What's New in JavaScript for 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://developer.okta.com/blog/2019/01/22/whats-new-in-es2019 <comment><USER2> I might get heat for this but personally I find the JavaScript ecosystem to be a mess. There are so many changes to the language that are done aggressively which I think are done without much thought. For example, the promises API, now we also have async/await. The module system, with require(s), then import/export, and there's browser JS and system JS (node), and npm and now yarn, then your build system, with webpacker, browserify, bower. Oh! You might also be interested in using new JavaScript syntax so don't forget to use babel.

And the funny thing is they are teaching all these at bootcamps and the students have a hard time trying to understand the concepts with so many variations in them.

There is however light at the end of the tunnel which I think where TypeScript is.

<comment><USER3> > I might get heat for this but...

Some variant of this is the top-voted comment of every HN thread on modern JavaScript.

> For example, the promises API, now we also have async/await. The module > system, with require(s), then import/export, and there's browser JS and > system JS (node), and npm and now yarn, then your build system, with > webpacker, browserify, bower.

Async/Await are essentially sugar on top of Promises -- use them if you want, you don't have to. Require has been deprecated in favor of import/export to be more semantically meaningfull (e.g. with TypeScript). Webpack is the next iteration of the Browserify approach, and Bower is just flat out dead.

All of this happened 3-4 years ago, if it's your job it's not hard to keep up. If it isn't your job there's plenty of guides out there to get you up to speed. I wouldn't expect to be able to jump back into Android dev after 5+ years away from it without doing some reading, I don't know why people expect web development to be so static.

<comment><USER2> > All of this happened 3-4 years ago, if it's your job it's not hard to keep > up. If it isn't your job there's plenty of guides out there to get you up to > speed. I wouldn't expect to be able to jump back into Android dev after 5+ > years away from it without doing some reading, I don't know why people > expect web development to be so static.

The thing is that the JavaScript language is so aggressively changed, unlike Ruby for example, that for years, working with it professionally, the only change I can remember that was significant in my work was the safe navigation operator `&.`. The build tool (Bundler) is still the same, along with other tools. Not sure why JavaScript can't do the same? More innovation I guess?

<comment><USER4> After the big dump of new features in ES2015, I don't find the pace of planned updates to the language aggressive at all. JavaScript is still playing catch up.

People will complain if they don't add features. When they do add new features, people complain that they're "bloating" the language or moving too fast. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The JS ecosystem is a different matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tend to agree with the article author about the use of a # (or indeed any punctuation mark) for private fields. I think it is just a personal preference thing though. Is there any publicly available discussion that shows what lead to this decision?

If fields in class definitions are incorporated I would like it to simultaneously make the field names in scope for any methods within the class definition.

      class Fish extends Vertebrate {
        color = "blue";
        constructor (speed) {
          super();
          this.speed = speed;
          if (speed > 5) color = "red" // does not need this.color because color is a class field.
        }
      }

      Fish.prototype.setColor = function (newValue) {
         this.color = newValue;  // this. is required because this function is outside the class definition.
      }

Adding this feature would allow for much tidier method bodies since there is now enough information to imply this.fieldName from fieldName alone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the FAQ on the private syntax: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal-class- fields/blob/master/PR...](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-class- fields/blob/master/PRIVATE_SYNTAX_FAQ.md)

<comment><USER5> Ok reading that I'm going to amend my suggestion above.

        class fish {
         color = "blue";     // color is now a name in scope for this class definition
         #agenda = "Total World Domination"  // agenda is now a name in scope for this class definition

        ...
         reveal () {
           console.log("I am a "
                   + color + " Fish "  // interpreted as this.color
                   +"seeking " + agenda // interpreted as this.#agenda;
         }
        }

You can still have this.agenda for public addon fields. But for the private one you can refer to it within the class definition without either this. or #

<comment><USER6> Yes please make the syntax simple like this! Even cleaner:

      class fish {
         color = "blue";
         private agenda = "World Peace"
         constructor(){
               color="red"
               agenda="Secret World Domination"
         }
         reveal () {
           console.log(`I am a ${color} Fish seeking ${agenda}`)
         }
        }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At this point why not just have browsers run TypeScript natively? Remember the <script type="text/javascript"></script>, maybe just put <script type="text/typescript"></script> and be done with it.

<comment><USER8> In my uneducated opinion, I think this is the direction things will go. Typescript will steadily supplant JavaScript and browsers will eventually roll out native support for it, and JS will be relegated to a legacy language.

<comment><USER9> >Typescript will steadily supplant JavaScript and browsers will eventually roll out native support for it, and JS will be relegated to a legacy language.

Typescript can't supplant javascript or relegate it to a legacy language... because typescript doesn't compile to bytecode or machine language, but to javascript. Browsers that support typescript natively must by definition also support javascript natively, and the more of the former you have, the more of the latter you have.

<comment><USER7> And C++ used to compile to C at first, I don't see your point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > There are a number of proposed changes to Classes, including field > declarations, private methods and fields, and static methods and fields.

So make it look full on like traditional OOP with classes, I guess? I suppose the prototype folks lost this debate.

<comment><USER11> It is interesting there is so much push towards classes now when a big part of the ecosystem (react) is moving away from them with react hooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12>
        #this_is_not_a_comment = 6;

<comment><USER13> Yeah... it's ugly as heck but they're clearly trying to avoid new keywords. I hope the TypeScript folks can convince ECMA to adopt normal keywords like they use:

[https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/classes.html](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/classes.html)

<comment><USER14> I've read the TC39 proposal and I still don't understand what's wrong with "private".

<comment><USER15> You can have a public field named the same as a private field and all fields in JS are accessed by " _this.fieldname_ " so you need a way to access the private field differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The only thing that still blows my mind are the private fields and methods. I understand there has been plenty of debate about it, but have not followed the conversation. I really hope that syntax does not get finalized.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I've read some of the reasoning behind choosing the syntax. Regardless of the issues, I think going with the current proposed syntax is a terrible mistake.

<comment><USER17> Me too, in fact it is the only thing I dislike about the upcoming language features.

<comment><USER18> Yes, absolutely alien/awful syntax. `private` is already reserved word, why not use it? It has been reserved word for this specific moment when it's needed for exactly this, am I wrong? What's the point in having reserved words in spec if the spec is afraid of using them? I don't get it, can someone explain why this ungodly # made it so far already?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> `flat` and `flatMap` are highly welcome additions for me; concatenating a bunch of lists together has historically been a very common operation for me, that right now is done best as

        [].concat(...arrayOfArrays)

It is also the basis more generally for the list monad, where `.flat()` is the `join` operation and `.flatMap()` is the equivalent `bind` operation.

So, like, the simplest example is if you're just getting a bunch of results from a paginated source -- you want to flatten them, and it is really nice to just have a method for that.

The list monad case is more interesting because it gives a syntax for list comprehensions:

        [ x + y for x in list1 for y in list2 if x % 2 == 0 and y % 2 == 1 ]

becomes

        list1.flatMap(x =>
          x % 2 !== 0 ? [] : list2.flatMap(y => (y % 2 == 0 ? [] : x + y))
        );

And more theoretically this list monad is all about composing nondeterminism, where one input could produce any of N outputs: if you store all of the current possibilities as an array then flatMap is the core composition primitive.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm _super_ excited for flat and flatMap. In working with multidimensional arrays, I'm always needing to use my own `flatten` function before returning my value. I love that this is getting native support.

</comment><comment><USER21> JS the language is great, and it becomes even better with TypeScript. But the ecosystem leaves a lot to be desired.

Having become proficient with Node/Express/Sequelize at Fullstack Academy and then used them for several months, I really miss Django and Django REST Framework. The ORM, serializers, effortless filtering and permissions, etc. are--with all due respect--simply unmatched in JS-Land.

As for the front-end, I learned and used Ember for over a year before picking up React (it was "cooler" and there were more jobs). So many decisions I've agonized over with React/Redux were solved years ago with Ember. But the problem with Ember is its proprietary object system and its lack of momentum.

If I have a choice, I will be starting new projects with Django on the server- side, and Ember only when an SPA is necessary. In the past, I hesitated to use Django for templates, but the lack of a robust client-side ORM has made that option more attractive.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Why not use private.x to refer to a private field of this, and > private(that).x to refer to a private field of another object?

I don't find the answer to this [1] to be particularly compelling. This actually seems like the right solution to me.

[1] [https://github.com/tc39/proposal-class- fields/blob/master/PR...](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-class- fields/blob/master/PRIVATE_SYNTAX_FAQ.md#why-not-use-privatex-to-refer-to-a- private-field-of-this-and-privatethatx-to-refer-to-a-private-field-of-another- object)

</comment><comment><USER23> Followed the links of the article a bit. The document explaining the process of finding a good name ("globalThis") for global is pretty cool: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- global/blob/master/NAMING.m...](https://github.com/tc39/proposal- global/blob/master/NAMING.md)

</comment><comment><USER24> Yet another signal that ClojureScript was ahead of its time when it was created.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you want to make programming inaccessible to newcomers, start making special characters that inexplicably mean special things... like # means 'private' when placed in front of a function.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a legitimate concern. Even if the person isn't new to programming and is coming from other C-like languages such as Java or C#, there's a good deal of precedence. Just like the "Don't Make Me Think" usability argument, we ought to stick with the conventions that people already know and are familiar with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The proposed globalThis seems like a hacky solution to a bad problem

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. It's ugly. I understand it's named globalThis to avoid collision with other libraries and breaking things, but my goodness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> so static is `static` but private is `#` ?

