SoundCloud launches Go: a subscription service - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/03/soundclouds-new-venture-mixes-social-network-music-service/?mbid=social_twitter <comment><USER3> I used to use soundcloud all the time but switched to 'Discover weekely' on Spotify, like the author of the article. Spotify hit it out of park with Discover weekly.

One downside of spotify is still discoverability, discover weekly doesn't introduce you to completely new kinds of music, it sticks to what you already like. You are on you own to introduce randomness into spotify's discovery algorithms.

I think Rdio had that right idea here. I was discovering much more new music when I was with Rdio than with Spotify. Spotify leans heavily towards what is popular.

<comment><USER4> Agree completely. Rdio did a much better job with music discovery, but they were limited by selection. Soundcloud doesn't have typical discovery features, but the ones they do have are quite good. Here's how I find good (relatively unknown/esoteric) music there:

\- Follow good aggregator accounts. These repost new music regularly, which appears in one's timeline.

\- Follow good regular accounts and play their "likes."

\- Go to a song's "related tracks" screen and play those

I find excellent music on a regular basis this way.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the tip. I used rdio, currently spotify, and pandora. My method in finding songs was going to Pandora and adding songs I loved from their to spotify. Pandora seems to be great at finding similar sounding songs to what I request.

The whole finding people to follow is what is the problem for me. It takes time finding accounts to follow. Friends dont have similar taste in music. Apple has the right idea in picking songs/artist you like before you get to start the service so you get something you like in your feed.

someone make an app to connect users to awesome playlists based on songs/genre/and more

<comment><USER4> The initial bootstrap period is definitely a missing piece that Soundcloud could and should build.

"DiscoverTracks" is a service to help with part of the process (it looks at your likes and plays you related tracks based on the likes of friends and friends of friends I believe.) Doesn't solve the entire issue, but it's handy: [https://www.discovertracks.com/](https://www.discovertracks.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SoundCloud Go is not available in Germany. It's kind of ironic given it's a Berlin, Germany based company.

I wonder if this is due to GEMA preventing them from offering Go for an acceptable price. Unfortunately many services (including YouTube) have this problem.

<comment><USER7> I really hate them, specially the taxes even on school songs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm trying to find out if there's any announcement by SoundCloud about paying non-RIAA affiliated independents. Yeah yeah I'm pretty sure it's a _Nope_ but it'd be nice to look into. At least Spotify pays. And Apple pays. And Google pays. And Deezr pays. And Tidal pays...

Can we please link to an article that doesn't have an egregious pop-up that blocks my screen every two paragraphs? This isn't an exclusive article or subject. Even the AP has a write-up: [http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/soundcloud- exp...](http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/soundcloud-expands- mainstream-paid-streaming-plan-37999375)

</comment><comment><USER9> Taking on Spotify seems like an odd choice to me. To me it would seem that Spotify has a huge fight ahead of it, even though it has raised well over a billion dollars at this point. They're fighting against the platforms that already exist: Apple Music & Google Play. Apple Music offers basically the same thing except with tighter integration with their hardware (and iTunes for buying the songs that artists don't allow to be streamed), as does Google Play.

It seems to me that Spotify is fighting an uphill battle saddled with an enormous valuation ($10b-ish I believe?); SoundCloud really wants to fight against them for whoever is left after Google & Apple? And, through all of this, Spotify & SoundCloud are paying a huge chunk of their mobile revenue directly to their competitors (Apple/Google stores). It doesn't sound like a space that I want to be in!

<comment><USER10> > And, through all of this, Spotify & SoundCloud are paying a huge chunk of > their mobile revenue directly to their competitors (Apple/Google stores).

I'm not so sure they are. By charging a higher price ($12.99 in app vs. $9.99 on web), I wonder if people really are paying the higher price just for convenience. I'm definitely not.

Tidal is currently doing the same with their pricing structure.

<comment><USER11> The price difference between in-app (ios) vs. web is due to Apple's 30% fee for in-app purchase.

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8913105/spotify-apple- app-s...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8913105/spotify-apple-app-store- email)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady >> "Eventually, everyone from DJs to podcasters will be able to monetize the same way, though the system is invite-only for now."

I'm not holding my breath. Overtime SoundCloud releases something cool it's only available to people they invite and never seems to become available to everyone.

On top of that I just tried to signup for Go - not available in my country (UK) so I'm guessing, as usual, US only. Pretty sucky for a company based in Germany.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah it seems like Dubset and Apple almost forced SoundCloud's hand - I'm already signed up to that collaborative service (Mixbank) and it looks very, very well put together. SoundCloud's reputation hasn't been the greatest lately from the user/producer experience so I'm with you that their 'open-ness' is suspect.

<comment><USER12> I doubt Apple forced anything. Soundcloud has been working on this for literally 18 months. the only thing holding on was the Sony deal.

Dubset is doing a great job product wise. Really well done, unfortunately they coverage of licensing is really limited. They sort of jumped ahead and sold the platform before closing at least 50% of the deals (see for instance completely absence of the Merlin catalog).

Soundcloud has been always open, but struggled a lot in having a communication channel with their users. Seams getting better lately. Finger crossed!

<comment><USER8> Fair counter and I was being a bit more tongue in cheek, sorry about that if it came off as sort of ignorant. I agree these deals are massive to construct, and the back-end has to be really interesting from a tech / rights standpoint. It has been, without a doubt, one of the biggest riddles for the instiutional players (re: rights & revenue). Again, sort of trying to be joking about the subject, but I bet it's a lot easier for SoundCloud to get 100% cooperation with major labels/societies by catering exclusively to them, and basically ignoring any potential compensation for the independent content creators (however minor it might be) - yeah I'm kind of slighting Merlin for only capturing its market, because I think there's probably a single digit percentage of content creators unaffiliated...not much, I know...

It just kind of feels bitter, like SoundCloud built their honest business on original content (not mashups), and then really is pivoting to the major monied players and hand-waving off the rest. If it's true I can understand it business wise, I can. I just...well, don't particularly like it on a personal level.

<comment><USER12> I think, and I hope there is going to be a room for compromise there.

If they'll manage to tune their recommendation and discovery system in the right direction, they will be an appealing platform for both indies and majors.

Indies can finally get a prime time exposure within the major content. If you sound like taylor swift, and your lyrics are about breaking up with every possible person on earth, I think you should deserve a spot in an automatic generated 'San Valentine's day Single' along with her.

Majors can have a far better social layer that as it is today no one else has been able to create (Apple Ping anyone?). Soundcloud can offer that millennial generation engagement in a pure music context that so far has been lacking everywhere else. And Majors love millennials :)

I'm not saying it's an easy position to be in, and also, I wasn't myself that faithful about all this would have played out for SoundCloud, but to be honest, is an exciting time for the music industry.

<comment><USER8> Very well stated and I like the perspective you've put forward. Rational and, it seems, also quite healthy for the major stakeholders. Breaking 'new' artists is a big deal, and profitable in the long run - especially if there's SoundCloud analytics behind the scenes pointing to new targets. Without a doubt I agree the majors have been successful in protecting their role as curators of taste in their own way; they've always been in a pretty strong position. Totally with you that this is a great time to be watching the tech and distribution and rights discussions taking place in music.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I like SoundCloud a lot, what the hell have they been up to for the last few years? From where I'm sitting Spotify, Apple Music and many more out- innovated them and SoundCloud did... well, nothing.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry but I need to disagree.

The problem that SoundCloud is trying to solve has nowhere else being address. Yes, spotify and Apple Music are growing at a fast pace, but they don't necessarily play in the same landscape of SoundCloud.

Content is what differentiate SoundCloud from any of its competitors. If you want exclusive content, early gems or just unreleased reworks, soundcloud is the place to go. Solving this on the legal prospective is a huge pain. That is what Soundscloud has been doing for the last ever. Allowing you to enjoy Rihanna new song as well as 'Dj in his bedroom remix of Rihanna new song'. Try to find that on Spotify or Apple Music.

Now that they've close all the deals they needed in place, you'll see how fast the product will grow.

<comment><USER14> I think YouTube Red is their largest competition here and has a comparable remix catalog, a music video catalog and a larger live collection.

<comment><USER12> I completely agree with you. Although Video vs Audio content can be a differentiation, especially in the growing market where there is a shortage of data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure I see what this is really offering customers. It seems like just another paywell for creators to put their content behind. While that's good for them, as a consumer I don't really have much motivation to sign up for another streaming service when I already pay for Spotify.

If an artist is on Spotify, great, I'll listen to their songs a bunch and they'll make a little money off of me. If it's a group I haven't heard much of before and they're good, I'll probably get more into them and end up seeing them when they tour in my area.

If they put themselves exclusively behind another service ( _cough_ Kanye West _cough_ Tidal), I'll be forced to find other ways to listen to the album, which will likely be less than profitable for the artist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there - It's a huge catalog of tracks which contains all content from both emerging and established creators. The full details of which can be found on [https://blog.soundcloud.com/](https://blog.soundcloud.com/)

<comment><USER15> I read the article - the pros seems to be:

\- Ad free music \- Listen offline \- More tracks from established creators

The first two are a given with any streaming service. My point was their catalog isn't enough to make me switch over.

As an artist, unless you're getting some kind of crazy deal to just be on one of the services, your best bet is to be on every one out there.

<comment> k-mcgrady Where in the article does it say you have be exclusively on this platform? The word is exclusive is mentioned twice and both times in relation to Tidal.

