Why The Value of Bitcoin is Skyrocketing - <AUTHOR> https://bitcorati.com/2013/11/13/10-reasons-why-the-value-of-bitcoin-is-skyrocketing/ <comment><USER5> At this point virtually everybody I know in the tech space is buying at least one coin to "hedge" against bitcoin achieving "gold 2.0" status.

What are the chances that as this message echoes out to virtually any urban- dwelling or internet connected human on the planet we may all, as a human race, wind up accidentally embracing a unified digital currency while in pursuit of what amounts to a lottery ticket?

<comment><USER6> The important question on the other side: What are the chances that we all, as a human race, wind up accidentally embracing a digital tulip?

<comment><USER7> Only if Bitcoin fails at its promise and can't be fixed. E.g. some crypto breakthrough makes all security worth nothing.

Only if P=NP, in other words.

<comment><USER8> Bitcoin is no longer the only cryptocurrency, so it has to hold value against gold, diamonds (both of which are _completely_ anonymous), all fiat currencies, as well as alternate methods of payment.

It is highly unlikely that it will be adopted as a currency for major business transactions (too unstable and unknown), and is completely traceable, so will not be adopted by major elements in the black market. In the end, if bitcoin specifically (as opposed to some alternate cryptocurrency) remains in use for a long period, it is likely to be for relatively small transactions in niche markets. Does that warrant it's current valuation? I have no idea.

<comment><USER9> Diamonds and gold make for quite shitty currencies

Gold is extremely laborious to move, and not divisible enough for most usage. Diamonds are not fungible or very divisible. Both are very susceptible to physical theft.

Network effects for money are very strong, and bitcoin has a huge first mover advantage. Any competing digital currency will require quite the innovation or distinguishing factor to gain any traction. It is becoming more 'known' and trusted with each month that passes. Pre-bitcoin-era financial groups are slowly yet increasingly giving it more legitimacy (Mainly VCs, a few funds, the occasional bank, and research groups -- also Second Market and the Winklevoss ETF are two big things to watch right now).

The main counterpoint currently is that bitcoin use is quite error-prone and hard to digest, but this seems more like a temporary roadblock to me. Y'all remember geocities and AOL right? Bitcoin will become much easier and more secure to use in the coming years. Software is relatively easy to improve, compared to gold, fiat, and the like.

There are some potential solutions to traceability, but it is uncertain how that will play out (I can't even pretend to fully understand the regulatory environments and international politics that will affect this). The one thing I can guarantee -- the way we use and conceptualize money is going to change drastically in the next several decades, and I think bitcoin will have a huge influence on this.

<comment><USER10> Bitcoins are very susceptible theft, as evidenced by the fact that someone heists a whole bunch of them from a website every other week.

You can't play off a good which is hard to move as "susceptible to theft" when you can log in and copy a data file and have succeeded in stealing a whole bunch of money.

<comment><USER9> I admitted using bitcoins currently is hard and expensive errors are easy to make. But this is a software issue. Old "good enough" security habits won't fly, as a lot money is on now on the line (old security issues usually didn't cause too much harm for most users). New practices/implementations will have to be developed, but I don't see why that won't happen.

Even nowadays with a few simple steps you can make your bitcoin stash VERY VERY secure. Install a fresh copy of linux on a USB, disconnect all networking capabilities, boot to the USB, create a new wallet/address (brain or paper) using established methodology, turn off computer, remove USB, presto, you have a un-hackable bitcoin address. You could even create a multi-sig stash that requires a digital signature from multiple people (2-of-3, 3-of-5, etc). Obviously, this is cumbersome and non-trival for the average joe. But with a small amount of imagination it is easy to see how everyday solutions could be developed.

<comment><USER10> Which part of those steps feels "simple" to you, compared to the various protections my credit card company and bank offer me?

You also haven't covered anything about backups, which means if you lose that USB or it dies, then _poof_ all that money becomes unrecoverable permanently.

You can't even access that money now without booting an entire new OS on the computer, which means good luck spending it, not to mention, for a digital currency you might want network connectivity as well.

<comment><USER9> Creating backups is not that hard. Print out extra copies, give one to your sister/best friend/lawyer/whoever you trust. Or store the seed phrase (or memory jog that only you will understand) in many places. Upload encrypted versions to dropbox/gmail/etc. Put a copy in your locked safe. There are many options.

There are several tools that allow you to create a transaction offline (using similar steps to what I listed above, which only take 10-20 minutes) and then you can broadcast the raw transaction text to the network using something like [http://blockchain.info/pushtx](http://blockchain.info/pushtx). Again, this only necessary for super secure storage of long term savings/investments/etc.

Lastly, one could easily keep small, day-to-day amounts on their smartphone, which can spent and transferred quite conveniently (average joe level convenient). Then top up this spending wallet every so often using your offline wallet (10 minute time commitment every week or two).

The options/methods for doing all of this will only get easier. We are in the pre-alpha stages of digital currency software right now. Think web in the early 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Forget these 10 reasons. The real 10 reasons are

1\. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy 2\. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy 3\. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy 4\. The price keeps skyrocketing, so people hoard or buy

etc... it all works out until it doesn't... it's long overdue for a major correction

<comment><USER12> Does not "correction" imply that there is a "correct" price for Bitcoin? Since it has absolutely no inherent value, what would this be? Zero? Or does its value derive from its utility as a medium of exchange (and associated transfer mechanism)? In that case, should its value be derived from the size of the global economy? (As done here: [http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/the-target- value-for-bitcoin...](http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/the-target-value-for- bitcoin-is-not-some-50-or-100-it-is-100000-to-1000000/))

<comment><USER10> It's zero.

Perfectly substitutable currencies have an exchange rate of either zero or infinity. If there's no reason to hold one over the other, you've no reason to ever give up your holdings of one or the other...until there's a slight imbalance, at which point 1 is clearly superior and you've a huge incentive to abandon ship as fast as possible.

In practical terms, government money is backed by the necessity of extinguishing tax obligations and debts within it's jurisdiction, so it's _not_ perfectly substitutable. Bitcoin has no such benefit - there's never a reason to hold it because everything provided by it can be provided by other currencies. Of course, the fact exchanging out requires selling to a greater fool provides some stability, but therin lies the nature of a bubble - <USER2> people want out, there's absolutely nothing that's going to convince anyone else they should want in.

Of course if you _hold_ Bitcoin, for any reason, you need to aggressively argue against this problem - and indeed all problems with Bitcoins, at least until you no longer hold Bitcoin.

<comment><USER13> How can a currency have an exchange rate of infinity?

<comment><USER10> Infinity isn't a number to start with, it's an expression of a limit. i.e. if you _need_ something, then how much you'll pay for it is effectively unlimited. The idea is, that how the price changes is basically only limited by how quickly your various agents can buy it.

You see the problem with this when artificial agents get into bidding wars - because they react so quickly, they end up creating massive price volatility because when it's worth buying _its worth buying_ and when it should be sold they can't dump it quick enough.

In practice every thing has some type of limits - i.e. even computers operate over limited time intervals, and any individual actor has limited resources so eventually something exhausts itself (i.e. everyone might have dumped Currency 1 for Currency 2, but even if no one holds any any more, they'd still be trying to sell it off if they did - ergo, we never reached a finite "price" for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I still think Moldbug has by far the explanation of the increasing moneyness and price of bitcoin: [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitcoin-is-bubble.html)

So when people say bitcoin is "bubble" they are essentially correct - <USER3> the condescension is usually misplaced. All money is a bubble in the sense that its reservation demand is far higher than its use value warrants. This is true for the dollar, and it's also true for gold, which also has a large element of "moneyness".

</comment><comment><USER15> _" The Silk Road shutdown resulted in brief, but shallow sell off and subsequent rebounded within a few days. This event showed the world and governments that illegal activities were a very small fraction of the transactions taking place on the bitcoin network."_

I would say it showed that _Silk Road_ was a small fraction of all BC transactions, but that still doesn't speak to the total amount of illegal activity going on BC.

That said, it does imply to me that either: (1) The total percentage of BC transactions being used for illegal transactions really is low (as the article implies), or: (2) The remaining entities using BC for illegal purposes are confident that what happened to the Silk Road won't happen to them.

<comment><USER16> No matter how small it was, it was probably the largest money-bitcoin-money faction.

Lots of people mine and trade coins. But only the few thousands (hundreds?) Silkroad users were actively pumping money constantly into the system, giving a much needed reality check of how much people will pay for a made up currency with established made up money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Investment-wise, the prognosis is still the same as it ever was: BTC will either become a huge thing worth a lot, or it will be worth near zero.

The only difference is the % of total BTC you can buy given your availabe assets.

For some people that % is now close to nil, whereas before it wasn't, so they've missed their opportunity.

For others, the % is still significant. Those people should probably still get into BTC if they agree with the premise of this comment.

