Show HN: Musikcube, a terminal-based music player, library, and streaming server - <AUTHOR> https://musikcube.com <comment><USER2> Unfortunate naming - I used this other graphical MS Windows music player back in high school: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusikCube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusikCube)

EDIT: oh, same developer, so all links are "legitimately" taken over for the new version, and the old version homepage is [https://musikcube.com/old/](https://musikcube.com/old/)

<comment> git-pull The Wikipedia page is in serious need of updating. For instance, it's cross- platform with multiple front ends now. clangen seems to be a reliable head developer as well too, so dev status is active.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The thing that really chaps my hide about the proliferation of these terminal based apps is that now I have all these terminal instances open.

For each cool app like this or terminal based chat apps or terminal slack that's another 2.4mb just for overhead! I'm looking at my process monitor right now and I have 250, _250mb_ , allocated to terminal apps. It's insane!

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't a GUI app have much, much more overhead though? Right now, the _Dock_ on my laptop is taking ~250MB on its own. A simple app that allows me to control when my monitors sleep is another 100MB. Both of those are way more that a simple terminal instance of 2.4MB.

<comment><USER5> I guess OP's post is just an irony about all the recent Electron apps bloat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would love to see a Spotify integration.

Yes, I know. Thats probably not the devs bad, but Spotify makeing it impossible to write a legal integration. Happy new DRM world.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to add support for various streaming services in the future. There is already a preliminary API that allows plugins to add music to the data store, which can be paired with other plugins that control downloading and decoding of audio data. It should be technically possible with the current system, but I haven't had the time to implement any services yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So it can only play a handful of the most popular formats and it requires a metric ton of dependencies. Why are you not using ffmpeg? It can handle decoding, encoding, streaming, tagging, filtering and output without any external libraries.

<comment><USER8> This is a great question. Unfortunately I don't have a good answer, at least from a technical standpoint. ffmpeg is super stable, battle tested, and does just about everything.

I think there were a couple reasons we (myself and the original developers) didn't go with ffmpeg initially: (1) we really wanted to learn how to build a medium-sized C++ app from scratch. Passing everything through to ffmpeg sounded boring. (2) it was difficult to build ffmpeg on Windows in 2007, when we started work on the audio engine. (3) ffmpeg is LGPL/GPL licensed. We originally planned on statically linking everything into a single executable, and were worried the LGPL license would require us to change _our_ license to LGPL. We really wanted BSD.

I don't think any of these are concerns anymore. To be honest, I've sat down a couple times to write an ffmpeg decoder plugin, but always get distracted by missing features and end up working on those instead.

All of that said, I think we should consider looking into ffmpeg again sometime soon, for exactly the reasons you've listed.

<comment><USER9> This is semi-unrelated, but would a more robust/portable playlist format be of interest to your project? I wrote a spec for one and am trying to work with projects to implement it in one:

[http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/](http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/)

I tried to write a beets implementation, I got rather far but it was cumbersome because beets is more of a library manager than a playlist manager. That meant it lacked playlist functionality, which meant I'd have to write my own playlist manager, which was quite a bit more work than just the import/export plugin :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this compare to mpd, the Music Player Daemon?

[https://www.musicpd.org/](https://www.musicpd.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Really nice looking app.

I installed it and the UI is absolutely amazing. Would love to make this my main music player.

I am having some issues though, the audio quality of the playback is suspect. I'm playing back an mp3 file and comparing it to cmus and iTunes play it fine, however musikcube has some weird audio artefacts (especially during heavy bass sections). I'm guessing(hoping?) it's some weird config, but this makes it unusable for me. I'm not an audiophile and I'm not being overly sensitive, there's some weird distortion that does not happen in cmus or iTunes.

MacBook Pro 13" 2015.

<comment><USER12> I remember there were some glitches prevalent in early downloaded MP3 files, which fancy decoders were able to smooth out somehow. Been a few years though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been a pretty big fan of CMUS and CLI based based audio playback for a long time..

This is absolutely amazing— much more polished than the alternatives—it feels like christmas.

Now I can't wait to contribute a pull request :) Thank you so much!

</comment><comment><USER14> Very interested in this as I've tried every terminal music player under the sun. As others have mentioned, how does this differentiate itself from the main players .... mpd and cmus??

<comment><AUTHOR> mpd and cmus are both awesome. I found mpd cumbersome to setup, and couldn't find a frontend I liked. cmus was closer to hitting the sweet spot, but I didn't find a remote control (or streaming) solution that worked the way I wanted it to. I also wanted something super lightweight that I could use in Windows without needing to install something like WSL or Cygwin.

In a nutshell: musikcube probably has fewer features than these alternatives, but packages everything together with a clean, straight forward user interface.

<comment><USER15> Do you know if musikcube has any intention of supporting the mpd protocol? I don't think it should be terribly hard to support, the protocol itself is fairly simple and stable. It would allow musikcube to integrate into tons of applications that already support mpd integration - I've even written a few of my own for my needs, the various libraries make it very easy to do. That integration is the main reason why I'm hesitant to move away from mpd even though musikcube looks appealing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looking at the video, I want to immediately (i.e., without switching to a mode) type "can" and have "Cannonball Adderley" highlighted at the bottom of the focused "artists" tab.

Does it work that way?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, unfortunately. This is on my list of things to do.

You can however, in most contexts, switch to the "category filter" view by pressing "f" without explicitly engaging command mode. This will switch the view, then focus the search field. So you can type "fcan" and get artist, album, and genre search results for "can". Not ideal, but does work and is still pretty quick.

<comment><USER17> I'd love this feature too. Should we open an issue for it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would be great if it could somehow drag & drop, or have a hack to load the currently selected track in another app such as Traktor. I know this is a weird feature to ask, but I'm looking for something keyboard based to efficiently organize & tag my collection for DJing. Simply bring down a terminal window and select the next song.

<comment><USER19> For tagging and organizing you should definitely check out "beets": [http://beets.io](http://beets.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This looks great. Clearly a labor of love. Congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER21> This looks fantastic, thanks for working on it! Especially the ability to act as a streaming server / client.

I have to ask though, when streaming protocols are fragmented already, why create a new one, and not use one of the existing / well supported ones, such as Subsonic?

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this is really nice :)

Nice UI and UX, lightweight and straightforward, will try it out for a bit!

</comment><comment><USER23> Off topic a bit, but what were you using to show the keypresses?

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to find some external tooling to help with this, but was unsuccessful. In the end, I just built a (hidden) feature into the app that intercepts and displays the key presses in that little bar on the bottom before dispatching the events to the actual handlers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> # How to compile from sources via Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit (missing from README.md)

## Install build dependencies

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake libboost-all-dev ncurses-dev libncursesw5-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libfaad-dev libmad0-dev libav-tools libvorbis-dev libflac-dev libmicrohttpd-dev libmp3lame-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev;

## Building

mkdir ~/Applications

cd ~/Applications

git clone [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube.git](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube.git)

cd musikcube

cmake .

make

# Running

./bin/musikcube

(edits: clarity)

</comment><comment><USER25> _Efficient music players remain elusive_ | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634658) (~250 comments & points last month)

Not sure what the general consensus is regarding connecting recent discussions but several lightweight players were recommended; most were platform-specific.

</comment><comment> git-pull Clickables:

\- Permissively licensed: [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/blob/master/LICENSE.txt](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/blob/master/LICENSE.txt)

\- CMake: [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/blob/master/CMakeLists....](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/blob/master/CMakeLists.txt)

\- Lean n' mean plug-in system to support audio codecs and sound systems? Check, [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/plugins](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/plugins)

\- CURSES (TUI) C++ abstraction layer: [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/musikcu...](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/musikcube/cursespp). Based off [https://github.com/clangen/cursespp](https://github.com/clangen/cursespp).

\- Indexes (a la mpd?): [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/core/li...](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/core/library)

\- Cross-platform audio abstraction interfaces? [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/core/au...](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/core/audio)

This could stand a chance of uprooting the mpd + ncmpcpp combo that's been pretty standard for many terminal lovers.