<comment><USER15> That's the only thing that really separates these services. They all have similar catalogs and features for the most part.

The issue I have is with the exclusivity deals that come up as part of them trying to compete with each other. It annoying for the customer, and ends up with less money for the artist as most people will inevitably just go torrent their work if it's not on the one streaming service they're using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was really hoping that they wouldn't have to pivot into competing with Spotify (somewhat indirectly, although that is TBD depending on what deals they've signed).

Here's hoping that the mention of an _indie_ library hints towards a more interesting slant on what exactly subscribers get access to. For example, it would be cool if there was a way to monetise un-signed or newly-signed artists rather than mainstream Spotify territory.

<comment><USER17> Bandcamp covers that territory pretty well now.

<comment><USER8> Honestly I don't see Bandcamp as really doing more than filling a niche for artists who refuse to be on Spotify and/or don't know how to get into the 'major' digital outlets like Spotify, iTunes, Google, etc. It's a different ecosystem with all the same 'quality' issues as SoundCloud but not the same social interaction type stuff. I'm not trying to knock it, but I don't see it as a major player outside of a really indie circle (re: critics, obsessives) and not quite the casual listener(s).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This would explain why they have removed the local cache option in their Android app.

In previous versions, you could select how much content to cache locally on the device, up to 100%. This meant if you listened to a song once, you could listen to it again offline.

From using their app now, and the website (non-mobile) it seems they have removed all caching completely.

Anyway, it's absolutely trivial to download the raw songs (MP3) from SoundCloud using Developer Tools in your favourite browser. It's not the highest quality, but since SoundCloud is 90% user contributed tracks, the original quality is often questionable anyway.

I see no added value from this service. Just download the songs as MP3 files and listen to them, offline and ad free!

<comment><USER19> This is one of the reasons I don't like the iOS app. There was never any caching. On the commute to work (where I listen to the most music) I could listen to the same track as long as I had net connection which isn't always the case.

I feel that they have taken a step back on their apps recently.

<comment><USER20> No, there used to be caching before they switched to the redesigned iOS app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not that I'm opposed to Soundcloud charging money, but I've been concerned with what happens to all that cool music if/when the business model fails.

I've been dreaming up a way to use ipfs, ethereum, and other distributed tech to create a user-owned, cryptocurrency sustained soundcloud that would persist. for anyone interested, I've got a rough use case disagram here [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gkEhfnwSVBZDE5TGtSUFlmYWc...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gkEhfnwSVBZDE5TGtSUFlmYWc/view?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER22> This would be appealing if the Soundcloud apps (including web) werent so atrocious. Navigating through your collection on Android is a mess, and the webapp shows as few as 2 tracks on a full laptop screen (while eating up gigabytes of RAM after only casual listening). I still love how the webapp "shuffle" mode will only shuffle through the songs already loaded by the client, so its just a mix of your most recent 25 or 50 songs.

<comment><USER23> The iOS app (last I used it, 1-2 months ago) was trash as well. Constant issues with buffering, no offline, crashing all the time. I use Mixcloud exclusively now and while it doesn't have offline either it works 1000x better and has more of what I really want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "If you're an iOS user, it'll cost more, with the company charging $12.99 for signups to account for Apple's mandatory 30 percent cut."

I'd be a little surprised if Apple will allow them to do this. It's kind of like credit card companies requiring stores to charge the same price regardless of if you use the credit card (which has fees) instead of cash (which doesn't). Charging different prices is a negative signal for Apple's ecosystem ("Why can I get this cheaper if I have an Android phone? Maybe I want an Android phone instead next time....")

While I might argue that the negative signal shoooould exist, I'm surprised Apple doesn't have it in its terms that you can't do that if you want your app on the Apple App Store.

Also, could we please amend the title? It's not a flat $12.99 a month for everyone, and it doesn't even match the headline on the actual article.

<comment><USER25> Spotify have the exact same pricing model/discrepancy [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/08/spotify-is- actively...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/08/spotify-is-actively- encouraging-ios-users-to-stop-paying-for-streaming-via-itunes/)

<comment><USER24> Huh. I guess since I signed up for it through their website so it was always $10/month for me, so I didn't notice.

But see, I was an iOS user paying $10/month for Spotify (because I paid on the web). Does Soundcloud offer this, or is it truly every iOS user has to pay through Apple for their subscription to Soundcloud Go, and thus have no choice but to pay more? It seems like it's the latter by the wording of their copy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The actual offering left aside, the naming is quite unfortunate.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "The actual offering left aside, the naming is quite unfortunate."

It seems good to me. One of the major features is offline listening to you can now listen 'on the go'. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER27> HBO Go Go (golang) Go (game)

<comment> k-mcgrady HBO Go is the only real clash there (very few people are going to confuse an offering by a well known music site with a programming language or board game). I don't see HBO ever making Go available outside the US so it probably won't be a real issue for many people.

<comment><USER28> I think the bigger problem with these generic names is that they are hard to search for and crowd the search space. Go is a common enough word that you'll need to search for `"SoundCloud Go"`, since `SoundCloud Go` will bring up a bunch of unrelated stuff about SoundCloud, e.g. "go to your SoundCloud account panel and..." But using quotes will miss sentences like, "SoundCloud has released a new service, Go."

<comment><USER29> Google seems to understand it perfectly.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=SoundCloud+Go](https://www.google.com/search?q=SoundCloud+Go)

<comment><USER30> Probably as a result of Google's use of ngrams for searching. It also seems likely that users instinctively (or rather, by years of experience from using Google) know to search for the proper noun rather than just "go" alone...basing that on my own anecdotal evidence of always searching for "hbo now" instead of just "now"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If soundcloud has mended their ways with regard to allowing takedowns etc by third parties, this hasn't really been communicated all that well.

I used to be a paying customer, but I ditched the service after they allowed Universal to harass their users. That's a while ago though, and I haven't been paying much attention to Soundcloud since.

Have they shaped up or should I still avoid them?

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "If soundcloud has mended their ways with regard to allowing takedowns etc by third parties, this hasn't really been communicated all that well."

I had my first take down a few months ago after using the service since it launched. I got 1 strike. A few weeks ago I had another take down but there was no 'strike' mention this time. I'm not sure if this was because Universal requested the first takedown and the second one was automatically caught by SoundCloud's system but it may be that when the second one occurred these deals were finalised so they've stopped the '3 strikes' nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not that I'm opposed to Soundcloud charging money, but I've been concerned with what happens to all that cool music if/when the business model fails.

I've been dreaming up a way to use ipfs, ethereum, and other distributed tech to create a user-owned, cryptocurrency sustained soundcloud that would persist.

for anyone interested, I've got a rough use case disagram here [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gkEhfnwSVBZDE5TGtSUFlmYWc...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gkEhfnwSVBZDE5TGtSUFlmYWc/view?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER14> Their competitive advantage will be their unique catalog and social features but Google with YouTube Red already provides a similar catalog and experience. Most remixes I find on Soundcloud I've also been able to find on YouTube and YouTube has more live clips in my experience. Either the brand value of soundcloud is high, it can attract artists to post exclusives on its site or the second-by-second social feature is an important deal or they will have difficulty competing with Google Play/YouTube Red and the others.

</comment><comment><USER32> What will be hard for many consumers and artists is that Soundcloud has so many DJ's and/or podcasters who've been putting out something like a weekly mixtape or podcast for years. Now let's say all of the sudden they now put it behind the paywall. Consumers who have gotten used to getting this free content for years will now be irked. I'm afraid people already equate Soundcloud with great free content, so transitioning to anything else will be difficult.

</comment><comment><USER33> I am a long-time user of Soundcloud that has recently stepped back from the service. As an EDM enthusiast, the service is the best place for finding up- and-coming talent and great remixes that you can't find anywhere else. The killer feature is the personal stream. Once you've started following a large enough pool of artists and labels, there is no better mechanism for wading through the pool of mediocrity to search out those rare gems.

Unfortunately, Soundcloud's method for organizing your content really breaks down under heavy use. I have over 1000 songs liked, and scrolling through the like list, dynamically fetching ten songs at a time, is a huge pain. Playlist creation and maintenance is even more cumbersome and limited than Spotify, which is saying something.

Worst of all, the usefulness of the stream, arguably Soundcloud's most unique and valuable listener-facing feature, really breaks down the longer you're using the service. Most heavy users I know end up following over a few hundred artists/labels/channels, accumulated over years of use, and the signal-to- noise ratio becomes unbearable. The sad thing is that the breakdown is purely a UX problem. The webapp is an infinite-scroll nightmare: forcing you to start at the top of the stream every time and fetch tracks 10 at a time. It doesn't clean up after itself, so after an hour of slowly chipping away through your feed, the browser gets so slow and unresponsive on my top-spec Macbook Pro that I often give up and don't bother trying to listen to new tracks that have been posted to my feed over 18 hours ago. Of course, as I now check Soundcloud less and less frequently, that means I am missing a ton of content.

On top of that, due to Soundcloud's reputation as solely a promotional tool within the artist community, you end up wading through a ton of 1 - 2 minute previews and other low-quality throwaways, and songs that you like can disappear from the service at any time, without notice. You cannot build a stable music library on top of the service. In fact, I used to have a process where I'd look for new songs on Soundcloud, and if I found something good, look it up on Spotify and save it within my Spotify collection, because I knew it wouldn't just disappear on me after a few months. Once Spotify upped their discovery game and the available EDM content grew, I removed Soundcloud from the process entirely.

