Medical Patents Must Die - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/medical-patents-must-die.html#hn <comment><USER4> How on earth is there not prior art (I think that's the term I want) for the functioning of a small part of the human metabolism? It seems to me rather obvious that the researcher, her/his ancestors, friends, you, and me all other humans constitute prior art to that patent. I struggle with similar questions when I see articles on how companies are patenting specific DNA sequences.

I guess my problem boils down to this. Isn't there a difference between a discovery and an invention? Logically I think there is. A discovery is a new understanding of an already existing reality while an invention is the creation of something new. On that difference it seems that the latter should be patentable but not the former. But if they truly have the patent claimed by the article, then our system allows for the patenting of discoveries! How bizarre. Are there other fields where discoveries are patentable. (Should Einstein have patented his theory of general relativity or E=mc^2?)

If Prometheus Labs had created a machine that measured and calculated the needed dosage change in a new and innovative way I could see a patent being granted, but not on this.

Could someone who has patent experience/expertise way in and help me here?

<comment><USER5> I dont know how/what to think about this, also I didn't mean to include any other links , so this will be my last take for today. <http://croak.eu/rDCDm9>

<comment><USER6> I request that you please refrain from using audio to voice your opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also: [http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...](http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm) ( _Against Intellectual Monopoly_ ) In particular chapter 9 which goes over the pharma industry. ( <http://www.dklevine.com/papers/imbookfinal09.pdf> )

</comment><comment><USER8> This specific example definitely feels like an abuse of the patent system. However, the rest of this article relies on weak connections and examples from other industries to argue that medical patents must die. If medical patents die, medical innovation dies.

For a moment, let's apply the realities of "medical innovation" (researchers across private and public fields) to internet innovation. Imagine that every app you published took four years and $100M to get to a testable product. Keep in mind, this is still unusable. You go out and spend millions more testing it on "fake users" (animals). If this works, you need to go raise hundreds of millions more to test it on your first batch of real users... then a second... then a third.

Billions of dollars later, you realize that your app doesn't work as it was intended. You've just spent 6 years and billions of dollars figuring that out. There is no fail fast, in this world.

Lets say your product actually makes it to market. Congrats, now you need to compete against copy cat app developers who can replicate your app at a fraction of the price. How do you defend yourself? Innovative marketing? Large email list? Good SEO? SEM? None of that works in medicine, because the switching costs are positive for a patient.

This is why we need patents. Without them we would see a significant reduction in medical innovation. When markets don't create enough risk-adjusted incentives to promote innovation, the government must step in to create those incentives. I'm not saying our system is perfect, but it's better than nothing (at least in medicine).

I spent a long time working on a medical startup and it's orders of magnitude more complex than most of the apps we see celebrated in our hacker community. I would bet that the typical FDA application is longer than the entire printed code base of most web apps.

<comment><USER9> Well, the issue is simply that testing (to FDA standards) is expensive. You could either have the FDA fund all testing, or just allow patents on well tested products.

You could even allow retrospective patents on some orphan drugs, if a company is willing to invest in testing it.

Most people think it's fine to patent stuff to cover the costs of bringing a new drug to the market.

<comment><USER8> Letting the FDA fund clinical trials could create conflicts of interest. I think it would be more beneficial if the FDA started conducting long term efficacy studies to determine if newer treatments outperform older, lower cost options.

<comment><USER10> Conflict of interest how? Isn't their more of a conflict of interest when a drug developer is paying the fees of the drug tester?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just to be clear, I think software and business model patents are ridiculous, but I think the hate the patent system gets on HN is not very constructive. Obviously it was put in place to solve some problems, but ended up causing/exacerbating other problems. My question is this, what is the better way of encouraging innovation and protecting the rights of inventors? I am not defending the current system here, I am just curious to see what people think would be a better system instead of endlessly bashing the system we have.

<comment><USER12> The main issue seems to be the inability of the patent office to realize what's trivial and what's not when reviewing a patent.

It fails to do that because it's actually not a trivial thing to do at all when you're not familiar with the field: it is very difficult for a non-IT professional to take a look at Kruskal's pseudocode ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal%27s_algorithm#Descripti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal%27s_algorithm#Description) ) and to state if it solves an existing pain or it's just describing trivial and intuitive, common-knowledge steps.

A solution would be to have patent reviewers splited in categories based on their professional accreditation and limit their ability to accept or deny patents to their field of expertise.

<comment><USER13> I think that's an approach that--on the outset--anyone can agree with. But the problem is that any decent professional of a field capable of doing that are also not the ones willing to sit in the patent office merely reviewing applications.

It's the same principle as PG mentioned in his essay that first rate technical people do not hire themselves out to do due diligence work for VC's, and as a result the "experts" VC's do send over are generally a joke. What's to prevent the same from happening in the patent review office?

<comment><USER12> You could pay them at their true value; high-end 6 figures would compensate the dulness and they would work for a healthy cause - the patent office could rise the patent review fees to cover up the costs, which would also have the benefit of eliminating the trivial patent applications that can't pull the weight of the review fees.

I doubt this will raise final consumer prices since for new inventions the price is more often than not what the market tolerates - I think companies will be forced to drop trivial applications as a response to the fee increase.

The other change I would make would be to limit the patent validity to 10 - <USER2> years max, so after the rich people pay for the research, the invention becomes available to the masses close to the actual production cost.

<comment><USER13> Just to add on to what hendzen said, they are already rather expensive as it is: $15,000 for 20 years (in Canada, where I'm from). Hardly affordable for the average small-time inventor. A friend of mine whom just patented a method of preventing over-the-shoulder spying for PIN input devices and could only afford to buy patent protection for 1 year (and for some odd reason, it cannot be increased with future payments--so whatever you commit to buying in the outset is how much protection you'll receive, period.) Increasing it further would simply make the price far too prohibitive.

As for limiting the patent validity period, the current 20 years that most nations follow is not all that long depending on the circumstance. A better method (if it's even regulatable) is X years of protection OR until you recoup your original investment + X % of return (whichever occurs first). The problem is to then police the claims of cost to invent the patent, which is a whole can of worms on its own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> All patents must die. After some time. Creators and investors are entitled to their money, their inventions must be protected somehow. That's all right. But not forever for god's sakes. Let's make it 5-15 years depending on the industry or something else. So much it's enough time to make fortune. But not so much that you can troll with that patent after half of the century. Even though the investors are paid and inventor is dead.

<comment><USER15> Patents right now at 17 years from issue or 20 years from filing (a process which can take several years to culminate in issuance).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The patent system reminds me of an airplane going down, but whenever I read statements like "Medical Patents Must Die" I remember that nobody has a solution to make it fly again. The captain might be wrong, but the first officer doesn't know how to fix it (which is a fundamental step of communicating concerns inside the cockpit - <USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management#Commun...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management#Communication) ).

We don't know enough about the human body, the human genome, the diseases around us and their cure. Those things take huge amount of money to research and huge one-time payments that have no certainty at the end of the research tunnel. When a cure is found, no person alone can reimburse its cost. Abolishing patents via a blanket rule would make all medical capital fly out of the window and the only research performed would be the one in government- sponsored laboratories. If that's the solution we want to agree upon, be upfront and state it clearly, otherwise let's not destroy what works without better alternatives.

<comment><USER16> The article is not talking about drug patents. It is talking about a current case which will decide whether or not to allow patents on medical treatment, even when the patents on the drugs have expired. The patent in question in the case regards a method for adjusting the dose of a drug. Medicine has done without these patents until now.

Ars Technica had an article about this the other day, which I thought was more compelling than the linked post:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/oblivious- su...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/oblivious-supreme- court-poised-to-legalize-medical-patents.ars)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One cannot patent anything that naturally exists. But one can patent strategies. Business methods, medical, and, until recently, tax strategies can be patented. Tax strategy patents were recently banned in the America Invents Act. There has been legislation to ban medical strategy/method patents, and frankly I'm surprised it hasn't been banned yet legislatively. And the federal courts in the past have limited business strategy patents (Bilski v. Kappos). It seems to me SCOTUS should move to limit medical strategy patents in their decision. But if they don't, this may spur Congress to actually do something.

</comment><comment><USER18> Whether or not the correlation is obvious is not the point. There is a long- standing doctrine that SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES ABOUT NATURAL LAWS AND PROCESSES should not be patentable.

If a discovery is made about the correlation between a measurement of something NATURAL in the body, and a dosage of a drug that should be administered, or between the dosage that is administered, and the effect is has on the body, this is MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE. THIS IS SCIENCE. It is not a patentable thing, because doctors cannot dispossess themselves of this knowledge once being told it. They are always able to USE THE KNOWLEDGE IN THEIR HEAD when treating a patient.

Therefore, this development seems to me to be atrocious, as it represents the first step in patenting KNOWLEDGE of natural phenomena.