That's not even to mention this app also has an android client ([https://raw.githubusercontent.com/clangen/clangen- projects-s...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/clangen/clangen-projects- static/master/musikcube/screenshots/android.png)), and something looks like it's being cooked up for windows, too: [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/musikwi...](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/musikwin)

Amazing skills. Just 2 main contributors: [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/graphs/contributors). _If_ the git history is pristine (information could have been lost/altered during a cross VCS import), the project was also around since at least 2008: [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/b272bf6](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/b272bf6)

</comment><comment><USER26> Added a folder location, then it crashed. Now it crashes on launch:

[http://imgur.com/a/Sb2hQ](http://imgur.com/a/Sb2hQ)

[http://imgur.com/a/fKUXO](http://imgur.com/a/fKUXO)

<comment><USER27> So add an issue on Github, this isn't the right place.

<comment><USER26> This is a Show HN...

And before you ask, I'm actually not only preparing the issue details, I'm looking to fix it myself.

<comment><USER26> Really easy fix.

[https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/issues/120](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/issues/120)

That section of code should be refactored though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If I have a musikcube server running on my network, can I stream music from my web browser to it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not currently; the only client right now is a native Android app[1]. However, the server[2] uses vanilla HTTP (for audio) and WebSockets (for data and eventing), so it should be relatively straight forward to build a web frontend.

[1] [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/musikdr...](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/tree/master/src/musikdroid)

[2] [https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/wiki/remote-api- documen...](https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/wiki/remote-api- documentation)

<comment><USER28> Even with a web frontend, I'm not clear on how I could get the audio from, say, youtube to go over the websocket instead of to the typical playback device. With something like Pulseaudio, I believe it's possible to stream to a remote host, but then musikcube would need a pulseaudio compatibility layer

<comment><USER29> You would have to download the youtube audio first (eg. using youtube-dl -x) then add that to your Musikcube library.

Then a web frontend could be served served audio over HTTP and play that back on the remote client.

Pulseaudio is system based audio, whereas here we are just talking about local audio to the musickube app.

Interesting idea to add pulseaudio compatability though..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Too bad it doesn't do youtube.

Anyone knows of a cli app that can play local files as well as youtube?

<comment><USER31> I don't know about local files, but mpsyt is great for listening to music on YouTube.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, I use it already, it's great. Alas I need to run something else for the local library.

I would have hoped there's a program that can do both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Please could someone explain why it's necessary to use 24bit/192k - I thought due to Nyquist/Shannon theory that 192k was overkill. In fact, doesn't it create more ear strain listening to higher frequency sample rates?

<comment><USER33> Play lower and higher quality encodings through a decent size of sound system (2kW upwards) to discover what all those frequencies do

<comment><USER34> You might find this interesting: [https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil- young.html](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

<comment><USER33> Thanks ! I'll read through that this evening

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is really good, looking forward to supplement my Subsonic and Plex install with this. I will contribute if I can :)

SSL support through a different app. Okay! Will have to finally begin using Nginx then. Good opportunity to learn something new.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is amazing!

Is there a way to navigate the collections by folders on disk, not by artist/album/genre? I keep my music nicely sorted on disk and I really got used to it.

<comment><USER36> MOC does that by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm about to install this on my third machine ... needlesstosay, I really like this project! Thanks so much for putting your efforts into it.

</comment><comment><USER38> Would love an ubuntu deb for this. That said it builds from source easily enough. But the libs are a bit new for my old version of ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER39> I love the asciinema demo! Really data efficient. Wasn't expecting to be able to watch a demo video on the subway :)

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm using Fedora 26 and

it shows that packages "asound", "pulse" and "libmp3lame" are not available.

What do I do?

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all common libraries that most distributions should have.

1\. "asound" refers to ALSA. 2\. "pulse" is PulseAudio 3\. "libmp3lame" is LAME

A quick google search looks like these may be the packages you need:

1\. alsa-lib-devel 2\. pulseaudio and pulseaudio-libs-devel 3\. liblame-devel, maybe?

Looks like I'll need to spend some time here soon installing a few more popular distros and figuring out the exact package names.

<comment><USER41> Would love to see Centos7 included in your distro list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Nice! Any chance this supports gapless playback for those of us who listen to classical once in a while?

<comment><AUTHOR> Gapless playback should more or less work out of the box for most file formats (flac, ogg, etc). For MP3 files it's still a bit hit-or-miss, and depends on what settings were used when encoding the files. This should improve over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Unfortunately crashes on windows when trying to understand my library. Looks great though.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm curious, how does this differ from what mpd tries to achieve?

</comment><comment><USER45> wow this looks amazing! I finally decided that i must get off iTunes and have been hoping for a terminal based software. I cant wait to try it out.

<comment><USER46> I also reached my limit on iTunes after it started giving me an error message when I tried to play a song with wifi off.

I've been using Swinsian, and am really, really happy with it. I also want to try this out, but for something similar to iTunes without all the terrible, Swinsian is A+++++.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Has anyone (started to) create(d) a FreeBSD port yet?

</comment><comment><USER48> Does it have shuffle? It looks amazing.

</comment><comment><USER49> will it play Apple Music / iTunes Store DRM'd tracks?

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm definitely going to try this, but I've become fed up with most music players and decided to code my own wrapper around MPV.

I used mpd and cmus for years but the main problem I had with them is that when I changed the directory structure of my music files it would corrupt my playlists. There are a lot of different work arounds but eventually I decided that to build a playlist I wanted to copy the file into a playlist directory instead of just reference the file location in a text file.

Right now I use Ranger (a CLI file manager) as the "front end" to mpv. I run mpv on a unix socket so it can be controlled remotely and I can request things like artist, title, etc.. and use that info in desktop notifications and widgets (if I want). Most of the time I never even look at my music player so this works out really well, and I already have mpv installed for video so I'm finding another way to utilize a program I already have installed instead of using another one.

<comment><USER51> I wrote a Rust command-line wrapper around libmpv also: [https://github.com/sevagh/surge](https://github.com/sevagh/surge)

Uses `youtube-dl` backend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I want to say that I'm really excited for this, because of a very simple reason: I can comfortably browse by _album_ , not just by _artist_ , or at least that's what I'm reading on the project wiki. Most MPD clients do a bad job of letting me do that, and things like MOC don't appear to let me do it at all. As someone with most of her albums being authored by different artists, it looks useful.

I look forward to using it, and thanks for making it free/open source.</comment>


Apple will buy Tesla for $75b in 18 months - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2015/02/14/apple-will-buy-tesla-for-75b-in-18-months/ <comment><USER2> There are some misconceptions in the article (imo):

The claim that game is already over is wrong, major car manufacturers like BMW, Audi, Mercedes, GM, Ford, PSA, are working on all possible approaches at once. They tested and tried any possible power train technology you can think of (except fission reactors and fusion reactors).

They are offering integrated services, even if they are moving slower than SV inspired companies, u should not underestimated their ability to move faster than expected. The automotive market is extremely competitive, companies that are succesful their, are succesful for a reason.

Cars are extremly complex, far more complex than an iPhone (there is a reason why they cost much more than an iPhone).

Teslas advantage is mainly that it can make money with selling certificates in California. This is good, but can not be applied worldwide.

The automotive industries supply chain is vast, they do operate globally, their relationships are much more complex than the electronics industry.

The devil is in the detail, Teslas much admired agility is no match for a Porsche or an i8. Building engines is an art.

Sales channels, selling a car is an art in itself (I do know something about selling cars, because my business idea is about selling cars, better of course than anyone else;-)). The sales channels are established and deep in the markets. Tesla has some trouble in China.

After Sales, a car needs after sales support.

Regulation, global car regulation is complex, wild and full of wonders.

Tastes, u will not believe how different tastes are globally. A Tesla looks like a Japanese Car to me as a German (which is a malus). A BMW, or Audi has it's own design language which is full of character and sophistication.

The hill to sell a car here is really really big.