<comment><USER18> > Investment-wise, the prognosis is still the same as it ever was: BTC will > either become a huge thing worth a lot, or it will be worth near zero

Almost but not quite: it must surely go to zero at _some_ point, because chances are extremely high that we haven't accidentally hit the holy grail of digital cryptocurrencies and no better thing could ever be possibly come along for all eternity. Before that happens, it will most likely become a bigger thing than now. So I think most folks are just wondering two things: before we reach zero, how much bigger will it become (multitudes? exponentially bigger? orders of magnitude? or just another $3.50 higher?) and over what timeframe.

And even the most educated guess at those two questions is as good as any other, truly.

<comment><USER17> > Almost but not quite: it must surely go to zero at some point, because > chances are extremely high that we haven't accidentally hit the holy grail > of digital cryptocurrencies and no better thing could ever be possibly come > along for all eternity.

Bitcoin mathematically approximates Byzantine concensus with arbitrary parcitipants. This is the fundamental insight over the fundamental hurdle that made all prior attempts at cryptocurrencies (for decades) non-starters.

What is the space of cryptocurrencies that exploit the Byzantine insight, but are somehow better than Bitcoin? I would suspect that it is very small, or nil.

So unlike you, I don't think there is a high chance of something better coming along. I think there is a low but significant chance.

A slight digression:

I _do_ think that bitcoin may end up being the "gold" used to resolve balances between crypto-banks that have their own currencies. The advantage of such a system is confirmation in almost no time, and not having to pay a transaction fee to get your transaction into a block (which could be large as contention for block space rises).

But other cryptocurrencies backed by bitcoin will have to be redeemable for bitcoin, always. If you sever the link, they become worthless.

Now if they increase the block size limit to keep transaction fees low, there may never be any need for other cryptocurrencies backed by bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anything that goes up fast will come down fast. That simple is that. The sooner you sell your speculative investment the more likely you'll get your money back (at the expense of other people). I sold some leftover coins of mine after 2x in price and that's still phenomenal gains from just some random coins I saved for any next purchase.

The value of BTC will slowly rise but naively extrapolating from the last year or so only I'd say the realistic value is still below $100. I'm pretty confident that roughly $50 is a rather stable floor for the years coming.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any logical/economic basis for this speculation you have so confidently pronounced?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr JS_loader == BAD_UX

I can't comment on the post because I'm on a train with spotty 3G coverage. Which begs the question. WTF is going on with this trend of JS loaders? If your site takes too much time to load, stop nagging users and just take the time to properly optimize the site.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just like with every bubble, some people will wait and wait again to invest in... Only once all their friends will have gain some money speculating, once the main media will say it's an easy way to make money, when they'll have the feeling that eveybody else is making money, only then will they invest in... And loose everything the next day, after the bubble collapse.

So, if you're planning on speculating with bitcoins, do it _right now_ , or never do it... The chances are it's already too late btw, since people are already mentionning exponential growth.

<comment><USER22> Case in point: I hold quite a few bitcoins. I am waiting to sell them. The deciding moment will be when my mom mentions bitcoins to me the first time. That will be the trigger ;)

<comment><USER23> "I just heard about some kind of tech scam where everyone lost their money. Bitslab or something like that. Have you heard of this?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> To Bitcoin owners out there: out of curiosity, what kind of stuff do you buy using Bitcoin?

<comment><USER25> given the crazy rise in prices I doubt anybody is spending any, apart from people who maybe want to, uhm, clean some money.

<comment><USER26> That's not really true, a lot of us more sensible people want to 'cash out' a little slowly as the price goes up, and what better way to cash out than actually spending the bitcoin on an actual product and supporting the economy? I'd be willing to bet that as people suddenly find themselves with tens or hundreds of bitcoins, and that they can buy a pizza for 0.05 BTC, they are quite open to the idea of receiving what is essentially free pizza. Sure, that pizza could be worth five pizzas tomorrow but you still have a decent chunk in bitcoins and if the whole thing plummets to earth then at least you got something delicious.

<comment><USER10> Hilariously this post highlights like, every reason why trading goods for BTC is a sucker's deal for the retailer.

<comment><USER27> How? The retailer gets exactly what they would if they had just asked for local currency, except maybe a little extra business.

<comment><USER10> My point was rather meta, but it was the choice of language. "Pizza effectively for free" \- lots of things about Bitcoin seem to involve people hoping they get something effectively for free.

In the case of the price volatility for hoarding bitcoin while it rises, it underscores the deflationary nature of the currency - no economic value has been contributed by someone holding the BTC, but they've gotten richer regardless. Sitting around doing nothing with the BTC did not produce any economically valuable activity - it wasn't invested or used to finance starting that pizza place, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How many of these transactions are tulip-style speculation, and how many are real use of bitcoins as a currency for exchanging labour and goods?

</comment><comment><USER29> Huh, nothing about the approach of a big buyer's holiday and the end of the tax period?

</comment><comment><USER30> Your idiotic mobile theme renders this as a gigantic, unscrollable "0%"

<comment><USER31> And breaks scrolling.

<comment><USER32> And screws with scrolling in desktop browsers too.

Seriously, why do people do this? Instant close tab...

<comment><USER16> Fad. Most show hn sites have zoom disabled. As does most look-how-cool-and- web-2.0-this-designer-website-is start ups.

<comment><USER33> Freaking zoom disable is the most pointless thing ever put in a mobile browser, ever.

<comment><USER16> Why browsers still respect that, even on custom ROMs is beyond me.

My CM7 browser can bypass this. but my cm10 can't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If goes btc keeps going up like this for 10 years 1 BTC will be worth more than all dollars in the world today. I think i'll keep hoarding 3 euro coins instead, at least you can make bullets out of them.

<comment><USER9> Some investments go up really fast for a while, and then go up more slowly after that. Do you have good arguments for why bitcoin couldn't do this?

<comment><USER34> Nothing goes up forever.

As for investments.. those usually have (or promise to have) a thing called yield. If i put my money in the bank, they give me an interest. BTC doesn't. If my bank goes bankrupt, my deposit is insured. If my BTC wallet is stolen...

And this is before we even start talking about regulatory risk. Again: BTC is a fantastic technical endeavour, but to call it an "investment" is quite a long shot. Call it a bet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What a headache. Just to buy a cup of coffee I need to boot up Linux on a USB disk, input a 500 digit hash, call my brother for the rest of the hash, and my cousin in Sweden for the rest of it, make the transfer an wait for 15 minutes for it to transact, then I get my coffee. Yea. I'd feather have GOLD, SILVER AND COPPER coins. Even digital representations maintained by a bank.

Also, I'm glad I didn't agree to pay my mortgage in bit coins when the value was $11. The 70X increase in price would BITRUPT me! :)

</comment><comment><USER35> TOO MANY BIT COIN QUESTIONS:

If they were stolen, who do I call to help me get them back? If I loose the keys to get into my coins, who will help me get access back to my cash. Does the UN have a BitPolice squad hunting down bit theft? If I were to declare bankruptcy would I have to declare my bit coins as a part of my estate? Is there a BITRUPTSY court?

</comment><comment><USER36> n.b. the article is about why (in the author's eyes) the price of bitcoin skyrocket _ed_. It's all very much past-tense, observation not prediction.

</comment><comment> grey-area This Bitcoin rise rases some interesting questions for me, even if it rings alarm bells at the same time.

What is the value of a currency? Is it the inscription 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand...', which nowadays will not be fulfilled? Is it the power of the organisation backing it? Perhaps the simplest explanation is best - <USER4> can you buy in other goods you might want with this currency? But that leaves you open to manipulation as you are entirely dependent on your _perception_ of what other people think this is worth, which can change in an instant as we have seen with stock markets or indeed government-backed currencies where confidence is lost. So a good confidence trick will be worth as much as or more than a solid currency, until a moment of panic.

If you try to base it on the current value of goods in the world divided by the currency in circulation (say 11m coins), Bitcoin has a large climb in value ahead of it _if_ it were to become a world currency, and if no other currency were in use. What is the USD worth if you price it this way though with only 3b in circulation and ?

If you say the value of a currency is its ability to buy other goods Bitcoin is currently worth a lot compared to other currencies and prices in it are deflating rapidly, but it has crashed before and will again, because the only measure of value seems to be confidence in its possible future uses, and that makes it very hard to pin down the value. It would be interesting (but I suspect impossible) to try to calculate a value for each Bitcoin based on actual use to buy goods of known value at the present time (as opposed to speculative trading).

If you base it on its use value as a medium of exchange, I have hesitations about the utility of Bitcoin, because of its anonymous nature (not tied to verified IDs), lack of regulation, deflationary policy, and lack of backing, and thus hesitations about its value. As a result of the free-floating value and lack of regulation, I suspect Bitcoin prices will behave far more like stock markets (a random walk) than like a normal currency which is pegged to others to some extent, and thus will be difficult to establish as a medium of exchange because of the volatility.

I also find it hard to believe if it is successful that it will not be supplanted by some other digital currency which has fewer of its limitations and is more suited to transactions between people who do _not_ value anonymity above all, and wish to be protected from fraud, and the govs and corps that would like to track them. All you have to do to set up a competitor is establish some rules and get people to use it - something which corporations or governments can easily achieve if their monopoly on the money-supply is threatened in a meaningful way.

