I like Pandora a lot but a couple of months ago I switched to last.fm because it gave me more variety. Maybe it's time to check out Pandora again -- though last.fm is still 100% free.
I just switched to last.fm from Pandora. The last straw was the same video ad for 'Mercy hospital' every single time I changed stations.
I have to admit that listening to last.fm is a completely different experience. There are a much deeper selection of tracks and I was thrilled to hear a 24 minute DJ Shadow song.
I wish pandora the best, and I was ok with the occasional video ad. But every time I change a station? If it was every 3rd time I might have put up with it.
Coding at my new job I tried out Pandora and after a few days I kept hearing the same music. My test is eclectic and I like hearing folk to jazz to alternative to 80s to etc ... Pandora does not seem to offer this type of station, but Last.fm does as if you trained it via a plug in it knows exactly what genres you like and the artists in those genres.
Also, I use Fire.fm firefox last.fm toolbar which is great as it puts play controls right into firefox and last.fm does not need to be open!
I'm not exactly sure about those particular mixes, but I know I end to get good results mixing genres in Pandora by using the "Add Variety" feature. I also find that keeping the window open and just pausing it stops the repetition, they tend to only repeat songs you really, really seem to like, or they will only once per page load (per station).
Cool thanks. I might give it a try. Though prefer last.fm's toolbar (fire.fm) as no site needs to be open, there are play controls at the bottom of firefox, as well it tells you what's playing. As I code/test within one Firefox window I prefer not to have to switch tabs to control music, learn who is playing, as well heart or ban the track playing. Though maybe Pandora has similar toolbar?
They have a desktop client, but you (apparently) have to be a member for that. I'm not sure about the features, but I would think it would allow for that.
It does, and it works on any platform Adobe Air works on. It's 30-something bucks for a whole year, and totally worth it for not having your music tied to the browser being open.
How often are you changing stations? I tend to only change stations every couple of hours, if that often. It seems like frequent station changing defeats the purpose of music discovery, because of how Pandora seems to react when changing stations. If I change a station, listen to an entire song, and then change back, it (seems) to reset the "play things I know skolor likes before branching out into new things". I don't have any data at all on it, but after I have a sufficiently mature station (50+ "liked" songs, or so) it seems to mostly play through 10-20 songs before introducing any new songs I've never heard before.
My main complaint with Last.FM is that it makes me putting a label on what I like in music, and then match that up with how other people label music. I know next to nothing about music, I just know I like certain songs and dislike others (Ok, I know a little more than that, but not much). When I used Last.FM I would pick a genre/tag I liked/artist, listen for a while, and get bored with it because it either sounded exactly the same or else I picked the wrong tag and it turns out that wasn't the factor in the original music I liked.
I'm working with matlab currently. It is simultaneously the best engineering tool ever and the worstest, lousiest development environment ever. It has tremendous shortcuts for doing things quickly and powerfully but everything has been added in haphazard, half-cocked, half-assed fashion.
I can see how the two face of matlab have evolved together in the way that Perl has amazing power and horrible maintainability. I don't see that they would have to have evolved together. Ruby, for example, does what Perl does but with more sanity.
Matlab is a horrible language, although at least it has lambdas now. Have you looked at SciPy? It can't replace some of the more specialized toolboxes of course.
Matlab is a requirement for what I'm currently doing.
I'll research lambdas.
But I meant it also in saying that Matlab is the greatest engineering tool ever. You can do amazing things in 200 lines. Then you do 400 lines and get caught in some BS for days. But if you remember to do only 200 lines (even just 2 lines), then you can be a very, very good and feel very productive.
In my experience, Perl has inherent problems with readability on a line-by-line basis. I don't think that there's anything that can be added to change this - testing would prove a line does certain things but given that a test isn't complete specification, testing couldn't by itself change the readability problem.
Again, Perl would have more justification if Ruby wasn't visible
If someone references a book with author/title, PLEASE at least check a review on the web before commenting.
I was hoping that any answer might be insightful.
(Readability is mostly a function of familiarity. Everything has advantages/disadvantages, if I'd list the problems with Perl, readability wouldn't be there.)
I worry about people using the work 'hacker' so broadly that it becomes meaningless. Is a football player a hacker because he's 'hacking' his body to optimize the actions that would lead to a touchdown?
Please let's stick to 'hacker' as a person who creates innovative technology.
I don't know if this is still the case, but when my team applied for YC there was a specific question about 'hacking' something, specifically, not a computer. So I would say this sort of news would fall within the scope of the community.
This particular instance may not be 'hacking' according to Hoyle, but it's a story of people dedicated to revealing the full truth about a long-standing mystery of human history. I think a lot of what makes a hacker a hacker is their breadth of knowledge and ability to apply it usefully in unfamiliar situations, which does apply to many of the techniques mentioned within the article.
Either way it's interesting material - good for keeping your brain on its toes.
I agree. Hacker is a word that only a small subculture of computer programmers would call themselves, despite what attributes they might project on others. This article was interesting to hackers, I haven't met a hacker yet who wasn't at least peripherally interested in archaeology, architecture, psychology and history.
according to wikipedia, technology is "a broad concept that deals with an animal species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects an animal species' ability to control and adapt to its environment" so the football player in your example, the one [not?] "'hacking' his body to optimize the actions that would lead to a touchdown" only fails to be a hacker by your definition ("a person who creates innovative technology" ) if he's not being innovative. which is a subjective decision that's impossible to evaluate from your analogy.
i worry about people using the word "hacker" so narrowly that we let our subjective prejudices arbitrarily limit our ability to innovate.
I agree. Isn't it a bit arrogant that every time we see somebody displaying ingenuity, inquisitiveness, or any other intellectual virtue, we think, "Hey, just like a computer programmer!"
You can't ignore growth though. In many cases it's much more important than current active users. A product with 1mil active users and a 10x growth rate is much more valuable than a product with 5mil users and a 2x growth rate. The same calculation applies to stock valuations. A stock isn't priced by current earnings, but by expected future earnings.
He didn't say that criticism of Israel is anti-semitism. He just said 'No Politics. No anti-semitism.' I agree with him that HN should have no politics and no anti semitism or any racism for that matter. Don't you?
You assert 'no politics' and also imply that anti-semitism is a type of racism. Some people think anti-semitism is different; that's a political issue. Therefore, according to pg, you are a hypocrite. And also irrational, if ivankirigin's interpretation is correct.
I agree with Paul's point, but it seems like the flip side of the equation is that most startups these days don't have the kind of big exits that internet giants like Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo and Google had (or even the mass market penetration that MySpace and Facebook have gotten for that matter). If a these new startups truly had the potential to capture huge markets, they would need the funding, because 3 guys in an apartment simply can't go after a $5bil opportunity. I think the phenomenon Paul describes is the result of 2 trends, not just one: 1) it's cheaper to start companies and 2) most startups are going after small markets (or whatever is left from big markets that bigger companies have already captured).
