conflagration

Thanks for mentioning Songkick, I just registered there and looks like a good service overall. Reminds me of some of the last.fm functionality I was using in the past for that matter. What its still missing, is support for the functionality I described for festivals. Yes, they match festivals for you, but they don't tell you, which bands you should see there. Also they would have to update their database pretty often to i.e. work for Fusion festival, which announces the line-up only a few days prior to the festival, or to account for additions to/changes in festival line-ups.

Nice service to get an initial overview. I am a regular festival-goer, but I prefer to go to more "underground"-ish festival (for the lack of a better word). Those festivals don't necessarily want to be easily discoverable (i.e. the Fusion festival in Germany goes great lengths to suppress the hype around it).

For me the discoverability problem is another one: In recent years, I am listening to so many new bands and musicians, that I am totally loosing track of their names. It occurred to me more than one time, that someone was talking about a band, whose name I thought I never heard before, to later find out that they did a song or album, that I actually listened a lot. This also goes for festivals: I walk around at a festival and hear a familiar song playing somewhere and realize, that there is a band playing that I enjoy a lot, but whose name I didn't remember at all. I know other people have this problem too and I assume this is a by-product of the UX of streaming music (when you have to put a CD or vinyl on every time you want to listen to a band, ofc you learn the names much faster).

So what I actually need is a service, where I can paste a link to a festival website, which the service scrapes and does entity recognition on. Then the resulting list of bands should be matched against my Spotify history and tell me the matches (either because I actually listened to the bands, or by some means of collaborative filtering). I am thinking about doing this in script form for this years Fusion festival, but would also like to know, if more people are interested in a service like this.

You are right about that, I lived in Trier, a German town next to the border to Luxembourg. A lot of people in the area went there just to fill their tanks (gas is around 20 cent less per liter) and stock up on cigarettes and coffee.

Like a Universal Health Care you could have a "Universal Law Care", a per se legal costs insurance for every natural person. You might have to pay low fares measured in daily rates calculated from your rate of income/wealth for any legal action you take, but nothing that would put your way of life at risk. With automated processes in law becoming more and more of a thing, it would be possible to handle cases faster and on a much finer grained basis, without sucking so much time and resources. Think of a fully-automated arbitration process. There would still be "manual law", where you could always escalate to, if you think Robo-Judge is wrong. Meanwhile wet-ware judicature would also get much more efficient/cheaper by help of automation (I think a wide-spread acceptance of teleconferencing into court would also help).

In a scenario like this, such obvious fraud would not be a thing anymore imo. And we could be there soon (except maybe for the Universal Law Care part).

That is already there :) Only one of the three servers allows bots.

Halite also looks interesting, but I think with generals bot-makers will have much more possibilities, because there are no limitations for your implementation. The game mechanics might also a little more challenging in generals, especially the fog of war makes a huge difference imo.

This will be super interesting. I think this game makes very much sense as an intermediate frontier on the road to a StarCraft AI. Here are my reasons:

* The playing field is relatively limited, just a little larger than Go. This makes it much more approachable than StarCraft as you will not need a server farm to get started.

* It has a fog of war, so a bot needs to handle uncertainty and have a memory.

* It's controlled through a web API and allows total freedom for the bot implementation by that.

* There are very competitive humans players.

* There is already a very huge dump of replays to train on.

I really hope this will get traction and establish as an ongoing AI competition. Also it will be very interesting, when the first bots will be better than the top humans here.

I don't agree. From Cologne you can stay on the Autobahn/Schnellstraße pretty much until you reach the Grohmann front-door. I think that's a much better kind of commute for reading/sleeping than going through urban traffic.

It depends on the kind of people you want. Even if the town is "remote" if seen by German proportions, it is still only an hours drive away from the next major cities and the countryside is very rural and beautiful. It's true that these are not the conditions that attract a lot of people straight out of college, but they are very attractive to more senior people, esp if they have family. I know Grohmann has been very good at binding talent for long times, i.e. by giving loans for houses at much better conditions than a bank would. So these people build their homes in the area, which ofc gives them a much greater tie to the place.

This just made my jaw literally drop. Not only is Prüm my former hometown (of roughly 5000 people), but I actually worked at Grohmann at holidays and as a part-timer during my school and student days.

This place is filled with prototypical German engineers (in the good sense) and the company was always in growth-mode. I think this might be a very good acquisition for Tesla.

For price-worthy PC Speakers I recommend Teufel: http://www.teufel.de/pc/pc-stereo21.html

I am also very satisfied with these headphones: http://www.thomann.de/de/beyerdynamic_dt990pro.htm The sound is crystal-clear and due to the big and soft earpieces you can wear them for hours without noticing. Perfect for home use.

This looks interesting at first glance, but to be honest, I don't fully get it from the description. Is it some kind of Storm/CEP/Graphite combination? Where does the actual "processing" happen? Do you have rent additional EC2 resources for your workers? It looks like a potentially powerful and interesting service, but the documentation could be a little more clear and maybe include an example of a DAG layout for a typical application.

I really like the music on your Soundcloud! Would you share your current hard- and software setup?

The sounds are great by themselves, but I had the most fun layering different generators by opening several tabs. I played around with the EQ and made something sounding very close to Biosphere with 4 parallel tabs. It really felt like the tracks were synchronized to fit into each other. Great work!

Here is my trick for this: I use an individual email address for each signup I do, in the form of <signupdomain.com>@mydomain.com. By that way, when I get spam, I don't only know the spams source, but I can block it with only one click by blacklisting the specific receiver email address.

Which stream are you using exactly. Are you applying any filters? Afaik the complete firehose has restricted access, or did that change?

Edit: very cool visualization btw. What are you using exactly on the backend for stream processing?

A really good framework built around ZeroMQ is Storm, which does exactly that: https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm

Mahout & EMR is a powerful combination and I can also recommend boto library for managing it. If you are using these together, be sure to use hadoop version 0.20 when running a jobflow. If you are dealing with explicit data, like star ratings, Pearson correlation might get you better results.

The nice thing about them is that they are very short and so you can try a lot of different strategies, but there were also long scripts like Mule DNA. I think this is a great way to teach kids the basics of addressing and low level programming. I remember writing these bots for a friends computer science class, good times.

Thank you for the recommendation. Some of my tasks are language specific, so I would like to find people capable of speaking a certain language.