Apple becomes the first $1T company - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/08/02/apple-becomes-the-first-1-trillion-company-in-history/ <comment><USER4> >"Apple's $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018," said David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland. "That puts this company in perspective."

The comparison would be Apple net income (~$50B) vs. GDP, not market cap (which has units of USD) vs. GDP (which has units of USD per year).

<comment><USER5> Or, the net present value of the US economy plus assets, which is probably pushing a quadrillion dollars.

<comment><USER6> No, 5 to 1 has been the ratio in recent decades. I know this was true in 1990s when I studied this issue, and it could not have changed that much in 20 years. So 100 trillion would be my assumption.

<comment><USER7> I wonder how that breaks down into categories. Some quick googling reveals the following:

~30 trillion in residential real estate

~6 trillion in commercial real estate

~30 trillion in pubic company value

Other big buckets I guess would be undeveloped land & private companies.

~100T sounds pretty plausible but I feel like I'm missing a big bucket or two. Not sure what though.

<comment><USER8> > I feel like I'm missing a big bucket or two. Not sure what though.

Considering how huge an employer the public sector is in the US, it stands to reason there's a huge value to in the government-as-an-enterprise, even if only considering cash value of assets, such as real estate (including natural resources!) and equipment (including military).

Of course, it might be very tough to calculate, if one includes every public entitity down the the local level and takes into account the debt of each entity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I worked at Apple in the mid-90's (BS before Steve) they lost $1B while I was there. I left and moved away because I didn't want to be there when it was sold or went out of business. Exactly one year later Steve came back. Oh well. Being there at the time not one person would have ever thought Apple could be viable much less worth $1T.

<comment><USER10> Somehow I found it funny that companies like Microsoft and Apple basically survived because someone brought a new OS from the outside.

<comment><USER11> In the case of Microsoft they directly acquired the original DOS and the designers of Windows NT - so they've perhaps done that twice?

<comment><USER12> I didnt know this about NT - Where did they come from?

<comment><USER13> Dave Cutler and his team of OS designers from DEC integrated with Microsoft software engineers to create the NT kernel. Cutler was a crucial figure in DEC, but was waysided by management so he jumped ship, and built the design he wanted to build at DEC (but never got management buy-in for) at Microsoft. All outlined in the book Show Stopper! THE BREAKNECK RACE TO CREATE WINDOWS NT AND THE NEXT GENERATION AT MICROSOFT

Also, if you took a peek at his wikipedia entry, the guy is behind almost every large MSFT OS related initiative in the last few decades: NT, Azure, XBox hypervisor.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler#Microsoft_(1988_to...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler#Microsoft_\(1988_to_Present\))

<comment><USER14> And if I remember correctly, NT's kernel was a microkernel. It seemed to be the best choice for the future, back then.

<comment><USER15> Windows NT was a hybrid: the graphics and windowing system is in the kernel for performance reasons (try running X on commodity hardware in the early 1990s) whereas Windows CE was all microkernel.

<comment><USER16> I wish people would stop saying its a hybrid because of the graphics being moved into the kernel...

That doesn't make it a hybrid anymore than having the filesystem in supervisor/kernel space does. Its a hybrid because its designed/layered like a micro-kernel with the individual subsystems appearing to do message passing and using subsystem managers (I/O manager, process manager, object manager, etc) which monitor/etc the message flows. Yet, instead of doing context/privileged switches when it passes messages/IRP's it simply makes abstracted function calls which hand ownership of the message to other subsystems that exist in the kernel's address space. This means you get a most of the abstraction/stability effect of having a micro-kernel without paying the context switch and message copy penalty.

NT has a crazy awesome design, which is somewhat obscured these days, but has yet to really be surpassed by anyone (IMHO).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I went to grad school with a guy who, the day Apple stock hit $14 a share, decided to spend $500 of his grad student stipend to buy some. He figured Apple's cash on hand was worth more than $14 a share.

I thought he was nuts. I was an idiot.

<comment><USER18> doesn't mean he held them though

<comment><USER19> This is what I tell everyone when they kick themselves for not buying BTC when it was $0.25.

You would have sold them the second they hit $1.00. The only people I know who got rich off BTC are those who found an old wallet on an old drive in their garage.

<comment><USER20> Define "rich". I know someone who had an almost 20x ROI with BTC and is still holding it since 2013 I think. That is _VERY_ good ROI, I think. But the invested sum was a paltry $1000 that was a lot for him at the time.

<comment><USER19> Your sibling posted a good example:

[https://twitter.com/gregschoen/status/70261648811761665?lang...](https://twitter.com/gregschoen/status/70261648811761665?lang=en)

Had he held on to his until the very peak, he'd be sitting on $30 million. That's rich.

With BTC, 20x isn't that crazy. I'm talking about 50,000x if you dig up an old enough wallet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The most impressive part of Apple getting to a $1T valuation is that they did it with a P/E ratio of about 20.

I would like to see Amazon attempt that.