I wonder whats the reasonig behind it? `private` is already a reserved word in JS, why not just use it? [https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_reserved.asp](https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_reserved.asp)

<comment><USER27> I feel like i'm spamming this link every time the private fields stuff comes up, but take a look at the FAQ, it explains the reasoning behind it and why they didn't go with alternate options (like underscore, private, or others).

I was against it at first, but after reading through that document, i'm on their side now. It'll be a small but useful addition in some situations, and it's scope is extremely limited.

[https://github.com/tc39/proposal-class- fields/blob/master/PR...](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-class- fields/blob/master/PRIVATE_SYNTAX_FAQ.md)

<comment><USER26> Thank you for that link, will read it carefully. From the first glance it feels like an attempt to cover mess with a bigger mess:

> this is already a source of enough confusion in JS; we'd prefer not to make > it worse

> Property access semantics are already complicated, and we don't want to slow > down every property access just to add this feature.

> [private x] in JavaScript this would silently create or access a public > field

Pardon me, but # as a declaration method of privates is an abomination.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I have to agree with this. I'm getting this vibe from a lot of changes to JS lately. A mess designed to cover another mess and people almost blindly supporting the new mess just because there is some logical rationale for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Noob question: What does static mean in other languages? Is it basically Foo.prototype.bar !?

<comment><USER29> A static property is generally a global variable namespaced to the class, so Foo.bar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Huh... why would there need to be something new for JavaScript in 2019?

At this point, it looks like they might as well import the Java syntax and call it "JavaScript fusion" and be done with it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm alerted that javascript tends to bloat the stdlib. Most of the features mentioned can be implmented as a external library. This is benefitial for users as they can switch the implenmentation and upgrade versions without waiting for all of their users to upgrade the runtime first.

The prime example of javascript unnecessary bloat is fetch api which is mere wrapper for ajax calls, was developed a while ago but still cannot be used because of lack of support in older runtimes.

<comment><USER32> From a performance standpoint it's way better to have stdlib grow as opposed to JS bundles. Modules aren't shared within a page so you'd end up with a lot of duplicated code that the user would have to continuously download and parse.

<comment><USER31> The problem here you can only rely on stdlib when most of your users have runtimes with it. For the browser features, you may never live up to this.

Its worse to forever live with two implementations(native and polyfill) and as large bundles, double the troubleshooting effort and extra support.</comment></comment></comment>


Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/tracking-political-manipulation-through-social-media-samantha-bradshaw/ <comment><USER2> I will start taking research like this seriously when authors will start discussing media spin as part of the problem. If you think bots are a problem, but news websites engaging in blatant, Orwellian language and fact bending are not... you should at leas be able to back it up with comparative research on effectiveness, which I've never seen being done. Online "discussions" of political topics are saturated with links to traditional media.

Increasingly, I think giving up on "news" and social media altogether is the best solution. I've quit most of it. HN is the closes thing to social media I visit. I watch YouTube, but limit videos to specific educational content.

<comment><USER3> You honestly do not consume any news about current world events, whether local, national, or international? Or do you just mean that you continually and deliberately ignore political news? I mean, that's not exactly rare: 100 million eligible voters (42%) did not even care to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election[0]; I suppose they either don't believe their vote would matter, or that Hillary and Trump were the same enough. I would think there are still easily tens of thousands of those people are still indifferent about the electoral process. Anyway, to me, it's easy to see how sports, video games, TV shows, porn, eating, alcohol, weed, and drugs can be seen as more interesting than, for instance, the current "battle" about if, when, and where the 2019 State of the Union address will take place.

[0] [http://archive.is/NDUkb](http://archive.is/NDUkb)

<comment><USER2> _> You honestly do not consume any news about current world events, whether local, national, or international?_

Not intentionally. Information about big things still leaks through websites like HN and Slashdot, through articles/interviews about "non-newsy" subjects, as well as through people I know.

I've considered quitting HN and Slashdot too, but I need up-to-date technical information to do my job effectively. Can't find a good alternative.

 _> 100 million eligible voters (42%) did not even care to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election_

When I need to vote these days, I approach it as buying a piece of electronics. I dedicate time to research my options. As in, sit down and spend several hours or days searching for relevant (to me) information on the candidates. Obviously, this might include news articles if they are relevant, but those have to be articles about something specific (e.g. some particular thing a candidate did in relation to a particular social or economic issue I'm interested in).

It's a tedious process, but I think it's better than passively and continuously consuming whatever some media outlet cooks up to fill their air time, print space or website home page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This interview should be held up as a definitive educational material for anyone working around social media platforms. Really shines an important spotlight on how bad actors manipulate digital information, and how to adjust business and mental models towards mitigating platform manipulation into the future.

Really pleased to hear how much research and thought is being done in this area now. Looking forward to hearing more from this team.

</comment><comment><USER5> Giant media corporations owned by billionaires, run by millionaires, and overwhelmingly staffed by members/partisans of a single political party pump out propaganda on all of their mediums 24/7 and totally dominate and saturate public opinion but we are supposed to understand that "bots" are a threat to democracy? As someone who has been deemed a "bot" by people who do not wish to hear information they do not like on more occasions than I can recall, I note an insidious aspect of this emphasis on "bots" is that it allows the ready dismissal of any individual expressing heterodoxy and glorifies/sanctifies the "official" media previously described. Yet we saw this past week that social media users were able to win a rare victory in bringing the "official" media to heel for their lies and manipulation in setting upon a group of innocent schoolchildren. The official media hates it when their marks push back and thus we get propaganda like this study.

<comment><USER6> Well we also had social media users falsely doxing some family because they thought one of the kids was involved in the events in said video:

[https://www.dailywire.com/news/42442/leftist-mob-wrongly- ide...](https://www.dailywire.com/news/42442/leftist-mob-wrongly-identifies- student-covington-emily-zanotti)

And there have been attacks on media sites, blogs, etc that admit their previous coverage was wrong and their attitudes towards the kids unwarranted.

So sometimes its the public bringing the media to heel, sometimes its the other way around, and sometimes it both groups acting like idiots and not doing any research whatsoever.

But yeah, there is definitely an undertone of disdain towards the internet, freedom of expression, outsider journalists and news sources, etc from the established corporate ones. And a lot of the 'initiatives' I've seen for monetising news sources, tackling bots and 'fake news', etc definitely seem very anti consumer/anti rights.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the giant media corporations bleat about the importance of a "free and independent press" out of one side of their mouths whilst simultaneously shitting all over the mediums that are most accessible to the average person and allow him or her to amplify his voice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's weird how when we talk about political manipulation we always talk about bots and fake news as only fringe media, while we overlook the biggest manipulation that comes from right wing concentrated multimedia like CNN, CNBC, etc. They have been caught publishing made up stories, communicates, fabricating witnesses multiple times. Like, dunno, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction comes to mind.

<comment><USER8> I don't think most people in the United States would consider CNN or CNBC right-wing. That's more Fox's purview.

<comment><USER9> "Most people in the United States" haven't admitted to themselves that the overriding purpose of all popular news media is constantly, insidiously to advocate for more spending on armaments and war. Historically that would have been considered rightist, but in the current context one could be forgiven some confusion...

<comment><USER10> I'm sure that's how it comes across to a far-left isolationist, just like the popular news media probably comes across as "insidiously advocating for greater globalization and surrendering American sovereignty" to a John Bircher, but that's probably because the commentators who say these things are extremists, not because the vaguely-centrist media has an appreciable agenda.

<comment><USER11> That's what it looks like to a "far-right" isolationist, too. If you hadn't noticed, Trump has been trying to extricate the US from conflict in Syria, with the media nearly unanimous in opposing this goal.

US news media is in fact generally pro-war and pro-globalization, and these are appreciable agendas which are only deemed "centrist" because they are shared by the two major parties. Outlets like CNN closely reflect the consensus of the governing elite, even when it is quite markedly out of step with the prevailing opinion of the public on any given issue.

Labeling positions which don't enjoy the endorsement of state-affiliated institutions as "extremist" is a common tactic to solidify control of the discourse. This comment reads to me as nothing more than naked worship of power.

<comment><USER12> > Trump has been trying to extricate the US from conflict in Syria, with the > media nearly unanimous in opposing this goal.

The media, the left, and the remotely sane parts of the right are largely opposed to the specific mechanism; very few are opposed to the (purported) goal of extricating the US from the conflict in Syria.

<comment><USER11> The specific mechanism of withdrawing US forces from the area? I seem to recall a lot of hand-wringing from neocons about specific withdrawal strategies from Iraq, but the bottom line was that Americans would remain in Iraq.