Soundcloud used to be the best game in town for music discovery, especially EDM, but they let that slip over the last few years of struggling to monetize and Spotify's constant progression has now really chipped away that advantage. I've signed up for this GO service, but I highly doubt I'll keep it past the 30 day free trial. $10 a month for offline download and removing ads? As far as I can tell, my stream is the same mess as it was before, and they don't even distinguish between GO-exclusive and free tracks. I don't see anywhere where I can find GO-exclusive tracks within the app at all, actually.

New music discovery is hard and the big players (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play) still haven't fully cracked it, at least for specific-niche enthusiasts like myself. When the Soundcloud stream is working well, it is the best interface I've used for finding new music I like, but the complete lack of focus and neglect on that front from this initiative means that I probably won't be coming back.

<comment><USER34> Great analysis of Soundcloud's problems. I love it for all the same reasons (something like 90% of the new music I've found over the past 4 years is via soundcloud), but any ability to filter/manage/sort/search your favorites or your stream is basically missing.

And, as you say, it's purely a UX problem.

Also the fact that they don't have limited permission tokens is insane. A lot of artists have a "free download for followers" policy, but the integrations that enforce that require 100% complete access to your account. As in, sign me up to follow anyone, post anything, etc. Just to verify that I'm following you.

<comment><USER33> I actually spent the last two years writing a music app that integrated with the Soundcloud API to provide the bulk of the music content. To call their iOS SDK "neglected" is an understatement, but what I found worse was the opaque failure modes and restricted access provided by the official REST API.

For example, Soundcloud provides artists with a switch to allow/forbid third- party clients using their API to access the audio streams of the songs they post. This restriction, naturally, doesn't affect the official Soundcloud apps. While it makes my app a second-class citizen for accessing Soundcloud content, I understand the motivation and reasoning for the feature.

However, how does the Soundcloud API surface these restrictions? Through one of the dozens of flags it attaches to the json response it returns when you query for a track's metadata? Ha, no, all the various "track downloadable" and "streamable" flags are all set to true. Instead, it just returns a 404 when you try to fetch the data from the track URL...except when it started returning 401 instead (an admittedly more appropriate return code)...until it started returning 404 again.

So as a developer, my only avenue for not surfacing non-playable tracks within my client was to attempt to download each track, catch any 4xx responses, ASSUME the reason is due to permissions rather than any other potential causes for 4xx errors, and hide the content within the app.

I can understand Soundcloud's lack of enthusiasm for providing decent 3rd- party integrations, but if your external API is this much of a mess, I'd hate to see what you vend internally. The fact their permissions token provides zero granularity is not surprising to me at all.

<comment><USER34> That is tragic. I'm such a huge fan of SoundCloud - I even pay for a pro account, even though I don't post that much audio, just to give them $$ - <USER2> ... sigh. These are not good problems.

And here I thought their Roshi library looked pretty good. Maybe the talent is all on the backend there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How much Spotify cost in the states? As a Swede it costs 99kr which is more than $9. I use Groove and that costs $9 which translates to about 79kr or something like that.

It's 20% cheaper for a little less content and a not as good client. The lesser price alone makes the service worth it.

<comment><USER36> So, we're talking 20% cheaper for less content and worse client?

How does that make the service "worth it"?

It sounds like subpar crap in every way but price, and even at that it's nothing to write home about either (a measly $2.5 savings).

If one can afford $9/month, I don't see how $11.5 month are prohibiting for a better experience and more content.

<comment><USER35> Well, it's not super bad and the content is almost as good. It's not 20% worse.

The big thing for me is that Groove works on Xbox, which I have and listen to, otherwise I used to be a Tidal customer. But I know there is a Tidal UWP app coming, then I will switch back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The cognitive load of differentiating between everything named "Go" in the tech ecosystem is giving me a migraine.

</comment><comment><USER38> why doesn't any music service come up with a less expensive price plan? I would like to try one, but am pretty sure I would not use it so much as to justify paying 10$ (or £) per month. How about a less expensive plan with limited features (e.g. only n hours of music per month)?

<comment><USER39> I honestly don't see how the $10 price point can be considered anything but affordable. When individual songs are over $1 each on iTunes and other digital music stores, and one album bought digitally or physically is more than a single month of renting 30+ million songs for a month, the thought of considering $10 to be expensive seems crazy to me.

I still have my student discount with Spotify so I only pay $5+tax, but even when I lose the discount, $10 is not expensive to me. Especially for what I get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> $12 a month seems a little steep. Especially when compared to Apple Music and Spotify.

<comment><USER41> it's $9.99 not $12.

125m tracks vs 30m (of Spotify) + offline listening (same with Spotify) + no ads makes it a killer proposition!

<comment><USER42> 125m tracks made mostly by guys dinking around with Ableton in their bedroom vs 30m tracks from artists you might actually have heard of. Whatever the proposition in pure numbers is doesn't matter when your experience will suck.

<comment><USER41> but looks like SoundCloud will have all the Spotify tracks, so still it's a win for them. Plus there are many great mixtapes, podcasts and indie artists there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I regularly avoid soundcloud because I dont want to use my data, so I am very excited about this offline feature</comment>


Make $300 Per User on Your Facebook App - <AUTHOR> http://adonomics.com

<comment><USER2> 1) Don't link to Digg... link directly to the original source.

2) Your title is ridiculous. Tracing back to the original page is like a reverse game of "telephone":

\- "Make $300 Per User on Your Facebook App"

\- "Add New Facebook App += $300 For Somebody's Bank Account"

\- $16.8 billion / 56 million users = $300 per user

3) The math makes no sense at all.</comment>


C++: Improve Multiplatform Code with __has_include and Feature Test Macros - <AUTHOR> https://www.bfilipek.com/2019/07/hasinclude.html <comment><USER2> This will end up including wrong headers _if_ they happen to be erroneously present on the machine. It basically assumes that if xyz.h is present, then it must be the right header for the job.

The standard approach is more robust and predictable - if we are building for X, then xyz.h must be present. It's a stronger invariant.

<comment><USER3> > The standard approach is more robust and predictable - if we are building > for X, then xyz.h must be present. It's a stronger invariant.

I'm not sure if you presently maintain any popular cross-platform packages (e.g. source code + build scripts) but that hasn't been the case for a long time. With all the different fringe distributions, bastardized kernels, mix of packages installed via the preferred system package manager vs 3rd party package managers like npm, pip, and homebrew, newer versions of libraries built and installed by hand from a tarball or git checkout, etc. all modern build scripts have switched to feature detection rather than (exclusively) platform detection (which I still favor, when I can get away with it).

autoconf, cmake, meson, etc. all recommend testing the toolchain for a feature (e.g. build a one-liner that tries to call a system API linking first against x, and if that fails, then y, then z) and go with whatever succeeds first (in the order suggested by the developer) leading to horribly complicated messes with infinite permutations.. but generally significantly less user issues when attempting to build a package or library.

However, I do feel that I may have misunderstood you and this is the approach you are suggesting?

<comment><USER4> autoconf et all, don't they test that the feature/api works as expected not just that something can compile if the header is included but not actually used?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please don't do this. Instead, write portability shims, and include them unconditionally.

<comment><USER3> This has been my preferred approach for multitargeting since day one (long before there was even a unified interface for creating cross-platform synchronization primitives, let alone filesystem and hardware access), but unfortunately I think we lost that race a long time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Now, the code doesn't depend on the platform name, which might be better in > some cases.

Even the author is hedging with "might". This approach isn't going to give you robust portability.

<comment> Const-me C and C++ are too low level for robust portability.

The proposal is not a silver bullet for all portability issues. I think it still gonna help, by making slightly easier (on average) to both write and build cross-platform software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote a tool that tested a compiler for what it says it supports a while back. It's probably not full up to date with the C++20 ones but should be once we know the final set. I haven't found any false positives so far, but def some false negatives(Apple Clang) where they don't report what they support. This may also be due to not fully supporting them. [https://github.com/beached/cpp_feature_flags](https://github.com/beached/cpp_feature_flags)

</comment><comment><USER8> I would refrain from doing this.

The problem is that you may have the proper include, but may be using the wrong compiler.

Additionally, you may need a specific version of the implementation of the header, not just the presence of the header.

Thoughts?</comment>


Africa's Largest API Marketplace - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2020/08/06/mtn-extends-its-digital-strategy-unveils-african-api-marketplace-to-unlock-the-continents-fast-growing-api-industry/ <comment><USER2> With the increasing population, new business models will foster from africa. Althouth API marketplaces are nothing new, a niche platform curated specifically for the African startups will quickly gain traction in my opinion.</comment>


Grand Central Dispatch Now Open to All - <AUTHOR> http://www.macresearch.org/grand-central-now-open-all

<comment><AUTHOR> Drew McCormack has already posted a follow-up that goes into greater detail, including a limited benchmark comparison to OpenMP.

[http://www.macresearch.org/cocoa-scientists-xxxi-all- aboard-...](http://www.macresearch.org/cocoa-scientists-xxxi-all-aboard-grand- central)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It will be interesting to see how the adoption of the syntax for blocks plays out. According to the wikipedia entry for GCD, the proposed C++0x standard has a similar concept, but uses square braces [] instead of the caret ^. The former could be brought down to C, but Objective-C, which is defined as a superset of C, already uses the square braces for object messaging.

Are there any C++ experts who could speak to whether there is any reason that the caret would not work in that language?