</comment><comment><USER37> Now I'm kicking myself for not buying into BTC last week!

<comment><USER38> I bought $9,000 worth of BTC at $7 two and a half years ago.

I sold them when it hit $30. :-(

<comment><USER39> $38500 aint bad, but it isn't $771000. I wish I would of purchased more than one when it was around $65 (right after the first pop). Now I'm trying to find the thumbdrive that contains the bitcoins that I got from the original fountain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Bandwagon + Peer effects = a "gold" rush. btw, the current exchange rate - $600 is making it worthless for everyday payments or small shopping. It is just a mass hysteria.

<comment><USER41> >btw, the current exchange rate - $600 is making it worthless for everyday payments or small shopping.

Huh? Why? You can buy fractions of a bitcoin, you know.

<comment><USER40> Prices like 0.0167 are averse.)

<comment><USER9> _That 'll be 17 millicoins, sir. Would you like a receipt?_

Or whatever hip term the youngsters come up with ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> the _price_ of bitcoin is skyrocketing.

why? "more buyers than sellers"

</comment><comment><USER43> Completely OT but what's up with the scrolling? Why would you do that?</comment>


16 new services launched in 48 hours in Estonia - <AUTHOR> http://garage48.org/blogger/garage48-tallinn-results-april-2010 <comment><USER2> I'll be honest. I find these things retarded. It'd be like sailing across the Bering Strait and announcing that'd you'd crossed the Pacific.

Something thrown together in 48 hours is not a startup; it's a website. It might be able to turn into a startup over time, and I think that would be a far more interesting statistic: how many of these "startups" are doing anything after 3 months?

<comment><USER3> I will tell you in 3 months. I was actually one of the organizers for this group of events (startup weekend and associated events were done all over the nordics last weekend and the weekend before) and I honestly don't think it's really about actually getting a startup going so much as the experience and meeting people. I do know from talking with the Startup Weekend guys in the states (Clint) that some of these actually do turn into _real_ startups and get funded and launch but many don't. I don't think that's a problem at all, I know from my personal experience (Lund, Sweden) that is was very heavy with university students who probably weren't considering or thinking about startups at all. The event helps people become aware of the opportunities, network and meet a lot of people who might be interested in doing something. One of the things that makes it easiest (my opinion) is other people interested in starting up and knowing the right people in your region to actually get help (legal, business, investors, feedback, everything else). These types of events give that opportunity to people who might have never even thought about it otherwise. If a startup is born from the event, AWESOME. If not, what else was gained? I think quite a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> In Tallinn we also had a great mix of people, from high school and university students to experienced professional people. Even 2 of the Skype founders, who have written core part of that product and made hundreds of millions in exits, were in the teams, developing Garage48 software products. Not so much to create new fantastic businesses, but to hack, have fun and meet people.

Interesting fact: On quick count 14 present and former Skype staff contributed to 6 of total 16 Garage48 teams. Skype has had a great effect on Estonian startup and development culture.

<comment><USER3> That's pretty awesome, glad to hear such a great group of people got together. We had Peter Sunde the first day give a talk and he stayed for the pitches asking questions and giving feedback which was pretty fun to listen to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The site's own headline has the decency to call these "services" rather than "startups". Oh, that the submission-headline would be as honest!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, changed the title of the submission. Absolutely agree, that for now most of these are just quick projects, that might grow into real companies. Ideas are cheap, execution is what matters. These were ad hoc projects, people who met first time on Friday, many of them students. The focus was also not on businesses, but products and services, some of them non- commercial - why not. Events like these have also the goal of getting contacts and new friends and give people motivation. In that Garage48 succeeded, so many people said they are now considering doing a startup, something they never before had thought of.

<comment><USER4> Thank you! (Many of the initial comments were reacting to the word 'startup' rather than the interesting services created, so I think this wording will get more of the right kind of attention/reaction.)

<comment><AUTHOR> True, sorry! We actually do most of our communications locally in Estonian and use different terms, which get lost in translation :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favourite: "Seenele - map based Facebook application to find places to get mushrooms."

<comment><AUTHOR> They said there are huge opportunities for growth. They can expand into berries. Or fishing. The pitch and jury questions section was funny as hell. That counts.

Seriously though, as a small 4-person team they developed an impressive mobile + Facebook mapping / events / social application that can be tried out in many revenue-generating businesses. What they need to do is experiment, iterate, get mentored and find their way. There are so many opportunities where they can grow. Using mushrooms as an example does not mean that's what they actually want to do for the rest of their lives :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I believe this quote from Paul Graham is relevant here: "Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest." <http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> Sign of a startup bubble?

<comment><USER7> No. There are plenty signs but this isn't one of them.

If they were valued at several million, then yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fun projects for mushroom fans or tracking how much parliament members attend the sessions are definitely not signs of a bubble :-)

One of the projects on the other hand made a lot of fun out of funding/exit bubble, making it their key theme: their only goal was to exit by next Friday. The first thing they did was list themselves for sale on an auction site. One of the VC's on the jury actually made a 50 cents bet on them, raising it from previous 40 cents ;) Having fun is important, not all things are dead serious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the success rate of startup weekend startups?

<comment><AUTHOR> If 2-3 of the 16 projects would turn into real businesses, we would be extremely happy. If at least half of them continue as websites or free software, that would be great as well.

Let's also not forget, that if the people are great and team works well, many of the startups find themselves doing something completely different in 1-2 years time. You just have to get started and experiment.</comment></comment>


Bees underwent massive extinctions when dinosaurs did - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131024121158.htm

<comment><USER2> Paper at: [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0076683)</comment>


Kickasstorrents Disappears From Google After Penalty - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-disappears-from-google-after-penalty-150718/

<comment><USER2> Right after another "error" on Google's part (which they never admitted to actually):

[https://torrentfreak.com/chrome-blocks-major-torrent- sites-o...](https://torrentfreak.com/chrome-blocks-major-torrent-sites-over- harmful-programs-150710/)

Saying torrents sites need to be blocked because they might contain some malware on some torrents out of millions, is really stretching it. If they really only cared about blocking it for malware to protect the users, then they should only be blocking those specific torrent pages, not the _whole site_. That's just as extreme as SOPA was - blocking a whole site because some user might upload some copyright infringement material.</comment>


Kerbal Space Program 2 Announcement - <AUTHOR> https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315-kerbal-space-program-2-master-post/&do=findComment&comment=3653021 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20740378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20740378)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The main page for KSP2 is [https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/game/kerbal- space-program...](https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/game/kerbal-space- program-2/), but I submitted the forum post because one of their Community Managers collected the page link, launch videos, Q&A and more into a single post, so I thought that would work better.

Launch is scheduled for 2020.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh man, multiplayer really is going to be a fun addition! Looking forward to sinking time into this when it comes out.</comment>


F*** Pattern Recognition - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mjb_sf/fuck-pattern-recognition-8178b279430f

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Oftentimes could relate, even being a 30-something male. ;-) Coming from a literature background and learned some things on the way, it sometimes feels strange.

But the moment, I was able to contribute to a open-source project I was thrilled.

<comment><USER3> Similar situation, coming from an education background, some experience in windows administration and currently in an editorial. Being able to make my first "project" that had people (albeit small group) interested felt awesome, regardless of how crude it looks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's some point in one's early musical education where you learn that all music follow patterns. And you think "how limiting," because the only patterns you know are major scale folk melodies and 3-chord rock. But as your pattern library grows, you appreciate how even the most avant-garde music follows patterns too, and without grokking the patterns you couldn't hear everything.

Company pattern recognition must seem limiting to someone who's only seen a small number of companies. But people who've seen 10000 companies can appreciate a range of patterns that would astonish someone who's only seen 100.

There are investors who focus on just one kind of company or founder, which is reasonable for part-time investors who want to leverage their particular experience. But in order to expand the universe of startups, YC specifically looks for promising new kinds of teams (though OP wouldn't be the first 40ish female founder new to programming to go through YC.) I hope Ms. Byerley will give us a chance to help her.

</comment><comment><USER5> tangentially related (and thank you for posting!)

German Women Find Break in Startups Denied in Corporate Chambers

"Women are changing entrepreneurship in Germany..." said Samuli Siren, a managing partner at Berlin-based Redstone Digital, which finds investors.

Women "are adapting and reinventing the idea of the startup, which is changing the game."

"It's important for women to share their entrepreneurial experiences with the public to encourage and motivate other females..."

[http://www.garp.org/risk-news-and-resources/risk- headlines/s...](http://www.garp.org/risk-news-and-resources/risk- headlines/story.aspx?newsId=117694)

</comment><comment><USER6> As a 41 year old male who didn't attend an Ivy League school (and never even bothered finishing his B.S degree), I can relate to this as well. I mean, we're not trying to raise money so I don't know for _sure_ how VC's will react to us, but from the various informal interactions we've had with various investors and other people in the "startup world" I definitely get the feeling that people don't take us seriously because we don't "pattern match" for them.