IP law wants to encourage creativity by giving exclusive monopoly rights in creations, but at the same time BALANCE it with giving the public the freest possible access to the results. This is now being attacked at every turn. MPAA, RIAA are lobbying for SOPA and PIPA. Copyright lengths are still being extended. And now, new forms of patents are being considered. If these come to pass, I am afraid for freedom in America -- we will get the great firewall of China -- and all because of IP.

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/14521817014/mpaa-b...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/14521817014/mpaa- boss-if-chinese-censor-internet-without-problem-why-cant-us.shtml)

<comment><USER10> How is the action of manufactured drug more natural a process than a cotton gin ginning cotton?

<comment><USER19> You can't patent the fact that a cotton gin works, nor can you patent the use of a cotton gin. You can only patent the design of the gin itself.

With drugs, you should only be able to patent the design of the drug itself, and probably also the method of synthesizing the drug. You should not be able to patent the idea of using aspirin to treat headaches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is basically the medical equivalent of a business process or strategy patent. I am really not sure how a law needs to be worded, but this whole class of patents needs to be removed.

</comment><comment><USER21> I read this as "Medical Patients Must Die", but it might as well have actually said that, since money and "getting mine" is really the only thing that matters the vast majority.

If the troublesome patent goes away, you can rest assured that something equally as troubling will almost immediately fill the void. Until we live in a world where something else is more important, we can't have nice things.

</comment><comment><USER22> Darn, at first I read "medical _patients_ must die". ;)</comment>


WireGuard, a Revolutionary VPN Project, Adds Support for Android ROMs - <AUTHOR> https://www.xda-developers.com/wireguard-vpn-project-support-android-roms/ <comment><USER2> Happy to answer any questions about the project in general.

For people interested in what WireGuard actually is, the best resources are the homepage and the whitepaper:

[https://www.wireguard.com/](https://www.wireguard.com/)

[https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf](https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf)

Also, I'm mailing out stickers just for fun: [https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2017-May/001338....](https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2017-May/001338.html)

The forum post on XDA is intended for ROM developers who would like to include the kernel module. Rest assured, we're now working on an app in the various app stores that will work on all Android (and iOS!) devices, without need for the kernel module or a custom ROM or anything like that. But the mobile kernel aspects are important and interesting, which is why we're pursuing these different but related efforts in parallel via XDA.</comment>


Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/528921/self-assembly-shows-promise-for-extending-moores-law/

<comment><USER2> What exactly is the holdup with extreme ultraviolet sources? I remember reading an article that said synchrotrons could generate x-ray beams with the power density of a blowtorch, and some others suggesting free-electron lasers should be able to generate anything down to hard x-rays with more or less arbitrarily high power density; why don't these suffice?

<comment><USER3> The reliable sources for high-power EUV light (synchotrons and free-electron lasers) are all expensive and gigantic (building sized) due to the accelerator and shielding required for the electron beam. They're completely impractical for industrial scale manufacture (you fundamentally couldn't put 100 of them into a single factory).

Heating tin in a regular laser until it forms plasma and starts emitting 13.5 nm light is much simpler to scale down (since it doesn't involve an accelerated electron beam) but you lose large amounts of power while trying to form a partially coherent beam out of the result, turning hundreds of kilowatts of infra-red laser power into mere 10's of watts of EUV power.

The high input to output ratio means that you need to be _really_ careful that the large amount of dissipated power doesn't cause problems. Tiny misalignment problems often result in the 200kW infra-red input laser melting the entire device into a puddle of former components.

[http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1321162&page_numb...](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1321162&page_number=2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe before long we'll start seeing subatomic transistors, along these lines: [http://gizmodo.com/5793926/researchers-build-a-transistor- ou...](http://gizmodo.com/5793926/researchers-build-a-transistor-out-of-a- single-electron)

Or some more possibilities: "In the long term, new switches might be based on magnetic, quantum or even nanomechanical switching principles. One possibility would be to use changes in the spin of an individual electron to represent a 1 or a 0."[1]

[1] After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm (2009) [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/science/01trans.html?pagew...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/science/01trans.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER5> Actually, the transistors mentioned in that article are still bigger than atoms. A single electron stores a 1 or 0, but that electron is still living in a pile of atoms.

(Source: I grew some of the crystals used to build those transistors in the article)

<comment><USER4> Good point. Still, the 1.5nm scale they mention is significantly smaller than anything we have now.

Is it conceivable that we _will_ see a whole new type of electronics on a subatomic scale in the future though? (Where the structure of a chip is not even made out of atoms, but entirely of subatomic particles?)

I actually have an electrical engineering degree, but the couple of materials courses I took back in the early 2000s are starting to feel a bit dated!

<comment><USER5> It's hard to rule anything out, but I think using non-atomic matter would be very difficult for a few reasons.

(1) Subatomic particles are not necessarily smaller than atoms. Even though in the particle sense, an electron is infinitely small, in the wave sense, an electron can extend over a volume much larger than a single atom. So it's not necessarily the case that a subatomic particle like an electron is smaller than an atom. (Also, the positive charge of the nucleus actually helps shrink the electron's range. So adding positive particles can end up making the system smaller.)

(2) If you want a transistor every 1.5 nm, then you probably need at least one particle every 1.5 nm. And the only way you can pack matter that densely is if it's charge neutral (a clump of singly charged particles would immediately disperse from electric repulsion). So you either need a combination of positive and negative particles (atoms), or neutral particles like photons/neutrons/neutrinos. The problem with neutral particles is that there's no long-range forces to keep them in whatever structure you design. Gravity is too weak at that scale, and electromagnetism has no effect because they are neutral. Perhaps photons could be used for computation, but without using atoms for mirrors/lenses/waveguides/etc it's hard for me to imagine how.

TL;DR: Atoms are an efficient way to pack particles and preserve structure. It's hard to imagine doing it with a plasma or gas or something else.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/optical- circuits-s...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/optical-circuits- single-photon-flips-transistor-switch/) There has been some (very early) work done with photon transistors. One of its cool applications will be fibre-optic hardware, to achieve much lower processing latency, hence faster data transit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lithography guiding finer block copolymers pleasingly follows Feynman's pantograph talk [http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html](http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't be the only person who immediately thinks of the Replicators from SG-1 when self-assembling materials are brought up, right?

<comment><USER9> Well you can be forgiven for that :-) That particular plot device was full of holes.

But a more interesting associated memory would be Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" and the discussion about obstacles to nanotechnology which include high on the list the ability to actually assemble devices.

<comment><USER10> What were the plot holes with it?

<comment><USER11> Fundamentally, we already have self-replicating robots with nano-level structures that consume materials from their surroundings and build new copies. They're called bacteria. The interesting bit over here is not the observation, but the question why we aren't all covered in bacterial goo miles thick like run-away nano-technology. (we do have them all around us and in us for what its worth)

I think a part of the answer is that if you have free form replication that isn't perfect, then sooner or later something is going to emerge from that goo that realises that it's just more efficient to eat the goo. Combine that self correcting cycle with hard limits imposed by nature (presumably they need to have a power source to make it work - the goo would start to die the minute it gets to a millimetre because of inaccessible sunlight. Then there is toxicity, what happens to the waste? Heat dissipation. Structural issues and other things...) and you have the recipe for a shorter sci-fi series than Firefly. (Dear Mark, today we succeeded in making self replicating nano-robots. They were exponentially multiplying within the petri dish and then they stayed in the petri dish, because apparently nano-robots are tastier than glass and metal. Doesn't matter though, we cracked open the crate of champagne anyway.)

Which is also an argument against von Neumann probes, btw. Perfect replication isn't possible, so sooner or later you are going to see a ton of weird errors accumulate to unpredictable behaviour... (perhaps a shark that goes around "eating" other probes?)

<comment><USER12> Bacteria aren't capable of spontaneously organizing into multi-celled organisms when they reach critical mass.

Fungi behave much more like this. The thing we don't have an example of in nature is an intelligent creature capable of making tools that can reproduce itself from a single cell. It's definitely a hard engineering problem, but it's conceivable. It's also conceivable that such an entity could seek out and remove any malfunctioning sub-entities.

We humans actually behave a lot like that, it's just that you need at least a whole human to grow another human. It's not so strange to imagine a designed, intelligent creature that can regrow itself from a small piece.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yay, humans are re-inventing proteins!</comment>


Contracts and Chaos: Uber's Customer Service Struggles - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/johanabhuiyan/contracts-and-chaos-inside-ubers-customer-service-struggles <comment><USER2> Uber is just reinventing the wheel, with the added burden of having to answer to aloof investors instead of involved owners.</comment>


Tesla's former CTO is building a giant lithium-ion battery recycling operation - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-of-the-brains-behind-tesla-found-a-new-way-to-make-electric-cars-cheaper-11598673630 <comment><USER2> Back in my day, I worked at Bestbuy and if you have ever been in one, you may notice that we have a "recycle" area in the front of the store. It is a separated bin, labelled with "wires", "cds", "batteries", etc. The one that always confused me the most was "batteries" since almost EVERY time they would empty that bin into our recycle bin in the back, they would dump the batteries into the trash because _almost_ all of them were non-lithium-ion. My manager said we couldn't recycle regular batteries so they needed thrown away and sorting through the absolute mound of batteries was too much to do.