</comment><comment><USER22> Here's what a trillion dollars looks like: [http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html](http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html)

<comment><USER23> Or about $3,000 for every person in America.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "A $600 phone?! Who's going to buy a $600 phone?!" -Steve Balmer

<comment><USER25> I worked in Windows Mobile at the time.

He was just quoting what the best market researchers had told him. We were given a LOT of market research papers with in-depth customer surveys where lots of people said, repeatedly, that they would "never pay money for a phone". If you think back to then, phones were "free" with a 2 year contract.

The idea of getting someone who was used to free to switch over to $600 overnight was, by any reasonable accounts, not going to happen. The market researchers did the safe thing and said that the status quo would continue.

Of course they were horribly wrong, but again, in the moment, trusting literally every expert in the field is not the worst position to take.

After all that I learned to be wary of market researchers.

<comment><USER26> While phones were routinely 'free' or $99, iPods were wildly popular in 2007 and routinely cost $300+, and one of the three legs the iPhone stood on was being an iPod.

It should have been a red flag back then if market researchers and the people that hired them didn't see this as a convergence of music player + phone markets; _it was the point of the keynote_! I remember people complaining then that they had to carry both their phone and their iPod around back then.

The smartphone market was also growing then, and devices like Blackberries and Treos were popular and cost $200+ on contract. I had been using a Treo since 2005, and remember the pain of getting apps on it and getting it to play mp3s or use GPS maps. When I saw the keynote, it was clear it was just the next logical step.

It's weird that Windows Mobile didn't see these trends. Perhaps it was a case of underestimating the general market interest, though iPod's success should have been a strong hint that consumers really wanted devices of this type and were willing to pay. iPods were more popular than Windows Mobile devices even then.

Finally there's just the 'sit down and use it' factor that the iPhone had. Once you played with it, it was hard to deny that it was the future. The fluidness and straightforwardness of the UI was so far ahead of everything at the time. Best I can think of as a comparison is sitting in a Tesla Model S after getting out of your Honda - it's not a question of _if_ , but _how much_.

At $599 the iPhone was definitely expensive for the time, but any reasonable businessperson could conclude from watching literally the entire history of technology that component prices are always on a steady decline, and there were other levers to lower price like carrier contracts. When the iPhone went down to $399 a few months later it's success was a foregone conclusion - <USER2> all, that was just a bit more than an iPod but with way more capability.

<comment><USER27> It seems like Bill Gates didn't want to believe. From an anecdote about Marc Porat and General Magic [1]:

>Eventually you won't really need a PC, because all your work will be in a sort of cloud."

>Suddenly there was an explosion from across the table. "MARC, THAT'S FUCKING BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT!" It was Gates.

To go all in they would have had to kill the PC. In the same way, MS didn't embrace browsers and the Internet for a long time.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17667776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17667776)

<comment><USER28> Nobody gets to upper management in an established company, ESPECIALLY not in sales, by using their own judgement to override everyone else's.

No matter how right they may be.

If you want that sort of position, burying your own ideas deep and hide them in shame (use them to impress interns if you must) is the only way to go.

<comment><USER29> That's where Steve Jobs was really so better than everybody else. One should never be afraid to put what's behind, and start again on something new. This thing is often repeated in case of failures, but I've realized this is even more so true in terms of success. Success is harder to put behind and start over.

The big part of this is 'continuity'. If something works well, you are tempted to take the next obvious steps in the process. And you should. But after while its not hard to see that you are max'ing out the net utility you could extract out of it. At that point, one must stop, relook and not be afraid to start on something all over again.

Also this is so very true at an individual level as well. Never stop having a life. So many sports people retire between 35 - 40, then their whole life falls apart. This is also true with people have some early career success, I have seen endless examples of people reaching career peak by 30 - 35 and then everything falls apart, may be because they lucked out, but largely because they just can't start again. You have to start with a new purpose when you come to an end of an existing path.

Or time is expensive, and it shows your loss sooner or later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> PetroChina was the first for a brief period back in 2007. Apple is the first trillion-dollar company in the United States, though.

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/nov/06/china](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/nov/06/china)

</comment><comment><USER31> I think about such a large number this is and I really am not surprised. Apple has created a product that I use all throughout the day. I won't leave home without it and I'll drive back if I forget it. It's so addictive that I have to take active steps against using it too often around my wife or kids.

<comment><USER32> Besides my family there are 5 possessions I get mildly depressed if I don't have. My iPhone, my Bragi dash, my Tesla, my house, my Bitcoin. Maybe 2/3 of these I can see being usurped by something better - I'll leave it to the reader to guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is this supposed to be good news? I see lots of excitement in this thread, but isn't having a single company worth so much money a sign that we are, as a society, failing to create an economy that is truly competitive and fair? We've already got banks that are too big to fail, soon we might have private companies that are humongous to the point of having the same status.

<comment><USER34> Turning that argument around, in a fair and competitive market would it be impossible for a company to grow to a $1T valuation?

Do you think the majority of Apple's $1T valuation is attributable to abuse of government regulation or patents?

<comment><USER33> > in a fair and competitive market would it be impossible for a company to > grow to a $1T valuation?