(Edit: spelling correction)

<comment><USER2> The C++0x feature you're referring to is for lamdas (anonymous functions). It might be possible to use another syntax, but it would make parsing (even more of) a nightmare because one can use "&" or "value" inside the square brackets to indicate if values should be pass by-value or by-reference.

In practical terms, I doubt the C++ committee would change the already delayed C++0x standard to accommodate a feature which may (but probably won't) make it into C.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thank you.

FWIW, it looks like the concept of a block is also an anonymous function, although it looks as if they only allow passing into them by value, not by reference. The developer documentation at Apple indicates that they also support these within C++, and has a small section on how they behave within it. So, at least, they went the extra mile and worked out the C++ parsing issues.

[http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/cocoa/introblocksgcd...](http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/cocoa/introblocksgcd.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish the headline would have been more specific and mention that this relates to Macs. I saw this headline on my phone while waiting for my table at a restaurant. I hurried my way back to work to sign up for it only to realize that it was not Google Voice / Grand Central. I guess I'll have to keep waiting for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh dear...I'm sorry about that. I copied the original headline verbatim, because I once saw someone get flamed for not doing so. This was my first HN submission.

<comment><USER4> Modifying headlines is fine as long as you follow the Hacker News Guidlines[1]. Just don't try and mislead people with any changes.

[1]:<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI, they also put up the updated XNU

<comment><USER6> The OS X/Darwin kernel for the unwashed...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be nice if this was back-ported to Leopard (so you could use GCD without the application being Snow Leopard only), I wonder how difficult this would be..

<comment><USER8> More than $29 worth of difficult. That's for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is this better than any other threadpool library?

<comment><USER10> I've found very little documentation on this, but apparently the kernel optimizes multiple thread pools to prevent excessive context switches. (Consider an N-core system where multiple processes each create N worker threads of their own.)

<comment><USER2> Do you mean process migration (rescheduling a process/thread on a different core, which does bad things to caches) instead of context switching (switching between different processes/threads on the same core, which requires saving registers to memory and does bad things to caches)? If so, any decent modern scheduler tries to avoid migrating threads.

<comment><USER10> When I said context switching I meant context switching. Now that you mention it, GCD may also reduce thread migrations. I'm just speculating since we don't know how GCD works.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


USB Armory: Open Source USB Stick Computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.crowdsupply.com/inverse-path/usb-armory

<comment><USER2> Very cool stuff - could this also be used as a (comparatively) cheap HSM?</comment>


Linode Backup Service Is Down - <AUTHOR>

I just noticed that the Linode Backup Service (http://www.linode.com/backups/) which automatically backups your server daily stopped working 6 days ago. I rely on the backup service to help ensure my files are safe in case of a server crash.
Linode Support Says: Hello, I'm sorry to hear of the issues you are experiencing. The backup service in the Fremont, CA is currently undergoing maintenance which is preventing backups for your Linode from being taken. Our backups team have been working diligently to restore functionality, but unfortunately some unforeseen circumstances has been delaying this process. Once the maintenance is complete and the Linode Backup system is back in an operational state, backups for your Linode will begin processing normally. Please accept our most sincerest apologies for any inconvenience this may be causing you. Should you have any additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate in letting us know.
I am a big fan on Linode. But what is disappointing is that there is no message on the Linode Status page: http://status.linode.com/
This message is an FYI in case you use the Linode Backup Service as well. <comment><USER2> I'm very surprised Linode was not more transparent with this problem. I use them for several of my sites and have always been very impressed by their customer service. We should have received some type of email to let us know this service has been down so long.

<comment><USER3> Yes, a notification email would have been nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the name of your company? I'll happily demonstrate the flaw in their reasoning ;]

</comment><comment><USER5> For some companies, this would be expected. For Linode it's pretty #fail. This is pretty serious...it should never have been down for 6 days, and failing that, they really should have reached out to customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mine wasn't working for several days. It's back working now.</comment>


France Won't Rule Out Military Strike on Iran - <AUTHOR> http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/148371#.ToRg9TsSPP1

<comment><USER2> It takes 90%+ enriched uranium to produce weapons and 1-5% for an electricity reactor. Apparently, 20% is to produce medical isotopes (U235 being a good neutron source _(1)_ ) or for some specialized naval reactors.

It's not yet sure if the Iranians really want to make a bomb or just want to show the capability of building one. Unfortunately, the sanctions and threats of war do nothing but entrench those currently in power there.

 _(1)_ There are ways to produce neutrons other than by enriching uranium, like particle accelerators.</comment>


How do you dismantle a nuclear submarine? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150330-where-nuclear-subs-go-to-die

<comment><USER2> The defueling process is pretty slick. On a 688-class submarine, they remove a semi-cylindrical section of the hull around the reactor compartment (RC) before landing a temporary building on the RC.

One tricky bit is the fact that the spent fuel is so radioactive that it still makes a significant amount of heat. The thermal power is low enough that sinking it away from the fuel isn't difficult, but if such measures were not in place, the fuel would heat up until (redacted) Something Bad Happens. So every step along the way has either timing and/or heat sinking requirements involved.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I was in the Navy I was stationed at Puget Sound and got to watch the yard workers dismantle a submarine. Every day I would walk past the dry dock on my way to my ship and check out the progress. It's pretty cool seeing a sub in dry dock getting cut apart section by section.

</comment><comment><USER4> My father was a civil service EE at mare island naval shipyard in vallejo, on north-east san francisco bay. He told me that when they drain the reactor cooling water, there is a flange where they cut the hole in the hull, with a pipe running to there to a cement mixer. They make concrete out of the radioactive water, then haul the concrete and the mixer to hanford, to bury it.

But one time they neglected to bolt the flange together. When they pumped out the water, it poured down on a shipyard worker who was standing on the floor of the drydock.

While he was not injured, he exceeded his lifetime maximum dose of radiation. At the time Dad told me this story, the guy still worked at Mare Island but was no longer permitted in the nuclear yard.

<comment><USER2> Normal reactor coolant isn't nearly that radioactive. However, there is a continuous filtration system that gets flushed from time to time, and it is extremely nasty stuff. Its possible that the yard worker was actually doused with filter media.

<comment><USER5> I actually don't think it's possible. If I remember my OPWACHEM course correctly, if the media you're thinking of did wash onto the yard worker he'd have been severely injured by radiation exposure, and not just quickly bumped up to his maximum lifetime allowable exposure. It is indeed extremely nasty stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Spent fuel will be dangerous on time scales much greater than recorded history. However, the old reactor compartments primary source of radioactivity is Cobalt-60, with a half-life of about 5 years. So on time scales on the order of our national history, we should be able to recycle them.

<comment><USER6> In case anyone is wondering, the Cobalt-60 is produced from Iron by multiple neutron capture and beta decay, in particular Iron-58.

<comment><USER2> Also Cobalt-59, which is a commonly used hardening agent in ferrous alloys. In the old days, valve seat wear products were a strong source of radioactive cobalt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would a solar furnace be hot enough to incinerate the nuclear waste so that it is much safer to dispose of?

</comment><comment><USER8> Should store it at the south pole. It's inaccessible to anyone that is not very well-financed, the cold will slow down decomposition of the containers, anything liquid will freeze and stay put.

Any leaks will also be thousands of miles from anything important.

<comment><USER9> One big problem is that the longer the transit, the greater the window of vulnerability. That and mutated super-penguins.

<comment><USER8> I thought the penguins only hung out on the coast. Antarctica is, after all, a continent, and a big one.

<comment><USER10> Well, they did, but during the winter months they like to warm their flippers around the rosy glow of this new place :-)

<comment><USER8> I'd be impressed if they were willing to leave their food supply and waddle a thousand miles to get there.

<comment><USER11> They can call the screenplay _2101: A Penguin Odyssey._ Humans have nuked themselves into oblivion, making room at the top of the intellectual food chain. Then, the first few penguins stumble upon the abandoned waste site...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If only it were cheaper to send things into space. It'd be nice if we could blast spent nuclear fuel into the sun.

<comment><USER13> Earth's orbital velocity is 29.78 km/s, and the escape velocity from the Solar System, at Earth's distance, is 42.1 km/s.

Of you want to get rid of something, it would be energy-wise cheaper to shoot it out of the solar system, than to slow it down completely so that it would drop into the Sun.

<comment><USER14> If you shoot it out of the solar system though, then you are littering the region outside our solar system with nuclear waste that future generations might stumble across as they start exploring the galaxy.

<comment><USER15> Space is a pretty big place.

<comment><USER14> It's pretty big _inside_ the solar system - I can't even begin to imagine how large a space nuclear fuel capsule shot on a solar-system escape velocity would have to itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Carefully.</comment>


Ask HN: How to hustle like the best of them? - <AUTHOR>

In a past product I made the common mistake of not marketing (enough) my product.
I don't want to make the same mistake this time, and hear a lot of how startup founders hustle their way to people, making deals etc.
What's the key? Are their any Hustle 101 bibles? <comment><USER2> Hustling is not a scalable activity for your company. You should ask yourself why you have to hustle your way to the right people. Is it because the decision makers that buy the kinds of products you sell are hard to get a hold of, or is it because they just don't want your product? The latter is a far more common reason for failure than not marketing "enough". If your product is truly something they need and want, then you will find a sales model by iterating – but only if that's the case, otherwise, you should spend your time iterating the product – and not scaling customer acquisition efforts until you have a model that is profitable.