I know we would receive laptop batteries, phone batteries, and other rechargeables but they never made it into the bin. I hear now, anything with a screen costs money to recycle at Bestbuy. They really seem to be taking a step in the wrong direction. Better labelled bins, and easier access to recycling areas will make it easier for the average person to recycle, which in my opinion, is a net gain for us all.

<comment><USER3> Have you tried replacing a phone battery recently? It involves using hot air to soften the glue, a lot of manual labor, unplugging wires, and carefully replacing the battery. Then you need to glue everything back together and pray the device works.

There's a straightforward solution to this and the recycling problem:

1\. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery

2\. Add a very small tax to each device with such battery (in the order of cents)

3\. Pay the same amount back to whoever brings the battery to a recycling plant

There you go. This system has only one knob (the amount paid per battery) and by tweaking it you can adjust the incentive to recycle. You sit back and let the market sort out the details.

Not to mention that this would extend the lifetime of phones by making it easy to replace the battery.

<comment><USER4> > 1\. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a > simple mechanism to remove the battery

Apple has argued that they can fit a bigger, harder to remove battery into devices, and the added capacity because it's bigger makes up for it being hard to remove. I've changed batteries on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and it's very straightforward; I'm not sure how much truth there isn't to that argument on laptops. Phones are so small that I find that explanation more plausible.

<comment><USER5> All Apple would have to do is to have the back cover use screws instead of adhesives, using up about one tenth of a cc more volume, and use a more malleable adhesive for the battery (or none at all). It would take at most two more tenths of a cubic centimeter more volume.

<comment><USER6> > All Apple would have to do...

This is hardware engineering, and high quality engineering at that. When Apple decided to use an adhesive rather than screws they could would have had excellent consideration of cost/quality/aesthetic issues.

It is true that they could easily create devices to match the requirements of randoms on Hacker News, but that isn't going to lead to Apple - the once in a decade consumer products behemoth. It leads to the Openmoko. Turns out nearly nobody wants that.

So yeah, it is an "All Apple would have to do", but evidence is Apple is much better at deciding what it _should_ and _shouldn 't_ do than back-seat designers. Sorry if that sounds a bit brusque, a nerve might have been hit here. But hardware isn't easy.

<comment><USER7> > It is true that they could easily create devices to match the requirements > of randoms on Hacker News, but that isn't going to lead to Apple - the once > in a decade consumer products behemoth. It leads to the Openmoko. Turns out > nearly nobody wants that.

This fallacy seems to be common in discussions of Apple. Apple is very profitable, therefore everything they do is infallible and impossible to improve.

Look at a picture of an Openmoko device. Just look at it. Here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko)

Compare this to various modern phones with a replaceable battery:

[https://www.androidauthority.com/best-android-phones- removab...](https://www.androidauthority.com/best-android-phones-removable- battery-697520/)

There are obvious reasons to expect the former to fail in the market but not the latter, even though they all have a replaceable battery.

Meanwhile the Apple devices further run iOS and are compatible with iMessage and the complete set of third party iOS apps, which are a large component of their success, but none of which would be any less true if they had a replaceable battery.

Doing a lot of things right can't prove that they're not doing a specific thing wrong.

<comment><USER8> I don't think anyone in this thread has suggested that Apple is infallible.

Rather, they are iterating upon the same few products with a zillion engineers in eensy weensy form factors where space is at a premium, so they probably think about why they do things a certain way.

<comment><USER5> And yet, their phones still have more than enough space for 4 screws, as you would see if you opened an iPhone. Actually, just reusing existing screw holes could do it.

There is a good reason, and the reason is that Apple doesn't want people to easily repair their phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The story is unfortunately sparse on the details of how the recycling works (whether there is any truly new idea).

Based on the "furnace" picture and language about melting down the batteries, it seems like their approach is to just treat the incoming batteries as "enriched ore" and proceed with an energy-intensive, standard, metal extraction process.

So what they save is the huge amount of energy and dirtiness required to dig in the earth (in the few suitable places on the earth) for rocks with <.5% metal content and crush those rocks into dust, which is substantial, but not revolutionary?

<comment><USER10> Does it matter if it is revolutionary? A lot of things that tesla does are not revolutionary but a very large number of small improvements that end up resulting in a qualitative change.

E.g. everybody is talking about exotic battery chemistries while Tesla is able to wring out significantly more performance from their existing chemistry by doing tabless electrodes.

You could argue that the focus on revolutionary progress versus incremental improvements is sometimes holding us back.

<comment><USER11> Tesla's competition wanted to make sure that their margins don't decrease, as most of their stock holders are chasing dividends. Dividends made sense in the 20th century (and those companies had better performance), but since 1990-2000 companies that reinvested all their money into R&D and gave back 0 dividends had better returns even disregarding the tax advantages.

<comment><USER12> This has always puzzled me. As a stockholder what is the use of a stock that never pays dividends? What does ownership of a bussiness mean when you have no share of its profits?

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't you want to own a company that doesn't pay profits for 20 years, but gives you $10B every year after those 20 years?

Discounted cash flow ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_cash_flow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_cash_flow)) is being used to value companies for this reason.

<comment><USER13> > _Wouldn 't you want to own a company that doesn't pay profits for 20 years, > but gives you $10B every year after those 20 years?_

That's an expected dividend.

What is the DCF available to shareholders of a company that never pays a dividend? Nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://archive.md/09542](https://archive.md/09542)

<comment><USER15> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "At the same time, the supply of used batteries is exploding."

That's an interesting/unfortunate choice of words given the well-documented issues with lithium-ion batteries :-)

<comment><USER17> Maybe they are predicting the just released Galaxy Note 20 will be a repeat of the 7?

<comment><USER18> No. All kinds of batteries explode in recycling centers, not just faulty ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I couldn't parse this paragraph:

> _To JB Straubel, one of the brains behind Tesla Inc., TSLA -1.13%▲ that > refuse holds the key to driving the electric car revolution forward—and > making the vehicles affordable enough for everyone to own one._

Could someone help?

> _Mr. Straubel said in his first in-depth interview about his new venture > since it was formed in 2017 while still at Tesla._

Was that with Tesla's blessing?

<comment><USER20> Refuse (noun): worthless or useless part of something.

(Prounuced 'ref-use', rhymes with 'refuge'.)

<comment><USER21> Where are you from? I'm en-gb native and refuse doesn't rhyme with refuge.

Ref-use: ref as in referee, use as in noose, or loose.

But then in en-gb we'd say "waste" or maybe "rubbish".

<comment><USER22> In en-US, refuse (verb) is pronounced reh- _fuse_ ("I refuse to do that."), while refuse (noun) is pronounced _ref_ -use ("This refuse must be disposed of.") The accent switches syllables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know what the price is for bulk e-waste a company like this would pay? Or how to find it?

I've been interested in setting up some free local e-waste collection for recycling, but it seems like the cost of collection and sorting is more than the price I can get for it.

<comment><USER24> Currently anything Li-ion is around $1.50 per pound (Midwest US prices) to be accepted for hazardous waste recycling. This means it costs you the consumer to have your laptop battery recycled.

I work with a company that recycles older hybrid batteries from Toyota, Honda, Ford. Most of these are NiMH and pay $0.40-$0.80 per pound for the Nickel value alone.

So a NiMH hybrid battery is worth $50 for the core from a Prius, but a lithium battery from a Nissan Leaf would cost you ~$700 to recycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How does a company get an article like this published?

<comment><USER26> Not many technical engineering leaders have a passion for leaving the world better than they found it, especially in an area where they consumed a lot of raw materials to make their life's greatest work.

Very few companies are doing more than lip service on the very difficult (sometimes impossible) task of dirty work to get recycled materials into the supply chain as a viable (and someday better) alternative than new raw materials from the earth.

This has so many implications if successful – you can compete with mining 1:1. It allows a company to handle disruptions in the traditional supply chain, etc. But, today this is hard to do and you often only see post-consumer recycled materials used behind-the-scenes (e.g. a plastic frame holding a non- essential chamber) or in packaging (e.g. bamboo ink, cardboard boxes without white paint), but it's rarely used in what the consumer sees (notable exception: The Google Nest Mini "fabric" is made from plastic bottles).

As more devices rely on batteries, we need to think about how we can start harvesting those materials for re-use ourselves and not just shipping overseas and closing our eyes. It's much more expensive to intentionally source recycled materials today and that is, unfortunately, a losing proposition for most manufacturers.

\-----

[https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/google-newest- nest...](https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/google-newest-nest-mini- made-100-recycled-plastic-bottles)

[https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/04/18/apples-2019-envir...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/04/18/apples-2019-environmental- responsibility-report-touts-increased-focus-on-recycling-and-material- recovery)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The existence of this company itself is pretty old news, Lora Kolodny reported on it in 2018: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/tesla-cto-jb-straubel- redwoo...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/tesla-cto-jb-straubel-redwood- materials-recycling-expands-nevada.html)

What's new is Tim Higgins giving JB Straubel space in the pages of WSJ to run a PR campaign for his company.