But if Tesla and Apple bring some new ideas on the table, it would probably good for all participants.

@asknbid or @obylocom

<comment><USER3> Ford explored fission reactors for cars in the 50s: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon)

<comment><USER2> Oh, even fission:-)

May be we will see shoe box sized fission reactors, if Lockheed succeeds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hope not! We don't want crazy patent wars spilling in there too. So far Tesla were quite positive in avoiding that:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2014/06/12...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2014/06/12/elon-musk-take-our-tesla-patents-please/)

If Apple buys them you can bet their crazy obsession with patents will poison Tesla as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> If anyone buys Tesla it likely would be an established car company because Apple buying Tesla would not solve Tesla's second problem.

Their first problem is money. They don't have the money to ramp up their car building ability to support the III. They have delivery and market issues with just the S

Their second problem is, they don't have the supplier network large enough to support the III nor the expertise to get it out on time. Apple buying them won't fix that.

Apple's problem is that they are sitting on too much cash to make a good decision. There really isn't anyone worth buying, Tesla surely isn't.

I would have thought Apple would be better served by making self driving cars simple through software and hardware that goes into other manufacturers cars.

<comment><USER6> I tend to think that buying any of the big silicon fab companies would probably be in Apple's interests. They generate the kind of cash you need to be able to invest in the huge R&D costs needed to sustain Moore's Law, and they have clearly indicated that they want to keep their iOS SoCs at or very close to the leading edge of process technology, because it gives them a huge competitive advantage.

However, the problem there is that it means you really need to be buying Intel, TSMC or Samsung. Clearly Samsung is a non-starter, and TSMC seems to be fiercely independent, leaving Intel. I can't imagine a healthy world where Apple has bought Intel, so that seems to also not be an option (I can well imagine that regulatory authorities might want to block anyone from buying Intel).

Maybe they could use their piles of cash to build their own fabbing capabilities from the ground up, but that seems like it would be a very risky and very drawn out task.

So, yeah, not sure there isn't _anyone_ worth buying, but they may not be able to actually buy the companies that would help them pull further ahead in owning their core technologies.

<comment><USER7> What about GlobalFoundries?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Apple's design team, software, and global distribution would actually LEVEL Tesla up."

"Software"... lately? No. Sorry. Don't agree on design either.

Thing is I'm not sure Elon wants to let go of Tesla. Tesla is on a roll right now and Elon strikes me as the kind of individual who would personally see that out, at least for the foreseeable future. He has visions of changing the world (and access to other worlds). He may take investments, but I don't think he's ready to see it sold outright.

</comment><comment><USER9> While it's a fun idea, I'm skeptical (though it would be cool!)

I think it's far more likely that Apple ends up either _designing_ a car for Tesla or, less-spectacularly, "powering" a car (which basically means expanding CarPlay to a bigger role than v1 will have on the dashboard.)

I still think it's ridiculous that car manufacturers essentially create their own OSs (yes, I know they get them from 3rd parties and some are QNX-powered, etc.) but in essence, every car has its own UI/UX, most of which are terrible.

CarPlay is step 1. I think the evolution of that is a car that's run entirely on OSX/iOS/CarOS -- with a real UI, good UX, and the joy of well-designed electronics. Modern-day cars are vastly more computer-controlled than they used to be, and it makes sense that Apple wants to be a part of that action.

I don't think we're going to see Apple The Car Manufacturer, but I do think we're going to see "Powered by Apple" soon.

<comment><USER6> I really like this idea. A range of cars from Tesla, deeply integrated into the Apple ecosystem, would seem like a pretty sweet place to be.

Apple can certainly solve Tesla's cash problem. Distribution probably takes care of itself when you put those two names together, in the sense that it's two exceptional brands that people will actively seek out, regardless of what their local dealers are trying to push.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This has got to be the next 'Googlezon' (EPIC 2014), I've now seen 3 people suggest that Apple and Tesla merge/acquire (one of them had Tesla acquiring Apple)

I think Tesla is in for a world of hurt actually. Pretty much everyone "gets it" now, and there is at least 10x the capital engaged in creating Tesla competitive cars as there is at Tesla creating their own cars. That means 10x more success paths explored per unit time. That means 10x more noise in the market to obscure Tesla's message. That means 1/10th the "oxygen" left for anything else. The best thing Elon did was the "gigafactory" as it will have a lock on battery supply if none of these new battery technologies come to market. That provides a pretty good defense against the onslaught. But every car company is gunning for him. It's pretty impressive.

<comment><USER11> There's only one company that's announced a long-range electric car other than Tesla - not much sign that everyone gets it! Awesome if that's really happening, but ... as an example, the only announced competitor is the Bolt, and there's no announcement for large-scale battery supply for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The main reason why it doesn't seem totally crazy is that Apple just has so much money and has been so successful in their current markets is that they're arguably going to have to do something radical at some point if they're going to continue to grow. It's unclear to me that an Apple Watch or TV-related tech of some sort is radical enough or big enough.

That said:

\- Everything stephanfroede wrote about the challenges of the automobile market and the level of competition there.

\- Modular auto displays/electronics are definitely somewhere Apple could play. But partnering is arguably the more profitable approach there. Look at Bose for example.

\- The article makes the argument for totally self-driving cars arriving within just a few years. I don't see it. (Although the case does apply to some degree even if you have autonomous navigation on some freeways within an interesting time horizon.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Apple buying tesla, makes increasingly more sense, if Apple really wants to get into cars. Electric cars is a whole different ballgame, and Tesla has shown that its possible to get apple like margins... Getting my popcorn ready and getting back into the Tesla stock..

<comment><USER14> Tesla doesn't have Apple like margins.

[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=TSLA&annual](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=TSLA&annual)

[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AAPL&annual](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AAPL&annual)

(I'm comparing total revenue and cost of revenue)

They still have pretty good margin there, but Apple is quite a lot higher.

They are also pretty unlikely to hold onto the margin they have as they move into the broader market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Elon Musk as the CEO of Apple? Wow. Doubt he would want to do it, but I > could see him being the Chairman — and that would be kind of special.

That's the ONLY reason why I would want Apple to buy Tesla - if Elon Musk can become its CEO let's say in 5-7 years. I can't even imagine what Elon Musk could do with Apple's money, but I'm pretty sure he'd at the very least take on fusion research, and other stuff that would accelerate the arrival of a new "space age".

Otherwise, Apple buying Tesla just as another profit-center and to make fanbois happy that they only have to buy their products religiously from a single company? Screw that.

Put Elon Musk on the schedule to become CEO and then we're talking.

</comment><comment><USER16> This post could do with the title being prepended with 'I think...'

</comment><comment><USER17> Apple will NOT buy Tesla for $75B in 18 months - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055177)

</comment><comment><USER18> Tesla's current market cap is $25b. Isn't $75b too much of a price premium?

To be fair though, Tesla's share price went up by 100% over the past 18 months, so a 200% increase over the _next_ 18 month isn't unimaginable.

[0] [http://www.google.ca/finance?cid=12607212](http://www.google.ca/finance?cid=12607212)

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't think Elon would want to sell Tesla since he can benefit in longterm as a supplier for batteries/EV tech?

</comment><comment><USER20> >Google is another likely buyer, but Google can't compete with Apple's war chest?

I always thought Google had more cash than Apple...this sounded off, so looked it up. Google's at 64B cash + liquid assets, Apple at 32B. Oh, no, how will Google ever compete with that?

<comment><USER21> That information is way off Apple had $178B as of Jan 2015 [http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple- cash-178-bil...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple- cash-178-billion/) The 32B is probably just the profit for a single quarter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lots of the things on this list could be accomplished with a partnership rather than an acquisition. Can anyone elaborate as to why Apple might choose to acquire over simply buying in?

<comment><USER23> Because Apple has a habit of buying companies to ensure that no one else can use the same technology. That's the reason the Nexus 6 doesn't have a fingerprint reader. Apple didn't invent that technology, they bought the company that did so no one else could use it.