You can't say oh, I'd like to extricate myself from this conflict, but also force a specific outcome. That's having your cake and eating it.

<comment><USER12> > The specific mechanism of withdrawing US forces from the area?

The timing, manner, and surrounding supporting activity (or lack thereof) of that withdrawal, yes.

> You can't say oh, I'd like to extricate myself from this conflict, but also > force a specific outcome.

Perhaps, but you absolutely can choose the manner in which you attempt to extricate yourself from a conflict with an eye toward the likely impacts of that extrication.

<comment><USER11> We could quite literally reparent your comment under a discussion about Iraq circa 2007 and it would not look out of place coming from a neoconservative. And no wonder -- those are the same people who now form the "remotely sane parts of the right," according to the so-called left.

> The timing, manner, and surrounding supporting activity

Presumably the timing is too soon, the supporting activity not vigorous enough, etc, etc. Let's kick the can down the road another year, surely our underspecified war aims will be closer to fruition.

<comment><USER12> > We could quite literally reparent your comment under a discussion about Iraq > circa 2007 and it would not look out of place coming from a neoconservative.

No one had a plan to criticize in 2007. If you mean 2009-11, sure. Or, earlier in the same conflict, in 2004 from much of the Left and non-neocon Right against the Bush Admin in discussing how the neoconservatives desire to disentangle rapidly after the defeat of Iraq was leading them to ignore the lessons of defeats of past regimes stretching back at least to WWII.

And there's plenty of historical evidence (including the conflict that drew us back into Iraq and Syria) that there was merit to both of those objections, despite them coming from very different, largely opposed, ideological factions.

<comment><USER11> I'll admit I just plucked a year at random there and it was a poor example. You've aptly demonstrated your grasp of history but think it's a case of refusing to see the forest for the trees. The question in my mind is whether you've soured on the entire imperial project or not. Were the American objectives there ever realistic? Did the war ever make sense?

The Syrian conflict itself is far too big a can of worms to open here. We probably disagree on the ground truth of what precipitated the conflict there and who's fighting whom and for what reasons. Regardless, it's very hard to convince the average American that whatever geopolitical maneuvering is happening there is worth caring about - despite very hard propaganda push campaigns in support of it.

Back to the start of the thread, it was my observation that media outlets such as CNN, Fox etc are broadly pro-war... you're basically getting the range of perspectives between State and DoD and that's about it. The broad heuristic you can use to predict their editorial slant on any issue is use-of-force maximization. And that's definitely a discernible agenda.

<comment><USER12> > The question in my mind is whether you've soured on the entire imperial > project or not.

That presupposes that at one time I supported the "imperial project"; as someone who repeatedly argued that it was an example of the crime of aggression for which we rightly hung a bunch of people after WWII, I don't think that is a valid premise.

OTOH, I don't think the illegality of how you got into a position does anything to.absolve you of responsibility for the consequences of the manner of your exttication; quite the opposite.

> Were the American objectives there ever realistic? Did the war ever make > sense?

No, and no. But, unless we are in a sci-fi scenario where we get to rewind time and attempt to alter the past, those are entirely irrelevant questions—as they address only _should we have intervened_ (and actually address some of the _less_ important factors of that question, as prospexts for success are only relevant when provocation is established) but are largely irrelevant to the question of "given that we are there now, what is the most appropriate manner for extricating ourselves from that situation."

<comment><USER11> What I intended there was not to accuse you of anything. I still think the question _is_ relevant, because it may be that the political objectives were never realistic, and thus the effort is Doomed with a capital D, and dogged persistence can only result in perpetual war.

It's also possible that, given the political, religious/sectarian, and economic factors at play, the region is likely to "relax into a minimum energy state," so to speak, which is unlikely to be much perturbed by the specifics of withdrawal.

There are always better and worse ways to do something. The hazard of holding out for the optimal withdrawal strategy is that it aligns you with disingenuous people who don't _really_ want an end to the thing at all. They will poke holes incessantly in any proposal because either they still think the thing is winnable, or prolonging it advances their personal or institutional interests.

I'm still curious to know what precisely is so complicated about US withdrawal in Syria, what the counter-proposal is, and what objective it's supposed to achieve. This thread is going to get depth-limited at some point though, so I may not find out.

<comment><USER12> > I still think the question is relevant, because it may be that the political > objectives were never realistic, and thus the effort is Doomed with a > capital D, and dogged persistence can only result in perpetual war.

I think that your equation of my argument about the need for care in extrication with something dependent on the viability of the original war aims is misguided; the concerns are almost entirely unrelated.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Model S racer can do 0-62mph in 2.1 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/tesla-model-s-racer-can-do-0-62mph-21-seconds <comment><USER2> I've heard the limiting factor to racing these is that the batteries overheat, so unless they upped the cooling system to those batteries, I don't know how they plan to not go into limp mode.</comment>


Ubisoft places multiple employees on leave following allegations of misconduct - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/26/21305018/ubisoft-multiple-employees-administrative-leave-sexual-misconduct <comment><USER2> For people who date / screw around with coworkers (either below, same level, or above) - why? Doesn't app-based dating make finding a partner easier than ever? This extra layer of drama where you have to see your girl/boyfriend 5 days a week on top of actually working your job must be so unnecessarily stressful.

I'm so glad I never once did anything like that. There must be so many people anxious over stuff they did even decades ago - a few tweets and your career can be destroyed! Just stay away from that noise!

<comment><USER3> I have at least one theory.

High pressure environments make people loopy, especially if they are already marginal. In one past project Hell (60 hour weeks for a good 6+ months) I got all but propositioned for a tryst by a colleague of the opposite gender old enough to be my mother (who was also going through problems at home).</comment></comment>


Clone software to start my own business. Is it ethical? (discussion) - <AUTHOR> http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.829048.17

<comment><USER2> Was google a clone of altavista? Was facebook a clone of friendster? Was the ipod a clone of all other mp3 players? Is Mockingbird a clone of Balsamiq?

Just copying an idea is fine. And if you do any kind of market research, your essentially figuring out which idea is the most profitable to copy.

Its finally all about execution.

<comment><USER3> You're right, it's all in the way you execute. But starting off with the word "clone" doesn't sound good.

I'd say Google was "a take" on search engines like Altavista, Facebook "a take" on social networks like Friendster. They didn't start as "clones".

Maybe it's just a matter of phrasing but I was surprised by the number of replies like "go ahead, clone it!". Being inspired by, revisiting... are words that sound better to me. Between his decision on cloning and the outsourcing, it doesn't bode well.

<comment><USER4> "Clone" doesn't sound bad to me coming from a programmer. Any programmer who is good enough to create an exact clone will find it psychologically impossible to do so. There's no way a programmer could complete a clone without thinking, "I can do better... they should have done it this way... it will be much better and more successful if I change this part."

Maybe I'm wrong, though, and I'm probably naive. Are there any software clones that aren't just inferior knock-offs, implemented by cheap labor hired by someone who never intended to match the quality of the original? I wouldn't count any product that beats the original in any meaningful way, such as better support for a certain language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Peldi is a class act.

He's wrong about one thing, though: "I wish you luck, but not too much" is much older than Obama-- here's a usage from 1932: [http://books.google.no/books?id=10wCi1LnRFoC&pg=PA15&...](http://books.google.no/books?id=10wCi1LnRFoC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=%22I+wish+you+luck,+but+not+too+much%22&source=bl&ots=xMn0FQ8dyu&sig=Wecm0-KvNcYlldtj6UTHZMcxuTE&hl=en&ei=xBiBTODzJ4jaOJC1yYcO&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22I%20wish%20you%20luck%2C%20but%20not%20too%20much%22&f=false)

<comment><USER6> Too bad you can't link directly to his comment.

<comment><USER7> You mean like this? [http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.829048.1...](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.829048.17#discussTopic829090)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the perspective of a customer I would go so far to say that it is unethical not to copy it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, I think that's actually true (about followers making you the leader). I had a competitor (following, though not cloning), and it freaked me out (like, seriously), and for this reason (and others) I ended up stepping back somewhat from the space. But looking back... my best sales were from that period.

I also had liked being the one and only - but that's ego, not business.

</comment><comment><USER10> Making an exact (more or less) clone of a successful product isn't especially unethical to my way of thinking, but it is _stupid_. The original product has a "head start" in the marketplace and you're almost certainly going to be playing catch-up in terms of market share and (here's the less part of "more or less") features.

What does make sense is a near-clone with a killer feature added. Google was like Altavista, but with results that are actually useful. reddit was just like delicious/popular, but with voting. Myspace was just like Friendster, but with uptime. Cheap/free when the competition is expensive usually counts as a killer feature, but isn't always the most effective way to make a profit.

<comment><USER11> I mostly agree with you but one small caveat - most companies do a relatively poor job of extracting economic value from their products on a global basis. So in this case if the OP is willing to work the Chinese local market much harder than Balsamiq can then the whole endeavour might actually be worthwhile. In short you dont have to beat the global maxima of product providers, just the local maxima.

<comment><USER10> Localization is very much a killer feature. Being just like Google[0] but with a China-centric instead of US-centric worldview seems to be working great for Baidu.