</comment><comment><USER28> [https://archive.is/3LYRl](https://archive.is/3LYRl)

</comment><comment><USER29> interesting timing...considering there's a lot of scrutiny from whistleblowers and short sellers around scrap inventory on Tesla's balance sheet and Tesla's real relationship with this company.

will need to dig around but recall seeing a screenshot of either an analyst call or archived page that suggested someone let it slip this was a Tesla subsidiary and not a completely unrelated entity.

<comment><USER30> Uh why does that matter?

<comment><USER29> the whistleblower Marty Tripp alleged that as Tesla ramped up Model 3 production their battery production facility was creating hundreds of millions in wasted battery product.

Scrap inventory has a severely depreciated value - the emails that have surfaced suggest they may have tried to hide it under "Work in Progress" where they could value it fully.

If they actually wrote down $100M+ in battery inventory that would be a massive shock - no investor is considering that level of scrap in valuing the company right now.

If they have a secret subsidiary they could sell it to this entity at some bloated price without anyone knowing.

This company then becomes some highly indebted entity that will probably eventually go bankrupt but save Tesla's valuation.

<comment><USER31> That is a reasonable concern from an accountant point of view. But time and time again Elon has shown that he isn't operating with the normal MBA CEO mindset. He is operating as an engineer, and all that matters in the engineering world is that if you can successfully build the technology and factories to remake these packs at a low cost, your total costs will be significantly lower than your competition. It doesn't take an MBA to understand the implications of that.

<comment><USER29> if this is indeed a Tesla subsidiary, it's accounting fraud

<comment><USER32> How could it possibly be?

Tesla had $100M+ of scrap inventory they pretended was still good and then somehow created a subsidiary out of thin air and "sold" the scrap to it?

I don't understand where the $100M the subsidiary paid materialised from. How is any of this possible.

What's preventing others from having secret fake subsidiaries and printing money out of nowhere?

<comment><USER29> I mean it's hardly a secret if it's on the cover of WSJ.

The question is who funded this company and what transactions have they made with Tesla?

but obviously no one will tell you those two things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why is battery disposal such a municipality-dependent shitshow in the US? The vast majority of cities I've lived in, with the exception of san francisco, essentially encourage people to throw their batteries directly in the trash by providing no disposal mechanism via municipal waste collection. This is much, much more dangerous in the short term with lithium ion batteries.

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://thebulletin.org/2009/01/the-limits-of-energy- storage...](https://thebulletin.org/2009/01/the-limits-of-energy-storage..).

Get the word out. Batteries are bad hydrogen is good. Current hydrogen gas will have more energy than batteries at peak technology growth. This matters because hydrogen cars are cheaper, more scalable, and more inclusive than battery cars. Rich people get battery cars, you get a battery bike.

<comment><USER35> The claim that hydrogen cars are cheaper and that battery cars are just for the rich in comparison is entirely unfounded. I have no idea where this idea came from as it is not borne by reality.

Compare two vehicles of the same overall type. A Toyota Mirai, one of the only hydrogen cars available, with a Long-Range Model 3.

Msrp: $58,550 for the Mirai, $46,990 for the LR Model 3.

Range: 312 miles for the Mirai, 322 for Model 3 LR.

Curb weight (!): 4075lbs for the Mirai, 4072lbs for the Model 3 LR.

Top speed, 0-60mph: 111mph and 9s for the Mirai; 145mph and 4.4s Model 3 LR

Cost per mile: $0.33 per mile for Toyota Mirai in LA [https://www.toyotasantamonica.com/toyota-mirai- faqs/#:~:text...](https://www.toyotasantamonica.com/toyota-mirai- faqs/#:~:text=How%20Much%20Hydrogen%20Fuel%20Costs,on%20the%20average%20consumption%20pattern).

About $0.05 per mile for the Tesla Model 3 LR (19 cents per kWh in LA for households average, ~4 miles per kWh) for home charging and $0.07 per mile for Model 3 LR with Supercharging (about 28 cents per kWh).

Battery-electric cars are basically cheaper and more convenient and more efficient and better in virtually every single way. (Even lighter for more range, which I was surprised at.)

<comment><USER36> > That's ridiculous.

 _When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

(The parent comment has since been edited.)

<comment><USER37> Please stop</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Is anyone here still listening to music in mp3? You may like this app - <AUTHOR> http://www.weezzler.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, I just updated my first app. If you are someone who still like to have your own mp3 files in your phone (like me) I think you may find this app interesting.

Basically it lets you listen to your music (and now also play videos) in your phone on any browser. I find it useful if you have speakers connected to your computer and you just like to shuffle your music. It's super simple to use, and unless you have some strange settings in your phone you don't need to configure anything, just be connected to a wifi network both in your phone and computer.

Unfortunately only for Android for now and can be downloaded here:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.weezzler.a...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.weezzler.android)

Hope someone finds it useful, thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: Has traffic exploded today since reddit went down? - <AUTHOR>

I don't know about most of you, but I use both reddit and HN on a regular basis. I find myself visiting HN more often today to get my fix. Just wondering how big this effect is. <comment><USER2> You know I like HN and reddit and other things but ever since reddit has been down all I can do is keep hitting refresh going, oh noooooes, please come back....

It's the whole denial makes you want it more thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty big.</comment>


Ask HN: How to pay freelancers abroad? - <AUTHOR>

We oftentimes work with foreign freelancers on design projects. Usually we pay them via PayPal, but that has become very costly.
We have considered setting up foreign bank accounts for our company, but that is 1. a pain in the neck and 2. generates hefty fees once again (we somehow would have to "fuel" these accounts, but both the US bank and the foreign bank charge significant fees for international wire transfers).
Any suggestions? Thanks guys! <comment><USER2> I don't want to state the obvious but just use a site like odesk or elance and have your freelancers join your team. Not only do you get protection for the work that gets done and a tremendous amount of reporting / accountability tools but they get the protection that if they do the work, they'll get paid.

It really cuts down the hassles and and questions that prevent most people from outsourcing and if you think about the 10% fee on oDesk you'll calculate it to be a minor surcharge on excellent productivity and accountability tools.

To give you an example, before India changed their payment rules about 4 years ago my vendors would tack on a 4% surcharge to paypal payments...and then India prevented payments over $500 so I switched to wire transfers that ended up costing me $40 per wire and about an hour per month per vendor to coordinate and verify.

I manage eleven outsourcers in six countries and I am the cheapest person that I know...and I still find a huge amount of value and protection by using these sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used Western Union a lot when I was working with a remote team. Depending on the country (and level of corruption) though that can give them trouble with their local 'friendly' government employees. At that point I started sending it through a third country.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I warmly recommend Payoneer.com, this is how we've been doing it for the last few months and its working great. There are a few fees but they are minor in comparison to PayPal and banks...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot!

Just checked them out, and it looks exactly like what we need, but the sign-up unfortunately site reads "Currently we can support applications only from companies paying at least $5,000 Per Month." While we will process more than this in January, it will only be a couple of hundred in February and March, and it's my understanding that they would want us to sign up for a plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does xoom.com compares with Paypal?

<comment><AUTHOR> Will definitely check it out. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> why not a wire transfer to their bank account?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because that is way more expensive than PayPal (the sending and receiving bank charge you).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> coinvoice.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will check this out, too.</comment></comment>


An opinionated guide to Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2018/02/10/an-opinionated-guide-to-haskell-in-2018/ <comment><USER3> I've tried messing around with haskell a few times, but the biggest problem I have is the tooling.

I just tried to get haskell set up a few days ago and I couldn't get it working with either vscode or Idea. I also couldn't get ihaskell (jupyter notebook) installed successfully.

I might give it another shot based on these instructions, but the fact that pretty much every program seems to make different assumptions about whether you're using cabal or stack and how you have them set up is really annoying. I assume if you are really knowledgeable about this tools it's not that bad, but as a haskell beginner they are completely impenetrable. (Even just the yaml files used by stack seem completely incomprehensible compared to the formats used by most languages' build tools.)

Considering that the language itself has a pretty steep learning curve, it's really frustrating wasting several hours just trying to get the haskell environment set up without success and not even getting the point of being able to try to actually use it.

I've had a pretty bad opinion of the Ocaml and F# tooling in the past, but the haskell tooling is just so, so much worse. (F# seems to have gotten to a point where the tooling if you can just use .net core, although it gets horrible again if you then need to also use mono at the same time so you can use the interpreter.)

It's especially bad if you compare it to something like rust where cargo works so well it's actually in itself a reason to use rust.

<comment><USER4> ihaskell is a somewhat fragile project briding several disparate ecosystems/languages. I'm not really sure the value-add is there yet; in any case it is not a tool for beginners or the preferred method to get feedback from your programs.

Haskell proper is pretty turn-key these days with stack.

Stay away from edgelord / niche projects.