<comment><USER24> So no phones can ever have fingerprint recognition? There is no other way around? Or Do they have to pay royalty to Apple?

<comment><USER25> Back in the Windows CE days, I used to own a Toshiba smartphone with a fingerprint reader on the backside.

Apple were not the first, but definitely their solution is the sexiest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For all that is great in the world, I hope this isn't true.

</comment><comment><USER27> Cars used to be mechanical miracle, today they are controlled by 'computers' and 'softwares'. Above all, their pricing is rip-off for high end cars esp., I am not currently sold for electric-only car, but I am more favorable for hybrid and I hope Apple make one too.

If you can read, computers and software above while you do know skills of Apple for both industrial and software design, perhaps you could find the missing piece of the puzzle.

If they re not working on a car, they should. And we do know, Apple can bring down the price of 'high-end' to near affordable. That's where, the current leaders in this industry need to worry.

<comment><USER28> > Above all, their pricing is rip-off for high end cars esp.

This is where you lost me, there is much more than styling with higher end cars.

> Apple can bring down the price of 'high-end' to near affordable

So many questions, but one stands out - what do you think a software company is going to do that Ford, Audi, BMW, Chrysler, GM, etc. haven't already looked into or are already doing? Ford Sync sucks, does that mean a car from Apple will be better cause it has better 'apps'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> no, they wont.

</comment><comment><USER30> Tesla and Apple are ideological opposites, I really hope this never comes to pass.

</comment><comment><USER31> The authoritative sound of the title bothers me like click-bait titles.

<comment><USER6> Not a particularly new thing for Jason ;)</comment></comment>


Guy Points a Gun at Google Streetview Car - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2012/09/google-street-view-camera-catches-kid-pointing-a-gun-at-it/

<comment><USER2> [http://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?13987-Baby- Zyia-...](http://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?13987-Baby-Zyia-Death- on-Brinker-Street)

<comment><USER3> "Body of missing toddler found in a junk-filled closet"

[http://news.yahoo.com/video/detroitwxyz-20910802/body-of- mis...](http://news.yahoo.com/video/detroitwxyz-20910802/body-of-missing- toddler-found-in-a-junk-filled-closet-29847396.html)

SAME HOUSE! WTF!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't surprise me.

I used to live in Nottingham in the UK. You could see hookers on streetview. It destroyed the property prices in the area in question.

</comment><comment><USER5> Jon Rafman maintains a fantastic, ongoing picture essay using Street View:

<http://9-eyes.com/>

<comment><USER6> I wish this guy listed the locations where these were taken - or am I missing it?

<comment><USER7> See my comment above. The sites where the pictures were originally found generally have a link to Google Maps for each image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What pains me is that after reading this article, the only thing I could think about was how the article contained the overused word 'like' in a sentence as if it was written by a 15 year old high school girl.

'Except for like, when you drive through a rough urban area and happen to have a large gun pointed at you.'

<comment><USER9> Haha, you ruined the article for me. I wonder if the guy driving the car even noticed, or was otherwise distracted by counting the minutes till he could get done with that area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Michigan isn't known as the murder mitten for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Once Google has perfected their driverless car, it won't be an issue to driver safety.

<comment><USER12> Hypothetical: Google develops autonomous self-driving cars and uses them to drive around updating map and street view data. Let's suppose the cars have pretty good AI that not only deals with driving, but also handles deciding where to go. One of the goals the AI seeks is to avoid dangerous situations and minimize damage to the car.

Suppose some of these cars figure out that certain neighborhoods are "bad": people are more likely to shoot them there, or stop them and steal parts from them. The AI decides to avoid those neighborhoods, and uses its machine learning algorithms to learn to predict bad neighborhoods based on its prior experience with other neighborhoods.

Why a particular neighborhood is "bad" is usually a result of the interplay of many complex social and economic factors. Poverty correlates well with badness, for example.

But the car probably doesn't have poverty data. It has to rely on observables. One observable that correlates reasonably well with poverty is race. Note this is just a correlation, not causation. But the car doesn't care. It just cares about the correlation.

So the car starts avoiding neighborhoods where it sees a lot of black people!

It will be interesting to see how society deals with that. It raises lots of interesting ethical and legal issues.

<comment><USER13> This might sound more subtle and less plausible than it really is. In Chicago, Google maps frequently gives me directions that I immediately discard because I am not going to drive across Kostner & Chicago at 11PM at night. I don't even really have to notice to map around the spots I don't want to drive through, because the map is advisory. Maps are less advisory in autonomous cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Poorly written article, I agree! However, the comments section contains uncountable kernels of white nationalist wisdom. What woodwork did these people come out of?

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks like a shotgun to me, but the image is blurry.

<comment><USER16> Lol,

The image is way too blurry to say even that. It could even be a airsoft gun.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, could also be any number of star wars weapons. Probably not a light saber, though.

<comment><USER10> It could be a light sabre but the blade of plasma just isn't activated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Naturally if you are shooting around priavte property without owners permission and regard to privacy, you may get shot.

<comment><USER19> Is there really much of an expectation of privacy on a front porch though?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What stats do you want to know about your address book? - <AUTHOR>

Hacker News, we need your inspiration.
A little background: We are creating an address book management tool which aggregates all your contacts and makes them available to you on all your devices and services. This means we connect with phones, email and social networks, import those contacts, deduplicate the resulting complete address book and in turn export it back to wherever you could need it.
We are now in the process of making our product more interesting and more communicative. One of the ways we want to do this is by providing our users with extended statistics about their address book. Currently we tell them how many contacts they have, how many of them are linked to social networks and how many got updated within the last thirty days.
To extend upon this we are wondering:
- What are things you always wanted to know about your address book?
- What are things about your address book that would be helpful to know?
- What are stats that would make you chuckle?
- etc.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> With one job I would like to know the rapidity of answers, and maybe "best deals" or "best savings" or somesuch. (Not sure how to measure that.)

I was an estimator for a sub-contract electronic engineering firm. I'd have a parts list, and I'd have to contact different suppliers to get prices. Getting quick responses was usually good. Getting good prices was sometimes good, but it's better to price high and buy low.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Interesting point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool Things I Would Use or Enjoy: -Least contacted (with counts and averages) -Most contacted (with counts and averages) -Geographical distance -Average age -Extreme privacy

<comment><AUTHOR> Ethan, what do you mean with "Extreme Privacy"?

Thanks for the input.</comment></comment>


The AutoDesk File: Detailed inside view of an early Unicorn (1994) - <AUTHOR> https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html <comment><AUTHOR> For those who haven't seen this the early AutoDesk papers on the founding and organization are particularly interesting. AutoDesk was a kind of virtual company formed by expert programmers creating individual apps, with the idea that the company would unify behind the one that got the most traction. That, of course, turned out to be AutoCAD.</comment>


How to turn data into money - <AUTHOR> http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/10/how-to-turn-data-into-money.html

<comment><USER2> I wrote this yesterday about similar, and Pete obsoleted it. <http://bit.ly/fatsurfer> Great stuff, Pete!

</comment><comment><USER3> "Down the road there will definitely be a need for data marketplaces, common platforms where producers and consumers of large information sets can connect, just as there are for other commodities." MS is entering this area with project "Dallas" on their Azure platform: <http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/dallas/default.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice write-up, though it does seem to skirt the notion that for many businesses users are not the customers, they are the product. User data is sold to to the _real_ customers.

Also thanks Pete for not using the word "monetize" since I read it right after breakfast.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good article. I'm actually finishing up a small side project about data that we originally built for ourselves to do some market research, but we are planning to release to the public for a monthly fee.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article. Did anyone of you guys tried to sell some dataset to infochimps.com? This could be lucrative, but I have no idea how many people buy this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out Next Big Sound</comment>


Friedrich Hayek and the Collective Brain - <AUTHOR> https://capx.co/friedrich-hayek-and-the-collective-brain/ <comment><USER2> Having read a ton of Hayek I thought I'd share what the real Hayek is like, not the libertarian poster child. Actually existing Hayek would probably disappoint most libertarians. He's against corporate personhood, skeptical about patents and copyright, and for urban planning, unemployment benefits, public health, socialized medicine, and inheritance taxes. It seems like what gets him really riled up is setting prices for cucumbers or state-owned hat factories.