[0] In terms of core-product, in the ways that matter to most users

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the looks of it, he wants to clone Balsamiq not because he thinks he can do the concept better, or because he has a different take on it, or because he's inspired by that sort of functionality, but because they say they make a lot of money.

That's all.

He basically wants to ride on their coattails, and presumably sell a cheaper knockoff.

Which is, I think, rather sleazy.

<comment><USER13> "Which is, I think, rather sleazy."

Why, exactly?

<comment><USER13> To whomever modded me down: Are you capable of expressing an informed answer to a serious question, or is it that you just get dumbstruck at the prospect of explaining something you'd rather just take as a given?

The idea that plain copying for the sake of making a cheaper knockoff is somehow wrong or sleazy is prevalent in many places, but never well articulated. It seems entirely a cultural thing, something that bothers some people because that's all they've known.

If there's a deeper reason, I'd like to know what it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On a side note: The guy is outsourcing his core activity - the actual development of the product. That can't end well.

<comment><USER15> Part of the discussion is about whether the core activity is marketing. That's an interesting question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very good discussion. Is it software or marketing or the people who wrote it or the community they have grown? The software is Balsamiq btw.

<comment><USER17> Wow! I had a really strange experience there. I read the first post, thought to myself "Wow, this is a terrible troll, the rest of the comments can't be worthwhile", and hit Back. ("make use of open source projects, which is immoral" was the breaking point for me to decide it was a troll).

Then I came back to HN to complain about the troll, read your comment and the others here, and promptly turned around and went over to the site again to actually read the comments. And it's true! It was a very good discussion.

My troll filter isn't very sensitive -- I usually give people the benefit of the doubt -- but it unambiguously went off here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If he clones, that's one thing. If he competes, that's another.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is one consequence risked when an ISV is very public and explicit about how much money they make. The chance is always non-zero, but surely it is increased if you reveal numbers in public and they are large.

That said, I love Balsamiq and appreciate most everything he has shared with the public. And I think what this Chinese guy is proposing is scummy, at least in how he treats it.

</comment><comment><USER20> My view is its similar to opening a laundromat across the street from an existing laundromat. Is it unethical? Wrong question. Would it piss you off if you owned the other laundromat? Yes. Golden Rule applies. On the internet any website is right across the street from any other.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand the ambivalence for stealing. If you've ever tried to teach someone something, you know it's impossible to get them to where you are. Maybe worse, maybe better, but never your equivalent. And if it's worse, no worries; if it's better, it fuels your own development.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why reinvent the wheel? If you can find a foundation from which to build a better service/app/mousetrap why not? Consider utilizing a clone a part of natural software evolution. Spend more of your time and effort on making it better than just making it.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Imitation is the sincerest of flattery." --Charles Caleb Colton

<comment><USER24> I see your quote and raise it...

"Good artists copy great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso</comment></comment>


Homeless woman prosecuted for enrolling son in Conn. school - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110422/us_yblog_thelookout/homeless-woman-prosecuted-for-enrolling-son-in-conn-school

<comment><AUTHOR> it is amazing to me on 2 points:

1\. what address should homeless person use? "Planet Earth"? Or the most recent bridge s/he slept under?

2\. public education is guaranteed. Why it is a "theft" then? Did her son got more of public education then he was entitled to? Does it mean there are different levels/amounts of public education one is entitled to based on the address one is registered at? "Address of registration" - reminds me about Russia's key notion of "propiska". The "propiska" address determines everything in Russia - school, medical clinic, jobs available....

</comment><comment><USER2> I am flabbergasted.</comment>


Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam - <AUTHOR> https://nr.apple.com/dE4i2T4q4O <comment><USER3> I really enjoyed working at Shazam. One of my favourite parts were the hackdays, got to learn a lot. Here's a write up of visualising music recognitions: [https://medium.freecodecamp.org/data-visualisation- with-1-bi...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/data-visualisation- with-1-billion-shazam-music-recognitions-90728df3a8c9)

I've been planning to do more write-ups from past hackdays, such as building a functional Shazam experience in client side JavaScript and other visualisations. For example one time, I repurposed a WebGL globe to plot music recognitions over it. I don't have access to the Shazam tag stream anymore, but you can get a feel for how this looked as I've applied near real-time Wikipedia edits on the globe instead: [https://umaar.com/globe/](https://umaar.com/globe/)

<comment><USER4> Wow. Is there any open-source equivalent for this. Would love to see the complexity of the job as it scales and the workarounds in actual code?

<comment><USER3> For the data maps which the Medium article displays, I used: [https://github.com/ericfischer/datamaps](https://github.com/ericfischer/datamaps) initially. If there's interest, I can try to get my scripts onto GitHub. They:

a) Include Node.js scripts for converting raw big data (the raw Shazam stream) into something usable for visualisations.

b) Contain Node.js scripts & utilities for automating the creation of maps focussed on particular geographic locations.

c) Contain client side JavaScript for displaying all the individual map tiles onto an interactive map & Google Maps API code to query for places of interest (like a club, shopping center) which may explain heavy usage of Shazam in a particular location.

For the globe, which is unrelated to the datamaps, here's the original WebGL globe which someone did in 2011: [https://github.com/cedricpinson/globetweeter](https://github.com/cedricpinson/globetweeter)

The Wikipedia edits version of the globe I did: [https://github.com/umaar/wiki-globe](https://github.com/umaar/wiki-globe) \- happy to do a write up of this if people think it'll be useful.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for posting this! I've always wanted to build an audible ad-blocker that can mute/replace the audio and analyzing a background/silent feed to restore volume. Unfortunately all product paths I can forsee will surely lead to targeted replacement ads, played at higher volume

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This has been happening for a while: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15899065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15899065). We've updated the title to reflect that.

This thread is a good one, though, so we won't bury it as a dupe.

</comment><comment><USER7> Shazam is the one app that has been around since about the birth of the iPhone that honestly still blows my mind in it's capabilities. The fact it can so quickly figure out any song in so many environments is incredible. Call me simple, but I use it almost daily, and it is accurate close to 98% of the time. I absolutely love Shazam's iOS app, and they have done a great job keeping up with UI/UX treads for it over the many years it has been around. Easily one of my favorite and most used apps.

With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple. Specifically meaning I love it's integration with Spotify. I will be bummed if that goes away for an exclusive Apple Music integration.

<comment><USER8> I agree with the lauding of Shazam, but I am interested in your statement "I use it almost daily" \-- what for? I've always viewed Shazam as a novelty and have installed and uninstalled it a few random times, but as Jobs would say it seems like a feature not a product.

<comment><USER9> I can't speak for who you're replying to, but I find myself using it at restaurants, bars, and public locations where music is playing, as well as friends' cars, and other social gatherings. I know these sort of situations are rare for the average HN user.

<comment><USER10> They're also rare for anyone over 30 to care about (if not the situations themselves, what some random soundtrack to them is). Give it time...

<comment><USER9> Yup. I too completely lost interest in music when I hit 30

/s

<comment><USER10> Yup, because it matters what some outliers do when it comes to statements about the general population ("it's also rare")

/s

<comment><USER9> I think I misunderstood ... _what_ exactly is rare?

<comment><USER10> People being as interested to follow new music after 30-40 as opposed in their teens early 20s...

<comment><USER11> Seems possible, do you have studies or statistical data showing this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shazam is the closest thing we have to witchcraft. I'm sure plenty of HNers will chime in with "well acktually..." type comments about how they could write it in their basement in a weekend, but to do what it does, as quickly as it does, on the ridiculously enormous library of music that it does is really something special.

<comment><USER13> Well acktually, in my admittedly limited experience, Shazam is not capable of recognizing any music at all without the digitized metadata encoded with sound files. I've tried multiple times to sing very popular songs to it. It never recognized them. You could attribute it to my poor musical skills (and I'm fine with that), but 100% of humans would recognize the songs in < 10s timeframe.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like the problem was your singing.

<comment><USER14> Pun intended?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I once read in an article (that I unfortunately can't find right now) that the the worth of Shazam lies in the fact that it can recognise, which songs are trending. The value chain is approximately like this:

1)New song is released

2)It starts being "shazamed" by various people - it's becoming trendy

3)Large stores that differntiate themselves by being trendy want to play trendy songs first

4)They pay Shazam to tell them which songs are trendy

5)The stores play them

6)Customers "shazam" those songs in the store

7)Customers view the store as trendy

8)Now four instances have profited: Shazam, the store, the musician and the customers (for having found a trendy song very early on)

<comment><USER16> The main bulk of their income is/was from affiliate income paid by Apple, hence the buy-out.

<comment><USER15> Very interesting, I didn't know that. Makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A great app that PRE-DATES smart phones. I remember using Shazam when it was a dial in service (dial 2580 in the UK), hold your old brick mobile phone up and you would get a txt message a minute later with the song. Seemed like magic then and still does now.

<comment><USER18> I was unaware that this was a thing. That's pretty cool, and it's always nice to see a company like that able to adapt and thrive with the advent of smartphones

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The app will soon offer its experience ad-free for all users so everyone can > enjoy the best of Shazam without interruption.