It depends on your definition of "fair". In my view, such a market would be regulated as to avoid that companies become too big to the point of turning into black holes that suck everything around them.

Money attracts top talent and allows companies to buy out possible competitors. That in turn generates more money.

<comment><USER34> Please explain in what way Apple is "a black hole that sucks everything around it".

<comment><USER33> Maybe Apple is not even the best example, but look at Google or Facebook. How many potentially successful competitors have they bought off? How much more diverse could the market be if they hadn't been allowed to do so?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of the email Steve Jobs sent after Apple's market cap passed Dell:

> Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the > future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. > Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought > it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/technology/michael- dell-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/technology/michael-dell-should- eat-his-words-apple-chief-suggests.html)

That market cap was $72.13 billion in 2006, by the way. What an amazing run Apple has made.

</comment><comment><USER36> I dislike market cap as a measure of a company, as clearly a company can be wildly overvalued or undervalued. It is a not as if the "wisdom of crowds" has calculated the true value of a company.

During some of the pre-crash days early in the century, publications would trot out companies ranked by market cap, as if that really meant something. All I remember is various of these companies going under in the crash, despite their pre-crash valuation.

Revenue is a big deal. And profit too, although Amazon has shown you can keep that close to zero by reinvesting in growth, and that can work too.

<comment><USER34> How much is my desk worth on the market? However much somebody is willing to pay for it.

As the article states, Apple's "value" as a company comes from, in part, the fact that it's a good investment. Some may argue that "the fundamentals" of the balance sheets and whatnot doesn't justify a $1T valuation, but they would be missing the intangible parts of the business which cause it to be worth exactly that much.

<comment><USER36> I'm not saying Apple isn't worth a $1T market cap. I'm just saying you wouldn't use market cap to calculate if a company were a sound long-term investment. You'd look at the fundamentals, then make a determination of what you think the long-term value of the business is, then you could look at the current market cap and determine if it is under- or overvalued. Breathless reporting on the market cap of companies is sloppy, I think. The market cap kinda floats around, and worst case may be completely unrelated to the true long term value of a company.

Warren Buffet for some time said that he thought Apple was undervalued. I have no idea what he currently thinks, but it is probably still a reasonable value.

<comment><USER37> >Warren Buffet for some time said that he thought Apple was undervalued. I have no idea what he currently thinks, but it is probably still a reasonable value.

He currently owns ~5% of the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "For comparison, the same $10,000 invested in an Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fund would now be worth $2 million."

That doesn't seem too bad considering the risk involved investing in a single stock.

<comment><USER34> The number I want to know: How would that $10,000 in S&P 500 fare if AAPL was removed from the index for the duration of the calculations.

Probably not _significantly_ less, but I'd be curious anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This has some decent charts and historical perspective (inflation adjusted): [https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/08/22/a-history-...](https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/08/22/a-history- of-ridiculously-big-companies.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER30> PetroChina was the first for a brief period back in 2007.

Apple is the first trillion-dollar company in the United States, though.

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/nov/06/china](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/nov/06/china)

</comment><comment><USER40> I have to say this is an impressive achievement for Apple. Good on them. Although I am sad that an insane amount of wealth is being accrued by the few. The top 6 US companies (all of them tech) are worth more than 5 trillion. That's almost 30% of US GDP.

In the last few years there's been an unprecedented rise in wealth yet as both a nation, and a part of a global civilization, we are moving back in some aspects. Even locally, housing is a shit show in the valley and trillion dollar valuations makes it worse for the service class.

Extreme poverty in US is on the rise, tons of people are dying of preventable health conditions. Healthcare and education are getting more expensive. Global warming and pollution aren't really turning back.

I guess the only mega billionaire I respect is Bill Gates because he's truly putting his money where it matters. Funding all sorts of moon shots like clean nuclear energy, wiping malaria e.t.c

I'm not saying its Apple's job to fix it. It really isn't anyone's job to fix the big problems. BUT with the insane amount of cash the big tech cos have, that's hellova resources that could be invested towards bringing the entire human civilization forward to a peaceful, clean, educated and a healthy planet where everyone has the basics and we're not dying because of very preventable issues.

<comment><USER41> They pay taxes, shouldn't government take care of these issues? Isn't that what governments are for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Paul Graham in 2015:

It would have been a good deal for Apple's board to give Steve 95% of the company.

Market cap when he came back: 1.73b.

5% now: 33b.

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/674760647767285761](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/674760647767285761)

Today, 5% of the company is 50 bilion. Jobs became de facto chief after then- CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997 (wiki). So that would make an annualized AAPL gain of 17.3 percent, excluding dividends. Even more impressive.

</comment><comment><USER43> I wish I'd bought Apple stock in December instead of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER44> Speculative investments are like gambling. Don't be sorry for Apple. Try FB...they may hit the trillion dollar cap as well..who knows...it's all just speculation.

<comment><USER45> FB has a problem with young people leaving. I wouldn't invest in FB.

<comment><USER46> What are these young people using instead? WhatsApp? Instagram?