His contribution to social science is his focus on distributed information in economic production. Think about how decision-making is distributed in capitalist economies: bankers, investors, asset managers, producers, distributors, retailers, brokers, executives, corporate planning departments, middle managers, marketing departments, advertising, etc. Just imagine trying to replicate all that effort with a few office buildings' worth of planners in Moscow (Compare that to just Wall Street!). You can't run an economy without enough planners.

Hayek never tells jokes. I think if he had any sense of humor at all it might have occurred to him that designing the perfect society without planners (or much democracy) was certainly a kind of planning. He's like the whiteboard in "Office Space" that says "Planning to Plan" except it says "Planning to not Plan" and it's three books and 700 pages long ("Law, Legislation and Liberty").

<comment><USER3> Indeed. I'm not really sure I see the difference between capitalist planning and communist planning.

Don't corporations have growth targets and multi-year plans? Don't they (mostly) have a top-down management structure, where freedom of action and collective intelligence are constrained the further you get from the Central Committee (also known as the C-suite)?

Don't corporations regularly do incredibly stupid, naive, uninformed, and self-destructive things that would be impossible if the kind of distributed intelligence claimed in this article was a reality?

Are corporations any better at constraining the effects of toxic self- promoting and self-aggrandising individuals who talk a good game but are either incompetent or actively destructive?

And so on. It doesn't really matter that Hayek is misunderstood and (mis)used for free market propaganda in the same way that Adam Smith is.

What matters is that the existence of true freedom of thought and action is debatable in any culture which considers that kind of propaganda a necessity at all.

<comment><USER4> The primary difference, and the reason why capitalist economy beats centralized planning[0] is that it scales _much_ better, by making it so that a lot of details solve "themselves". I.e. capitalism depends on most of the minutiae decisions to be made by market feedback loops - instead of e.g. explicitly setting it so that factory A produces X components, so that factories B and C could use them to make Y goods, capitalism lets the factories just run on a free market, and in time, an equilibrium of supply and demand will form.

That said, planning on top-level is still needed and still done. The point of setting up feedback loops isn't to let them run unchecked, but to make it easier to control the whole system (including keeping it stabilized). Just like it would be stupid to build a thermostat without input, having the temperature be determined by the point at which the materials it's made of start to "sweat", you don't want to leave market totally unchecked, doing whatever the hell it wants. Governments still get to influence the market, the same way a temperature dial influences the thermostat.

\--

[0] - as performed by humans with pen and paper; I don't see a reason why a centralized planning scheme could not work better than capitalism if performed by optimization algorithms in a hyper-connected world.

<comment><USER5> > I don't see a reason why a centralized planning scheme could not work better > than capitalism if performed by optimization algorithms in a hyper-connected > world.

One very Hayekian (Austrian) reason is that you won't have [very useful] data on consumer preferences. The price system will aggregate this effectively. You can't really poll for this, but purchase decisions will reveal it.

<comment><USER6> Why can't usage data be recorded rather than what people purchase? If you want a Fuji apple, you request one, and that would be recorded in the system. How does the price system determine what people want? Many products which people don't want are made, and in fact capitalism has manufactured products that they have to convince people to use.

<comment><USER5> Because you can't measure what people don't want, or what their relative preferences are between comparable items. You really can't do this right without a price system.

UPDATE: And this applies not just at the consumer level, but in the decisions firms make regarding their supply chains.

<comment><USER6> >Because you can't measure what people don't want, or what their relative preferences are between comparable items.

In what way do prices help with that? If more Fuji apples are requested, you know people like that over the other varieties. If you want one brand of apples over the other, one brand's products_distributed variable increases by one. Sorry if it appears as though I'm being obtuse.

>And this applies not just at the consumer level, but in the decisions firms make regarding their supply chains.

Howso?

<comment><USER7> Different varieties of apple have different production costs, and those costs change over time, sometimes rapidly an unexpectedly.

Maybe I prefer Fuji apples, but only slightly; I'd be perfectly okay with a Nashi pear too, or if there's a shortage of Fuji apples, a Royal Gala.

Maybe a frost has reduced Fuji apple production; it would make sense for Fuji apples to be allocated first to the people who _really_ prefer them, and then if any are left over they could come to people like me.

> If you want one brand of apples over the other, one brand's > products_distributed variable increases by one.

Right, so how do you capture my "sure, a Fuji apple, but only if there's plenty"?

In a price system, it's easy: The price of Fuji apples fluctuates based on supply and demand, and I'll purchase the fruit based both on my internal, ever-changing preferences _and_ the price. Regardless of the changing relative scarcity of Fuji apples, I will, apparently magically, end up with the fruit that more efficiently matches my wants and needs with the global fruit supply.

And this works even if you scale it up to 7 billion people and millions of products. That's a very difficult trick to match!

(And keep in mind, we also need to make decisions about distribution, stock levels, what apple types to grow, how much land to allocate to orchards, how much fertilizer to use, where to locate orchards to maximise growing season but minimise fuel usage for transportation. Every resource we have is limited in some fashion, often sharply so, yet our wants and needs are effectively boundless.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "[..] Exchange, as practised by people for about the last 100,000 years [..]"

We know that exchange is just one more activity that humans do, but, historically, in the thousand of years context, it was not fundamental.

We could argue that in the palaeolithic the social organization had little to do with markets. We could argue that in the neolithic, the social organization was, in most cases, hierarchical and top-down.

So, the implicit assumption of markets as the 'natural state' of human organization has not real basis. Even money is an invention of the state.

The idea that markets are powerful tools don't need to be defended. It's the idea that markets know what is better for us what many reject.

It's like saying that we should just start the lawnmower and leave it to decide what to cut. Then, when we don't like the garden, we have to accept it's for the best, because if a better garden was possible is what we would have.

<comment><USER9> _> Even money is an invention of the state._

The existence of money precedes sovereign governments. The only prerequisite for "money" is consumption decoupled from the instantaneous moment of the trade (aka not direct barter) and human memories to keep track of them. That form of "money" has been happening for thousands of years. The prerequisite for "currency" is any item (coins, cigarettes, hotel loyalty points, scrips, etc) that's frequently used as an intermediate store of value to obtain other items.

However, a _fiat_ currency requires a modern state to convince citizens to put faith into authorized pieces of paper instead of cattle/tobacco/yams/gold/diamonds/etc. If the citizens lose faith in government-printed money (e.g. Zimbabwe, Germany Weimar Republic), people will fall back on underground "organic money".

<comment><USER8> It's probably a question of definition, but if you exchange cattle, tobacco or gold you are not using "money".

I would argue that money is an IOU, a promise of something that can be used generally, not only between the two initial parties (that would be a contract).

What would be the point of calling 'money' to cattle?

"That form of "money" has been happening for thousands of years. "

Can you give me some examples? because I have read about it and it seems that it's not the case. At least, not in very relevant contexts.

'[..] people will fall back on underground "organic money".'

Actually they start using currency of other states.

And it's not a "faith" thing, it's related to a real loss of value of the currency caused, in the cases that you mention, for supply shocks in the country (see [http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3773](http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3773) ).

<comment><USER10> A gold coin can be money, a bank circulating a IOU that allows withdrawal from bank of one gold coin is called fiduciary media. The underlying money is still gold not the note.

<comment><USER11> The gold coin would be gold first, coin later.

What makes it a coin is that someone measured its purity, and stamped it with their mark to underwrite said purity.

The IOU, if not attached to a specific name, is just as good and exchange medium as that coin. Even better perhaps because the value is not in the material itself, but in what it can be exchanged for.

Frankly gold is nothing magical, it is just a material that is very corrosion resistant. Thus making weights out of gold would allow them to stay accurate longer while being transported around.