Probably, one of the best results from this acquisition.

<comment><USER20> You can bet they will kill integration with Spotify though. And maybe no more Android support. I'll take ads over that.

<comment><USER21> > _You can bet they will kill integration with Spotify though._

Will they? Don't forget, the information flow is 2-way here, users get something useful out of it but Shazam (and now Apple) also learns what stuff is trending. If anything I actually lean towards them keeping or even enhancing Spotify and other service integration, at least as long as those services are viable: it effectively creates a direct channel into competing services that tells Apple exactly what stuff people want out of them, which they could then use directly in making Apple Music more competitive in turn.

Even if we take as granted that boosting Apple Music is a major concern to Apple, doesn't that at least maybe seem like an equally or more valuable way to do it? It doesn't make any users angry either or act as bad PR, they aren't taking anything away, and they get a massive information channel into every competitor and even real-world venues.

> _And maybe no more Android support._

By the same token, if Apple wants to boost Apple Music in general then having information on music popularity and trends coming in from the population of Android users too also seems helpful.

<comment><USER22> Being able to see trending songs regardless of the platform is definitely a benefit for Apple, but I would also say that another possibility is that Spotify itself cuts off the integration now that Shazam is owned by their competitor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hopefully they'll rewrite Shazam's Apple Watch app using the private first- party APIs so that it actually works rather than randomly crashing 50% of the time.

The state of third-party apps on the Watch is awful. It usually takes 10 seconds for an app to start on a Series 2, and sometimes they just get stuck on that loading screen. If you manage to get an app running, the UI library has ridiculous bugs like accidentally enabled screen rotation where turning your wrist flips the content by 90°. (Unlike a phone, there's no reason at all for a watch to react to orientation changes.)

I could sort of understand these deficiencies for a hurried 1.0 product, but it's been three years and it's still this bad. There's no API for watch faces either. I get the impression that Apple truly doesn't want third parties on the Watch at all.

<comment><USER24> If they "truly" didn't want third parties on the Watch "at all" they wouldn't have released the watchOS SDK or made it possible to write, build and publish watch apps on the App Store.

<comment><USER23> This wouldn't be the first time that Apple releases an SDK, decides internally it's actually not something they want to support, and then just leaves it languishing in a semi-broken state because it would be too much trouble to cancel it outright.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This was essentially announced at the end of last year, and is now being closed. You can now search for songs on Apple Music by typing in the lyrics to the song.

<comment><USER26> How long ago did Siri integrate with Shazam? Seems like a year or two now.

<comment><USER27> I think it was quite a bit further, but every time I've tried it the app seems to work better than asking Siri for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like Shazam, but I love Soundhound. I've found it way more accurate and I also found their other audio tools through it. Such a cool company.

Congrats to Shazam though!

<comment><USER29> Agreed. Shazam has failed for me too often where Soundhound has returned the result, that the only reason I use Shazam anymore is out of curiosity after Soundhound, to see if it can also find the track.

<comment><USER20> Just as another data point, I've had the opposite experience. SoundHound doesn't work most of the time for me. My tastes are eclectic though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's weird to think that I would find it strange if Apple acquired a company like Shazam and left the ads on, isnt it? In a day and age when all of their competitors are turning to ads to increase revenues, Apple is making great customer experiences ad-free.

I think the idea that making Shazam ad-free "makes sense" is actually fascinating because if it were google or amazon buying Shazam, I would assume it would remain littered with ads.

<comment><USER12> It's hardly "littered" though. I use Shazam a lot and always found the ads very unintrusive. It is good news that they're going completely ad-free however.

<comment><USER31> Not just ad-free, but free now as well. Shazam had a free tier and you could pay to get rid of ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Apple doesn't really need to mess with the tech behind Shazam too much, I've personally found it to be lightyears ahead of the competition. I switched to Soundhound for a few years back in 2010 when both were relatively new, but the difference is unbelievable now. Shazam can get popular songs in less than a second, it's like some sort of musical L1 cache.

</comment><comment><USER33> The journal article by the Shazam creators titled, "An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm"[0], was one of the first CS papers I ever read. It was very easy to follow and I remember even making a personal utility that implemented their algorithm.

[0] [https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf](https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER34> I would love to see something like the Pixel's _Now Playing_ feature come to Apple devices. If you haven't seen this, it periodically, passively listens for background music and displays the currently-playing song on the lock screen, using a local database of IIRC 20,000 songs. There's a paper about it ([https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/46522.pdf)) – but I'd have to guess it's patented and we won't see it soon.

<comment><USER35> The always-on nature of this is the really killer aspect of it, especially when combined with the always-on OLED screen. If something is playing nearby I don't even have to _touch_ my phone to know what it is - just a glance will tell me what's playing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Tangent: I recently discovered SoundHound which supports singing / humming / whistling as input for song ID. IME it's not as good as Shazam for capturing "real" (pre-recorded / radio) tunes though.

</comment><comment><USER37> That's gonna make it so much easier for apple to offer an EU "upload filter as a service" for music in the future...

<comment><USER38> Nice point, I was trying to guess what value could this have for apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Shazam is one of those apps that has truly changed my life. I still remember as a teenager times where I heard a song on the radio or a mix show and missed the name of it. I have purchased entire albums thinking they had a song I liked and have been WRONG. Now I can let my phone figure it out over a noisy background like a bar or restaurant and it still knows what song I am tagging. This app is one that truly feels like magic. Even almost a facade later.

<comment><USER40> Yes, Shazam has done a lot for genre, and diminishing the care for genre at all. Now for people that have spent way too much of their life defending or living a genre, what I mean is that it allows artists to be more creative and less pigeonholed, and it allows people to explore more of what they want.

People want certain sounds, and want more of that sound.

Shazam has been a key component of the discovery process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hopefully we don't lose the integration with Spotify, deezer, ...

</comment><comment><USER42> Sorry to hijack this post, but if anyone is interested in content recognition, we built one of the largest reverse search engines for video/audio [0] and are always looking for skilled engineers to do more.

I think our scale makes things very interesting. We currently index over 20 hours of video every second and to date we've indexed over 11.5B videos.

Feel free to reach out to me directly at email@example.com.

[0] [https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/06/22/video- search...](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/06/22/video-search-with- rasty-turek/)

</comment><comment><USER43> For those experiencing an acute sense of déjà vu, this deal was announced in December 2017 and closed today.

</comment><comment><USER44> Apple Insider has a good bit on why this acquisition happened: they've been doing a lot of interesting stuff with Augmented Reality. [https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/25/why-did-apple- spe...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/25/why-did-apple- spend-400m-to-acquire-shazam)

</comment><comment><USER45> Apple Music's recommendation and discovery is pretty abysmal. I guess this will fix that issue. I'm amazed at how bad it given they know the standard that has been set by their competitor Spotify.

When Apple acquired Beast we heard about how Jimmy Iovine and Dre were going to bring their understanding and expertise to Apple's music service. This now seems to have been a lot of bluster though. Apple had such a head start with iTunes, missed the boat with streaming, spent a fortune on Beats and finally seemed to be getting serious about their streaming music offering. And the product has been somewhere between underwhelming and "just OK."

It's interesting to see that Apple's solution is to just buy their way out of their discovery problem. For a company with unlimited resources and great design skills it's strange that Apple is not really good at building services.

</comment><comment><USER46> How long until they pull the Android version?

<comment><USER47> Start the timer when Apple Music for Android stops getting updates.

<comment><USER48> I don't think Apple Music for Android was a play for Android users. It's more of away not to be at a disadvantage when Apple is trying to sell a Family Plsn for Apple Music to a family of mixed Android/iOS users.

Back in the day, people didn't realize the competitive advantage it gave MS to have a version for Macs. They could sell into large enterprises that may only have 5-10% Macs with a cross platform offering. Their competitors couldn't.

<comment><USER47> You're absolutely right! And I hadn't thought about MS Office for Mac in that way before; thanks!

My comment was more geared towards OP's "well, now they're going to cancel the Android version" when Apple literally just released a new version of Apple Music for Android with platform-specific features: [https://www.macrumors.com/2018/09/19/apple-music-android- aut...](https://www.macrumors.com/2018/09/19/apple-music-android-auto- support/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I believe Shazam is very much an acquisition for its patent and algorithm sauce. The technology behind it is relatively simple based on audio fingerprinting

[http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in- java/](http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/)

It was either Google Music, Spotify or Apple Music that would have acquired it.

I'm a 100% sure this will end up as a deep integration with Siri and the existing Apple Music app.

Apple has always done well with its acquisitions. Buy small companies that do one small thing and do it extremely well, and fuse that with the Apple ecosystem, quality and rigor.

Congrats to the Shazam team for going with Apple. Google would have most definitely messed it up like they did with Songza. I will never forgive them for that.

</comment><comment><USER50> Their original white paper [1] is one of my favorite math-meets-software reads. Readable, elegant, and real world.

[https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf](https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER51> For those wondering why a seemingly normal acquisition took a year to close, it's because the EU was investigating it as a potential anti-competitive move.