Check out these readings: \- Steve Blank. "The Startup Owners Manual". Also available as a lecture series on Udacity. \- Eric Ries. "The Lean Startup". \- <http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html> (numbers 3 and 10 might be especially relevant, and I suspect 16 answers your original question specifically) \- <http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html> (numbers 4 and 5 might be especially relevant)

<comment><AUTHOR> Some interesting points in Paul Graham's post for sure, some especially relevant.

In reply to your first point, I am speaking to the right people at the moment. However, I am not sure about how to proceed after. Closing the deal so to speak. I have been winging it so far, but some solid advice would be ideal.

Secondly, I suppose, there are actual users. Paul Graham's point of not wanting to get your hands dirty is probably my downfall here. In the most ideal situation someone would come along and love doing all the marketing, copy, emailing clients and maintaining PR. Is the real solution to simply 'brute force' the matter? Spread the word where ever possible? How do I not come across as spammy in such a scenario?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is going to sound out there - but watch this video =>[http://teamcoco.com/video/serious-jibber-jabber-04-jack- whit...](http://teamcoco.com/video/serious-jibber-jabber-04-jack-white)

Jack White talks about what it's like to hustle from a garage band playing at a local bar to becoming an international rock star.

A great deal of what I've read about marketing (doing it enough) is in this video.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for posting this - have it on in the background right now and loving it so far.

<comment><USER3> Welcome - found it the other day and thought it was terrific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Subscribe to Marketing Bits. You will get the data you seek.

<http://orangethirty.github.com/marketing_bits>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this, seems very useful indeed! Props for putting this up. I've sub'd to your mailing list =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You should read Scott Britton's blog life-longlearner.com. Its the best out there. It covers everything from cold emailing to how to do partnerships.</comment>


Indie developer Vlambeer has a message for clone apologists. "F*ck you." - <AUTHOR> http://www.pocketnext.com/stories/someone-elses-solutions/?utm_campaign=eli&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter <comment><USER2> I see the issue totally differently, entire styles of art came into existence due to cloning. It is also an essential part of being human, humans clone and refine ideas. I really wish society was designed to reward the original idea people in entirety up front and then their contribution went into public domain. So you make a lot of money for executing the idea up front, but then the entire work is public domain, to me we would be so much further as a society if we did not have to contort human nature around the idea of intellectual property.</comment>


140 Google Interview Questions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seattleinterviewcoach.com/2009/02/140-google-interview-questions.html <comment><USER2> I must admit to hating interviews and especially these sort of questions. I'll happily sit down and chat to people about any of the areas I know about, but these sort of gotcha questions just make me think 'why I am here justifying myself to these people'?

Watch me juggle! Watch me somersault! Watch me do and say pointless things to impress you with how smart I am!

<comment><USER3> Almost every interview I've ever been on that consisted of these kinds of questions, I've gotten an offer. I agree it's a mostly useless exercise in trying to determine someone's technical skill, but as an interviewee, ultimately it makes more sense to just "play the game" and memorize the mostly-exhaustive list of questions.

Conversely, one interview I do remember where I didn't end up getting an offer, was going swimmingly talking about pirates splitting gold and manhole covers. And then one interviewer asked me with so much Perl experience, why hadn't I published anything on CPAN? Boom, done.

I still haven't published anything on CPAN, but could I interest you in this scale and 8 balls I have here?

<comment><USER4> I'd answer the question of why I haven't published on CPAN (which I haven't, and I primarily program in Perl for work) is that I don't have the time. I've published some small add-ons for Warhammer Online (Lua, not Perl), and have found that even such a simple thing as that, where it is common for add-on authors to abandon their add-ons and users do not expect much support, was a lot of time. That's because if I put it out there, I'm going to support it. If user's ask for features--even features I won't use--that make sense, I want to try to add them.

If publishing something in such a specialized and restricted universe is so much work, I would expect that publishing and maintaining (to my quality standards) a CPAN module, which would have a potentially much larger audience, would simply take more time than I have available.

<comment><USER5> My current policy is that unless a piece of code suddenly makes the world a worse place to be in (hopefully I haven't done that yet :) ) I'll release something (normally on my website) and make no further commitment than that.

My philosophy is that it's still better to have your code out there and unsupported where someone can have the option of using it, rather than leaving it stuck on a hard drive never to be seen or useful to the world at large.

While it pains me not to answer every person who emails me about code I put out there, I try to live with it. Plus, it gives them a chance to solve their problem for themselves. :)

In order to get to that point I had to get past the "Oh noes, what if people/future employer/rockstars see my code deride it, laugh in my face and not give me a job because the hacky code I put out is..hacky". I still have flashbacks though. :)

I would encourage you to lower your standards for publishing your code. Is there a "CPAN Unplugged" where lower standards are explicitly accepted and okay?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 The author of "Crack the Coding Interview" and careercup.com claims[1] this list is very, very fake (for "software engineer" questions). She claims to have served on Google's hiring committees for over 3 years, so I would take her word over this blog's author.

In my own experience Google does not ask these types of questions.

If you do your own research on glassdoor.com and other sites where candidates self-report their interviewing experience, you will find almost no reports of candidates for SE positions being asked these types of "brainteasers".

1: [http://www.technologywoman.com/2010/05/17/debunking-the- goog...](http://www.technologywoman.com/2010/05/17/debunking-the-google- interview-myth/)

<comment><USER6> I got asked brainteasers in one of my (many) Google interviews. Non- engineering position though - close to Product Marketing. I was asked to use the board.

Certain interviewers have preferences for certain types of questions. I had questions similar to the listed ones in each category (including basic ones in Engineering).

Generally in their engineering interviews, you're expected to know sorting and search algorithms and their big-O complexity - and expected to code on the board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One good interview trick I learned:

First, you only ask one of these silly questions during the interview. And it should be one that makes the candidate sweat and think out loud a lot, but one where they'll eventually be successful -- I like the one where you ask the candidate to think of as many uses as possible for _X_ and you just keep going until they run out of ideas.

As soon as this question is over, the candidate is relieved. This is when you take the opportunity to ask them _the_ key question of the interview, whatever that may be, while they're at their most unguarded.

So watch out for these questions: sometimes the interviewer is just trying to soften you up for the next question.

<comment><USER8> I once had an interviewer suddenly ask me if I liked beer. My first reaction was to quickly guess what kind of answer he was looking for. Obviously, his goal was that to see if I was being honest or just trying to give the right answers. Anyways, I told him I liked beer :)

<comment><USER9> I see you are in Canada and in North America questions like that may get the interviewer into the legal trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It probably doesn't have to be repeated here, but most of these are just random apocryphal interview questions - not anything representative of what would actually be asked at Google. There are good sources for actual Google interview questions if you care to look for them.

<comment><USER11> Agreed to this - Google asks you straightforward (but difficult) computer science stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find it hard to believe they really ask devs the manhole cover question, that's been making the rounds for well over a decade now.

<comment><USER13> Well, maybe that's _exactly_ why they ask that question:

<http://hebig.org/blog/003029.php>

Sometimes, doing your own reasoning on a "smart" question leads to new ideas. Just ask Galileo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have worked through the questions for a software engineering position quite a while back, and while most of the problems were rather boring, there are some quite nice ones in there, for example there is a very simple and nice solution to this one:

      Given a Data Structure having first n integers
      and next n chars. A = i1 i2 i3 ... iN c1 c2
      c3 ... cN. Write an in-place algorithm to rearrange
      the elements of the array ass A = i1 c1 i2 c2 ...
      iN cN.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised, my first big question from them wasn't listed: You have search results coming in from a thousand servers, as a big stream. How do you sort them by Pagerank and send it down to the client? How do you do this on a page- by-page basis? (This was for a software engineering position on the build tools team, about a month ago.)

<comment><USER16> FYI, I believe interview questions are covered under the NDA, so if you did interview (and presumably had to sign an NDA at the time) you shouldn't actually be talking about the questions you were asked.

<comment><USER17> Google NDAs their interview process? Another strike against their "don't be evil" record. I'm not sure why I even pretend to expect differently now.

<comment> brown9-2 Their NDA does not state that the interview process itself is "confidential". It only states that as a part of the hiring process Google may disclose certain information to the candidate that it considers "confidential", and that you as the receiver are only to use this information for the purpose that Google disclosed it to you (i.e., your hiring).

It would be quite a stretch to interpret this as meaning that the questions asked as a part of the interview, or Google's process itself, is "confidential".

At the rate Google interviews, it'd be quite an effort to make sure that no candidate shared information about their interview questions, the format, etc.

Also, this type of agreement during the hiring process is pretty standard for medium-to-large size companies.

<comment><USER18> > It would be quite a stretch to interpret this as meaning that the questions > asked as a part of the interview, or Google's process itself, is > "confidential".

As far as I've heard from _anyone_ here, that's the interpretation. Questions are not to be shared, otherwise we'd spend all our time generating new interview questions and never actually getting any work done.

The NDA covers _information_ , not experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You people do understand that no one should ever ask the manhole question, right?

</comment><comment><USER20> I interviewed at Google today and I recall their documents specifically saying that they would appreciate my _not_ disclosing their questions.

<comment><USER21> Did they actually say "appreciate"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I interviewed, I was asked exactly one of the given software engineer questions. And a lot that weren't on the list.

Also if you do well on an interview question, a lot of Google interviewers will then choose to dive deeper on the question, and start to ask more difficult follow-up questions.