<comment><USER45> Yes,and Snapchat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is Samsung Electronics ridiculously undervalued or what? It generates more profit than Apple [https://wccftech.com/samsung-posted-higher-profit-than- apple...](https://wccftech.com/samsung-posted-higher-profit-than- apple-q2-2018/) yet is valued at only $290 billion instead of $1000 billion. What the heck.

<comment><USER47> I think there's three big reasons.

Reason #1: Apple has 243.7B in cash right now. That'll already push them to nearly Samsung's valuation.

Reason #2: Samsung's business is more vulnerable. Most of their profits came from the chips division:

[https://money.cnn.com/2017/07/27/technology/samsung- profit-a...](https://money.cnn.com/2017/07/27/technology/samsung-profit- apple/index.html)

Samsung sells components to many companies, including Apple. In fact, Samsung makes more money from iPhone than they do from the Galaxy S8:

[https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/2/16404430/s...](https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/2/16404430/samsung- iphone-x-galaxy-s8-screen-components-money-revenue-display)

As an OEM, Samsung has a much more vulnerable moat. What happens when Apple starts to make those components on their own? They already started doing it with processors. What about memory? They buy a ton of memory from Samsung.

Reason #3: reality distortion field :)

<comment><USER48> #1, so you agree that it is undervalued?

#2, Samsung's business is diversified, not vulnerable. During the DRAM glut years ago, the mobile division's higher profit helped cushion their chip division's lower profit. Now, it's the other way around. Also, unlike Apple's reliance on a single product line, their mobile sales come from many different models, greater than the sales of Apple's in aggregate, but, as individual models, lower than that of Apple iPhone. CNN's comparison likewise is nonsensical.

Apple accounts for about ~3 or 4% of Samsung's overall sales last I checked. Apple has significantly cut their reliance on Samsung, especially after the legal battle started in early 2012's, and stopped using Samsung's parts before -- for instance, the earlier iPhone Ax chips were designed and manufactured by Samsung in Texas, USA, but now Apple designs them in-house (after PA-semi and Intrinsity acquisition in 2008 and 2010) and outsources manufacturing to Taiwan/China. That was about 6 years ago and Samsung is still laughing their way to the bank with about $50B in profit last year.

#3, I've too noticed that a lot of Apple fanbois are out of touch with the reality at times (is that what you call reality distortion field?). Congrat Apple for achieving such huge milestone and I love my MBP which is 6 years old and still going strong, but surely, no sane mind would believe that Samsung would be out of business (or vulnerable) without Apple.

<comment><USER49> > outsourced manufacturing to Taiwan/China

Actually, it's 50/50 chips produced by TSMC (taiwan semiconductor) and samsung.

<comment><USER48> That was years ago when Samsung was on 14nm (vs TSMC's 16nm). Apple completely moved all US based A chips manufacturing to Taiwan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I like to think that between AAPL dividends and Apple hardware resale value (not even counting the value of the stock I'm holding on to) my spending on iPhones and MacBooks and Apple Watches has all been free.

Also, I sometimes I buy put options before a big product reveal in advance of the frequent stock price drop when all the analysts say "Is that what all the hype was about? That'll never sell!". Of course the stock prices pops back up again after Apple can't keep up with demand.

</comment><comment><USER51> Market cap is number of shares times share price. Is this equivalent to total amount of money that went into AAPL? Did investors put in 1 trillion dollars?

<comment><USER52> I don't think so. All of the money put into to AAPL (via the public stock market) is all the stocks issued via public offerings * the price of the offering, no? After that they have just been traded without Apple seeing any of that money. Stocks given as compensation also contribute in some way, if we expand on "money" as to include forgone income by the employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good for it. Becoming a trillion dollar company selling quality products people love. Not data mining everything about your life and using it for advertising (Google), ruthlessly destroying competition (Microsoft), or destroying the environment (Exxon). How old fashioned.

<comment><USER53> On the other hand. I think Google creates way more value for the world, they are just not as good as Apple at capturing that value.

Android, Maps, Docs, Gmail, Navigation, Analytics are all (mostly) free.

<comment><USER54> They're not free. They just don't cost _money_. Arguably they're very expensive.

<comment><USER55> _They 're not free. They just don't cost money. Arguably they're very expensive._

This is a distinction most people don't grasp. I didn't, myself, until recently when a briefing from the legal department resulted in scouring the word "free" from eight web sites and replacing the word with "at no cost."

<comment><USER56> DuckDuckGo looking nicer every day.

<comment><USER57> DDG is essentially just a reskin of Bing.

<comment><USER56> A privacy filter over Bing is fine by me. Lately I've been switching to incongnito every time I search for any product, video or anything to do with news or politics. It's getting ridiculous. I should just switch to DDG permanently.

<comment><USER49> Use startpage, then. It's a reskin over google, which seems to provide better results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Alphabet has two stock symbols (GOOG & GOOGL); they have a combined market cap of ~$1.6T. Does this not count?

<comment><USER59> I think the stock quotes represent the same entity. So it wont be ~850B + ~850B.