</comment><comment><USER52> On Snapchat, you can hold the camera screen and it starts to "Shazam" what songs are playing.

I wonder if Apple will allow them to keep this feature.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm hoping that this extra access to Apple's extensive music collection will make this usable for music other than what you would hear on MTV or the classic rock station. The potential of the application is great, but as somebody with limited interest in pop, I find myself lacking for a way to identify new music discoveries.

<comment><USER54> Shazam doesn't just work on pop music, I've used it successfully on some pretty obscure stuff.

It has to have been published "properly" though, which in the day and age of self-publishing directly to the net doesn't work so well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> In case anyone is interested, this is a good read on how audio finger printing in services like Shazam, Soundhound et al work:

[http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition- wi...](http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition-with-python/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Makes sense, since Shazam already powers the Siri "what song is this?" capability that links to iTunes.

</comment><comment><USER56> Apple is likely intending to use Shazam's tech for contextually-aware computing (via Airpods etc)

</comment><comment><USER57> Looks like I'll be uninstalling Shazam and using only Soundhound thanks to the likely-deprecated Spotify integration.

The platforms will swallow our options until we have no recourse but to jump platforms.

Unless they make that too difficult, too.

</comment><comment><USER58> Am I the only one that feels Shazam is no longer relevant? I don't think I know anyone has iShazam or SoundHound installed anymore. I feel all our music is on our phones now, so we already know what it is.

<comment><USER59> Really? I still find it highly relevant. As someone who goes to a lot of gigs, listens to a lot of DJs & always has some sort of set playing in the background while I work—I find it invaluable for tracks I can't identify and want to quickly note/share with friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I first heard about Shazam when I worked in a project to integrate Shazam API to Hello Moto J2ME app back in 2007~2008. And it was amazing to see how they were able to move to the smartphone world so gracefully!

</comment><comment><USER61> I have so badly wanted to be able to Shazam and automatically add something to a Spotify playlist via IFTTT or whatever.

I wonder if that will be more or less possible now. Maybe with a Shortcut?

<comment><USER7> This functionality has been around for a bit actually, you may have missed it. You have to connect your Spotify in the Shazam app. And every time you Shazam something it auto adds it to a "My Shazam Tracks" playlist in Spotify. Been using that feature from them for about a year now! :)

<comment><USER62> Yes, been using this for quite a while now. You don't need IFTTT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what this does to the Jamie Foxx gameshow.

[https://www.fox.com/beat-shazam/](https://www.fox.com/beat-shazam/)

<comment><USER63> I imagine a couple hundred fruity lawyers are wording a cease and desist letter to perfection right now.

<comment><USER26> Why would they do that? The show was developed with Shazam's blessing and probably a hefty license fee.

It's literally a 30-minute commercial for the app (including a play-along game you do _with_ the app).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I like to say Siri, shazam this and it works great. Wish there was a way to add it to Notes after it Shazams so I can remember it for later.

<comment><USER65> You can also just ask her what song is playing. You just have to make sure she isn't confused by any music app you might have open, because he will name the active track in that first.

I agree a drawback is there is no history. I take a screenshot of the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Although Shazam is a black box to us consumers, I'm pretty sure its recognition quality dropped drastically in the last 2 years.

<comment><USER67> > I'm pretty sure its recognition quality dropped drastically in the last 2 > years

What happened 2 years ago that you think affected its recognition quality?

<comment><USER68> Mumble rap became popular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Google has this built right into the assistant now and detects music is playing well enough to suggest "What is this song?" as a query - and it has really really good accuracy in my experience, and I am impressed mostly by it being able to pick out the song in a somewhat noisy room (a bar for example)

Who needs shazam? Apple's just looking for more AI chops. G's already all over it.

</comment><comment><USER70> I've had way more luck with Soundhound, so I'm not very bothered by this news.

</comment><comment><USER71> How long until they kill off Android, like they did with TestFlight and Buddybuild?

</comment><comment><USER72> Shazam was featured in one of the commercials for the iPhone 3G in 2008.

</comment><comment><USER73> I'm guessing this thing is going to run all the time and send Apple a continuous stream of what music is actually playing around people, so they can use the data to better market music.

Having song identification built into your iDevice is a nice value add for the consumer though

</comment><comment><USER74> SoundHound is much better and I'm glad they didn't acquire it.

</comment><comment><USER75> I honestly thought this happened when Shazam was integrated into Siri

</comment><comment><USER76> To anyone curious how Shazam works, it looks for similarity in the spectrogram of the music. This is not too different from how we identify certain chemical compounds with mass spectrometry.

</comment><comment><USER77> What was Shazam's business model?

</comment><comment><USER78> $400 million, ~December 2017

</comment><comment><USER79> Mmm, Price? :-)

</comment><comment><USER80> I remember feeling that way the first time I used Uber (in SF where getting a taxi was difficult and unreliable).

A few taps on my phone and a car shows up to my exact location in 2 minutes?! And that's it? No calling dispatch and hoping they'd show up eventually (sometimes they didn't). No fumbling with cash or tip or anything.

It was like magic.

<comment><USER81> A shame that uber and the whole gig economy is so shit, circumventing basic employment rights and both minimum and living wages. I mean I like the basic idea and I agree that the taxi business needed the disruption, but it's opened the gates to people working well below a living wage because there's nothing else. That is, there's plenty of people that are willing to work below minimum wage because it's the only thing they have left. And companies - <USER2> Uber - are more than happy to offer that kind of work.

<comment><USER82> I don't understand this logic generally and in this case it makes even less sense. 10 years ago, Uber literally didn't exist. How, in any way, is Uber forcefully underpaying it's employees/contractors? People flocked to drive for Uber; where is the oppression here?

This is the same "Walmart doesn't pay its workers and destroys local businesses argument". People work there, and people shop there. Walmart didn't make anyone do anything, and neither does Uber.

In a free market, people do what is valuable to them. How can you say those people aren't? If it's not a free market, then how is it the corporations fault? Don't hate the player, hate the government.

<comment><USER83> In a completely free market, corporations are free to distort economic and labour policy so that poor unemployed people are desperate to get any job they can, regardless of how poorly it pays.

This is why minimum wage and other laws exist.

See also: race to the bottom.

<comment><USER84> To add to this: if workers are underpaid relative to the cost of living in their area, they'll likely end up on some government assistance program.

Effectively, Walmart/Uber/etc get to double-dip -- they pay their employees less than a living wage, and based on the US tax structure, don't have to pay for the government assistance programs that their employees end up needing to make ends meet.

<comment><USER85> > To add to this: if workers are underpaid relative to the cost of living in > their area, they'll likely end up on some government assistance program.

But that was already the situation before Uber came to the market? For all we know, driving Uber might have moved some of the people less dependent on the government assistance programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Wow. Can't believe Apple now own Shaquille O'Neal.

</comment><comment><USER87> Apple's first Android app?

<comment><USER88> Not quite: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple+Inc](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple+Inc).

<comment><USER89> This URL only works if you include the period at the end (which HN's URL detector does not).

<comment><USER88> Too late to edit my original comment but this may work better: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple+Inc%2E](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple+Inc%2E)

<comment><USER87> Each of those three looks half-assed (or _half-apped_ ). I guess Shazam would be Apple's first _serious_ Android app, except probably not. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Can you please update the title? Apple acquired Shazam a bit ago. Today, they have completed that acquisition process.

</comment><comment><USER91> Is this the same Shazam that was a torrent service back in the Napster days?

<comment><USER92> Are you thinking of Kazaa?

<comment><USER93> Really? I could have sworn Sinbad endorsed it back in the day...

<comment><USER94> as a genie, i remember that</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tech Firms Dominate the Top-Paying Companies in U.S - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-firms-dominate-the-top-paying-companies-in-u-s-1461150004 <comment><USER2> Paywalled

<comment><AUTHOR> copy/paste main headline in google using private mode in any browser. Should do the trick</comment></comment>


"When we do mathematics, we touch immortality." - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161020-science-math-education-survey/?code=3048 <comment><USER3> There is the ontological position that mathematical truths are "out there", independent of us, and we are merely "discovering" them. As such, they're eternal, and you could argue then that you "touch immortality".

But apart from that, I find this sort of talk unhelpful. It's a bit like Schopenhauer who thought that instrumental classical music gave access to the innermost truth of the universe (I'm paraphrasing from memory here) - <USER2> hogwash.

Lastly, the headline has not much to do with the article, has it?

<comment><USER4> So, the value of PI is a human invention? That's hogwash.

<comment><USER5> The concept of "circle" is a human invention, in that a perfect circle has never been observed in the universe. The value of pi follows immediately as a derivative human invention.

<comment><USER6> I would argue the 'perfect circle' is inherent in every circle, similarly to how it is inherent in your dismissal of it

But if you require a more direct understanding I would say there is a perfect circle in every rotation

<comment><USER7> The _possibility_ of a perfect circle exists in this universe, but the last digit we are aware of is definitely a posteriori. In other words, the _description_ of a circle is prior knowledge given it allows calculating pi, but the actual values are post observational knowledge, given they must be calculated and continue to be irrational forever. (At least as far as we know.)