But then again, we're going against the grain intentionally in many areas, so it's not entirely unexpected. For one, we're not doing a Social-local-mobile- daily-deals-ride-sharing-uber-for-X application. We're doing enterprise software. BORING, right? We have also consciously chosen to bootstrap while continuing to work dayjobs so far. We'll quit our dayjobs when the time is right, but it's downright insulting when people act like we aren't "serious" or whatever, because we're still working so we can, you know, pay the light bill and buy food.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't get past the author's painful misuse of the concept of pattern recognition. That is literally the only thing the human brain does.

<comment><USER6> It isn't the author who started using the term this way. She's referencing something that has, of late, clearly become part of the vernacular in the startup world.</comment></comment>


Okta and Yext file for IPOs - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/cloud-identity-and-access-manager-okta-files-for-ipo-1489443249 <comment><USER2> Wow I am hearing this name Yext for the first time ever. What do they even do?

<comment><USER3> Their primary product allows businesses to manage their online location listings. So the locations, hours, coupons, all that jazz.

<comment><USER4> So, basically mozlocal but for larger companies and lot more expensive?

<comment><USER5> One of their biggest competitors is a fraction of the cost and size.

0\. [https://alllocal.com/](https://alllocal.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These two companies are on my beat, so please hit me up if you have interesting insights on them! firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER7> I know that we're pretty unhappy with Okta at work because they recently acquired & shut down Stormpath, which we were using for authentication. It's made us reluctant to trust Okta & similar SaaS.

<comment><USER8> Okta, a single sign-on solution that you constantly have to sign in to. I _love_ it.

<comment><USER9> We recently switched to Okta at work, and while it's better than the no SSO we had before, it's really annoying and makes a lot of things a pain the butt.

<comment><USER10> What do you have trouble with? I found it rather painless to use. Allow automatic login when linked to OS login and supports Google Authenticator. Far prefer SSO over the alternative.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Climbs to New Heights of Arrogance with Wave - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2009/05/28/google-climbs-to-new-heights-of-arrogance-with-wave/

<comment><USER2> The author thinks that wave is a product, but it is a protocol that they demoed with an application.

It _is_ like email--they are both communication protocols. Why would he compare a protocol to a product that uses a different protocol? It's like comparing bittorrent to Firefox.

The creators rightly dismissed the question of monetization because you don't monetize a protocol, you monetize programs built with it. The demo is just one of many potential products that can be built on it, so they can't answer that question based on it.

They rightly dismissed the competition of Sharepoint and Outlook because that was primarily a presentation of the protocol. The demo seemed like something thrown together to show how communication through the protocol looks like, and not the premier application that they will use it for.

I have an idea for potentially using the protocol for a distributed issue tracker that would work well with a DVCS; the protocol is not limited to Outlook and Sharepoint competition.

<comment><USER3> This is a dodge. Even TechCrunch was unable to talk about Wave without drawing a direct comparison to FriendFeed, an actual product. Meanwhile, talking about protocols without talking about applications is cart-before-the-horse handwaving.

<comment><USER2> None of the writers at TweetCrunch seem like creative programmers; they specialize in reporting on actual products, and not underlying protocols, so there isn't anything for them to report. It's not a dodge because there isn't anything to compare; you don't compare a protocol to a product that uses a different one.

I/O is a developer conference; talking about the protocol without an actual product is just fine--the demo was good enough to show developers what basic features they can use for whatever product they can imagine.

That demo just shows what you can do. You can't compare it to any existing product. As terrible as this article is, the author does come to the realization that it will be useful for their actual email and office products, however brushing that question off wasn't arrogant; it was a weak denial--a developer conference isn't the right place to talk about their office products.

<comment><USER3> The GigaOm article isn't about what you want it to be about, but that doesn't make it a bad article. They write on their terms, not yours. Those terms are: where does Wave fit in with the Google ecosystem? What's likely to happen to it? Is it worth an investment of time an interest?

The thesis of the article is that the Wave pitch is arrogant. The evidence mustered is that Google has a poor track record of weaponizing innovation, and has little to say right now about what they'd actually do with Wave, but is prepared to say that Wave is more important than SharePoint, and maybe SMTP.

I don't have to agree with this thesis to see that it's worth considering.

<comment><USER2> "The GigaOm article isn't about what you want it to be about. . .Those terms are: where does Wave fit in with the Google ecosystem? What's likely to happen to it? Is it worth an investment of time an interest?"

That's actually exactly what I thought it was about. Your comment, applied to this article, is the perfect explanation of why it is terrible: The presentation isn't about what they want it to be about, but that doesn't make it an arrogant presentation. Google was not doing a product presentation and GigaOm didn't understand it, and got upset when Google dismissed questions irrelevant to what they were presenting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe Google Wave won't be as revolutionary as some think, but calling Google arrogant for coming up with new stuff seems just ranting for the sake of ranting.

<comment><USER5> Yes, and they're doubly arrogant because they don't seem concerned with making money with it. The callus bastards. It's almost like they're just sitting there enjoying themselves...

<comment><USER6> callus vs. callous, related but not the same.

callus: A callus (or callosity) is an especially toughened area of skin which has become relatively thick and hard as a response to repeated contact

callous: emotionally hardened; "a callous indifference to suffering"; "cold- blooded and indurate to public opinion"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author cites Spencer Wang's estimate of YouTube's earnings yet again, despite the fact that most HN reader have pointed out that those numbers are useless.

It's amazing how crappy information like this keeps getting spread around, and I think it reflects the authors eagerness to prove his point with little regard for the facts.

</comment><comment><USER8> "The breathtaking arrogance of blowing off potential competition and touting tech buzzwords rather than at least giving a cursory examination as to how one might make money from a product is the Google way"

One must not forget that, even if it was greatly mediatised, it was still a develloper conference, not a consumer/enterprise conference. To be sure of that, you can just search other "non-techy" news sites about it, and you will see it's quite dead. For one good reason. It's not launched yet.

On the other hand, even if it's not launched, it's of great interrest to us devs, and there is some rationale behind the fact of unveiling it before a finished product is available, be it only for information purposes, since it's gonna be an open platform.

Devs are by nature quite arrogant about their new babies, there is nothing wrong with that. Wave looks quite exciting, and gigaom looks like they're lacking some good material to make themselves interresting ...

</comment><comment><USER9> The author mistook Google being 'arrogant' for Google just doing its thing.

Google is truly an idea farm. They push out their ideas in a subtle manner, releasing rapid-prototypes to see what sticks.

Is that being arrogant or just smart? Have they ever released a product that was over-hyped, over-marketed and have it flop?

Those are the kind of mistakes that kill companies. Apple could certainly lend a story or two.

Admittedly, Google definitely goes overboard with some projects but none of those were mentioned in this article.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd hate to be arrogant myself, but I'm pretty sure the author "doesn't get it". I wouldn't talk about sharepoint in the same breath either. Wave is a way of tying communication mechanisms together, not a crappy web interface thrown on top of shared storage.

<comment><USER3> SharePoint is a huge big deal inside enterprises, and it's not just a crappy web interface; it's also a crappy SDK for building crappy applications that fit into that crappy web interface. So without endorsing SharePoint, I can see how blowing it off is arrogant.

<comment><USER11> It should also be pointed out that SharePoint was Microsoft's fastest business to ever reach $1B annually.

You think Google made Wave federated out of the kindness of their hearts? Expect an enterprise version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This wasn't a shareholder meeting, it was a developer conference.

</comment><comment><USER13> Add directory services and it becomes the way to communicate at a company replacing Outlook/Exchange, MSN, Twitter, Skype.

I plan on using it at my company.

The only wish feature is directory services with administrative controls.

<comment><USER14> Use what where? There's no product here.

I don't mean to be rude, but are you comfortable making Wave a big part of your organization's process and culture? What will you do if Google stops developing Wave?

<comment><USER15> They're releasing the spec and large chunk of the code openly - if it's a good idea and google stop developing it I'm sure someone else will step in.

<comment><USER14> That's not how B2B services work though. Dependability trumps everything. If your organization depends on a niche product who's provider exits the business you've got a big problem.

Lets say Google releases Wave, it doesn't gain a lot of traction, and they Jaiku it. For someone to pick up where they left off a lot of things would need to happen:

\- Google would have to enable exporting your data capital into a standard format

\- The new provider would have to match Google's now defunct service feature- for-feature

\- The new provider would have to have the infrastructure to handle this demanding XMPP app, which has real-time editing to the nth degree, and store all of the associated rich media assets

\- The new provider would have to find a business model which would sustain such expenses, succeeding where Google had failed

On top of this, the new developers would be expected to iterate the product, provide customer support, and solve whatever problems caused the app to fail under Google's tenure.

If you're sure Google will stick with Wave then none of this matters. But that's not a bet I'd take.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I honestly feel like the cool thing to do these days is hate. I mean everyone is hating on something, Dave Winer is hating on twitter(even though he uses it all day every day), Om is hating on wave, just seems like everyone is hating on something.