<comment><USER10> Of course gold is not magical, I don't clam it is.

The coin form is just for exchange, gold itself is the base money.

> The IOU, if not attached to a specific name, is just as good and exchange > medium as that coin.

This is where you are wrong. Exchanging a IOU of a third party increases the trust relationship to a third party. That is useful to do, and that's why banking exists, but it is not inherent or required.

> Even better perhaps because the value is not in the material itself, but in > what it can be exchanged for.

Yes. But again. It is still bound to the base money. Look into how historical note issuing banking system work, there are great resources on this. The banks exchange the gold when they get other notes. Then they further abstract and establish clearing houses that do multiparty exchange.

Note here that the relationship always grow complex and more trust is involved, but it is all based on the soundness of the underlying base system.

The IOUs, banking and all are simple not required for something to be money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Funny to see this on HN. I am currently reading a book that details the recent history of economic theory and how it has been in bed with neoliberalism. It has much to say about Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society, a think-tank that he founded to develop his ideas.

What surprises me about Hayek was that he had a radical conception of decentralization, managing to talk about human society as though on-par with an ant-colony. IMO, this sort of anti-humanism is a necessary ingredient for overcoming anthropocentrism in our current thinking and pivoting towards ecological thinking, rather than purely rational thinking.

However, I think Hayek makes some tremendous mistakes in his thinking. Firstly, by reducing the Collective Brain to merely the market/price- discovery, he ignores the possibility that price-controls and/or social- demonization could themselves be components of that brain (perhaps fulfilling the function of an OS's kernel). Hayek talks much about there being no one person who can understand everything, but fails to critique himself. Secondly, he fails to see how the setup of a market has an influence on the kind of information that gets processed. In order for some thing to be exchanged on the market, it needs to be commodified in some way. This transformation of /thing/ into /commodity/ is where the social slight-of-hand happens, necessarily discounting some aspect of it's worth. An example is having two identical mugs, but one of those mugs being /mine/ and therefore special to me. That specialness doesn't exist if the mugs are a commodity, and perhaps that specialness fulfills an informational/computational function. In the end, the price is a result of a collective brain, but the market itself is a human construct. Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit and 4Chan all structure their 'markets' differently, with incredibly different results.

Hayek had some good ideas, but he was too much of an apologist for the existing economic order for those ideas to really be useful. As technologists resurrect his ideas to apologize for the existing technological order, the same will likely be the case.

<comment><USER10> > Firstly, by reducing the Collective Brain to merely the market/price- > discovery

He does not.

> he ignores the possibility that price-controls and/or social-demonization > could themselves be components of that brain

Again. He does not. He actually talks about this question in actual interviews that you can listen to.

> Hayek talks much about there being no one person who can understand > everything, but fails to critique himself.

Again, there are literal interviews where he talks about this exact question.

And making a argument myself, his point is that you can not understand everything and that's why you can not centrally control it, not that he actually knows how everything works.

Plus, he has spent a lot of time on actually trying to figure out how this processes happens, and again, there are audio recordings of him talking about it.

> In order for some thing to be exchanged on the market, it needs to be > commodified in some way.

False. Prices work for uniques as well.

> This transformation of /thing/ into /commodity/ is where the social slight- > of-hand happens, necessarily discounting some aspect of it's worth. An > example is having two identical mugs, but one of those mugs being /mine/ and > therefore special to me. That specialness doesn't exist if the mugs are a > commodity, and perhaps that specialness fulfills an > informational/computational function.

That is exactly what the price mechanism is for. If the mug has special value to you then you can not sell it or sell it at a higher price. You are signaling to the 'collective brain' that this is a special mug. That's the exact point.

> In the end, the price is a result of a collective brain, but the market > itself is a human construct.

Nobody argued against that.

<comment><USER12> I see a couple of interviews here:

[http://hayek.ufm.edu/index.php/Main_Page](http://hayek.ufm.edu/index.php/Main_Page)

Do you have a suggestion of which one is good to start? I really want to dive deep into this guy.

Also, to be fair, theory travels. A lot of time it's more interesting to see how a concept is misused than applied correctly.

EDIT:

lol. it seems that yea, he thinks price-signals are the only thing.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV7-2Aua4_4&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV7-2Aua4_4&feature=youtu.be&t=2m25s)

<comment><USER10> Yes, the place you linked to is the best for interviews.

A couple of things to note.

These interviews with some leading schooners came about because Hayek was old and he had not given many interviews on video. So what you are seeing there is a very old Hayek who does not always get everything correct about the past (as always happens in these situations).

Second, Hayek changed his position on some topics quite a bit. Please don't watch the interviews directly assume his book that he wrote earlier are the same.

Hayek's arguments by nature are hard to write and talk about. Him not being a good speaker (or writer) makes this very hard. He himself multiple times tried to invent new words for concepts because he felt the words that existed did not capture the meaning. Mostly he was not successful beyond his own works.

If you are open to reading, I would suggest "Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek". The auther is leading authority on Hayek and is the editor of Hayek Collected works.

Depending on what aspect you are interested in there are different more specialized books. For Hayeks own works, I think "Road to Serfdom" is a easy first read but its written for a very specific people in a specific context, that has to be understood. Some people recommend "Fatal Conceit" as a nice 'summary' for lots of stuff, but there are also some issues with it. I think also that the essay collection "Individualism and Economic Order" is required reading.

There are a couple podcasts that I can recommend, specially for beginners. One is with the author of the book above. They address different aspects of Hayek.

\- Boudreaux on Reading Hayek [http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2012/Boudreauxreading...](http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2012/Boudreauxreading.mp3) (this gives a good overview about his books)

\- Caldwell on Hayek [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/01/caldwell_on_hay.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/01/caldwell_on_hay.html)

\- Caplan on Hayek, Richter, and Socialism [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/06/caplan_on_hayek.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/06/caplan_on_hayek.html)

\- Larry White on Hayek and Money [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/02/larry_white_on.html](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/02/larry_white_on.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Libertarians take vague/basic stuff, rephrase them and act as if they just uncovered Gods truth itself. Yes, commerce/market has good stuff, but capitalism isn't the sole owner of commerce and markets, not the inventor, nor anything of it. The Ottomans(islamic golden age etc) had them, but they also redistributed resources to the needy and condemned usury, and so, most past societies also had markets and commerce, and also, no one has ever rallied against "freedom", those 'argument' mean little. The text reads like it could have been written by any teenager who uncritically took all propaganda from facebook and is enamored with an ideology. Plus, he makes it sound like these sort of liberalism and theory is just injustly shunned for no reason(or maybe no other than "all academics are secretly communists"?)

The point where left vs right were == USA pre-90s model vs soviet model should be considered anachronic by now, as most leftists, and even china, are not for central planning as a rule, and neither is USA capitalism as defensible now. This is a perfect example of false dichotomy(probably one of the most abused nowadays, because its necessary to do so to sustain a certain narrative).

Libertarians(which are called liberals everywhere else on the world, with libertarian meaning non-authoritarian leftist) defend private property and so they are completely for states, police and prisons by consequence. And if you take the theories as nature's truth and apply it leaving out politics you end up with dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile, where only the kernell of state violence remains because it is necessary to keep a system which is not able to satisfy humans needs of survivorship and self-determination(aka freedom).

I do plan to take a closer look at Hayek as this one seems like one who was actually interested in science, philosophy, and truth and seems to be an honest free thinker and not as much an ideologue, Nassim Taleb praises him, it seems the reason he's not taken so seriously in Academy is actually because his ideas refused to 'solidify' and provide hard models which would be seem as "more sciency"(I could be wrong, but seems it's one of the points Nassim makes, that a Science with uncertainty at it's core is better than one that tries to cargo-cult its way through).... But damn the undead arguments and mythologizing of 'market is god and good and pure freedom for all all in itself' must die already, lets live in the real world, shall we?

Edit: some spelling

</comment><comment><USER14> It is a fascinating thought that human intelligence is collective, and that a vast network of specialists is more efficient than a small network of self sufficient producers. I think there is a lot more to study there.