Anyone who thinks they can memorize a few of these and then breeze through the interview process will have a nasty surprise coming.

</comment><comment><USER23> >How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

I can't see how there would be a correlation between answering this question well and being a good Product Manager.

What's most upsetting about this style of question is the 'holier than thou' attitude that comes along with them. If you're not willing to play the game, don't expect to be seen as a good candidate.

<comment><USER24> There are apparently 5.7 million good piano tuners.

<comment><USER6> How did you arrive at that answer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25>
      In a country in which people only want boys, every family
      continues to have children until they have a boy. If they
      have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy,
      they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the
      country?

Thoughts?

<comment><USER25> Smart-ass, no-way-getting-an-offer answer: if we assume gender selection to be truly random, the answer may be _anywhere_ between 0 and 1, period.

<comment><USER26> > the answer may be anywhere between 0 and 1

0 and infinity, actually.

(sorry, couldn't resist)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And now that these are published you can rest assured that they will never be used in a Google interview again.

</comment><comment><USER28> _Google Interview: AdWords Associate

• How would you deal with an angry or frustrated advertisers on the phone?_

And this would be important to google how? Since when did they have telephones installed for customers?

<comment><USER29> The companies who buy ad space are served by real salespeople, no? Google product end users for the most case are not Google's customers. Rather, access to end user eyeballs are the product Google sells to the real customers, the advertisers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just remember, it's _cheating_ if you read these and then go to a Google interview where they use the same questions!

<comment><USER31> [http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/studying-for-job- interview...](http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/studying-for-job-interviews- isnt-cheating/)

<comment><USER30> I suppose considering HN was somewhat split on the issue my sarcasm isn't completely obvious.</comment></comment></comment>


Olympic Runners Supplement Training with Brain-Stimulating Headphones - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/olympic-runners-supplement-training-with-brain-stimulating-headphones?src=SOC&dom=fb <comment><USER2> Neuron doping?

"...According to Halo Neuroscience's website, these headphones enable "the motor cortex to send stronger, more synchronous signals to muscles" and enhance motor learning for the athlete, allowing them to make extra marginal gains with each exercise...."

What is the difference between electronically self-stimming or taking a chemical to do the same thing?</comment>


Show HN: Taxaroo, an on-demand platform for tax preparation - <AUTHOR> https://www.taxaroo.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, HN! Long-time fan, infrequent contributor here. I posted this a while back, but since I didn't get much traction I believe it's fair game to re- post.

My co-founder and I are excited to share with you our startup - Taxaroo. At the risk of sounding cheesy, think of Taxaroo as "Uber", but for tax preparation. Taxaroo is a marketplace that matches tax filers with professional tax preparers entirely online. We offer up-front, fixed-price quotes based on clients' unique tax situation, and match them with experienced tax preparers that are able to handle that specific scenario. Clients pay no additional fees to us - we only charge tax preparers a referral fee.

Beyond simply a marketplace, Taxaroo is also a convenient (and secure) platform for you, as a client, to exchange documents and basic personal information with your preparer (rather than emails, lugging stuff to someone's office, or [shudder] faxing docs). We also enable you to pay with a credit card and only be charged once you've approved your final tax return(s).

Though we've been working on this for nearly a year, we only recently opened up the platform for tax preparers and have already received a strong response and lots of enthusiasm. We have signed up professionals from across the U.S. with an average experience of over 17 years preparing taxes. We rigorously validate several levels of identification and credentials, and verify these with the IRS.

We'd love for you to check it out and let us know what you all think! If you're getting ready for tax season, we want to offer HN a 10% discount for the first 25 people using this promo link: [https://taxaroo.com/getstarted/LOVE4HN](https://taxaroo.com/getstarted/LOVE4HN).

Thanks,

Tim (Co-founder and CTO, Taxaroo)</comment>


Paulson's Swindle Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081110/greider2/print <comment><USER2> What follows is a pretty harsh opinion, but I'm going to attempt to state it:

In the 80s when RICO laws were being extended to drug dealers, my strict judicial process viewpoint was that you simply cannot take away property prior to a conviction. Over the years, many courts and subsequent laws have supported this practice and now its part of our legal fabric whereby many thousands of drug dealers have seen _all_ their assets seized prior to trial (and that includes anything they put in other peoples names). A judge doles out from the seized assets to allow the accused to pay attorney fees throughout the legal process and if found guilty, the gov keeps the bounty.

As this practice has become standard and well vetted by our court system, I think its about time we start applying it to those that destroy our economic fabric and treat them in the same fashion we would treat a drug kingpin.

Ken Lay should have never had a house in Aspen to go to to die after being found guilty in Texas. He should have had no assets and been escorted straight from the courtroom to a holding cell to await sentencing.

If Paulson and many thousands of others are found guilty of fraud or gross mismanagement or collusion, we should wipe out their entire fortunes in addition to the 5 to 20 years of prison time. And God forbid we find out they illegally offshored some money...we'll need to tack on extra years for that.

I am a hard working entrepreneur. I invent real things that create sustainable jobs and tangible assets. People that only flip money around while defrauding investors should be treated the same as drug dealers.

I know many will think that those cheating the system are doing so "semi- legally" in that if there were no or few regulations, then they didn't technically violate the law. However, most states have "fraud legislation" that defines fraud as "what 12 members of a jury think it is." I think its about time we start putting some of these massively wealthy people that have fleeced the public in front of a jury of "our peers" and give them a fair trial.

<comment><USER3> I agree, but you're unfamiliar with how the upper class works aren't you?

<comment><USER4> How did the French upper class work before the guillotine?

I think jhancock is talking about how it should be, not about how it is right now.

<comment><USER2> I'm just hoping that if people can finally stand up and elect a minority as president, then maybe we can also demand that white collar criminals start to take some heat.

To put it in Hacker perspective, if "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." then the best way to create social change is to get off our collective butts and demand it ;)

btw, I'm not actually foolish enough to think Obama is going to make radical progress in these areas. If we want people to pay the price for economic malfeasance, we have to demand their heads be put on pikes. If we make it clear that its either them or you ("you", meaning our elected officials) we might see some progress.

<comment><USER5> Subprime loans were made at the insistence of elected officials.

<comment><USER2> that's correct. However, I do not believe our elected officials pushed it to allow "poor and minorities" easier access. I think they did it to allow financial institutions to reap the benefits of more and cheaper funds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Arggghhhh... Stop linking to print versions. They are way harder to read.</comment>


Automotive Grade Linux is hitting the road - <AUTHOR> https://dailykanban.com/2018/06/automotive-grade-linux-is-hitting-the-road/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.automotivelinux.org/](https://www.automotivelinux.org/)

[https://www.automotivelinux.org/software/download](https://www.automotivelinux.org/software/download)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this is an "improvement" over what exists right now - the vast majority of carmakers do seem to be stuck in the 90's era of security best practices, but I don't think using the whole Linux kernel is a good idea for this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Ken-ichi Murata, sporting his trademark Van Dyke beard, told me that AGL has long left the design labs. AGL already is in the Toyota Camry and in the new plug-in Prius, "and it will be in many more Toyota models to come," Murata said. Sitting next to him, Thomas Wurdig of Daimler explained how AGL will become the brains of upcoming Mercedes vans."</comment>


China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/china-is-said-to-order-carriers-to-bar-personal-vpns-by-february?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social <comment><USER2> Considering how important the CCP (Communist Party) considers information oversight and control to be I'm surprised it took them this long. During the time I was in China getting around the 'Great Firewall' was so routine that most didn't really give it a second thought.</comment>


Google offers better Chromebook pricing to lure businesses and schools - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/google-offers-better-chromebook-pricing-to-lure-businesses-and-schools.ars <comment><USER2> I still remember when the original iPhone came out without support for native 3rd party software development, and Steve Jobs said with a perfectly straight face that the web is our SDK. Faced with the capabilities offered by native first party software at the time, it didn't fly then, (and that was on a phone, not a laptop), and I just don't see things having progressed enough in the four years since then for it to fly now. Maybe if they try again in another four years, when the state-of-the-art of web software and service creation and usage will have advanced a bit more, they'd encounter more enthusiastic support for this product. Hopefully, they haven't nixed the whole project by that point.

<comment><USER3> Browser capabilities have come a long way since 2007, and the use cases are very different between mobile consumer apps and business apps. While ChromeBooks aren't able to fill every need, I bet they could still fit the needs of a lot of organizations. I've worked in at least a couple places where every single business app was web-based.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They wouldn't have had a pricing problem if they would've went with a powerful ARM chip from the beginning, like say Nvidia's quad core Tegra 3, which handles browsing quite well:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yab7mv9yOm8>

<comment><USER5> Given that it doesn't run any external binaries, they still could?

<comment><USER4> I know they could and they probably will, but what I'm saying is that it could be too late. They had to make a first impression with Chromebooks and they blew it, in big part because of the pricing. They did the very same mistake with the Google TV Revue that was also powered by Atom and cost $300, while the ARM-based Apple TV was $100. And it seems they still haven't learned their lesson, now making all future Android versions optimized for Atom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Business pricing under this model is $559 or $639 up-front for the Chromebook and first year of service_

ZOMG...

[http://www.frys.com/search?query_string=&cat=-68384&...](http://www.frys.com/search?query_string=&cat=-68384&pType=pDisplay&rows=50&sort=price%20asc&start=0&cat=-68384&from=0&to=24)

Google dudes... I know you can't tell me anything because of NDA's and lawyers and stuff. But really? What are you thinking?