I do understand that google is a huge company and definitely has some financial end game associated with wave, but I don't mind that. What we need is more companies innovating, regardless of whether they are failures yet or not.

I think its irresponsible and ignorant to call a company arrogant because they are not worrying about making money(at least initially). Only thing that is evidenced by this article is that the author doesn't understand google or its motivations.

</comment><comment><USER17> Silicon Valley Google Wave Discussion lunch tomorrow (5/31)

Come, Bring a Friend and let's discuss Google Wave over lunch.

Please use the following link: <http://www.socializr.com/event/976099347> to RSVP.

Feel free to forward to anyone who might be interested.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm inclined to think of Google as a platform rather than a product company. It seems like a strong trend with what they are coming up with/acquiring. When talking about monetizing a platform, it exactly what you be, get your initial attempt out (especially if you have the $) and then monetize later.

</comment><comment><USER19> The whole point about this of course is for google to allow for an even more refined advertising product.

ALL their products fundamentally is about that.

It makes perfect sense.

</comment><comment><USER20> Google wave will make all sorts of interesting interaction possible.

I love how it mixes and matches a bunch of different technologies and use cases together.

A really interesting protocol. I wonder if it'll take off like how email did?

</comment><comment><USER21> And gigaom writers climb to new heights of ignorance with that post.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. This post really resonated with me, although perhaps the title is too much.

The half-assed launch of Wave today struck me as little more than an attempt to steal a few news cycles from Bing. When Google actually develops and releases a mature product based on the Wave concept I'll listen. Until then I'll take Wave about as seriously as I take OpenSocial.

<comment><USER22> _Until then I'll take Wave about as seriously as I take OpenSocial._

I'll see your OpenSocial and raise you a Knol.</comment></comment></comment>


Apply HN: SecondInnings – Provide Second Chance to Senior Citizens(For India) - <AUTHOR> Probably its too early for me as I just started exactly 2 weeks back, but any feedback is welcome and much appreciated.
Problem:- An average Indian 60+ year young man would have made numerous sacrifices and/or compromises for their family. But now that their kids are settled and perhaps have kids of their own, these folks have much free time to spare. This is the time when the feeling "I wish I had an opportunity to do XXXX" comes in. Our Solution:- Second Innings is especially for these folks who would like to do stuff what they might have missed earlier. We offer our platform (a combination of website and mobile apps). To begin with, we have classified these unsatisfied aspirations into 5 major categories:- a) Art - Such as learning singing, dancing, painting, sculpting etc
b) Travel - Be it for religious reasons or simply for the thrill of it c) Learn & Teach - a language, a topic (e.g a computer language), or teach something from their vast experience
d) Hangout - Just hangout with like minded individuals e) Charity - Donate or volunteer for a cause
How will it make money:- Commission basis from various service providers
Target Market:- Senior / retired citizens (60 to 70 age group) who can use the internet or smartphone with little assistance. About me:- I am Praful and am the solo founder at the moment. This is my second startup and earlier I have co-founded an Edtech startup. I hold a Masters degree in engineering and I am also the developer. I spoke to over 250 senior citizens, mostly in  Mumbai and Hyderabad to build the wish list.
Timeline:- Beta website  will be done by May 2016 and the Android app will also be ready by then. <comment><USER2> Heh, did you watch "The Intern"? Thanks to that movie, I actually think this is a really awesome idea.

But, obvious two-sided marketplace. I think you are likely to hit bottlenecks on both sides. Are the signups willing to pay, and how much? I think that's the key to the whole thing. I also think you need to focus on a narrow niche. My grandma recently did this "Road Scholar" program, which might be similar in nature (all-inclusive trips targeted at sr citizens with a scholarly/educational component).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. No I did not watch "The Intern" but I will now ;) Most of the signups are willing to pay, the target market is middle and upper middle class seniors who have decent savings and can afford a reasonable amount for quality service to fulfill their aspirations. Since the nature of aspirations are diverse the amount can be anything from INR 500 per month for a drawing class to say INR 250,000 for a Europe tour (thats roughly $10 to $4000 range) You made an excellent suggestion regarding focus on a narrow niche. I would definitely consider it. Probably start with 1 or 2 top requested services and then add on more later. I have not heard about Road Scholar pgm, will google and find more about it, sounds interesting. Thanks for sharing. Wow, feels so great to get feedback from HN community.</comment></comment>


Nokia suing Apple over the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8321058.stm

<comment><USER2> This is exactly why patents are not good for the world. Imagine if the iPhone was never built because they respected these patents. The cell phone industry would literally be 3 years behind where it is now.

Patents do not encourage innovation, they smother it.

<comment><USER3> Ugh, what a knee-jerk echo-chamber reaction.

If there were no patents, the iPhone would have never been built, because Nokia would have kept this IP as trade secret, or not developed it at all. For companies, patents increase the value of R&D investments by orders of magnitude, and without them, most current R&D spending would be impossible to justify to shareholders. If there were no patents, Apple would have no financial incentive (and that's the _only_ incentive public companies have) to invest so heavily in all of the technologies in the iPhone, as they could easily be copied by others.

The world isn't as simple as "competition always yields innovation". Giving companies limited time monopolies on their discoveries (by definition, limiting competition) increases the amount of R&D they do. This was understood hundreds of years go, even before the Copyright Clause was debated, and still holds true:

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

I'm not saying that the spirit of this holds true here, or in every patent case. I'm saying that responding "ugh! patents suuuck!" is too simplistic of a world view.

<comment><USER4> _If there were no patents, Apple would have no financial incentive (and that's the only incentive public companies have) to invest so heavily in all of the technologies in the iPhone, as they could easily be copied by others._

No financial incentive other than, you know, a need to compete in order to sell their product? It's not as if you can just photocopy a phone and wind up with the software written and hardware designs necessary to reproduce it -- and if you can, how novel are the ideas?

It's disingenuous to state that Apple relied on Nokia's IP (that they would have otherwise kept trade secret), especially given that it's almost certain that Apple engineers ignored existing patents as much as possible when developing the iPhone to avoid additional liability.

<comment><USER5> _It's disingenuous to state that Apple relied on Nokia's IP_

Unless there is any truth in the "we got our patents into industry standards which Apple supports" line from the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why would apple be responsible? Last I checked they were using a separate radio processor chip from someone else (I believe Broadcomm), so wouldn't Broadcomm either have already negotiated the patent rights or ultimately be the one responsible for any patent suit?

</comment><comment><USER7> This line says it all:

"Earlier this month, Nokia posted its first quarterly loss in a decade amid falling sales."

And that in the same month where Apple has a record quarter.

If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em.

<comment><USER8> I have to think that the author of the article added this statement precisely so that the reader would make the same inference that you did.

It could be that they legitimately spent time and money researching technology, only to have it brazenly ripped off by Apple, and they just realized it right now. Starting legal proceedings against a big company like Apple isn't something you do between lunch and your afternoon cup of coffee, after all.

(But actually, I made the same inference, and I think it's right. I am just pointing out how carefully-picked "facts" can lead you to believe something that you imagined is a fact.)

<comment><USER9> I think you are both right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> See also: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870422400457448...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704224004574489221111114540.html)

Referenced from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=897380>

</comment><comment><USER11> I would assume Apple has some patents in its portfolio too.

So, what happens when one company sues other over patents, and the other has interesting patent portfolio? They settle it and each gets to use some new tech (without fear of similar lawsuit in the future).

> "[...] those companies who contribute in technology development to establish > standards create intellectual property, which others then need to compensate > for," said Ilkka Rahnasto, vice president of Legal & Intellectual Property > at Nokia. "Apple is also expected to follow this principle."

So, I think it's not Nokia being evil and suing the disruptive underdog to keep its profits. It's just a (start of) business exchange.

(Disclaimer: IANAL and I own a Nokia phone, so :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Nokia's actual complaint:

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/21458614/Nokia-vs-Apple-Complaint>

<comment><USER6> Interesting, they claim they own a bunch of patents related to 802.11, does that mean they can sue every laptop manufacturer, and any other device that is wi-fi enabled next?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896838>

<comment><USER14> Not really. The other one is a Nokia press-release. This is, I suppose, a more balanced point of view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=898020>

</comment><comment><USER16> the article is written with bias

</comment><comment><USER17> [http://www.talkiphone.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/nokia-s...](http://www.talkiphone.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/nokia-suing-apple1.gif)</comment>


Alan Kay on "What Made APL Programming So Revolutionary?" - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-made-APL-programming-so-revolutionary?share=1 <comment><USER2> I programed in APL! Sure, I just had to change an already developed code from my MSc adviser. It was weird! First of all, you needed an special keyboard just to use it: [http://ageinghacker.net/hacks/apl-keyboard/apl- keyboard-1.jp...](http://ageinghacker.net/hacks/apl-keyboard/apl- keyboard-1.jpg)

When you were not fluent, the myriad different symbols would overload your working memory, making it very hard to program. Just needing to find the symbols in the keyboard would make you program slowly. It had some nice ideas about matrix programming, probably they are similar of pandas or tidy verse. Cool, but the steeeeep learning were really terrible.