Stay away from most of the IDE tooling, including ghc-mod. You don't need to be fighting the tooling when starting. The repl and "ghcid" should be all you need (though I grant it takes some learning to use these as effectively if you're used to an IDE- you will learn with experience).

Just use the "ghcid" cli tool to get compile errors and feedback. It is rock solid.

[https://github.com/ndmitchell/ghcid](https://github.com/ndmitchell/ghcid)

Your experience will be much smoother.

It takes a bit getting used to if you're used to an IDE, but with Haskell it's usually a better to go for a multi-terminal/repl kind of setup

<comment><USER3> > Stay away from most of the IDE tooling. You don't need to be fighting the > tooling when starting. The repl and "ghcid" should be all you need.

I'm honestly not sure I'm interested in learning haskell if this is considered an acceptable situation.

<comment><USER4> There _is_ editor tooling, you can look at intero or dante for that. It works. My point is as a beginner, it is added friction when the focus should be on learning how to use the repl and the language. If you absolutely require an IDE, Haskell is probably not going to be your favorite language.

<comment><USER5> I make the same recommendation for people learning Java, and Java has the best IDE support there is. The fact is that an IDE is a large and complex tool with a lot of details to understand, and jt will sap mental energy that is needed for dealing with the new language.

When starting out, pick a common programmer's editor you already know, find a syntax highlighter for it, and turn on auto-indentation. If there's a plugin or tool which does auto-formatting and doesn't need a lot of tweaking, add that too. Learn an IDE once you understand the language and are getting frustrated by boilerplate, navigation, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For people who wanna learn Haskell:

1\. __Don 't touch Haskell platform. Install Stack. __

If you did, Uninstall it.

[https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell- cafe/2011-March/0...](https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell- cafe/2011-March/090170.html)

Why? It is considered harmful

[https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell- community/2015-Se...](https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell- community/2015-September/000014.html)

2\. Install Stack:

[https://haskell-lang.org/get-started/osx](https://haskell-lang.org/get- started/osx)

If you do not wish to install these dependencies, you may use a virtual machine instead

[https://github.com/data61/fp- course/blob/master/ops/README.m...](https://github.com/data61/fp- course/blob/master/ops/README.md)

3\. Learning resources:

[https://github.com/allenleein/brains/projects/9](https://github.com/allenleein/brains/projects/9)

<comment><USER7> I consulted with one of the co-organizers of the Haskell meetup here in NYC, and while he seems to have a nuanced view that is anti-stack for professional Haskellers, he also recommends stack for new people.

I'm thinking the consensus is that this is good advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of people use Atom, but I think emacs + intero is currently the best Haskell tooling. I use it with spacemacs. Has everything I would need from an IDE, including highlighting errors on the fly, auto completion, jump to definition, auto formatting. It's no intellij, but I'll take Haskell's type safety over that any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

[http://commercialhaskell.github.io/intero/](http://commercialhaskell.github.io/intero/)

<comment><USER9> +1, emacs+intero is the way to go.

Emacs in general is highly underrated due to years of RSI/muh loading time shitflinging. Evil mode is by far the most complete vim emulation out there, and other than JS pretty much every language I write has been a more enjoyable/easy experience on Emacs than it was on vim or st3.

<comment> james-mcelwain I'm writing a lot of Java right now, and it's frustrating that the experience is so horrible on Emacs -- or so much better in Intellij. I tried using Eclim with Emacs for a while, but it's so tedious moving through Java without a specialized IDE. Still, I keep Emacs open on Java code solely for the git interface (magit) and helm integration with `ag`, which I find vastly superior to find-in-path / regex search capabilities in Intellij.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > There was a time when cabal-install had a (warranted) reputation for being > nearly impossible to use and regularly creating dependency hell

> You almost certainly do not want to use stack install.

> The .cabal file is, ultimately, what is used to build your project, but > modern versions of stack generate projects that use hpack, which uses an > alternate configuration file, the package.yaml file, to generate the .cabal > file. This can get a little bit confusing, since it means you have three > configuration files in your project

> Frankly, I think the UX around this is terrible.

This goes to show that no amount of static typing can save you from implementing badly-designed software.

<comment><USER11> > This goes to show that no amount of static typing can save you from > implementing badly-designed software.

Sure, but that's like saying "you can die to cancer even if you drive around in a Volvo."

<comment><USER10> This analogy (as any analogy) is wrong. A slightly better one would be "an expensive camera doesn't automatically make you a great photographer".

There's a long running tradition of languages with static typing and better type systems making fun of dynamically typed languages and those with "worse" type systems.

A good example is[1]: """ It's 2018 - static type systems are not optional... It is especially worrying that these people think they are gaining velocity by trading correctness. """

And yet I'm seeing more and more examples where (often preceived) correctness is often offset by much bigger problems. Another example is mini-thread on how horrible DateTime is in Haskell: [https://twitter.com/chris__martin/status/956002730778288128](https://twitter.com/chris__martin/status/956002730778288128)

[1] [https://twitter.com/timperrett/status/957493915937943554](https://twitter.com/timperrett/status/957493915937943554)

<comment><USER12> Any weaknesses with the Haskell "time" library have nothing to do with static types in particular nor the language in general.

To stretch your analogy further "Having an expensive camera does not prohibit you from also taking photography lessons".

<comment><USER10> > Any weaknesses with the Haskell "time" library have nothing to do with > static types in particular nor the language in general.

Hence, my original point: This goes to show that no amount of static typing can save you from implementing badly-designed software.

<comment><USER12> If your point was literally "no amount of static typing can save you from implementing badly-designed software" then yes, that's correct and beyond challenge. I perceived a hint of "and therefore we may as well just use dynamic types" or "but proponents of static types are too ideological to accept this" in your subtext. I apologise if I was mistaken in my perception.

<comment><USER10> I have to admit, there was a hint of such subtext :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, I wish this existed when I was wprking with Haskell a few years ago. This is a compendium of useful information. I really love how Haskell makes me think and code in an entirely different way. It is fun, and I hope the language continues to grow.

</comment><comment><USER3> OK, I am trying to install haskell again using the instructions given in this guide.

I removed my existing stack installation and my .stack directory, installed stack again, created a new stack project and then ran the recommended command in the guide to install ghc-mod and related tools: "stack build -j 8 --copy- compiler-tool ghc-mod hoogle weeder".

I get an error:

Error: While constructing the build plan, the following exceptions were encountered:

In the dependencies for ghc-mod-22.214.171.124: Cabal-188.8.131.52 from stack configuration does not match >=1.18 && <1.25 (latest matching version is 22.214.171.124)

...etc.

Can someone explain what's causing this?

<comment><USER9> Cabal version too high. Did you have a pre existing cabal installation independent of stack or something?

<comment><USER3> I don't think that I do. Is it possible that ghc-mod is broken on lts-10.5?

<comment> lexi-lambda It isn't broken in lts-10.5, it just isn't in lts-10 at all. Go to [https://www.stackage.org/lts-10.5](https://www.stackage.org/lts-10.5) and search for ghc-mod—it just isn't currently available.

Unfortunately, the reason for this is that ghc-mod still isn't updated for GHC 8.2. It's almost there—a package candidate has been uploaded that works alright—but it hasn't made it into the LTS yet. There's a way to build and install the package candidate in a way that will work with stack, which I have done on my personal machine, but honestly I decided it was just too much for this (already overly long) blog post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really great. I'd love to see a follow up covering other topics. Such as testing (with hedgehog), modeling SQL, etc. Or -- anything that helps open up the world to see how Haskell is a beautiful language to build on.

</comment><comment><USER15> Learning Haskell is one of those two weeks things that's been on my interests list for a long time, but will likely stay there for awhile yet.

Though, if anyone has got any high-quality quick resources handy that'd be appreciated!

<comment><USER14> [http://haskellbook.com/](http://haskellbook.com/) is a great modern deep dive catered to folks like you! It is long, but guides you along the way

<comment><USER16> Need to reply after one day, but I read the sample, figured out an environment for Haskell using Spacemacs and bought the whole book. Because of your link, I decided to be proficient with Haskell in 2018. 2016 was the year of Clojure, 2017 Rust and now Haskell.

Thank you in advance!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How good is the static analysis tooling (IDE / editor plugins) for Haskell?

Given Haskell's powerful type system, I imagine that it must be possible to see warnings, hints, autocompletion and other early feedback about the code in the editor before compilation, like in Java, Kotlin etc. or even better - <USER2> that the case?

<comment><USER18> I use emacs + intern and it's great. Type errors are underlined immediately, warnings and lint messages are marked. Half the time I let the compiler write the code by using ghc placeholders and playing type golf

<comment><USER19> > Half the time I let the compiler write the code by using ghc placeholders > and playing type golf

Is this method documented anywhere? Sounds interesting.

<comment><USER18> Just put in an underscore where you want to write code. If you compile the code, GHC outputs an error with the expected type as well as all bindings in scope. Then, just work backwards. If you use intero, then all type errors are underlined, including placeholders.