Why not pour a couple of $ Billion into Desktop Linux?

</comment><comment><USER7> all i have to say is I love my chromebook and the majority of people that diss it haven't used one for more than a few days.

</comment><comment><USER8> Key problem with Chromebook = no client side caching... This coupled with the nature of internet connections in America today (unreliable enough to lead to a momentary lack of being able to type into a cloud doc once a day for a moment) makes these products untenable for most users....

</comment><comment><USER9> $200 - with decentish netbooks that can do all that and more at ~$250-270, chromebooks will never fly until they can hit $200.

</comment><comment><USER10> That's still too high. We can get bulk pricing cheaper on HP net books with 3G through Verizon cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER11> The Chromebook is the modern day Net PC.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you get motivated?(the hard way) - <AUTHOR> Asking for help. I could not get myself to prepare for interviews even after knowing that I am stuck at a dead end job. Mostly because I am in my sudo comfort zone. Anyone one else faced the same situation? Is quitting your job that you don't enjoy anymore (but makes ends meet) and prepping&searching a stupid option ?<p>PS: by dead end I mean: very less chances of learning new skills, not able to find good mentors, not fully realising my potential or exercising current skills. <comment><USER2> Tangentially related questions: How do you know you're not "fully realizing your potential"? Why are you not learning new skills (even dead-end jobs have learning opportunities)? What makes it a "dead-end job"? Can you _afford_ to quit your job to "prep and search"? Why can't you do that _and_ do you job that pays the bills?

</comment><comment><USER3> Have confidence in yourself and make a decision. Sounds to me like you already know what you need to do.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds familiar.

Currently I'm trying to meet deadlines at my full-time job (freelance, which is ok, but feels like I'm not moving anywhere with it), while during weekends working on part-time project in area, which looks more interesting-promising than current full-time. Bills coming too often to quit full-time job in my case, also not ready to add serious risks.

When I first time left office job and moved into freelance, it was more like moving into something new, rather than running away from current. Risk was rewarded, but time should be right for this.

Really important to find how to make money doing things you are enjoying, so you can make progress there even after long day at boring-job-for-bills.</comment>


Quora Down? - <AUTHOR> Is Quora down entirely? <comment><USER2> Not from my location "fr.quora.com"

<comment><USER2> Update: yes actually "fr.quora.com" also down

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems it's back now</comment>


Wire's independent security review – Server source coming end Q1 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/wire-news/wires-independent-security-review-61f37a1762a8#.hqj2nggg0 <comment><USER2> Direct link to the report itself [https://www.x41-dsec.de/reports/Kudelski-X41-Wire-Report- pha...](https://www.x41-dsec.de/reports/Kudelski-X41-Wire-Report- phase1-20170208.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why just review the source of the crypto? Why not the rest of the software used by Wire?

<comment><USER2> They reviewed protocol implementation and the post on Kudelski site says that they'll tackle the complete solution in the next phase.

I'm no expert but these reviews are no trivial matter, takes time and effort.</comment></comment>


Breaking Down Walls, a Decentralised Social Web? - <AUTHOR> http://evan.prodromou.name/files/sxsw2012/sxsw2012.html <comment><USER2> This makes no sense whatsoever. "Plum Pudding"? and a b/w picture of some guy?</comment>


Yahoo Store now C++ (comments by pg from 2003) - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg02367.html <comment><USER3> Emailer: "ITA [Software Inc.], the other alleged Lisp success story.. also says much the same thing.. they don't really use Lisp except for certain key things"

PG: "Using a language for these "certain key things" is exactly what it means to "really use" it."

I thought this was a terrific observation about language wars. You can build a website in Ruby or PHP or Python etc., without _really using_ the language. If your code ports nearly line for line from say, A to B, you're probably not taking advantage of the benefits of the language(s). You are using the language, but not _really_ using it.

A more concrete example:

You can build a website in PHP that also has a chat room written in node.js.

In this case you are _really_ using both languages.

Alternatively, you can build a website in node.js that also has a chat room written in PHP.

In that case you are _using_ both languages, but not _really using_ either.

<comment><USER4> Do you think that this _really_ _using_ argument is more or less a tautology?

(1) If people who wrote their website in Lisp (Viaweb, ITA, Reddit) continue using Lisp, then they are smart and Lisp is powerful.

(2) If those people (or new people) rewrite the website in a different language (C++, Python), then either (a) the new people are dumb (Lisp is too powerful for them!) or (b) the website was not really using features not in the new language (the powerful Lisp features were not used!).

EDIT: As noted by pnathan below, maybe it is more of a No True Scotsman.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman>

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's a tautology, just getting too hand-wavy on an important point.

What does it mean to _really_ use a programming language? I take it to mean that your task aligns with the strengths of the language. I can use the butt of a screwdriver to drive in a nail, but hammers certainly are better at the task. Programming languages are similar, but defining the strengths of the languages and the needs of your task are monstrously more complex.

One strength, and weakness, of Lisp is its malleability. The language itself can be turned into almost anything you want or need. If your purpose is to demonstrate _possibility_ , few tools are better. At this point you can _really_ use Lisp, because at this point you are free to exercise the strengths that only Lisp has.

Once that possibility is known, though, this strength becomes a form of weakness. The project should now move with purpose, methodically exploring the problem space. You draw attention, hopefully money, and with it more team members. What was a single vision wrought in code now must be the coordinated effort of a large group. You can no longer _really_ use Lisp because the group is too large and sharing the knowledge of a newly built language feature takes more time than the feature saves. So, you stop _really_ using Lisp and _just_ use it, carefully selecting the subset of tools that allow people to work together.

Or, you rewrite, in some language whose strengths are more in line with the needs of your now larger project. Then you are _really_ using that language. I don't see tautology or contradiction here, only shifting requirements that we fail to acknowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is basically a manifestation of the "LISP Curse" - high level functional languages are sufficiently powerful that small teams of really smart people (like us) can crank out amazing applications with relatively low effort.

However, to maintain and improve these applications, you need to maintain and grow a pool of really smart people, which is something of a challenge for large companies. We tend to be like cats - very fascinated for short periods of time but unwilling to listen to non-technical direction issued by a bunch of MBA's.

It's far easier - for a non-technical person - to assemble a horde of average developers using a pre-packaged toolkit (Java, Microsoft, SAP, or enterprise software packages) and boss them through some form of digitized process map. Let them hire a bunch of their B-school buddies at ACN or Mckinsey to "faciliate" the deployment, for $300 - $500 per hour, and it's a lock.

Big companies don't care about technical excellence - they care about ensuring the company, not the developer, controls the code. The truth of the matter - developers are not created equal and you will get a lot farther in a small group if you let your best person carry the ball.

Unfortunately we're comparing archers and crossbowmen - the archer took YEARS to train but delivered (for his time) an awesome rate of fire with good accuracy. The Crossbow allowed you to herd together large groups of average peasants and overcome the archer by sheer weight of numbers.

<comment><USER7> your "easier" route will produce fake progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pure Paul Graham: "Do you have any idea how long the future is? Do you really think people in 1000 years want to be constrained by hacks that got put into the foundations of Common Lisp because a lot of code at Symbolics depended on it in 1988?"

In my CS degree we never learned about how language will evolve. We learned how they work, how to write new ones, how to translate between them, but never how to future-proof them.

But right now it looks like C will remain the language of the future :)

<comment><USER9> In a "Long Now" talk [1], science fiction author Vernor Vinge mentions the "software midden heap", the layers of software standing on the shoulders of and papering over the bugs of earlier software layers. Will anyone be able to excise rotting middle layers without breaking software compatibility?

Another example is from Vinge's novel _A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY_. He describes a software system thousands of years in the future that still uses the _time_t_ epoch. None of the system's space-faring users know the significance of the date 01970, though a few believe it is the date when computers were invented. :)

20 years after the "discovery" ;) of UNIX, Linus began developing a Linux from scratch. Linux is now 20 years old. Is some college student writing a new operating system that will cut the cruft from Linux? Even Linux is far from a clean slate design because it embraces (and extends) POSIX APIs and UNIX conventions. Will we still be using Linux (or Linux derivative) in 2050? 2010?

[1] Vernor Vinge: _"What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?"_

[http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/feb/15/what-if-the- singula...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/feb/15/what-if-the-singularity- does-not-happen/)

<comment><USER10> _None of the system's space-faring users know the significance of the date 01970, though a few believe it is the date when computers were invented. :)_

And some thought we measured time from the date of the first moon landing.

More relevantly in the book is the class of people known as programmer- archaeologists who specialise in digging through libraries of software looking for code that already does what they need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like the guys who recently switched from Erlang to Python [1].

"Too afraid to learn Erlang" exactly.

[1] [http://code.mixpanel.com/2011/08/05/how-and-why-we- switched-...](http://code.mixpanel.com/2011/08/05/how-and-why-we-switched- from-erlang-to-python/)

<comment><USER12> Well, there's certainly a difference in scale here. If you have a shop where no one knows Erlang and everyone's experienced in Python, and your conversion project can be knocked out in 2 weeks by a fresh intern, well, I think the time savings are pretty straightforward.

X developers x Y time to "really learn Erlang" = Z > 2 weeks

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love programming languages and I never miss an opportunity to learn a new one, but I think that anyone who thinks that a programming language can make or break a company doesn't have much clue on how the industry works.