Read the article! Great reminiscences from one of greatest computer science elders. Made me understand better the language.

</comment><comment><USER3> This code example (Nile language not APL) makes me want to look into those languages:

[https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main- qimg-07327016425ac646009769...](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main- qimg-07327016425ac6460097699f322b1a28)

I think its so beautiful, just the math written down.

<comment><USER4> I always liked this example: Conway's Game of Life in One Line of APL [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4) It's esoteric as one-liners tend to be, but I think it's a fascinating glimpse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since Alan Kay mentioned Nile, I'm gonna dump here the list of relevant resources on Nile and its derivative works that I've found over time:

Ohm, the successor to the parser (Ometa) used by Nile: [https://github.com/harc/ohm](https://github.com/harc/ohm)

Maru, Nile's compiler/interpreter/whatever: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/157xdz/maru_is...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/157xdz/maru_is_a_symbolic_expression_evaluator_that_can/)

Nile itself: [https://github.com/damelang/nile](https://github.com/damelang/nile) (pdf presentation in README) [https://programmingmadecomplicated.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/...](https://programmingmadecomplicated.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/self- commentary-notes-on-graphics/)

Gezira, svg drawing lib on top of Nile: [https://github.com/damelang/gezira/blob/master/nl/stroke.nl](https://github.com/damelang/gezira/blob/master/nl/stroke.nl) [http://web.archive.org/web/20160310162228/http://www.vpri.or...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160310162228/http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Gezira) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P97O8osukZ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P97O8osukZ0) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8085728](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8085728) (check the demo video) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY) (live demo on stage later on) [https://github.com/damelang/gezira/tree/master/js/demos](https://github.com/damelang/gezira/tree/master/js/demos) (downloadable and runnable in browser)

KScript, UI building on top of Nile: [https://www.freudenbergs.de/bert/publications/Ohshima-2013-K...](https://www.freudenbergs.de/bert/publications/Ohshima-2013-KScript.pdf) [http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/KSWorld.ks/](http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/KSWorld.ks/)

Final Viewpoint Research Institute report, where the entire system (antialiasing, font rendering, svg, etc) was rendered using Nile into Frank, the word/excel/powerpoint equivalent written completely in Nile + Gezira + KScript): [http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf)

VPRI wiki restored from archive.org: [https://web.archive.org/web/20171121105004/http://www.vpri.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171121105004/http://www.vpri.org:80/vp_wiki/)

Shadama, which the Nile author (Dan Amelang) worked on too: [https://2017.splashcon.org/event/live-2017-shadama-a- particl...](https://2017.splashcon.org/event/live-2017-shadama-a-particle- simulation-programming-environment-for-everyone)

Partial DOM reimplementation on top of Gezira: [https://github.com/damelang/mico/blob/master/gezira/svg.js](https://github.com/damelang/mico/blob/master/gezira/svg.js)

Partial reimplementation of Gezira: [https://github.com/Twinside/Rasterific](https://github.com/Twinside/Rasterific)

And the famous Nile Viewer itself (everything interactive): [http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/high_contrast.html](http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/high_contrast.html) [https://github.com/damelang/nile/tree/master/viz/NileViewer](https://github.com/damelang/nile/tree/master/viz/NileViewer)

Commentary: [http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/4325#comment-66502](http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/4325#comment-66502) [https://fonc.vpri.narkive.com/rtIMYQdk/nile-gezira-was- re-1-...](https://fonc.vpri.narkive.com/rtIMYQdk/nile-gezira-was-re-1-ftw) [http://forum.world.st/Vector-Graphics-was-Pi-performance- fun...](http://forum.world.st/Vector-Graphics-was-Pi-performance-fun- td4690038.html)

Since Alan Kay himself is on Hacker News, maybe he can comment with more links I couldn't find. It's hard to fire up the live Frank environment, though understandably reproducing the working env might not have been a top goal. Maybe someone more cunning can merge these into a single executable repo or whatever so that I can stop playing archaeologist =)

</comment><comment><USER6> Kay: > There are several modern APL-like languages today — such as J and K — but I would criticize them as being too much like the classic APL. It is possible to extract what is really great from APL and use it in new language designs without being so tied to the past.

It would've been good to see specific criticism instead of being just like classic APL.

I think many of APL/k/j verbs/adverbs can be generalized to working on streams (dataflow programming). Perhaps Dan Amelang's very interesting work on "2.5D" graphics can be cast into such an extended version....

<comment><USER7> I have played with both Nile and APL now for a bit, and I have been thinking about how to combine them. I believe if we took Nile's operator overloading, tick syntax (s' is the previous value of s), and recursion being expressed via streams (<< operator), and combined it with some of the higher order adverbs of apl, it might be very interesting. In APL complex structures (say a point, or a bezier curve) need to be broken up into constituent equal length arrays for processing, but I believe one could just overload basic operations like +, - , etc.

<comment><USER6> I am more familiar with k so will use it as an example. If we were to extend it, the equivalent of some functions in compositor.nl would be something like this:

      compositeSrc:{x} // output first arg
      compositeDst:{y} // output second arg
      compositeInvert:{+(1-x[;0];1-x[;1];1-x[;2];x[;3])}
      // take a column, invert r, g, b columns and transpose

where x[i;0 1 2 3] == ith (r,g,b,a) of x. No need for "∀ (A, B) >>". This is implicit as k/APL work on whole collections. Basic operations are already overloaded. There would need to be a way to define tuples. "x[i;2]" to refer to ith blue value is a bit cryptic. You can define verb "blue x[i]" to do the same but may be some language syntax would help. I can't grasp enough of Nile through the examples I've seen so far but seems doable.

<comment><USER7> If you take a look at things like converting beziers into sub-beziers of specific flatness, you could express it pretty easily as a // convergence as in k, or a power operator in apl, but it would be really nice to have the notion of an algebra of points. So if the distance between two points is b - a, then +/ eachprior {y-x} would give us the total length of a polyline.

<comment><USER6> This can get a bit tricky. You can do something like this today:

      d:{_sqrt+/(y-x)^2}
      ls: 2 10 # 20 _draw 0 // a list of 10 random points
      +/d':ls // total length

Now if x, y above are vectors of points (as opposed to vectors of pairs), and if points have their own - verb, total length becomes "+/{y-x}':ls". But to define such a - for point, you'd need conversion verbs (or enclose/disclose).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Holy Sh*t! A lot of things to do and I just discovery Alan Kay's answers in Quora: [https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan- Kay-11](https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11)</comment>


Maybe Monads Might Not Matter - <AUTHOR> http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2011/01/maybe-monads-might-not-matter.html <comment><USER2> If you're designing a programming language, and you're planning to include monads solely for the sake of IO, the author has a point: Monads are a very complex way to perform IO, and you're better off with a simpler abstraction.

But monads are good for dozens of other things, including Bayesian inference[1], computation with optional values, list comprehensions, software transactional memory, quantum mechanics[2] and (to geek out a bit) anything that involves defining a lambda-calculus analog over a topos. Any time your problem domain includes a bunch of hairy matrix math, there _may_ be a lovely, intuitive formulation using monads.

Now, if you're never programmed in Haskell, or if you've stuck to the IO monad, you may not understand why monads are a powerful way to tackle certain kinds of problems. But if you've never used monads in anger, how do you whether or not they're a useful tool?

If you want a relatively programmer-friendly language that supports monads, check out Scala's 'for' loop. It looks like a list comprehension, but it gives you about 90% of what you want from monads in practice.

[1] Here's an article I wrote on probabilistic programming with monads: [http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/02/22/bayes-rule- an...](http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/02/22/bayes-rule-and-drug- tests)

[2] Here's a much cooler article on quantum mechanics with monads: [http://blog.sigfpe.com/2007/03/monads-vector-spaces-and- quan...](http://blog.sigfpe.com/2007/03/monads-vector-spaces-and-quantum.html)

<comment><USER3> There's an often-discussed (hypothetical) extension to Haskell's list comprehensions called Monad comprehensions. I suppose that would be similar to Scala's "'for' loop".

But really, the difference between 'do' notation and a syntax based on list comprehensions is not that big.

Compare:

[(x, y) | x <\- [1 .. 10], y <\- [1 .. 10]]

vs

do { x <\- [1 .. 10]; y <\- [1 .. 10]; return (x,y) }

The main difference is that it uses return (which is implicit in the comprehension syntax), and the final element in the do syntax is pushed into the first position in comprehension syntax.

(Another alternative would be liftA2 (,) [1 .. 10] [1 .. 10].)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This author seems to make several mistakes.

First believing that async calls to actors with side effects helps reasoning.

Second he conflates Haskells exposure of monads with the math of monads. Haskell just makes more explicit (and provable) what other systems indirectly model (often times muddling the ability to reason over it).

</comment><comment><USER5> This post is full of spurious reasoning. Haskell's monads are mainly (ignoring the specifics of IO) syntactic sugar for a series of lambdas akin to a series of asynchronous functions linked via callbacks. While I get that this can be hard to grok given the magic of the syntax, it has nothing to do with the difficulty of monads in math.

