I was going to say the same thing. Similarly, you can get around the NYT 10 articles per month simply by opening the link in an incognito/private browsing mode window.
I agree with the album playlists issue. My account has a ton of playlists for exactly this reason. That said, the browse and discovery screens have found quite a bit of interesting music for me so I'd call it a wash at this point.
For a very extreme take on this, you should read Ian M. Bank's Culture series. The AI's have progressed to true sentience and run mind-bogglingly massive space ships which can hold billions of people. At this point, the ships truly are in control of the civilization and yet the humans are OK with it. There is no money and no need for humans to work as ships/drones/avatars/dumb robots do all the real work - wether it's turning raw materials into actual goods or taking care of all the tiny but important things necessary to an advanced, space faring society. I've found it to be a fascinating idea, so perhaps you will too?
There was also this workflow [1] posted recently, which is what I'm basically doing at $work. It's simpler than gitflow, so the reduced overhead might suit you better as a sole developer.
I live in a suburb of Sydney, Australia and in this area most of the residential streets on OSM are unnamed. So my assumption would be that there is a LOT of metadata waiting to be collected in most (all?) cities across the entire world.
I'd say it's more a "because we can", but isn't it interesting anyway? Exposure to new ideas, or new ways to implement existing ideas, is usually interesting.
Unrelated to the article content, I just noticed the table of contents on the left side. The slow fade in/out when you mouse over it is perfect! It's fixed position so you always see it, yet it's totally unobtrusive while reading the article. Brilliant!
Plex Media Server on your FreeNAS is what you're looking for. If the client doesn't support a format PMS will transcode automagically for you. I'd bet this will solve your sound issues.
I recently bought a Roku 3 and paired it with a FreeNAS server running the Plex media server. Add the Plex channel on the Roku and you get the network file support + Youtube. Getting Plex + Roku setup been the best thing I've done on my home network in years!
I have the luxury of having both of things. At the time, I had neither the money nor the time to deal with getting a 157 visa. Guess I've been lucky so far.
I'll take a different angle from most of the comments and talk about the prohibition of Medicare negotiating the price of drugs. The article talks about how two other countries have negotiated discounts of 35-45% off the list $2000 USD price. If you want to help hold down prices, all that's necessary is to actually negotiate a volume discount with the drug companies. It's basically an indirect subsidy to the drug companies via Medicare.
I got started programming back in 1995. After a few months of crafting HTML pages using MS Word, and learning to write macros to help automate it, I wanted something more interesting. My first foray into true programming was writing perl CGI programs for email forms and it took off from there. 18 years later, I am a full stack developer specialising in Perl.
My first truly "big" project was writing the backend for the original thinkstock.com. I had never done anything on that scale before, but I jumped in with both feel and did a decent job (or so the guys who took over after me said).
I've been in Australia for over 2 years, coming in under the 457 program. No degree either, and it didn't seem to be a problem. Getting PR through a 457 is pretty straightforward, though it will take 2 years and is more expensive now than it used to be. The upside is there's no skills test going this route.
I've been reading the Culture series by Ian M. Banks (RIP) recently and have been fascinated by the idea of an underlying energy grid between universes, and how that is used to power spacecraft moving at 1000x multiples of the speed of light.
What is even more interesting is how the ideas of scifi from decades ago - considered outrageous at the time - are now coming true. The possibilities of even near-light-speed are endless, much less actually being able to exceed it.
I remember seeing Vanilla when it first came out. It looked quite nice them. I'll have to look into seeing how it could be integrated into an external site - hopefully via an API.
I'd love to more about how gift cards in general work. Is it like a numbered swiss bank account where when you buy a card and the account number/password under the scratch-off on the back is your only access?
Clearly there are multiple gift card networks, but how does a company go about getting a card setup for their brand/product? And how would a business like PIA be allowed to use other brand's cards? The idea of a gift card being a deposit would make sense in this case.
It's always a treat, both intellectually and visually, to see new posts by Ilya. They are consistently excellent. You would be well advised to read the previous posts as well.
On a related note, I didn't realise that websockets didn't already support compression. I just assumed that you could use your standard gzip HTTP compression, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I've recently purchased a Roku as well so I can use Netflix. So that combined with Plex + downloaded content means I hardly ever watch broadcast TV any more.
The article did mention the use of 40k unique IP addresses, so I'm guessing their rate limiting is based on IP address and not the username or IP+username combination.