The general feature is called 'typed holes', and there's a wiki page here: [https://wiki.haskell.org/GHC/Typed_holes](https://wiki.haskell.org/GHC/Typed_holes)

<comment><USER19> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I look at many modern Haskel guides, they all seem to recommend adding all these extensions/sugar into your code. If these things are so common to use, why doesn't Haskel adopt them into core?

<comment><USER21> Haskell is a standardized language that moves very slowly. Some of the extensions may be integrated into Haskell2020.

<comment><USER22> The most recent progress on Haskell 2020 seems to be a GitHub issue in which the committee members admitted work had stalled and put forth some ideas to improve things. That was 9 months ago though.</comment></comment></comment>


This Week in Programming: Python Heats Up the Language Horse Race - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/week-programming-horse-race-heats-python/?utm_content=buffer5e792&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> I can't take it seriously, it listed NoSQL as a language.</comment>


Ask YC: Feedback for ReviewGist.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.reviewgist.com we have been in open beta for sometime even though we are still building out. Feedback/suggestions on product, marketing, biz dev would be nice. <comment><USER2> It's kind of nifty - next time I'm thinking about buying something I'll try to remember to use the site. Now, I'm going to try to be constructive; The site is nifty but it's unremarkable - it's not that your site isn't cool it's just not engaging to users. Maybe a place to log in - so a user can post a review? Or maybe a place to post questions about products?

<comment><AUTHOR> actually I think you are right, however it was also something we were overtly specific about - of trying to build a site which helps make sense of already existing data rather than a community approach to solving things. More on the lines of google search rather than yahoo answers.

I think what you are getting at is that we need something more to engage the user for a longer term to keep him on the site. Definitely interesting, though not sure if it is good from loosing focus point of view.</comment></comment>


Unearth virtual currency on every website you visit - <AUTHOR> http://pix.do/

<comment><USER2> So, this is "let us track all your browsing activity" with a reward system and marketing that tries to leverage the trendiness of alternative currency, right?

<comment><USER3> Actually that's way off, sorry :)

PIXDO is not selling/renting any private information - just to put this off the table.

It's about content discovery and fixing the broken bounce rate of the internet.

You might just as swell say that reddit/hackernews/stumbleupon/pocket are tracking you by voting up certain posts and all their features are mere "marketing". On PIXDO you 'vote up' by visiting for 24 seconds that is all.

The main difference is that PIXDO give a full experience. It's not a utility, it's a seamless part of your browsing.

You can contact me directly at firstname.lastname@example.com for more information, ask anything you'd like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey! That's my startup and I didn't even post this! How awesome is that? Thanks jphallain

<comment><USER4> Impressive beautiful page.

Looks like a remarkable interpretation, or btc/alt-currency net original creation.

Not sure what it does --that's Ok, I like the mystery.

Before someone gives you their email, shouldn't they know what is being downloaded, and that it is compatible with their OS or browsers, or what?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this honest comment. I agree, I should definitely be more clear about that in the landing page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm using it for awhile and I can definitely say that I recommend it.</comment>


UPS program delivers unnerving surprise - <AUTHOR> http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/28/business/la-fi-lazarus-20131029

<comment><USER2> Hasn't this been standard practice in the payments / banking industry for a very, very long time to verify identity?

You can get all of this on a credit report AFAIK and I'd rather go through this so they know it is me than have some dude sign up for My Choice in my name and receive any UPS packages for me.</comment>


Theology majors marry each other a lot, but business majors don't - <AUTHOR> https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/theology-majors-marry-each-other-a-lot-but-business-majors-dont-and-other-tales-of-bas-and-marriage/ <comment><USER2> This could very well just be from the small numbers in the survey and group.

In 2016, 1,920,718 people graduated with a BA in the USA. Of those 9,800 were theology majors. The survey data used only covered roughly 26,000 people, which would give us an expected 131 theology majors. 31% of those, or forty, married each other, giving us only twenty surveyed theology-theology marriages over an eight year period.

And there were even fewer Architecture graduates and marriages.

<comment><USER3> Several of the current top comments ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941770) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941603) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941307)) explain why this makes sense. I very much appreciate the parent's explanation of why, however sensible it is, one might be sceptical of this result.

From my perspective, the point is that it's often very easy to come up with a _post hoc_ explanation of why the effect you see is the one you would have expected; and, had the numbers come out the other way, there probably would have been just as many people who could explain why _that_ was the expected outcome.

The power of statistics is that it abstracts away from what should be or what we'd expect to what _is_ , whether it is intuitive or non-. The price paid for this power is that it's very easy to ask questions that seem reasonable but aren't, so that one gets an answer to a precisely defined, rigorous question but misinterprets it as an answer to a possibly ill defined, less rigorous question; and that, to me, is what the parent comment is forcing us to remember.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is not surprising to me as I expect that the average pair of theology majors has more in common from the perspective of worldview and values, important things to share with a spouse, than the average pair of business majors.

<comment><USER5> Similarly but subtly different: you can also look at things that matter to people that are more or less common. Theology majors probably have more uncommon important values than business majors do. So it should be much easier to find a non-business major with matching values for business majors, than it is for non-theology majors and theology majors

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Theology majors may represent a greater proportion of believers in pre-marital sexual abstinance than do business majors, therefore weighting the odds in favor of marriage.

<comment><USER7> > Theology majors may represent a greater proportion of believers in pre- > marital sexual abstinance than do business majors

Or maybe Theology majors have a higher pregnancy rate and "need" to marry more often. ;)

Any theory is as good as any other without more data or a way to test it.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe you need a massive set of data to reason that people who study theology are more likely to be religiously inclined though. So I'd say grandparents theory appears more likely.

<comment><USER9> I only know one person who studied theology and she experienced her first religious service 2.5 years into her studies.

Yes, even things we believe to be true we have to put evidence for on the table in scientific discourse.

<comment><USER10> I have met tens of former theology majors; all of them were very religious. 100% were catholic school teachers or priests though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This makes sense, given that if you major in theology you are likely going to a small unaccredited school with only a few dozen or a few hundred students from very similar backgrounds.

I'd expect that if you looked at religious studies majors instead, you wouldn't see any especially unusual marriage patterns.

<comment><USER12> This comment is prejudiced and incorrect in every possible way.

The next highest majors are Agriculture and then Architecture. How does that fit into your just-so-story?

Philosophy/ReligiousStudies is the 8th most extreme outlier, right after Liberal Arts.

Further, the article isn't about majors of _students_ getting married, it's about majors of _graduates_ getting married.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if there is a degree of separation from other students influencing the homogamy here: theology is often taught in a separate school of Divinity (eg Harvard), and at least some large universities have separate schools of Agriculture and Architecture ( eg Cornell).

<comment><USER11> I did my undergrad in the Cornell ag school. In practice it just meant having one class a semester in a different building. There wasn't any meaningful impact on my social life, other than becoming unusually proficient at identifying mushrooms. If you go through a super intensive program like architecture or medical school then that's going to have a huge impact on your life, but whether or not that program is in its own school probably doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here is an interactive version: [https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who- marries-whom/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to see whether there's a correlation here between gender imbalance in the particular subject and the marriage rate. I suspect theology is a heavily male-dominated subject, since a large number of the associated careers are either formally male-only or traditionally male-dominated.

I'm wondering if this might be a case where the men outnumber women so much that a high proportion of the women in the field can easily find suitable men to pair off with without going further than their college.

Checking whether other male-dominated subjects have similarly high intra-major marriage rates would test this(I don't know what they are, offhand, but I suspect a lot of STEM subjects might be there), and also doing the gender- reversed study (where it goes by the first marriage of the husband) might get similar results with more female-heavy subjects.

<comment><USER12> The article is about graduates, not students, so this comment bears no relation to any of the relevant facs.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't married graduates be disproportionately likely to initially meet each other as students?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anecdata, but in my year at Oxford I heard stories about people going to Theology drinks with one eye on meeting potential life partners.

<comment><USER17> There's also the very old corny joke that many people attend college to get their "MRS" or "MR" degree.

But there is some truth to it since many partners meet in college, if not at a job requiring a comparable educational background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For a similar chart (that is potentially even harder to read and visualize somehow) this came out a couple years ago wrt people actually in certain _occupations_ rather than for graduates in certain _disciplines_. [https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries- whom/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Business majors have a lot of sexual relations and are more "distracted" by what the (meat) market has to offer. Sad but true.

<comment><USER20> Alright but these people are all married

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of the reasons may be better job prospects.

In Germany, for aspiring protestant pastors, you may share a position in a parish as a couple (both getting paid 50-75% of a full position, with the unspoken expectation of being available for 100%).

Also the protestant churches are extremely territorial (a vestige of the medieval political landscape), so if you take your exam in Hamburg, you are not necessarily welcome in Munich. But you could marry a bavarian spouse who is also a pastor, which can be your entry ticket into the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Bavaria...

edit: corrected name of ELCoB

also see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landeskirche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landeskirche)

</comment><comment><USER22> Never bring business home.