<comment><USER6> do notation (in Haskell) is syntactic sugar, monads themselves are not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As one who has dabbled with Haskell a bit here and there, "programmable semicolon" is the most apt metaphor I've seen.

Every time I have to break up a chain of method calls in Java with several lines of ternary null checks, I think about the Maybe monad.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've found monads in programming languages to be a lot easier to understand than the myriad "guides" that explain them in obtuse ways.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sometimes it really amazes me just how far out of touch with the mainstream people in the FP community can be. Any concept that the elite struggle with as much as monads simply has no place in the working programmer's toolbox. Haskell is a wonderful research language. It and its ilk will never be bread & butter.

<comment><USER10> The same could be said originally for generics and lambdas which have become increasingly common elements of programming. Complex ideas can yield powerfully simple and useful implementations.

<comment><USER11> I would say about one out fifty (2%) of bread and butter programmers can actually figure out how to pass an anonymous function as a parameter to another function. Granted, those 2% are probably a lot more important than the other 48%, but I don't think lambdas are actually common...

Also, if one of those 2% have to write code understood by the other 48%, they probably shouldn't use a ton of anonymous functions (or generics, whatever they are).

<comment><USER12> Are you saying that you think only 2% of programmers are capable of programming in Ruby? Blocks are pervasive in Ruby, and although technically slightly different than anonymous functions, conceptually very similar.

(Also, you mean "the other 98%".)

<comment><USER13> Perhaps the distinction between "can copy and paste existing syntax examples" and "understand what the syntax does" is significant.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Japanese market Panasonic business laptops with loads of ports and features - <AUTHOR> https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/index.html <comment><USER2> Japan fascinates me- laptops that still have VGA ports. Like I find it crazy that flip phones with video tuners were so popular out there. I had a friend who worked with Sprint that told me Softbank tried to get video working on cell phones back in the day. Americans had no interest when rolled out in test networks.

Just makes you wonder how much our use of technology differs around the world. (Like German cars without cupholders)</comment>


Is Your Angular App a House of Cards? Ours Was - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@HubbaDev/is-your-angular-app-a-house-of-cards-af1335ec03b6 <comment><USER4> Admittedly I have not done much work with Angular, but this seems to be more of, "Is Your Home-Grown Per-Entity Data-Fetching Solution a House of Cards?".

The relay idea is nice but it makes a little more sense in a GraphQL-based world, where multiple entities can be fetched in a single call. And I believe the Apollo client does have batching options that will re-compose your queries to limit API calls.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminded me that everything old is new again. We keep solving these problems, only to create new tooling that expose these problems in a new - <USER2> entirely uninteresting - way for us to solve once more.

</comment><comment><USER6> Reading this, it looks like your app was a house of cards because that's exactly how you designed and built it. It was only when it started to hurt your productivity did you realize the mistake.

Honestly, who thought it would be a good idea to have a UI element that appears many times in a single page be responsible for fetching its own data?

This guy is a senior engineer but has never heard of higher-order components or the container pattern? Smells fishy...

<comment><USER7> I learned from a great dev not long ago that the data structure is often the most important aspect in developing a system. Like you, I was thinking - <USER3> would products, likes status and like count be a different call for each individual card. That is obviously inefficient use of both network and drawing as the DOM will be continually drawing as the requests return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am not familiar with front end development at all. It does not seem fun.</comment>


36th Chaos Communication Congress – Streams - <AUTHOR> https://streaming.media.ccc.de/36c3 <comment><USER2> PSA: All talks will be live-translated between English and German, and into one additional language (primarily into French or Spanish; on occasion there were translations into Russian and Mandarin) [0].

If you find any talks on the schedule [1] that seem interesting but are in a language you're not fluent in, use the 'native'/'translated' switcher in the video player.

Subtitles will be available after congress, here [2].

Finally: Congress is an amazing experience, and it's all volunteer-driven (including the crazy network infrastructure, the live streams, the translations and everything). If you have some spare time between Christmas and the new year, consider visiting next time around. It's a lot of fun!

[0] [https://c3lingo.org/](https://c3lingo.org/)

[1] [https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2019/Fahrplan/index....](https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2019/Fahrplan/index.html)

[2] [https://c3subtitles.de/](https://c3subtitles.de/)

<comment><USER3> You'd have to be lucky though. Unless you are/were an angel (volunteer) you'll have to depend on the ticket lottery. The switch to Hamburg wasn't enough to accommodate the number of participants nor did the switch to Leipzig. It really is a very popular event.

<comment><USER4> They are slowly scaling the event up. Hamburg were 15k people. Last year was 18k. But they are careful to scale it slowly so that things dont collapse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looking forward to this years installment of talks. I sort of wonder if this year will be a bit more technical again. The last 5 years felt like technical topics faded into the background in favor if social issues and knitting ...

<comment><USER6> The non-technical topics couldn't be more relevant today. The idea that tech just exists in a bubble, and that one does not need to concern themselves with any ethical or moral implications is causing more harm than ever before. Dismissing that as "social issues and knitting" is concerning to me.

(knitting also being a notably feminine-coded activity)

<comment><USER7> You also have to cater to your user base. Otherwise theres no point going to that conference instead of reading medium articles.

<comment><USER6> The Chaos Communication Congresses have sold out in seconds every year for a decade. Visitor numbers are limited only by how many people they think they can fit. It is unrivaled in technical, medial and cultural relevancy in the region.

At that point, the question becomes not how you get people to come, but who you want at your event. And I'm very glad that for Congress, this means being unashamedly political, artistic, social, antifascist, inklusive. If that scares you away, that's by design.

<comment><USER7> Last time a bunch of people tried too much to be "political, artistic, social, antifascist, inklusive", Trump was elected.

At least technicity is objective and drama free

<comment><USER6> I've been sitting here trying to understand what point you're trying to make for a few minutes and I'm really coming up blank.

<comment><USER7> Point that pushing subjective political point of views in technical conferences will not make the tech nor the political landscape better. Its actually divisive to push your own point of views without restraint and can actually backfire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You find some more information in the wiki: [https://events.ccc.de/congress/2019/wiki/index.php/Main_Page](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2019/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)

This is the active IRC channel: [https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/#36c3](https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/#36c3)

</comment><comment><USER9> Grafana Dashboard with Network Metrics and more:

[https://dashboard.congress.ccc.de/](https://dashboard.congress.ccc.de/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Can someone summarize what this is and why it's interesting? It's not clear from the landing page, it looks like some kind of listing of streams?

<comment><USER11> The 36C3 is a gathering of hackers hosted by the german Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and is one of the biggest in the world.

Traditionally many of the talks streamed there are pure gold, they even have english translation for the German talks. Given that the title of this page is _hacker news_ it should really be on the top of the page when it is happening.

All the stuff is recorded and stored on [http://media.ccc.de](http://media.ccc.de), which you can spend months on because you will find recordings of more than a decade of talks on interesting topics.

<comment><USER12> > they even have english translation for the German talks

Really? I tried the videos and couldn't find any. How do you unlock these translations?

<comment><USER13> In the bottom right corner of the player is a button labeled "native" it opens a dropdown in which you can select translation

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Decentralization cluster (featuring Monero), streaming at: [https://youtu.be/Xu_QH6oi7oA](https://youtu.be/Xu_QH6oi7oA)</comment>


How would user-centric payouts affect the music-streaming world? - <AUTHOR> https://musically.com/2018/03/02/user-centric-licensing-really-affect-streaming-payouts/ <comment><USER2> For anyone who is confused about what the difference is (like I was initially), consider the most extreme case for the "user-centric" model: suppose I subscribe to a streaming service, paying $10 a month. If I only listen to a single artist for that entire month, then my entire $10 (minus the service's own cut) goes to that artist, regardless of that artist's fraction of the total songs streamed that month by all users.

<comment><USER3> I think Youtube Red does something like this.

<comment><USER4> YouTube red distributes money according to watch time per month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone else find it counter-intuitive that indie labels would benefit here?

The way I'm thinking about it is, a band stands to gain if their listeners generally listen to _less_ (total) songs than the average user, but stands to lose if their listeners listen to _more_ songs than the average user. My thought is that listeners who listen to more music are more likely to develop a taste for the longer tail (desire for variety and possibility for exposure.) From the studies they cite, though, it sounds like the opposite happens.

<comment><USER6> You might be right, but I think wrong. I would assume that people with non discerning tastes would be more prone to clicking whatever popular playlist is thrown at them while people with preferences would. People with specific tastes would probably fall into grooves of specific groups for distinct periods of time. I know most of my music streaming is playing specific groups. But that is of course just anecdata

<comment><USER7> In the more nice corners of the music world - especially dance, jazz, and classical - it is very common for music fans to describe their tastes by following a specific label. A good label head is a tastemaker and curator, and their label brand will all be a consistent kind of sound (or level of quality, for classical).

