The reason why this bothers me is that there is no longer any EXPLICIT confirmation that I want to post something. Not sure who said it but I read it in a TechCrunch article, "Just hit play in Spotify and it will share with your friends".

No, any sharing I do HAS to REQUIRE an EXPLICIT action on my part. I have to be in full control. Visiting a web site does not mean that I believe it will be interesting to my friends NOR do I want that information shared with people on Facebook.

A like button that shares, much like the Google+ 1+ button is perfectly fine, I have to hover over it, and choose my circles to share with, and then share. It is not automatic once I visit the site.

I don't want articles automatically being linked just because I visited a page, or clicked play in Spotify, or put the toilet seat up.

It is not just privacy concerns, it is the image I try to convey while using social media sites where it is common place to be friends with your boss and or co-workers. I don't need them knowing I like the Bloodhound Gang or that I read articles about atheism in the NYT but have never read a single article about religion.

Eventually all this collected data will be used against me. What if I do a simple Google search for cancer and I end up reading an article about it, that is now shared publicly, my insurance company a few years later gets a claim for cancer they claim it was a pre-existing condition and deny me coverage.

These are all scenarios going through my head. I am all for the interconnected web, and making it easier for me to introduce my friends to new content across it, however it has to be done on my terms, it has to require explicit authorisation and must never do something automatically without my consent. If I like the content enough I am extremely likely to copy and paste the URL into my social networking sites, I don't mind that extra step. Create a bookmarklet that fills in some of the forms ahead of time for me (I have a reddit bookmarklet that fills out title, URL and the sub-reddit to post in (personal one for me to share links with friends)). I am more than happy to continue using the platform, but this frictionless sharing scares the crap out of me, and will see me closing my account sooner rather than later if it continues down the path that it looks to be going down.

The site seems to be under a lot of load. In case anyone (like me) is having trouble viewing the images, I wrote a quick script to scrape the images:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/markerdmann.com/paintings.tar

The naming format is "page_X_image_X.jpg".

EDIT:

Here's a video slideshow of the images:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/markerdmann.com/Paintings.mov http://vimeo.com/29510470

The reason why it is so hard to become a doctor is because the AMA restricts the number of applicants and schools that can create doctors so wages can remain artificially high.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/25/american-medical-associatio...

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/06/physicians-incomes-an...

So, surprisingly, this rant is more or less accurate, imo. (I went to med school, residency, fellowship)

I mean some things stronger than others, but it hits on the major negatives as you go through training. I know a lot of these rants tend to romanticize how hard people's own professions are in a "no one else has it this hard" type stance. We see similar "how hard it is to be a programmer" type rants as well. But, I'll pull out the one aspect that I've always felt I lost.

"3) You will spend the best years of your life as a sleep-deprived, underpaid slave."

I do feel like I missed being young (20s) and just having a regular job, enjoying life with my friends. 4 years of medical school, and 3 years of residency pretty much wipe out age 22-29. So I do regret that.

Unfortunately, Jacques needs to answer a pretty basic question in order to get his wish: why? Why should CS paper writers show Jacques (or anyone else) their code?

We have discussed this topic on HN a number of times, for example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2735537 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2006749

Many of the comments in those threads do a better job summing up than I ever could. However, briefly, literally all of the incentives are aligned against publishing code and data.

If a writer's code is wrong, they are embarrassed (and there is no culture of being embarrassed by not publishing code).

If a writer publishes their code and it is actually good, someone else can scoop their follow-on results.

If a writer does not publish their code, and it is actually any good, they can potentially commercialize it thanks to the Bayh-Dole Act.

If a writer publishes their code and people intend to use it, the writer needs to clean it up, check it for correctness, and handle support requests. These activities are probably more time consuming than writing the code in the first place.

If the writer publishes their code, and other people in the writer's field do not, the writer is usually at a disadvantage. Others will appear to have more publications, the basic currency of academia. (Many people have great reasons for not publishing their code or data, especially researchers embedded at large companies making changes to large proprietary systems.)

So overall, yes, it would be great if CS paper writers gave out their code. What they are doing is not reproducible science in the philosophy of science sense.

But what is Jacques (or anyone else) doing to fix this system of incentives, and what could anyone do?

It is standard GAAP accounting. Amazon reports revenue as the sales price of the item sold, even though a portion goes to suppliers. Google reports total revenue from Adsense, even though a portion of the revenue goes to the site hosting the ad. In my opinion as an ex-finance/accounting guy, the SEC is wrong in this case, for a few reasons:

1. The share that the business receives is negotiable and different for different vendors.

2. Groupon is the point of sale for the full amount of the revenue.

3. The merchant receives their share at a different time from when the Groupon receives the revenue.