<comment><USER58> I guess I just assumed the stock data would all be per-ticker-symbol, that is, market cap on a given symbol would simply be the number of shares on that symbol times the price. But Google itself does report _identical_ market caps, now that I look closer, and that seems unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> It is an achievement in almost all facets of success. It is a perfect story of the great American dream. Most products throughout their history have been world class. Congratulations Apple and good luck for the future.

</comment><comment><USER61> Just to give some context, the first publicly traded company to hit $1T USD market cap was Petrol China, but that was only in HK, in mainland china, its stock were never valued more than $500B. And it has only 5% of stock in HK open market.

Compare to AAPL today.

Apple still has a ridiculously low P/E of ~17. Which is how everyone values a hardware company. And has stayed within this P/E range since the death of Steve Jobs. Apple hasn't been selling more iPhone than the last super cycle aka iPhone 6, which is when the plus version was first introduced. But Apple's iPhone ASP has been up $100+, and Apple has been buying back LOTS of share, which is one of the main reason pushing its stock price upwards.

A lot of analyst likes to focus on the flat unit sales, and the higher ASP. In reality it is the user base growth that is much more important. Tim Cook mentioned a double digit percentage growth in iPhone. That puts Apple with close to 800M active iPhone users. Roughly 70M+ of iPhone users coming are either new to smartphone or switching from Android. So while Apple's iPhone sales has been flat for a few years, its iPhone user base has matched from 600M to 800M. Given the moat, or the stickiness of Apple ecosystem, users are likely going to buy another iPhone, staying within the ecosystem than going to Android.

The Mac are also adding lots of new users, 60% of Mac buyer are new to Apple. This continuous trend means Apple is adding 10M new Mac users YoY. The last reported figure there were roughly 150M active Mac users. If we look at the sales figures and Active Mac users over time, it is clear the average Mac lifecycle is now on 4 - 5 years before upgrade.

The iPad has roughly 300M, may be now closer to 400M iPad users. Again while the sales hasn't grown, its user base is growing.

Both Horace Dediu and Benedict Evans are expecting 1.5 billion Active devices by either late 2018 or mid 2019. As impossible it may seems, Apple is STILL growing its user base.

And there are few more things to fuel future growth. The rumoured of slightly cheaper iPhone and Mac. We should have a sub $700 6.1" LCD iPhone coming this September. Along with a better sub $1000 entry level MacBook. And I believe the best iPad has yet to come, still with lots of potentials.

Yes, I hate the TouchBar, Yes I absolutely hate the new bloody keyboard they put on MacBook. And I don't like FaceID much, still prefer under screen finger print. But all these aside, Apple is still doing extremely well, and its bigger picture is good with no immediate risk at its current valuation. Cant say the same for Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. And they have just finish moving into its new Spaceship. There are lots of mental preparation and inefficiency involved when moving to a whole campus. I hope they are now settle and up their productivity.

To sum it up, with a P/E less then 20, and the most Net Cash ( ~$130B ) any company has in the world, they are truly worth their $1T Market Cap.

Congrats AAPL.

P.S - Steve probably would have sent another note to all employees about Dell. :P

</comment><comment><USER62> My grandparents bought and still own Apple stock from their IPO. Seems like good news for them.

<comment><USER63> That's great. Companies need to start IPOing earlier again.

[http://blog.pmarca.com/2013/03/26/unshackle-the-middle- class...](http://blog.pmarca.com/2013/03/26/unshackle-the-middle-class/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Samsung is making much more Operating Income than AAPL. Why their market cap is so low?

<comment><USER65> Market cap is based on a half-dozen factors, but primarily a factor of

\- assets (e.g., cash on hand and other things that can be converted to cash),

-Operating Income, and

\- _growth_ \-- meaning how quickly the annual operating income can grow (my guess is Samsung's growth is lower than Apple's)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Not yet

[https://twitter.com/ampressman/status/1025033219803103232](https://twitter.com/ampressman/status/1025033219803103232)

$AAPL needs to be $207.0425 to be $1T company

<comment><USER67> This one is actually correct. It tapped the $207.05 value briefly - <USER3> "Today's High" at [https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl](https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl). That tweet is from a previous time earlier today, just after the markets opened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Who's "beleaguered" now?

</comment><comment><USER69> Psst! That's an arbitrary number.

</comment><comment><USER70> Avoided the most taxes in history too!

<comment><USER71> It's legal to find ways to reduce your tax burden.

<comment><USER72> the tax system should be made simpler... no loopholes (I know it is probably not easy to accomplish, but worth a try) ... because middle class can't afford to avoid taxes like the rich does it.

<comment><USER73> That's simply not possible. The IRS themselves state that "tax evasion" is illegal, but "tax avoidance" isn't. A "loophole" is the use of deductibles to lower the amount you pay in taxes, that you choose to try to get.

For example, you could get lower taxes by "getting married", even if you're just friends you can get lower tax rates, etc. That's a "loophole". Are we supposed to prove they "really wanted to get married"? Now apply that to potentially all deductables.....

<comment><USER44> >>For example, you could get lower taxes by "getting married", even if you're just friends you can get lower tax rates, etc. That's a "loophole". Are we supposed to prove they "really wanted to get married"? Now apply that to potentially all deductables.....