It would take an infinite amount of power to calculate every digit in pi, given pi itself is irrational, even while describing _how_ to calculate it is rational.

<comment><USER6> You are moving someone else's goalposts

I answered where circles are in our universe and you then try to change the original intent of omalleyt's question to mean a symbolic representation of pi

> It would take an infinite amount of power to calculate every digit in pi

Calculating pi is so simple life without nervous systems does it

Now, expressing that value in our limited yet overly verbose base ten symbolic representation would indeed require infinite recursion

<comment><USER7> I'm not aware of a means by which goal posts can exist in a philosophical debate around rational vs. irrational thinking. Both types of thinking are valid, but I can see how and why some tend to argue for absolute rationality at all times.

<comment><USER6> I apologise, I thought you were implying that what omalleyt 'really meant' was a perfect circle is data we can calculate

It seemed to me you were changing the question that was being asked, and a question asked implies an answer, or 'goal post'

But if you were just developing new inquiry stead building off omalleyt then I apologise and would hope to encourage like critical thinking in the future

.. Thinking on it 'goal posts'.. and 'soap box' elsewhere in this thread.. lacks a timeless quality, I really should have left it out ;P

<comment><USER7> I asked my daughters friend why pi was irrational, and she said "because you have to calculate it". The knowledge of those calculations cannot be given, but the way to calculate it, with a bit of suffering, can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a better way to describe this is that you touch reality.

It's important to remember that for all the books written about physics in layman terms, especially quantum physics, there comes a time when words don't cut it and only math allow you to continue the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER9> >> "the math that's being taught has no relevance to my life"

I think our math education do fail in that way. Math essentially is a logic system where you set up premises and derive and make sure everything is consistent. That can be applied to real life such as accounting and physics, or it can be applied to an artificial game -- number theory is such a case. Our education emphasize on the latter part, and it is quite irrelevant to real life, and it is hard. I am in mid-life now and on reflection, fractions, for example, had zero use for my life, and I am in the career of scientific computing. What we need is a concept level of understanding of mathematics -- realizing that the key idea of mathematics is basically consistency. Most importantly, the math required in the real life is not hard -- it is necessarily intuitive. What the education we receive is the technical gaming part of mathematics, e.g. how to actually find the roots of quadratic equation. I don't really remember the formula now, but I now have an intuitive understanding of the quadratic curves and the meaning of roots. And the same goes for quintic equations. It is not hard at all. I roughly sketch out the curve and I immediately have a rough idea of where the roots are. And at work, it is simply an exercise in programming. It is hard following the way in our education, though.

The purpose of education is to show them that knowledge exists, but not the knowledge itself. Knowledge itself is misleading. It is more important to recognize what you don't know than to remember what you know.

To clarify, I personally do not hate math. And I respect the discipline of mathematics. However, doing math (the way our education system assumes) is just like doing music or art, or playing star craft, it is not for everyone.

PS: on further reflection, not only useless, the concept of rational number has been quite damaging in our understanding of the real world.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking about education last night and here is the idea I am developing.. I encourage ongoing criticism

Students study varied subject matter but only one subjects' grade 'matters' and can be chosen by the student

Personally, I think our maths education suffers from a lack of freedom.. I do think it can be for anyone but only because I believe anyone can bring to it whatever they'd like, whereas education tells you what areas need to be studied and how

is competition the foil of expression?

<comment><USER10> Could you elaborate?

For example, What would motivate a student to put towards any effort in their non-main courses if it doesn't affect their grade?

Edit: clarity and accuracy

<comment><USER6> Exactly, it would be unnecessary

The student could just coast through a course.. they would have to sit through all lectures and would be assigned problems and reading but only one course would track their retention

I feel this is basically already what is happening in education with the prevalence of students' creative ways of undermining the current grading paradigm

But with the ancillary benefit that a student would be freed to actually do the work to foster an interest in at least one subject

Also, the student could be free to explore other subjects in ways outside of the means of tracking retention

I was pushing my math research since I was a child but instead was forced to abandon it and had calculus forcibly replaced as 'how I should think about mathematics' even though I fundamentally disagreed with its concepts

If I was free from the stress of doing poorly from the standpoint of grades I could have focused my interest on my own mathematical insight and simply allowed my education to expose me to calculus

wherein I would have retained an appreciation for mathematics and developed one for the practicality of calculus practices

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Immortality, meanwhile, rolls its eyes. Still, it's interesting to see what motivates people to learn something (or to stay away from it). Better put:

>"When you take a course in Euclidean geometry is not the teacher putting a... learning program into you? ...You enter the course and cannot do problems; the teacher puts into you a program and at the end of the course you can solve such problems. ...Are you sure you are not merely "programmed" in life by what by chance events happens to you?" \- Hamming

I'm curious as to how different mathematics would be for two otherwise identical civilizations but with distinct average lifespans. In alternate Earths where lifespan is 40 or 200 years, what's the state of mathematics in 2017?

<comment><USER12> As Hamming describes, it was very much for me: 8th grade plane geometry feels now like an intellectual awakening. The satisfaction of proving "pons asinorum", by Euclid's method, followed by vexation at learning I had overlooked the much simpler reflexive approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's surprising to see so few math haters in the hexagon (the thin outer shell). I'm guessing there is a self-reporting bias, since if you hate math you wouldn't really want to fill in this survey...

It's also interesting to note that many of the haters direct their hate towards rote learning tasks like arithmetic calculations and memorizing multiplication tables, which makes me think that they don't really hate math but rather the way it is taught. I'd hate math too if I saw it as following procedures blindly! Perhaps with better computer math tools[1], future students won't be forced to learn "manual labour" math tasks, and instead focus on "white collar" tasks like modelling and abstraction.

[1] SymPy is the best computer algebra system ever: [https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pd...](https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> God, some of those quotes about how some early math teaching techniques hurt people's appreciation and understanding of the subject are depressing. I still remember the anxiety and even embarrassment caused by timed drills in elementary school that seemed to harshly pit student against student.

It took me until college to realize that I was just coasting through math courses and not really investing myself in the subject. Perhaps in an effort to avoid those long-ago memories? Everything started to click in college. Interestingly enough, it was my enjoyment of programming and study of philosophy that really helped to push me. That, and sitting in a calculus class and realizing that I had to either dive in or be royally screwed.

It's a shame that such stories are so common.

<comment><USER15> Dear god, the timed drills. I distinctly recall the tremendous anxiety evoked by the ultra-competitive nature of those drills in elementary school, and especially the subsequent feelings of failure when comparing my performance to that of my peers.

It must have been that bitter flavor of failure that first inured me against mathematics...it didn't help that the rest of my K-12 education never even attempted to demonstrate the enormous beauty of maths. In fact, until I discovered calculus on my own terms between high school and college, I understood mathematics to be nothing more than the practice of applying rote formulas to arbitrary equations. There was no rhyme or reason to the quadratic equation...it was just one of many "rules" pulled from the mathematical "rulebook," and math was simply the practice of recognizing when this arbitrary rule applied, and then applying it.

Therefore, for most of my life, math was not seen as a creative or exploratory discipline, and in fact the very opposite: One's ability in math was completely contingent on their memorization of rules and simply following them. It was purely robotic, the domain of tightly-wound, uninspired automatons. It was for squares, not free-spirited creative souls like myself!

Though I am disappointed to think of the heights and wonders I could have visited by now, had I been given a proper introduction at a younger age, I am no less excited by the wonders ahead of me, and the many years I have left to explore them. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold." —Hermann Weyl

</comment><comment><USER17> Can we get a title change? About half of the people seem to be commenting on the HN title instead of the article content.

</comment><comment><USER18> Did not read the article, but that was my feeling when I first touched math and (almost at the same time) wrote my first code.

Using Coq, Idris, Haskell, Purescript, Mercury and k give me that sense still. Anything that takes a long and hard time to think about.

</comment><comment><USER19> Which, along with infinity, does not exist.

The ability to produce an infinite series of numbers (by adding another one) does not constitute a proof of existence of anything infinite outside one's mind.

Good philosophers, like Leibniz and the Indian tradition, which includes early Buddhists, have postulated this, but popular memes are much stronger.

The ability to notice some inherent patterns of natural phenomena, such as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, does yield this ratio to be immortal, or any other inferred constant.

Math does not exist outside people's minds (contrary to the popular discourse from the Zen And Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance). Only a few of what we call conservative forces and different forms of what we call energy (or matter if you like) which are different aspects of the same That, to which human categories are inapplicable.

<comment><USER20> Once, just once, I would love to open the comments of a philosophy-related HN article and not see a middlebrow dismissal [1] as the top comment.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920)

<comment> Ar-Curunir It's a slight variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect; people have just a little knowledge of some field, and can therefore dismiss entire decade's worth of thought on the matter.

<comment><USER19> What is wrong with dismissing entire decade's worth of superstitions, astrology, alchemy, metaphysics and theology?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Mathematics touches immortality like fractals touch infinity and circles are endless.