That being said, I could have done without the left leaning politics === extreme, oppressive, authoritarian government bologna.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can't think of Hayek without being reminded of his claim that personal freedom in Pinochet's torture state was greater than that under the previous government where people were not getting their eyeballs pulled out and genitals shocked for disagreeing with the State.

<comment><USER10> I really Hayek fan and I agree that he was wrong here.

Allende was not as socialistic and not as much in control as Hayek thought. Since WW2 Hayek had a huge fear of democratic socialism turning into what we would now call stalisim.

This fear never really came to pass because there is to much vested interest in the markets, thus the change happens slowly. Most democratic countries realize that they have gone to far, and then go back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Hayek's point in his famous essay of 1945, "The Uses of Knowledge in > Society", is that central planning cannot work because it is trying to > substitute an individual all-knowing intelligence for a distributed and > fragmented system of localised but connected knowledge, much of which is > tacit.

Yet centralized control is the hammer that everyone turns to whenever there is a problem. Instead of figuring out the root-cause and actually solving problems the default instinct of all modern state-heavy economies is always to add more layers on control. And I don't mean the 'state' but people... I see it all the time on HN and Reddit too.

A perfect example of this recently is all of the calls for price controls in pharma - prices are a great example of distributed knowledge systems. Despite the fact research points to gov-backed monopolies being the primary cause for drug price fluctuations [1], sometimes increasing prices 2000% at a time. In any other market if a company increased prices even 25-50% they would put themselves out of business because a competitor would step in to offer a better price.

This was demonstrated recently with the Epipen controversy [2]. They would never have been able to jack their prices so high if they had any competitors, and there are companies dying to compete with them, but they have been stuck in the FDA 'backlog' for years.

Plenty of other research shows that price controls results in shortages. Just like the massive food shortages that have been happening since Venezuela enacted price controls on food.

Yet the argument is being characterized as the evil selfish individualism which permeates American 'capitalism' making these pharma CEOs jack prices up.

Of course not all regulation is bad. There are many externalities that can't be controlled in the market (pollution is the perfect example). But this immediate instinct to always turn to more centralized control with blind trust, while villianizing markets, is an unhealthy obsession IMO. People act like capitalism is the shining star of American culture but as far as I can see it is continually villianized in movies and pop culture to the detriment of society. While government is held to such low standards that we only expect mediocrity from them.

For example, in response to pharma prices, how about cleaning up the existing regulatory system so the FDA doesn't have companies in the backlogs for years? Or investing more capital so they have enough people to handle the load? Or are we just so used to inefficient government that we just expect them to not do their jobs well? But no, clearly the solution is to give them even more work to set prices for thousands of drugs.

I'm all for Hayek being taught in schools, maybe people would hold both markets to higher esteem and governments to higher standards. So we get better policy and new policy only when centralized control actually makes the most sense.

/rant

[1] [http://khn.org/news/government-protected-monopolies-drive- dr...](http://khn.org/news/government-protected-monopolies-drive-drug-prices- higher-study-says/)

[2] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining- dr...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs- chairs/)

<comment><USER15> Hayek was an absolute fabulist and quite dishonest too. His arguments against central planning rely on a sleight of hand where any government planning is identified with something like GOSPLAN under Stalin. How people using the internet, created by DARPA and NSF can fall for that is beyond me. Clearly, governments can plan well or badly. For that matter private corporations can plan well or badly - IBM and Intel have centralized planning on an immense scale.

<comment><USER8> "IBM and Intel have centralized planning on an immense scale"

Right. In fact, is there any human group that don't have some kind of central planning?

Ironically, the only kind I can think of is the anarchist meetings where, somebody told me, nothing is never decided.

<comment><USER17> This is where people should read Coase rather than Hayek, who actually addresses the question of why companies exist and are centrally planned.

<comment><USER10> Yes. I have pointed to Law&Economics (invented by Coase for those who don't know) multiple times in this thread.

I would however also say that Hayek has more to say on the topic and that the parent comment mischaracterized Hayek's arguments.

Little triva, Coase was a student at LSE when Hayek was there in the 30s. They are two of the best and most important economists of this century, both should be studied in depth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting aside - the Matt Ridley who wrote was chairman of the Northern Rock bank in the UK when it became the first British bank to suffer a run for 150 years. Perhaps when it was nationalised in 2008 he said something like "it takes a government to rescue a failed bank".

<comment><USER19> Pretty sure you've got him mixed up with someone else, I went to a review of his book and saw this: "Matt Ridley is a zoologist by training and a disciple of Richard Dawkins."

<comment><USER20> Not mixed up with someone else.

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

He was made a board member because his father had been a board member. And then he was promoted to chairman of the board. His academic training was in zoology but he wrote for the Economist.

<comment><USER17> > He was made a board member because his father had been a board member

How amazing that the free market in employees would produce such a coincidental result! That the most economically efficient person would be a relative of another board member!

<comment><USER10> That the bank failed seems to be a indication that it was not economically efficient and the market correctly removed it. That seems to be the exact thing that we want.

For some (easy to understand) reason government have taking into their heads to 'save' these institutions, but you can hardly blame that on the market as a organisational principle.

<comment><USER20> The government did not try to 'save' this bank. The government tried to stop its contagion from spreading. Hoover had allowed that sort of contagion to spread in 1930 to ill effect.

Also, you are ignoring the Major Major Major Major who ran this bank and now lectures us about economics. If Hayek is the marginal figure he is, it is partly because of the Ridleys championing him.

<comment><USER10> This 'Hoover let it continue'-story is partly correct but it ignores the larger and far more important story. The bank failed because there was a liquidity crunch caused by a badly implemented gold standard and a even more badly manged Fed that failed to do its job. Its not the banks fault that there is a massive liquidity crunch. Its also not the banks fault that they have been legally restricted from note issue. In Canada (with no central bank) no banks failed in the same period, but the economy of Canada was hit almost as hard.

By the way the hole argument that you are making goes back to a British guy 100 years ago (Walter Badget, often called "Lender of last resort"). You would be to discover that this guy was actually against the idea of saving bad banks, and even more he was against central banks in general. His argument was that if banks can not expand liquidity themselfs as they did before central banks, then the central bank must do it, BUT ONLY TO GOOD BANKS AGAINST HIGHLY SECURE ASSETS AT HIGH RATES.

Sadly his arguments have been turned around into something different by people who don't want to read his point for political reasons or simply don't understand them. Now its, 'if you let any bank fail, a domino-effect will destroy everything', this is simply false, most of the time, most banks are good. The problem is liquidity, and the central bank is in control of that, that its job. The domino effect only happens if the central banks fails, as the Fed did in 1930 and 2008.

I'm not in detail informed about this particular case in England. I made a general point about markets and governments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> (1) 'Exchange between strangers is a unique feature of us modern hominids' isn't really falsifiable without begging the question or establishing a hard boundary between kin and non-kin, which afaik is currently a function of the problem under consideration (i.e.'kin' might mean something different to geneticist vs. anthropologist vs. linguist vs. classical economist and even something different for a different problem in each of those disciplines). But 'this is what makes us human' is far from essential to Hayek..and probably basically inimical to Hayek, as some other commenters have pointed out.

(2) The 'reduction of collective intelligence to the price mechanism' objection (which is often a specific case of generic objections to dimensional reduction, including e.g. perceptron thresholds) is addressed throughout Minsky's Society of Mind[0], esp. the 'frames' concept.

(3) The article doesn't mention the benefits of localized knowledge (as opposed to the 'practical reality' of localized knowledge, which may be lamentable and/or fixable), which iirc Hayek does get into (or maybe some other Hayekians? more modern systems-oriented folks? can't think of a source at the moment). If some knowledge (for example, within a community of practice) weren't pretty strongly localized, then every knowable would be in one truly global variable space, and abstraction would be incredibly computation-intensive, and knowledge growth would be horribly O(n!), and all of thought would work like JavaScript (ZING). This is a stronger kind of localization than technical specialization (which just maps onto SOLID class design rather than variable space).[1]

[0] Beautiful html edition: [http://aurellem.org/society-of- mind/](http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/) [1] Broad philosophical musing on this sort of thing: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bubbles](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bubbles)

</comment><comment><USER22> When the author talks about the Collective Brain, or the Cloud, it is really referring to the Market, or the Marketplace of Ideas. Conservatives like the market over government for the very reasons outlined in this article. I'm glad these fundamental ideas are getting updated with today's nomenclature.