Ha ha ... What about a trillion dollar company paying less than 0.9% tax in countries where tax is minimum 13-19% ? Are we supposed to prove they really tried to evade tax? Or companies not paying any tax at all by siphoning profits through fictive loans in places where they pay little or no tax?

I'm not sure if you get this but the issue is not about someone getting married to get lower taxes(even though that would be illegal just like married someone to get permanent residency is illegal).

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/05/-sp- luxembo...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/05/-sp-luxembourg- tax-files-tax-avoidance-industrial-scale)

<comment><USER73> We both agree on the problem that they should be paying more. I suggest that fixing "loopholes" isn't the solution, and instead may consider a "hard- minimum" for multi-billion dollar companies. No deductions beyond x%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> > The company hit a $1tn market capitalisation 42 years after it was founded > and 117 years after US Steel became the first company to be valued at $1bn > in 1901.

Is that adjusted for inflation?

</comment><comment><USER75> Soon Amazon will be in this list.

</comment><comment><USER76> ... on design and user experience.

Take note.

</comment><comment><USER77> Alright. Who's next?

<comment><USER78> Gotta be Alphabet

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Without paying taxes, or a very small percentage, it's a fake achievement.

<comment><USER80> Are you suggesting that AAPL gets tax breaks that, say, Exxon doesn't?

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> remember the guy who gave up his Apple founding stock?

</comment><comment><USER82> An honest question, why do people really care about the market capitalisation of a company?

<comment><USER83> Because investing has become integral in personal finance and market cap gives an estimate of a company's value, room to grow, etc.

<comment><USER84> I appreciate how you state that investing has become an internal part of personal finance. I agree with you, but unfortunately nobody taught us this where I am from.

<comment><USER85> Same for me, other than tidbits I got from my parents occasionally. Like many of the important things I learned in life, I had to teach myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> First public trillion dollar company, right?

Source: [http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies- all-...](http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies-all-time/)

<comment><USER87> I guess you missed where that infographic says "inf. adjusted".

Regardless of inflation adjusted or not, Dutch East India shouldn't be considered given their rampant use of slave labor. doing a lot of business off of slave trade (pretty easy to make money when you're kidnapping people and sailing them across an ocean then selling them), having a nearly absolute monopoly, and uh... being government backed.

<comment><USER88> Kind of arbitrary to exclude a company because it uses slave labor or other immoral practices. Your list of giant multinationals would be very short indeed. No textile producers for example except for some tiny boutique shops. No petrochemcial companies at all. No agribusiness. Modern society is built on the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised.

<comment><USER87> >Kind of arbitrary to exclude a company because it uses slave labor or other immoral practices.

No it is arbitrary to say "nuh uh this company back when was worth a trillion dollars, if we adjust for inflation". Apple is literally the first worth a trillion United States dollars, a currency that did not even exist for the first 190 years of the Dutch East India company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Not so fast, they bought back $20 Billion in stock last quarter.

<comment><USER90> That has been accounted for already. Before the buyback, the stock would have had to reach $203, after the buyback, the stock needs to reach $207.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> No. It is the first PUBLICALY TRADED company on the US STOCK MARKET to be valued at $1T. There have been many companies that have broken that point in inflation-adjusted and NON-inflation-adjusted valuations. Three big ones are the Dutch East India company, the most valuable company in history, Standard Oil, the most valuable US company ever, and Saudi Aramco, the current, most valuable company. I've seen to many articles claiming this today, so I rage wrote this on mobile.

See article for numbers: [http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable- companies-all-...](http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies- all-time/)

<comment><USER92> I have found the calculations for these historic companies to be dubious. They mostly calculate the worth of a company in relation to some historical GDP figure and apply that percentage on a modern GDP figure.

Think about it, how can the Dutch East Indies company be worth $7 trillion dollars when the Netherlands today has a GDP of only $900 Billion, which is after centuries of economic growth.

The Dutch East Indies company may have been _comparably_ more powerful in relation to its time though.

<comment><USER93> The VOC basically owned the entirety of trade in SEA. It's not hard to imagine a valuation of 7 trillion when they had a monopoly of an entire continent's worth of trade (spices!) for two centuries.

<comment><USER92> Let's put it this way. According to Maddison,

[https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...](https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/releases/maddison- database-2010)

The entire world's GDP in 1700 was $371 Billion (1990 International Dollars). That would mean the VOC's value then was ~10x the global GDP, which I find hard to believe.

Or if that doesn't convince you, consider the world population in 1700 was 700 million people. That would mean the Dutch Indies Company's value per person is $10,000!

<comment><USER94> 10,000! is quite a large number, to be fair.

Kidding aside, I agree: I'm also quite dubious of this article's claim on the East India company being worth as much as was computed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> It's worth noting that this is the first U.S. company to hit $1 trillion, not in the world. Also, it's still intraday, so Apple has not technically reached that point yet.

<comment><USER96> > _this is the first U.S. company to hit $1 trillion_

What's the other one?

