves that may have maximized for companies around that time period. The first is the batch size, which has increased from ~10 companies to ~100 over the years. And the other curve is that companies take something like 5-10 years to mature. Maybe it's just that the companies of that vintage are just old enough to be really valuable, and that there were enough companies in the batch to push them to the top of this ranking.

My money is on macro effects, though.

[0] https://medium.com/the-mission/state-of-seed-investing-in-20...

Louder is not really worse when it comes to music. In fact, try turning up whatever you're listening to right now--it'll actually sound better!

The loudness wars (mass application of massive compression that reduces dynamic range) are the music equivalent of adding salt to savory foods. People like it better even though it's technically "worse".

Another way to frame this is that it's easier to get rich via your investments than your direct labor. Working at a company that is willing to give you equity is a funny sort of investing: you're investing your time rather than your money.

That the world pays off equity in a company orders of magnitude better than labor for a company is the real thing that will complicate a young person's worldview.

The Eatons are now in the Bay Area and are working in tech. Here's an article about their transition: https://medium.com/south-park-commons/ashton-eaton-from-olym...

You may want to take a look at https://github.com/alvaroloes/enumer which can generate functions around your enum to give/accept string representations, plus JSON and SQL scanning.

There are actually two big questions here that seem fairly tied together, but practically speaking are totally separate when it comes music online.

  1. How much money should consumers/advertisers
     be charged for access or proximity to music?
  2. How much money should artists, publishing companies,
     record labels and other rightsholders be paid for
     that access?

In reality, the actual floor on how much rightsholders get paid is only up for negotiation if the music comes as a result of interactive streaming from music provided by the rightsholders (read: Spotify). If it's internet radio, where the user doesn't choose what they hear (non-interactive, read: Pandora) the rate is set by Congress regardless of the business income or rightsholder desires. And if it's user-generated content subject to the DMCA (read: YouTube) there's no clear need to pay anything to the rightsholders (see Grooveshark). So, there are tons of arguments about #2.

As far as #1 goes, there's never been a music company that got to million-user scale and was long-term profitable, so clearly companies (and their investors) are willing to send more money out the door than they make. Fixed-rate subscriptions have a perverse property that your best users by engagement metrics are your worst users financially--they cost you the most with all that listening. Advertisement-based monetization matches consumption to revenue, which is nice, but as Pandora and Spotify will both attest, the revenue from ads thus far is way short of what they or the rightsholders would like.

So what to do? Talk about it in the press and see if you can get public outcry to force someone to pay your company more?

And who elected those filibuster-threatening senators? Were the senators acting of their own accord, or on behalf of their constituents' desires?

Well, in this particular case, there was no popular vote for any part of Obamacare. But there were a very large number of congressmen elected before the bill passed, during its negotiation and even now well after it's been cemented as law by the Supreme Court who had a major policy platform of reforming or completely rolling back the ACA.

This is a pretty great personal account, and it helps me tremendously in my goal of understanding this group of people who feel left out and overlooked by their government. However, it's also a good demonstration of how people find ways to rationalize acting against their own self-interest.

One example: The author observes that the unnecessariat is having lots of economic value extracted from them, e.g. from required, high cost healthcare plans. She implies things were better when there was no requirement (and thus no coverage). I think that's a common sentiment among conservatives, which is why they have voted continually against Obamacare. But as she points out, these are people for whom even moderate healthcare costs can be devastating financially. So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes? And why didn't she consider that a reasonable enough future to even mention it?

I worry the answer is that they've given up on using (representative) democracy to improve their lives.

AsicBoost is hypothetically an easy 20% win for any miner to implement, but it's patent encumbered, so there's now an attempt [1] by the core developers to fork Bitcoin in order to nullify its effect.

Why fight it? Not just because it's patented. The bigger fear is that because it's patented, no one in the US will be able (willing?) to implement it, while folks in other countries with lax enforcement of IP laws (read: China) will. Since mining is a competitive race, a 20% boost should ensure only patent infringers will ever mine blocks.

[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016...

This is a proposed 3:1 stock split which would take the per-share price for Facebook down to the $30s and also give Zuck the ability to donate 2/3rds of his resulting shares without any change to his percentage control of the company.

The key change for Uber when we have completely autonomous cars is that we will go from a two-sided marketplace matching drivers to riders to a much simpler retail model: riders buying rides. Whatever mindshare and network effects Uber has in the marketplace model will fall in importance, and the new king in the space will be the company that can deliver rides cheapest and fastest.

Uber is way behind Google and even Apple when it comes to calculating the best routes from place to place...

Fair. But then you read the answers list (http://www.talisman.org/cgi-bin/robin-hood-morality?all=true) and learn that there were right answers (jrms, jmsr) and everyone else gets insults.

This is very poorly set up. What are even the facts of the case?

0. We're instructed to forget what we know about these characters, but then through hints we're supposed to recover the details of these characters' relationships to each other and the world?

1. Is this a real sheriff?

2. Did Robin Hood and Little John do anything deserving of being locked up?

3. What was the previous relationship between Maid Marion and Robin Hood? Were they truly lovers or something less?

4. What was the previous relationship between Maid Marion and the sheriff? Were they necessarily citizens with a power differential?

5. Would the sheriff have released his prisoners the next morning regardless of Maid Marion's actions?

6. Was Robin's "abuse" verbal or physical in nature?

7. What was the previous relationship between Little John and Maid Marion? Were they necessarily unlinked except via a mutual tie to Robin Hood?

8. What was the previous relationship between Little John and Robin Hood? Were they friends with some obligation to each other, or merely cellmates?

9. Was Little John truthful in his promise of devotion?

Many different rankings can stem from differing understanding of those facts rather than differing moral standards. Not to mention the conflation of Honesty with Morality.

Also nice is the style guide, which also covers a number of best practices for modern Objective-C: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/5utnlwhr18ax05c/style-gu...

Are there actually folks out there willing to pay a 10%+ a year interest rate to take a loan denominated in BTC? Bitcoin's price is all over the place, and often moves up very quickly, so even if the loan were at 0% it would be a bad idea. But at 10%, you have to ask, are there any ways to invest your loan such that you could beat that rate? Consistently? The default rate is going to be sky high.

The only rational explanations here are 1) these people are actually intending to short Bitcoin and don't realize there are cheaper ways or 2) these people don't exist, and this is a Ponzi scheme.

The latter seems more likely, especially since this site claims to be covering losses on defaults (an even crazier idea than taking a BTC loan in the first place).

I made the worst comment of the month list for a comment I actually thought was good (!), and now I'm really curious about the context...

Is there any way to recover the thread ids or parent comments for items on the the worst comments list?

Sorry about earlier. Should be fixed now...