I have a lot of respect for pg but the successful sell out of his company had a lot more to do with "the right product at the right time" than it had to do with Lisp.

I'm also very disappointed with this kind of condescending claims:

"The reason they rewrote it was entirely that the current engineers didn't understand Lisp and were too afraid to learn it. "

Or maybe, just maybe, they know a little bit more about the pros and cons of using a mainstream language to ship a product in terms of staffing and tooling and they decided that Lisp just didn't clear that bar.

<comment><USER10> _"the right product at the right time"_

"We chose Lisp. For one thing, it was obvious that rapid development would be important in this market. We were all starting from scratch, so a company that could get new features done before its competitors would have a big advantage. We knew Lisp was a really good language for writing software quickly. [..] And because Lisp was so high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. [..] with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release." - <http://paulgraham.com/avg.html>

It was the advantages of using Lisp which gave them the ability to create the right product at the right time, instead of the right product too late, or dreams of the right product, too expensive to hire the team to build it.

The claim isn't really that Haskell might be a success and F# a failure, but only that if you can take advantages of more powerful languages power, you gain some advantages over companies which use less powerful languages - <USER2> not a guaranteed make or break difference, just another bit of help.

Given that he's gone from successful founder to successful investor mentoring several thriving startups, your claim that he can't "have much clue how the industry works" feels hollow.

 _Or maybe, just maybe, they know a little bit more about the pros and cons of using a mainstream language to ship a product in terms of staffing and tooling and they decided that Lisp just didn't clear that bar._

Or maybe, just maybe, the guy who wrote it and was there when it was rewritten knows more accurately what happened than you do. It isn't condescending if it's true.

<comment><USER13> > It was the advantages of using Lisp which gave them the ability to create > the right product at the right time

Obviously, because they used Lisp, they were able to produce the product at time t, and any other language would have produced it at a different time t'.

I claim that they had no idea that t was better than t'. Nobody can.

It was a fluke, like many success stories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> ironically, Yahoo Mail is now rewriting chunks of their C++ backend in Java, because thats what new grads are taught these days instead of C++.

Back in 2003 pretty much all of ymail was in C++ with this crazy templating language that generated C++ code. Now it's all PHP and Javascript on the frontend. I assume that's true for other properties as well but i don't know first-hand.

</comment><comment><USER15> A few days ago I read this article:

<http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html>

"10: An interesting side-note. While the LMAX team shares much of the current interest in functional programming, they believe that the OO approach provides a better approach for this kind of problem. They've noticed that as they work to write faster code, they move away from a functional style towards OO style. Partly this because of the copying of data that functional styles require to maintain immutability. But it's also because objects provide a better model of a complex domain with a richer choice of data structures"

The world of software is so large and varied that I no longer can just believe the word of experts can be applied to other domains that they probably are not expert or have experience in before. PG with his LISP/Scheme world. Joel Spolsky with his Microsoft background. Martin Fowler with his OOP, Modeling ecosystem. Joshua Bloch with software correctness. Linus Torvalds with his embedded/OS island.

Are the things they wrote and spoke, within their domain, correct/make-sense? Perhaps.

Can we apply their opinions to other domains? Probably not.

I also feel that it's weird when a person always say "use the right tools for the job" but always push for his/her favourite programming language as if the language is always the best tools for anything that pops up in HackerNews. It feels like someone trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

Then there's the "let's burn the Agile Consultants" movement around here while promoting alpha-geeks that always change their programming language or web framework or their app-server of choice once every 2 years.

Some people don't care with the next programming language probably because they're busy learning Data Mining (Math & Stats), SOA, REST, HTTP protocols, SEO, CSS/HTML, administering Linux server, designing a database model, automating their testing effort, writing i18n-compatible apps, building robust code (in the programming language of their choice). Pretty much getting better in the situations that don't necessarily involve learning a new programming language.

Maybe programmers prefer to learn new programming languages as opposed to other things because learning a programming language is easier as opposed to learning Data Mining. Most programming languages are similar in a way they have a subset of common features: functions, type systems, object/classes in some, pointers/reference, iteration/loop, array. It's probably because we're human: we prefer things to be instant.

I don't think Ruby is more productive than Java in almost all situations. I'll give Rails the credit for being more productive for a simple CRUD apps if you compare it to most Java frameworks (the newer ones like Play, Spring MVC, Spring Roo, and a slew others are on par).

Maybe we shouldn't judge people based on their knowledge of more programming languages.

</comment><comment> the-kenny "Too afraid to learn Lisp"

This is sad. Very very sad.

<comment><USER16> Yes, if it's true, it is (it's PG's assessment). But since they wrote an interpreter for Lisp in C++, they couldn't have been that afraid, at least not all of them. I guess that's what they "gained", that only a few adventurous of the engineers at Yahoo "had" to learn Lisp and the rest could continue program in C++.

<comment><USER17> _But since they wrote an interpreter for Lisp in C++, they couldn't have been that afraid, at least not all of them_

Another interpretation is that this is like the "comb-over" syndrome. How does a middle-aged man end up with a comb-over, given that everybody knows it's a lame look? The answer is that it creeps up on him day by day, there is no one moment in time when he asks himself, "Should I comb my hair over?"

Likewise, whenever you see a Greenspunned[1] system, there is rarely a moment in time when some bright and ambitious person decided that the right thing to do was to sit down and implement half of Common Lisp. Instead, they make a series of small daily decisions (add this, change that, add such-and-such a feature, whoops, to fix that bug we need to do this...) that end up accreting into an interpreter for Lisp.

I don't know the whole story, perhaps they did decide to write such an interpreter right from the start. But it could be that they initially decided to write something very small and specific, but wound up with a comb-over.

[1]: [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Greenspun%27s...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule)

<comment><USER18> Nice explanation.

I have to ask though: Is Greenspunning such a bad thing?

It seems like this would be true of _any_ non-trivial software system (successful or not).

What's the variant of the 10th rule - something like:

 _'Every complex system contains an ad-hoc informally specified implementation of Common Lisp. Including Common Lisp'_

<comment><USER19> > I have to ask though: Is Greenspunning such a bad thing?

Yes, because if you knew you needed Common Lisp, you'd just use CL, rather than an ad-hoc informally specified implementation of CL. In general, the half implementation has half the value of the 'real' implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the language debate comes down to two classes of people: (1) people who care passionately about languages and code aesthetics, and (2) people who don't really care. Unfortunately, the second class of people are more unified and comprise at least a plurality, so they win.

The problem with the first camp is that we all want to use different languages-- Haskell, ML, Clojure, Scala. And these are all good languages! But companies can't afford to have more languages than there are people, not as the latter number grows and as being able to read code becomes more important than being able to write it. So every company needs to limit its white list. Those of us who are passionate about good languages nonetheless disagree on which of those good language to use. And we do ourselves a disservice when we bash Python because it sucks compared to Haskell; the result of this disagreement is we end up having to use C++ or Java.

The perversion here is that the reason so many companies coerce their codebases to C++ (i.e. limiting the whitelist) is that they recognize the importance of reading code. Yet they choose languages (C++, Java) where reading average (not bad code, mind you, but 50th-percentile code in a production system) code is extremely difficult. A good C++ programmer can write eventually comprehensible, but not beautiful code; a bad or average one can easily make an illegible and unmaintainable mess. For contrast, a good ML programmer can write beautiful, easy-to-read code while bad ML programmers are practically non-existent because they can't get their code to compile. For bad programmers, ML is that evil little language that caused them to nearly flunk that PL course they had to take in college.

What I wonder is how Yahoo managed to get people of sufficient talent to do the project. It seems like one of those hard-but-shitty projects that never succeeds because the people who are competent enough to do it have better options. Do-the-same-thing rewrites are never popular projects, and most people who understand Lisp are not going to be happy about taking on such a project for the sake of C++.

(No, I'm not saying that there aren't good programmers who use C++. There are great programmers who use C++. That said, someone who understands functional programming well enough to read Lisp is not likely to be among them; people who understand FP want to use it.)

<comment><USER21> You've done an excellent job of summarizing why Google does what it does: extremely few languages, and all code must pass readability review (or be written by an author with readability for the language(s) used) before it can be committed.

Though reading code isn't just it, language interop everyone knows how to use is important too. While all the fancy JVM languages have Java interop, it's still a huge pain for every old Java developer who wants to call your Clojure library. They'll end up learning how to do it separately for every language, every time, multiplied by the number of developers who aren't fluent in these languages (most).

<comment><USER22> Note that with JRuby, it is trivial to implement a "normal" java interface so your java consumers do not need to bother with the implementation detail (language) of your jar.</comment></comment></comment>


500px Arrives On iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/28/gorgeous-photos-in-your-pocket-500px-arrives-on-iphone/

<comment><USER2> since their released the website, I don't see what's the difference between 500px and Flickr except the latter is more mature and feature rich. in other words: what's their selling point and the reason they became popular?

<comment><USER3> It's the presentation. Flickr has terrible presentation, with tiny thumbnail views and lots of clutter. As a photographer though, the 900 pixel maximum width imposed at 500px.com is unacceptable. As a programmer, Flickr's api allows all kinds of social analytics that I would hate to give up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find the title a bit misleading. Does that mean the new iPhone will have 500 pixels? That's what I thought when I first read it, because I'm not familiar with "500px" the company.

Maybe change the title to reflect the one on the article?

<comment><USER5> 500px is a Canadian startup in Toronto. They been on the front page of hacker news several times. The word order made perfect sense.</comment></comment>