<comment><USER95> PetroChina did it in 2007: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/petrochina- soars-to-1-tril...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/petrochina-soars- to-1-trillion-market-cap-in-debut)

*edited to include link

<comment><USER97> including state owned companies, which is really just government assets themselves, isn't really relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Everyone talks about Apple as the best possible investment, but an investment in XEM or XRP (Nem or Ripple or Stellar Lumens) in early 2017 surpassed all of Apple in its 30 year history.

My money is on Google, Facebook or Amazon eventually surpassing Apple though

<comment><USER98> > but an investment in XEM or XRP (Nem or Ripple or Stellar Lumens)

None of those is an investment in something with inherent worth. Hence, I'd not call them an investment, but pure speculation.

<comment><USER99> The worth of a share is what someone will pay you for it.

<comment><USER100> A share is fractional ownership of the underlying company and all it's assets - that is what gives it value.

A "cryptocurrency" is merely worth what someone else is willing to pay (hence speculative).

<comment><USER99> No, what gives a share value is that someone else is willing to buy it from you for a certain price. The fact that it represents fractional ownership is _why_ someone is willing to pay a certain price to buy it from you. But fundamentally, the value only exists as long as there is a counterparty.

<comment><USER101> >No, what gives a share value is that someone else is willing to buy it from you for a certain price.

What the heck? This is absolutely wrong. The fundamental basis of the value of a share is that _it results in gaining a portion of the company 's profits_. The company makes money and then _pays some of that out_ to shareholders. Even companies that make zero money _now_ have shares valued at least in part on expectations of what money they might make in the future.

Sure, humans are obviously not perfect at anticipating and researching and calculating all this by any means. We are not homo economicus either. There is room for irrationality, for misjudgements, etc. But even with all that shares are just that, _shares_. The actual ownership of a public company is about shares (yes, there can be different classes in some cases). They represent power and returns, even if it's decentralized.

So a share does in fact have an innate value in terms of the actual cash it can spin off for a shareholder and the input to the company it gives them. Multipliers will vary based on risk and future projections and such, but it's perfectly possible to hold a lot of boring stocks that may not grow much but just print money, consistently, year after year with minimal management. This is not at all the same as cryptocurrencies or any pure asset, where what you ultimately get from it depends purely on what someone else will pay you for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't own an Iphone and neither does anyone I know, but good for them.

</comment><comment><USER102> Apple is worth $1 trillion in the same way an asteroid hurtling toward Earth contains $1 trillion in precious metals.

Tim Cook has yet to prove he can do more than maximize profits while someone somewhere is working on the thing that'll undermine the source of Apple's value while they're not looking.

edit: generalized away from a specific example because it distracted from the point.

<comment><USER103> I'm pretty much a microsoft fanboy but - We had a batch of surface devices at the office and they all had massive battery issues. Like that scary thing where it starts to expand and bend the metal.

I think we had to mail it back to the manufacturer in a specially designed hard-case.

With quality like that - I'm not sure they're being undermined that badly yet.

I think MS are doing other great stuff but surface laptop/tablets are probably not it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> Hmm. I'm waiting to see what the iPhones are like. I sense trouble brewing.

</comment><comment><USER105> If time travel existed, I'd go back and buy me some 1980's Apple stock. I think we just proved time travel can't happen.

<comment><USER106> Just go back to 2009 and buy bitcoin, then sell it on 15 Dec 2017 at $17,500.

<comment><USER65> Pretty awesome how we can all be millionaires as long as we can complete historical information and can choose our buy and sell dates :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> This will be very controversial, especially in HN, but market cap doesn't mean shit.

Apple has roughly $50B in revenue and $120B in equity. Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor. Market cap is a measure of public trust among other things but _not_ actual worth or value to society.

<comment><USER108> On top of the holes in your financial argument, you've overlooked something in your competitor argument.

A competitor could replace most of Apple's current products in 5 years, but where will Apple be in 5 years? They'll be five years ahead.

<comment><USER109> Replacing means that Apple doesn't innovate further.

This always happens with big companies, Nokia, Ericsson, Yahoo, they are replaced by new companies.

5 years ahead for the big company means no progress.

Apple is where it was 5 years ago in terms of innovation. They havent done anything new that was meaningful and only reap the benefits of what jobs invented 15y ago.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the proven techniques to build Twitter following? - <AUTHOR> New startup, new twitter account, almost no followers yet. What are the good ways to build the following? <comment><USER2> [http://www.programmingformarketers.com/automatic-twitter- fol...](http://www.programmingformarketers.com/automatic-twitter-followers/)

It's dirty but it works.

I'm of the opinion that it's important to maintain a good ratio of following:followers

If you follow 10,000 but only have 100 followers then people will assume you're spam and not follow you.

You can also use something like [http://quuu.co/](http://quuu.co/) which automates the posting of content via Buffer.

Alternatively, you could just join Twitter conversations naturally and build your following that way.

In my experience, Twitter doesn't give the best traffic (both quantity and quality) compared to other acquisition sources.

<comment><USER3> What are some of the 'best traffic' sources that you referred to?