<comment><USER23> Unless your business is theology?

<comment><USER24> For Christian theologists, at least, the "business" expects you to come to His home instead...

<comment><USER12> He dwells in your home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if it has anything to do with mutual feelings about pre-martial abstinence.

</comment><comment><USER26> Also, mathematicians! I don't have precise statistics, but anectodally when I was in my (under)graduate years it seemed like every mathematician was dating another one, unlike what I saw happen in other faculties

<comment><USER27> Opposite of my experience. Seemed like every math major was single.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Bloomberg interactive guide is interesting.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries- whom/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/)

This statement is also interesting and I find it to be an accurate representation of most relationships that I'm aware of:

> High-earning women (doctors, lawyers) tend to pair up with their economic > equals, while middle- and lower-tier women often marry up. In other words, > female CEOs tend to marry other CEOs; male CEOs are OK marrying their > secretaries.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Computer/Info Sci" was one of the few columns with mostly-red (fewer marriages). I guess we don't get out that much ;)

<comment><USER29> Mostly red does not mean fewer marriages, since the table only shows the ratios for people who married.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Would be nice if the charts were legible...

<comment><USER31> [https://familyinequality.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/spouse-...](https://familyinequality.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/spouse- major-matching.jpg)

[https://familyinequality.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/spouse-...](https://familyinequality.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/spouse- matching-which-bas-marry-down.jpg)

<comment><USER30> Thanks! How did you get these? I tried opening the images in a new tab to see if they had been artificially resized, but they had been compressed to all hell.

<comment><USER31> Remove the end of the url "?w=500"

I use the Imagus addon which does this kind of stuff automatically

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As a finance major, I don't really want my wife whispering "EBITDA" in my ear late at night, so I can believe this conjecture even if the article isn't convincing.

<comment><USER3> > As a finance major, I don't really want my wife whispering "EBITDA" in my > ear late at night, so I can believe this conjecture even if the article > isn't convincing.

This seems like an unfortunate argument, since, to the extent that it is valid, it is surely also an argument against anyone marrying you who doesn't long to hear financial jargon whispered in her ear at night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Looks not too different from random. Low effect size, if anything.

</comment><comment><USER34> Business Majors don't, but MBAs do.

Business majors want to focus on their career, MBAs are mostly there and ready to settle down.

</comment><comment><USER35> Two predators together doesn't work, one has to work and yield.</comment>


Ixoth - <AUTHOR> http://ixoth.com/ <comment><USER2> You know what's cool about Siri? Apple now has a vested interest in improving natural language processing artificial intelligence as fast as it can. I don't think there's ever been a commercial interest in that type of technology at this scale before. And they probably have more cash to throw at this kind of stuff than any other company on the planet. I will be extremely interested to see where this develops in the coming years. You can imagine upcoming WWDC events unveiling amazing new Siri developments.

Services like Ixoth may end up being able to develop into much more useful products in the future, once they don't have to rely on hacks like SMS responses.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was thinking the other day how an Android equivalent of Siri could include some mechanism for mapping spoken queries to Intents. If someone could find a user friendly way to execute on this, any app could expose itself to voice commands from a centralized interface much the way it can expose data for search, etc.

This could be implemented as a third party app on Android by using the built in speech recognition, then doing something similar to Ixoth in order to map text queries to Intents. I don't know enough about iPhone development to say whether such a thing is possible there, but if not its hard to imagine such a thing hasn't been considered as a future Siri feature.

<comment><USER4> This blog post touches that subject: How to Integrate Siri with your App? - [http://blog.roveb.com/post/11855331044/how-to-integrate- siri...](http://blog.roveb.com/post/11855331044/how-to-integrate-siri-with- your-app)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So I can hook up any web service that has a SMS offering to your service and have it interface with Siri?

Yesterday I wrote a blog post re: checking my bank balance using Siri (<http://ryanspahn.com/siri-checks-bank-balance.html>), as well as other services(Foursquare - though they need to simplify the process & steps).

After writing this post I thought there should be one service that interfaces with Siri(thru SMS) and all my favorite web services. If I'm not mistaken, I think you just created it?

<comment><USER5> I am sorry that this article is not accessible anymore??? Google has blacklisted each URL name change(changed it six times) of this article I've created???

The article is written solely in HTML/CSS and only has two scripts within it (Intense Debate's script for their comment system & Google Analytics). All instances of this article have checked out fine when tested for malware or bad actors using the Google Chrome extension & Google Webmaster Tools. I have no ill intent. I love the Internet from desiging/coding sites to creating ideas on the web like <http://sleep.fm> to participating in my local start-up community.

It's very strange why this keeps getting blacklisted, as I am just trying to share a thought/idea I had with interested parties. If you are interested in reading the article i have it posted on my site @ ryanspahn.com

Re: your service I am glad others are thinking the same way. I will be using your service. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dang it, you just sold me an iPhone.

<comment><USER7> As far as I saw, the only Iphone specific detail was the ability to speak the message instead of typing it.

Or did I overlook something?

<comment><USER8> You can send SMS and email directly from the Siri panel, also Siri has been added to the system-wide keyboard and you can use dictation even in third- party apps.

<comment><USER9> Android already does more or less both of these things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://ifttt.com/channels/sms>

Could be a nice interface for working with services that exist as ifttt already has interfaces with a lot of services.

</comment><comment><USER11> Neat stuff, qrush!

Some feedback: the order in which you introduce the concepts on the page seems backwards. You're starting with the "how" and ending with the "why."

I know this is just an MVP and you're focused on the tech types, but I, for one, had to read the page more than once to really 'get it.'

My humble suggestion:

1\. Set the context with the Siri screenshot, which iPhone 4S users will recognize. ("Okay, I get this. We're sending a text with Siri.") 2\. Next, demonstrate the value with the SMS-and-response screenshot. Hook the imagination. ("Wow, that's cool! How can I do that?") 3\. Context established, hook in place, continue with the how-to screenshots, technical details, email signup.

Kudos again for the neat project. You may have just sold me a 4S, too!

<comment><USER12> Thanks nz, I too was trying to "get it", and I wanted to see if others would too. Definitely could use some clarification and I'll continue to refine the concept...once I get it in the hands of some more folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm missing something ... where is the intelligence in how your message gets translated to the hook?

As far as I can see the whole 'tell me the top story' bit it fluff ... isn't it just matching 'hacker news' against the SMS?

What happens when I want multiple actions for Hacker News? What if two people want to register different hooks for Hacker News?

Hasn't this stripped all the Siri style 'AI' out of the equation beyond the actual sending of the SMS?

<comment><USER12> Hooks will be defined per user, it just a simple match right now. MVP, right? :) Obviously there's a lot to figure out still, hence the beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks awesome (albeit, simple to make using twilio).

If this does get traction, one can imagine opening up a whole marketplace of endpoints that can expose all kinds of interesting Ixoth functionality.

What I'm really looking forward to is when Apple opens up API support for Suri. Suri with a whole ecosystem of apps would be mind blowing.

<comment><USER15> exactly, as with the AppStore in 2.0, Siri will really get off when 3rd party support is finally there

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Neat. "ixoth" is a pretty unique name, pronunciation-wise. Anybody know if there have been studies done exploring the sound-space of voice recognition? E.g. if you could map typical sounds of (english) speech to some sort of dimensional space, which areas are dense and which are sparse?

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't get it - is that because I don't have an iPhone or understand how Siri works or because I'm stupid?

<comment><USER18> So assume you have an iPhone 4S. Siri, the new voice activated assistant, can do all kinds of cool stuff, but it's sandboxed to the Apple-created uses. There is currently no public API... sort of.

Siri can send SMS messages, and SMS looks remarkably like a messaging queue. Given that, you have a basic messaging queue hook within Siri. So if your receiving endpoint happens to be an application, rather than another mobile phone, you need only to parse the input and take action.

This will not reach widespread adoption, however. The integration is too loose, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love this but it would be really cool if there was already a sample set of commands, eg look up the value of a stock, top news item, price of an item on amazon. That would allow non technical people to use it and still allow technical people to develop their own.

<comment><USER12> My focus right now is tech folks, it's going to be an API. Maybe eventually I'll extract common actions performed, but I'd really just like it to be a general API service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is fantastic. It is still a work-around, which won't fit well with the UX, but it's a novel take! Really looking forward to some interesting webhooks.

</comment><comment><USER21> How do you pronounce Ixoth?

<comment><USER22> Truthfully, it's a really bad name for a piece of software you're supposed to reference verbally.

Luckily, you can name it anything you want in your address book.

"Watson, please order me the usual from Grub Hub"

<comment><USER23> Presumably this was a design choice: "Ixoth" doesn't really sound like anything else, which means Siri is unlikely to confuse it with another name or command.

<comment><USER12> Yep, this exactly. I purchased the domain originally because I was going to write a roguelike game, but then I got an iPhone 4S :)

The name comes from a monster in Nethack, for the curious: <http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Ixoth>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is so cool.