</comment><comment><USER22> For me when I see some physics equations is a mystic experience.

</comment><comment><USER23> Despite Gödel's incompleteness theorems?</comment>


Show HN: Redis-cell, an API rate limiter as a Redis module, written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brandur/redis-cell <comment><AUTHOR> Author here: this was a pretty fun side project to experiment with Redis' (relatively) new module system [1], and to help me learn Rust. It uses Rust's FFI module [2] to call into a C binary, and thanks to Rust's minimal runtime and lack of a GC, this turns out to work out very well. Its benchmarks are quite good [3].

Redis provides a fairly novel API for plugging into it in that instead of using a shared object (.so), it's only exposed as a C header file. To compensate for this in a non-C language, I have a build step that compiles a library for Rust to link against [4]. It was a pleasant surprise to find that this functionality is built right into Rust's compiler.

[1] [https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/modules/I...](https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/modules/INTRO.md)

[2] [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ffi.html](https://doc.rust- lang.org/book/ffi.html)

[3] [https://gist.github.com/brandur/90698498bd543598d00df46e32be...](https://gist.github.com/brandur/90698498bd543598d00df46e32be3268)

[4] [https://github.com/brandur/redis- cell/blob/master/build.rs](https://github.com/brandur/redis- cell/blob/master/build.rs)</comment>


Show HN: War and Peace and WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://wdobbie.com/post/war-and-peace-and-webgl/ <comment><USER2> This discussion reminds me times 4 years ago, when I showed my WebGL games to my firends and instead of getting an interesting feedback, 90% of comments were about my games not working on their devices. Sad to see the same thing in 2016 :(

<comment><USER3> Oddly, my machines really did creak with WebGL, but it appears as if they have been improving in performance. It's probably not graphic drivers as this ubuntu laptop hasn't had a new graphics driver since 2013. It must be the browsers improving performance. Anyone else noticed WebGL working better these days on the same hardware?

<comment><USER4> I work on the renderer for a product that uses WebGL (I won't link to it because I don't want to sound like a shill, but it's a web based 3d modeler called FormIt).

Unfortunately, I think webgl performance has actually been getting much worse on Chrome. (Firefox has been fine).

WebGL is pretty exciting in what it makes possible, but it's based on the OpenGL ES2 spec from 2007 which is way out of date at this point, so the surface area of the hardware you can actually use is really limited, and various aspects of javascript lead to some really ugly performance compromises. This is partially why I'm pretty excited about web assembly -- I don't think it'll fix everything off the bat, but not having to go through javascript could be a really big win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious about the choice of bmp for [http://wdobbie.com/warandpeace/glyphs.bmp](http://wdobbie.com/warandpeace/glyphs.bmp)

Why not a png ?

Edit: So after a quick test:

* glyphs.bmp 53.5 MB

* glyphs.png 7.6 MB

I guess it could be shrinked even more.

<comment><AUTHOR> The .bmp file is served gzipped to 7 MB.

LZMA and Bzip2 both get it down to about 3 MB but I'd need to use a javascript decompressor.

<comment><USER5> Makes sense. My bad, I tested with wget and compression was disabled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It works well for me in several platforms.

What would improve it is when you zoom, with the mouse wheel or gesture if it would zoom in on the mouse cursor point rather than at the centre of the screen.

</comment><comment><USER7> Works fine, and is rather impressive, on Windows 10 - both in FF and Chrome.

Doesn't work on iPad - just get blank pages.

<comment><USER8> Windows 10 chrome. doesn't work. chrome canary didn't work (some d3d errors) edge (i gave up after waiting for 2 minutes to load)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not really sure this is an unsolved problem in other contexts. For example, any good image viewer would have no-shimmering at all scales.

You simply render your text as images and then apply the method already used by the image viewers.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm getting some weird artifacts: [http://i.imgur.com/U3sSkW3.png](http://i.imgur.com/U3sSkW3.png)

Ubuntu Gnome, AMD open source driver

</comment><comment><USER11> interesting technique but it's extremely slow on Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB (and so I assume other machines). Like when zoomed in it's under 2fps whereas I suspect the built in chrome text renderer can do that much faster (generating texture glyphs of the needed characters at the desired res and then rendering them). I'm curious why drawing less characters (like 5 giant characters) runs at 2fps. Is the shader that heavy?

</comment><comment><USER12> I see all white pages with no text on them. "Show grid" shows yellow and green rectangles. Linux, Firefox 43, Nvidia proprietary drivers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Loaded up linux and I got the same issue. Working on it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be fixed now!

<comment><USER12> Yes, works like a charm now. Really nicely rendered. Good job!

What was the issue?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really like this demo, but it reliably crashes a mid 2012 macbook pro with lion, both on firefox and safari (the older version of the demo was the same).

Now, reading the other comments, i wonder if there are any tools that help with diagnosing device capabilities? I don't have high hopes of integrating anything WebGL related in my projects due to these problems, so how can you make sure that WebGL code will work across devices?

Edit: How can you make sure you notice when it's not working?

</comment><comment><USER14> It's almost completely unreadable on my Android phone. The character shapes are mostly there, but the triangles overlap in weird ways, like vertex order might be wrong it something.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/cvutftylbj77d8r/Screenshot_2016-01...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/cvutftylbj77d8r/Screenshot_2016-01-24-11-13-37.png?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3qn9h5pgw2p671/Screenshot_2016-01...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3qn9h5pgw2p671/Screenshot_2016-01-24-11-15-18.png?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/y4h93ycueykrjai/Screenshot_2016-01...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/y4h93ycueykrjai/Screenshot_2016-01-24-11-17-19.png?dl=0)</comment>


Frink Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://frinklang.org/ <comment><USER2> I'm regularly reminded of the "Alan's editorializing" commentary in the "units.txt" file, which contains gems such as:

[in candela := cd]: "I think the candela is a scam, and I am completely opposed to it. Some good-for-nothing lighting "engineers" or psychologists probably got this perceptually-rigged abomination into the whole otherwise scientific endeavor...

...What an unbelievably useless and stupid unit."

[and in Hertz := Hz]: "Here is YET ANOTHER place where the SI made a really stupid definition...

... Either way, if I ever develop a time machine, I'm going to go back and knock both groups' heads together. At a frequency of about 1 Hz. Or better yet, strap them to a wheel and tell them I'm going to spin one group at a frequency of 1 Hz, and the other at 1 radian/s and let them try to figure out which one of those stupid inconsistent definitions means what. Hint: It'll depend on which time period I do it in, I guess, thanks to their useless inconsistent definition changes."

<comment><USER3> Not sure I understand the second quibble. 2π radians per second = 1 hertz seem simple enough?

<comment><USER4> I believe his complaint is that SI defined 1 Hz as 1/s, not as 2π/s. So 2π Hz in the new definition is 1 Hz in the older.

It does make the Hz unit a bit redundant (saying "hertz" is no faster than "per second", and tends to obscure rather than elucidate). Though I do believe it ultimately has saved confusion as it means the 2π multiplier must be explicit,, which prevents accidental confusion between cycles per second and rate of rotation.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, after reading the above, I went to the source, Alan Eliasen's units.txt.

You're right, there's a history of changing standards. Without having much familiarity with the topic, I'm inclined to agree that the unit of frequency based on cycles per second, in radians, is more consistent than a "radian as the dimensionless number 1" per second.

\---

[https://gist.github.com/cyrex562/6c7a7cdae68583c02f42658b32e...](https://gist.github.com/cyrex562/6c7a7cdae68583c02f42658b32e9a7ce#file- units-txt-L743)

The Hz is currently defined simply as inverse seconds. (1/s). See: [http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html](http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html)

The base unit of frequency in the SI _used_ to be "cycles per second". This was fine and good. However, in 1960, the BIPM made the change to make the fundamental unit of frequency to be "Hz" which they defined as inverse seconds (without qualification.)

Then, in 1974, they changed the radian from its own base unit in the SI to be a dimensionless number, which it indeed is (it's a length divided by a length.) That change was correct and good in itself.

However, the definition of the Hz was _not_ corrected at the same time that the radian was changed. Thus, we have the conflicting SI definition of the radian as the dimensionless number 1 (without qualification) and Hz as 1/s. (Without qualification.)

This means that, if you follow the rules of the SI, 1 Hz = 1/s = 1 radian/s which is simply inconsistent and violates basic ideas of sinusoidal motion, and is simply a stupid definition. The entire rest of the world, up until that point, knew that 1 Hz needs to be equal to _2 pi_ radians/s or be changed to mean _cycles /second_ for these to be reconcilable. If you use "Hz" to mean cycles/second, say, in sinusoidal motion, as the world has done for a century, know that the SI made all your calculations wrong. A couple of times, in different ways.

This gives the wonderful situation that the SI's Hz-vs-radian/s definitions have meant completely different things in the timeperiods:

* pre-1960

* 1960 to 1974

* post-1974

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really appreciate frequent updates on Android (android app on Google store), so currency rates etc. are always at least recent.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is source code available?

</comment><comment><USER7> Is source code available?</comment>