When you find a DJ you like, you figure out what label they're signed with, and if the label head has done their job right you've just discovered a whole family of related similar artists who produce music in the same style and often tour/perform together.

This doesn't really happen as much in other genres, where the goal is to be signed with a sub-imprint from Sony, Universal, etc... there isn't nearly as much curation going on.

<comment><USER7> Its too late for me to edit this comment but FWIW I intended to write about "niche corners", not "nice corners" \- hopefully it seems a little less elitist with that context :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hate how most of the money I pay Spotify goes to artists that I never listen to.

A niche band that I love broke up for financial reasons, and I was of no help.

Businesses that use Spotify to blast the top-40 all day are watering down the revenue for everyone else.

<comment><USER9> Buy their records on Bandcamp instead. It's that simple.

<comment><USER8> Me buying the record would help, but it's not enough. The payment model needs to change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's the simplest way to understand where your money goes (assuming you're a subscriber, otherwise where the ad revenue earned on your eyeballs goes): For each song you stream, that artist gets a fixed fraction of a cent. Unless you listen to an atypically large number of hours of music each month, there will be leftover money. That remaining money goes into a pot allocated across every artist on the streaming service in proportion to their total number of streams.

So, roughly, the policy as it stands pays the biggest artists—or, really, the labels of the biggest artists—more money. Those big artists and labels are powerful enough that the chance such a change will be made is basically nil.

The reality is a little more complicated because the fixed per-stream rate is set based on the total number of streams, but to a first order approximation this is it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Are there currently any services that stream user-centric as the article describes? I'd put my music on it, since I have a very small number of very loyal listeners.

I remember hearing about a startup (musician-owned?) that was trying to launch that kind of service, but I don't remember the details. I love the idea as a non-profit, almost like a musical "utility" service.

<comment><USER12> Crunchyroll (probably the largest and most visible Anime streaming service) does, see: [https://www.otakujournalist.com/where-your-crunchyroll- dolla...](https://www.otakujournalist.com/where-your-crunchyroll-dollars- really-go-an-interview-with-the-ceo/)

<comment><USER13> Wow, that's really great to read. I don't watch a huge volume of anime, but it's heartening to see that in a month where the only thing I watch is a niche career-drama slice-of-life show, that studio really is getting a proportionate amount of my subscription dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pro rata is how indie artists get 700 hours of listeners in a year with $0 income from Spotify. Unless you reach a certain threshold the big artists get to walk with the income generated by your hours. Most likely this happens to the vast majority of indie artists on Spotify.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've always been confused about whether this actually makes a difference, or whether its just arithmetic associativity working.

foreach artist: foreach user, count number of songs of artist X listened to by user

vs

foreach user: foreach artist, count number of songs of artist X listened to by user

</comment><comment><USER16> Related from a few years back: [https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-to-make- streaming-royalties-...](https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-to-make-streaming- royalties-fair-er-8b38cd862f66)

<comment><USER17> This article doesn't seem to mention ads at all. I have been using Spotify for at least 6 years now, and have never paid for it.

<comment><USER18> Good point. Maybe ad revenue from your sessions goes into the pro rata pool somehow?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can we talk about how we (the listeners) don't own our music anymore, and are at the mercy of the cloud to provide us our precious songs. Apple Music has a nasty habit of deleting my music without warning. This can't be a sustainable long view for us. All this hubbub about what service based model is correct is missing the real issue in my opinion, though that's not to say getting my money to the actual artists isn't important. We need something more different.

<comment><USER20> You pay for a streaming service, you don't pay for specific songs or artists.

I have been using Spotify since 2011 and have never once had an issue with music being deleted from Spotify or my device.

Perhaps I'm missing something here but it's not really an issue. You are at the mercy of the cloud, but for great benefit over having to purchase each individual track for $1.99 from iTunes. Where you could argue that you had a level of "ownership" over the track because you could export it anywhere.

What is your alternative?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This debate has been going on in music biz circles for at least 5 years or more[0], with zero results. I've also heard the comical excuse of calculating the proceeds this way as being "too difficult" in terms of data processing...

0: [https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-to-make-streaming- royalties-...](https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-to-make-streaming-royalties- fair-er-8b38cd862f66)

</comment><comment><USER22> If either service really cared about musicians' well-being, they'd let their customers subscribe to artists directly, contributing a set amount that goes straight to artists, minus txn fees. In other words, what Patreon does, but intermediating in a way that makes it less awkward for artists, so they don't feel like they have to a.) beg for money b.) become content creators.

</comment><comment><USER23> It only seems fair that, if I pay a fixed amount for an on-demand service, that the artists I actually stream are the ones that actually get paid.

If I pay $10/month, only listen to the Obscure Flooters, why would Taylor Swift get a lot of my money, and Obscure Flooters get basically 0?

<comment><USER24> Vulfpeck attempted to game the system by creating an album of silent music and asked their listeners to play it on repeat while sleeping

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The problem is that not all songs are equal. People don't care about all artists equally, and therefore the "value" of a stream is different if you're listening to a song from, say, Taylor Swift, compared to a song from an unknown artist that gets about 10 streams per month.

Another way to think about it is the value at risk for the streaming company of an artist being dropped from the service. Nobody (or close to it) will stop subscribing to Spotify if a random, unknown artist who only gets a few streams leaves the service. But if you had a few major artists drop the service, you'd see a drop in value much bigger than their share (in streams) of the revenue.

Just as you don't expect a Van Gogh to cost the same as my kindergarten painting, or Jeff Dean to be paid the same as someone just out of college, you wouldn't expect a stream from Taylor Swift to be paid the same as that of a random unknown tuba player.

<comment><USER26> I pay for Spotify because _everything_ I want to listen to pretty much seems to be on it. If many of the small artists with only a few streams per month left I would probably unsubscribe.

Sure millions of people listen to Taylor Swift, but millions of people in aggregate also listen to Folk Punk, or Indie Country, or their own small local artists on the service too.

I like Spotify because I can go and listen to the latest single by the Foo Fighters or whatever, and the next moment on a whim I'll search up this gem: [https://open.spotify.com/album/2JDWZnVNQ2RpUWUF5XNkcX?si=YuJ...](https://open.spotify.com/album/2JDWZnVNQ2RpUWUF5XNkcX?si=YuJMV77PQpughebXkue24w) and lo and behold it's there too. (warning: album title is a bit nsfw)

<comment><USER18> The parent isn't saying that the service doesn't need artists with fewer streams, just that the service takes a bigger hit from losing big names than it does from losing small ones. More people are likely to leave the service from Spotify losing Taylor Swift than from losing a budding Noise artist with 3 followers.

<comment><USER27> Funny thing, I subscribed to Spotify _because_ it was at the time Taylor Swift-free zone. (I like her as a person though).

<comment><USER25> Sure, but you're one in many millions, the vast majority of users have the exact opposite behavior.

<comment><USER26> Do they? Lots more people listen to Taylor Swift than they do any single given "niche" artist, but there's also a lot more niche artists than there are Taylor Swifts (or equivalent).

<comment><USER25> Indeed, but artists are not the source of revenue, users are.

There could be a billion small artists, if nobody (or almost nobody) listens to them, they are irrelevant.

<comment><USER26> You still seem to be completely missing my point, I don't know how I could explain it more clearly to you.

<comment><USER25> Likewise.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


When Google makes an AI (and they WILL be first), the world will end - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/incoherent-brainfarts/cheering-on-the-end-of-the-world-a8c25da5ca0?2

<comment><USER2> (Mostly) agree. Google is out of control, and they'll do anything to sell more ads.

The best solution is simply to not use google products (which aren't that good anyway).

\- duckduckgo for search \- dropbox, box, etc. for files \- openstreetmap for maps \- firefox for web browsing (except firefox is about to introduce advertising, too, so I'm not sure about this one.)

This way, your data is decentralized, making it harder to track you. Also, these companies each focus on just one product, meaning their products are better anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not about centralization, imo. An out of control AI will be able to harvest this data from wherever - Google just has the best starting set and the most robust data stream to make the initial leap, I think. But I agree with moving away from Google as much as possible, though FF is dubious - it's both a mediocre browser and will, as you say, introduce ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This reads much like "The Minority Report" which was written in 1956. While this author has a modern spin and is attaching it directly to a company we all know - how is it any different? Has science fiction given us these ideas and led us to this point, or has it been a neon warning we've been ignoring all this time? Maybe this path was inevitable?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's different in that none of this is actually science fiction, but just science. All the tech is already there. There's just _one_ more step until we reach AI level.

In 1956 it was impossible. Today, all of this is almost here. The path to AI is inevitable, but it branches into many - we should try and find a way to pick the right one before we reach the crossroads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sort of like writing some science fiction stories to prove his point. Any evidence that AIs will be out of control once Google makes them?

Will Google call it Google Brain? It does the thinking for you, all you have to do is follow its advice?

<comment><AUTHOR> For evidence, see the WaitButWht post linked in the article. Also, the book Superintelligence. It won't be about following advice, the AI will instantly overpower humanity. You won't have an option.</comment></comment>