</comment><comment><USER23> > If Hayek is mentioned at all in academia, it is usually as an alias for > Voldemort.

I thought that economists in academia were largely Austrian, which would certainly not position Hayek as Voldemort.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Hayek is my homeboy"

...

that must be a bumper sticker...

</comment><comment><USER25> There is one guy in a t-shirt in this classroom. Savage!

</comment><comment><USER26> Wild to see Hayek on hacker news

</comment><comment><USER27> The way I see it, democracy and markets are opposed to each other.

Democracy: One person one vote.

Markets: Each person has tiny micro-votes, and they can get more votes by supporting initiatives that pan out. One individual with millions of micro- votes can easily out-vote a million individuals with less votes.

It's interesting to see just how "cargo cult"-like the practice of voting has become in many places.

<comment><USER10> You are not seeing the full picture.

> One individual with millions of micro-votes can easily out-vote a million > individuals with less votes

No. In a market there exist property rights that are designed to not work like that. If I own a simple pen, somebody with a billion 'votes' can come along and if I refuse to sell my pen that just that.

In a pure democracy, this is simple not the case. The rule of the majority is a real thing, if I have a pen and there are a majority of votes for me to be forced to give away that pen, I can do nothing.

This is of course in theory, in practice their is no pure form of either. However it es a extremely important thing to point out. It is the exact reason why you can run a economy with markets but not with democracy.

<comment><USER27> "A simple pen" is a nice example, but the real interesting question is what to do about common goods like natural resources and land.

The more we shift to an economy where people "own" things via debt and rent, it really becomes a matter of best bids.

\--

edit: It's also interesting to keep in mind that the original distribution of land wasn't equal. So much of libertarianism is predicated on ideals like "homesteading", but in practice most parcels of land were unequally distributed from the very beginning. This was never corrected, and continues to reverberate.

<comment><USER10> > "A simple pen" is a nice example, but the real interesting question is what > to do about common goods like natural resources and land.

A pen is made out of natural resources.

> The more we shift to an economy where people "own" things via debt and rent, > it really becomes a matter of best bids.

No, a rent is just a transfer of right of use but not right of ownership. Once you have stable property rights you can actually make renting practical, and that opens many more options. It does not fundamentally change the system.

> edit: It's also interesting to keep in mind that the original distribution > of land wasn't equal. So much of libertarianism is predicated on ideals like > "homesteading", but in practice most parcels of land were unequally > distributed from the very beginning. This was never corrected, and continues > to reverberate.

Nobody ever said that life was fair, certainty not the classical liberals. No system can go back in time and fix all the morally wrong thing to establish a perfect system and then role history forward. This is not Kafka DB.

The argument is that the best societies establish a property rights system and based on that develop further. That's the best we can do. If there are identifiable rights violation that we can 'fix' then this should of course be done. The issue of course explode in complexity with time.

<comment><USER27> I think you're missing the forest for the trees.

Once upon a time, society was really really really unfair. Aristocrats ruled everything autocratically and justified it via divine right, etc.

Then stuff happened, people fought, and democracy came along. Many hailed it as a much more egalitarian form of decision making. We still pay a ton of lip service to the idea that democracy is amazing.

However, then more stuff happened, and now democracy is very very weak. We barely use it to make serious decisions, we collectively prefer to delegate to experts or markets, and decision-making power more and more blatantly now falls upon those who have cash.

This is varnished over by saying "the markets decided x". It's not even necessarily a bad thing, some believe the wealth was accumulated meritocratically and therefore it's better in the hands of those who know what to do with it.

However, it doesn't erase the fact that markets and democracy are opposed to each other. This doesn't mean one is good and one is bad, it just means that when it comes to making a collective decision about what to do with a resource, one cannot both do it democratically and according to market principles. It's one or the other.

Life isn't fair but we get to decide if we make it a bit fairer. The notion that the best societies limit themselves to a property right system, and not further, into an education and health and entertainment systems, seems like it's very much up for debate.

I see no reason why it's in society's collective interest to maintain a security system to uphold private property rights, and not others for other rights.

\---

People always like to talk about how "the invisible hand of the market" led to this or that conclusion. Even if a greedy horrible butcher wants to gouge people, the competitive nature of the market will stop him. So, pretty clearly, the invisible hand stops evil-doers from doing so much evil.

However, what's also increasingly clear, is that the invisible hand also works in the opposite direction. That is, if you want to do better things that what the markets allow, if you're a particularly benevolent butcher, the same invisible hand that stops the bad butcher, will stop the good butcher.

The market has a logic of its own, both for good and for bad, and we need to collectively decide when and where we want to utilize it, and when we want to use some other decision-making system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Swiftc – SIL and its not-so-basic blocks - <AUTHOR> http://swiftc.io/post/132392598484/sil-and-its-not-so-basic-blocks <comment><USER2> A few issues:

One, passes have to special case BB arguments whether they are phi nodes or not ;)

IE this doesn't actually make something like constant propagation easier. You still have to perform the meet operations. You still have to go and look what arguments were passed to your basic block.

In the phi node case, they are right there. I assume they link the basic block parameters to things passing those parameters, in which case: they are essentially phi nodes.

Second. It's really easy to create phi nodes. Creating basic blocks is a heavyweight thing (maybe not in SIL, but in general).

For most compilers, creating basic blocks requires messing with the CFG, update dominator info, etc.

However, if want to put something in loop closed SSA form, i can just drop in a bunch of phi nodes without messing with the CFG. In their form, i'd have to add basic block arguments to a bunch of blocks.

Additionally, phi nodes have natural analogues, like in SSI form, etc.

It's harder to represent the splitting operating sigma nodes perform in a basic block form. ;-)

<comment><USER3> I've seen another IR that replaced phi nodes with BB arguments, but they also replaced return with continuations, leading to a kind of best-of-both-worlds cross between SSA and CPS. They were able to implement a bunch of interesting optimizations on closures, in an imperative language.

[http://compilers.cs.uni- saarland.de/papers/lkh15_cgo.pdf](http://compilers.cs.uni- saarland.de/papers/lkh15_cgo.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> People recognized ~20 years ago that, semantically, SSA is just reinventing lexical scope:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.34.3...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.34.3282)

<comment><USER2> IBM knew this when they invented it (note: Ken Zadeck was my officemate when i worked at IBM ;P)

The original pass was called RNN - right number of names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. MLton did the basic-blocks-with-arguments thing too:

      http://mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2007-February/029597.html
      http://mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2003-January/023061.html

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of Steele's Rabbit compiler (as noted by Appel and probably others). Always made a lot of sense to me, though I never worked out the details. I thought in terms of every basic block taking arguments (in registers), and every branch passing some arguments. Lexical scoping gives us a way to express common arguments. This should be interesting to read and think about.</comment>


Show HN: Send a personalised Telegram to anyone in downtown SF - <AUTHOR> http://telegramthat.com/

<comment><USER2> Congrats on launching, and judging by your ratio of upvotes to comments I'm guessing a few people have 'Saved' this for their future use.

As a concept, I like it, and like most business models I'm intrigued at how to make hand-delivery profitable for $15 (not saying it can't be, especially with some scale, - I just love crunching the numbers on different business models).

If I wanted to nitpick, I'd suggest a different paper stock. Maybe historic Telegrams are mostly yellow because of age, but even if they were originally on white card (I'm assuming yours are decently thick) the 'yellow' effect looks more traditional and adds a nice touch. Also, I think you misspelled Haight-Ashbury in your sample telegram (? Not a SF local).</comment>