</comment><comment><USER25> Really sweet hack

</comment><comment><USER26> What really bothers me about Siri, is how Apple makes it tied to specific hardware. Technologically, there should be no reason why Siri-style actions are not available to every PC, and every smartphone.

Native platforms have been, and still are (thanks to Apple's success), the major roadblock to innovation.

<comment><USER27> When Microsoft put speech recognition in XP, were you complaining? When Nuance made Dragon dictate? When Kurzweil made Voicepad Pro? When Google made the Android only Voice offering? Were you complaining they had hardware requirements or were platform or OS specific? But now Apple buy and release it in a way people like, easily a decade after this kind of technology was first commercially and suddenly that's why nobody else has innovated?

And your complaint isn't even accurate aside from that - DARPA funded SRI for military purposes, SRI finished their military contract and reformed to a commercial company and Apple bought them (I.e. innovation happenings) and in an interview with the company founder he said they had to struggle to get it to run on the 3GS and implied it would be much better on better hardware. Speculation is that it does voice recognition on the client (I.e. There are plausible technical reasons why not every smartphone could run the current implementation).

Having to differentiate their native platform drives innovation, its having to support the lowest common denominator and backwards compatibility which stifles it, and patents which roadblock it.

<comment><USER26> My Macbook Pro should be powerful enough to run the Siri software. But Apple doesn't let me use it because they only put it on a particular, expensive, smartphone.

Your comparison isn't valid.</comment></comment></comment>


Attention is All You Need by Google Brain - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 <comment><USER2> This sounds like RNNs may officially be dead</comment>


Spotify Raises $250 Million, Valued Above $4 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304791704579212152163448852-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwMTEyNDEyWj

<comment><USER2> I find myself torn with Spotify. I _really_ love the product and company and probably use it at a minimum 5 hours a day every single day. However I really wish artists actually earnt money from it.

[http://lowerdens.tumblr.com/post/34308869231/on-spotify- and-...](http://lowerdens.tumblr.com/post/34308869231/on-spotify-and-music- consumption)

<comment><USER3> If you really listen 5 hours a day, Spotify pays nearly 4x for your music as you pay to them. (calculated with 300hrs/mo, 3.5min/song, and $.0075/song)

Good thing they have so much VC money to keep the lights on for a while.

<comment><USER2> Maybe they could offer a tiered subscription model wherein heavy users pay more?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Spotify makes an amazing product. I went from spending hundreds a year on CDs and MP3s to just paying their subscription fee. It's like Netflix for music, except they actually have EVERYTHING you want and it's there the minute it comes out in stores.

<comment><USER5> I love Spotify, but they don't have EVERYTHING. Most notably they're missing The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

<comment><USER6> And Tool. I think it's a conscious decision on part of those bands / rightsholders since they know that fans will go buy their music anyway, so they don't have to settle for the cheap stream fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spotify needs to fix their android app I have been having major problems on my S4 recently. I am about to jump ship.

I can see how they can be worth 4 billion but how can snapchat be worth almost as much.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sirius XM is valued at $22 billion; I am not very bullish on their business model long-term. I would say Spotify has a brighter future.

<comment><USER9> I am subscribed to SiriusXM and Spotify. The reason I still have the SiriusXM subscription is because of their DJs which are presently much better than any of the music discovery functionality of Pandora, iTunes Radio, or whatever. If someone can come up with a recommendation engine that would knock that out of the park, I can see SiriusXM being done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I happily pay $9 bucks a month for spotify. It's one bill I'm not bummed out to pay each month. I get at least that much value out of it - probably more.

Love that they're gettin' after it.

<comment><USER11> Not only do you get more _value_ out of it - even Spotify's _cost_ is more than they're charging! From the article:

> Spotify's losses have also widened amid expensive licensing agreements and > hefty costs related to expansion into a bevy of new markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am disappointed that the most expensive package (Premium) that was advertised for offline usage does not allow putting the music to iPod/mp3 players.

They do advertise that you can sync your music with iPod but they fail to communicate that you can NOT put Spotify music on it.

Spotify client works as an iPod sync client but syncs ONLY the mp3 files you have downloaded from other sources. So my only option is to take the music from Spotify to my training&walks by carrying an Android or iOS device. But those are way bigger than ipod nano etc.

<comment><USER13> I think you have misunderstood things.

There are two different ways of listening to Spotify on an iOS device

a) iPod sync, like you mention - only your local mp3 files

b) via the Spotify client, online or offline. see e.g. [http://blog.laptopmag.com/people-follow- spotify](http://blog.laptopmag.com/people-follow-spotify)

<comment><USER12> Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. My issue is that in order to listen to Spotify songs offline users still needs a Spotify client. Whenever they advertise iPod/mp3 player sync one obviously thinks that one can transfer the music to a regular iPod. For me this is misleading. (1) But yes, I should have read [https://support.spotify.com/us/learn- more/guides/#!/article/...](https://support.spotify.com/us/learn- more/guides/#!/article/How-to-sync-iPod-with-Spotify) first. They do warn about it.

Yes, iOS supports also iPod sync for local mp3 files in addition to Spotify client but it's a rather useless feature for most. There is no clear reason why iPod sync in Spotify is necessary at all, it is confusing the offering as it has no relevance to the music that Spotify as a service offers.

(1) [https://www.spotify.com/us/#premium](https://www.spotify.com/us/#premium) Listen on all your devices Download music & listen offline

<comment><USER13> I think they just added the local mp3 sync feature to avoid having to use the horrid iTunes client for that. Agree it's a bit out of place, unless you are a very particular kind of user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Spotify routinely loses licensing and rips music out of my playlists.

Case in point: They lost several artists on "The Great Gatsby" soundtrack less than a week after it was released. It was just gone one day as if it never existed.

I moved to Google Music so that I knew when I needed to buy a song to add it to a playlist or I could simply purchase from Amazon and upload it. Playlists stay intact, and I don't have to worry about a transfer after the fact if I reformat or switch phones.

Spotify had a shot.

<comment><USER15> You could just use Spotify and buy the songs it doesn't have on iTunes. Spotify imports your iTunes library.

<comment><USER14> I don't use iTunes. Honestly I did think that would be a great feature, but being able to import what I already do own has been fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I dropped Spotify in favor of Google Music because I could upload additional content I've purchased elsewhere and have it integrate in tightly with my playlists.

Spotify doe

<comment><USER16> Also, Google Music works a hell of a lot better on Android and Linux than Spotify ever did... I just wish you could keep Google from crapping free tracks all over your library.

<comment><USER17> Does GM have a free tier? That's why I've been sticking to spotify.

<comment><USER18> Their free tier is uploading your own 20,000 songs and being able to access that from any device with your Google account. The only way to have access to their "All Access" catalog is to be a paid subscriber. Unfortunately there's no free tier with access to their full streaming catalog. Which I find a little strange, since Google's forte is targeted advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know about real music lovers and underground people, artsy whatever you can be with music, but as a normal music person, listening to music at work, on the public transportation and at home, I just love spotify, and it's one of the rare product I pay for;

It makes it so easy to share playlists with friends, find music (almost everything) and discover new things, it seems perfect for the normal person who listens to music.

I'm glad they raised that and hope they'll do good use of it :)

</comment><comment><USER20> Although its not available in India yet, it was trivial to figure out how to use it in countries where its unavailable. One of the best UIs you will ever see in a music app. My movement from one place to other is seamless. Their algorithm which recommends new songs based on my listening history has worked out brilliantly for me and I am consistently discovering new good artists.

</comment><comment><USER21> And somehow still not available in Canada...

<comment><USER22> Blame Canada!

[http://static2.fjcdn.com/comments/I+m+american+we+always+bla...](http://static2.fjcdn.com/comments/I+m+american+we+always+blame+Canada+_cce759cacbd20ad1150f8f730be3cb41.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What if every person that heard a song over the radio had to pay $0.0001 per listen?

If a wired music mass distribution system existed before wireless broadcasting (AM/FM), wouldn't the whole business model of the music industry be different?

</comment><comment><USER24> This thread was in the top 5 on the homepage just minutes ago, and now it's plummeting like nothing I've ever seen before. Cases of heavy handed moderation like these make me doubt the integrity of this forum.</comment>


A 194-year-old Apple tree, the matriarch of Northwest Apple industry, has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/22/us/old-apple-tree-vancouver-washington-dead-scn-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> TFA didn't mention how long apple orchards are normally economically viable.

I'm used to seeing roughly 30-year orchard lifetimes. How does that compare with your fruits?</comment>


Company unindexed by Google, responds by releasing product into public domain - <AUTHOR> http://www.pro-barcode.com/background.html <comment><USER2> Hm. They complain that they couldn't contact Google about this, yet it only took me a minute or so to find: "To request reinclusion, log in to Google webmaster tools, click Tools, then choose the Request reinclusion link and follow the steps outlined there."

Perhaps they did that and just didn't mention it.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a lesson here: don't depend on a single factor you can't control.</comment>