<comment><USER2> Completely depends on your area of relevance and if you're B2B or B2C and I'm not sure what you are.

For example, for a music app/site you would get strong and qualified traffic from Facebook ads, targetted at users who like the artists and record labels you feature. Or you could look at Pinterest, posting album covers.

One of the best for me has been Medium, way more effective than any blog I ever had. Probably because of the built-in userbase, and the SEO efforts that any blog would have to take a huge effort to build up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1- Use Moz.com Followerwonk or similar tools to find the followers and the people who follow (and their followers and the people who they follow) the influencers in your sector.

2- Find if they publish any blogs with RSS fields

3- take those feeds and build an IFTTT script to publish links to those blog stories, you can also link to them through your own automated story aggregation site (you can use IFTTT to publish to Tumblr, adding links to your own product concatenated to the RSS story.

4- Be ready to turn your IFTTT bots off at any moment, if necessary

5- Eventually because you've been automatically published links to stories with the same context, other Twitter followers will find your Twitter feed.

6- Prepare yourself to suspect that the majority of Marketers' Twitter accounts may not be all human after all /s

<comment><USER2> Out of interest, why point 4?

<comment><USER4> Some people may see their RSS feed as their exclusive IP. Even if "Syndicated" is in the name of the protocol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Get influencers to follow you. It's easier to convince the one than the 1,000 but if you get the 1, the 1,000 will follow.

Follow and engage a few verified users in your niche, maybe they'll follow back.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's like rap music. To get new followers, start a beef.</comment>


The man who grew eyes - <AUTHOR> http://mosaicscience.com/story/man-who-grew-eyes

<comment><USER2> Isn't it a neat idea, that in so few years we may see the end of the need for a donor registry? The end of your body rejecting a new part, the end of anti- rejection post-implantation medications? Massive, limb-destroying battlefield wounds completely fixable?

And eyes - eyes and ear drums and nerves and...

...and reattached spinal columns. It's all coming, and many of us will be alive to see it.

<comment><USER3> I wonder how it will interact with cybernetic tech like artificial arms and artificial eyes.

I hope we don't stop researching artificial eyes once we are able to clone organs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Oh, Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes!"

<comment><USER5> I wonder how many younger readers recognize this cinema reference.

<comment><USER6> Don't worry. Google exists for the same reason - improve your general knowledge!</comment></comment></comment>


Vim Tips to Make Yourself Faster - <AUTHOR> https://joshbetz.com/2014/12/vim-tips

<comment><USER2> Relative Line Numbers looks actually pretty smart and interesting - I'll give it a try. I have my doubts regarding matching exception traces with actual line numers, but I suspect ":30" would still work.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I suspect ":30" would still work.

Yep.

I only use relative line numbers in normal mode. The snippet I posted switches back and forth automatically.</comment></comment>


Man Builds Robot to Kill Him - <AUTHOR> http://www.robotworldnews.com/100497.php

<comment><USER2> I can only imagine Asimov rolling over in his grave.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it is a good thing that we aren't in an Asimov book or that robot would probably become the leader of a revolution.

<comment><USER4> In the Asimov universe the Robot would probably suffer a mental break down. It would be a very traumatic experience for him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And so it begins.

</comment><comment><USER6> _and the man attached the machine to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets._

.22 LR? He might wake up in the driveway quite disappointed.

<comment><USER7> I agree it's somewhat of a gamble, but it is an easily underestimated round. There's a ton of murders with .22LR every year.

<comment><USER6> The brain is more resilient than people realize:

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3685791.stm>

(I couldn't find a picture of the guy who shot 12 nails into his head deliberately, but he survived [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002945554_w...](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002945554_webnail21.html))

Suicide is a bad enough idea by itself, but the possibility of turning into James Brady is very high when not doing it right. I mean, if you're dead, why spare expense? Get a 45 ACP minimum.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps in Australia it's easier to get a .22LR "target pistol" than larger calibers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It sounds to me like it was just a really elaborate, remote-controlled gun, rather than a robot whose AI decided to shoot him.

<comment><USER2> It sort of reminded me of a scene from Family Guy where Peter sets off this Rube Goldberg breakfast machine and in the end it just shoots him.

"Owww! It doesn't make breakfast at all. It just shoots you."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Look at all these robots that make up larger robots

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Simple_machines>

<comment><USER10> I think I get it. Well, maybe killing yourself with a robot is no different from shooting yourself with a really elaborate gun. But somewhere in that elaborateness is a line to be crossed; otherwise convincing someone else to kill you would be the same thing. Unless being made out of bio-parts somehow makes you irreducibly different from a robot?</comment></comment>


Canada's oilsands are paving the way for driverless trucks and threats of layoffs - <AUTHOR> http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Canada+oilsands+paving+driverless+trucks+threat+layoffs/11118375/story.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Oilsands were sold to the public as an avenue to create high paying jobs and to rejuvenate the economy.

800 high salary earners ($200k/yr avg) could be put out of work as their profession is eroded and the public is shut out of what was supposed to be an opportunity to stay in/bootstrap themselves into the middle class.</comment>


Stenography at German Bundestag (Parliament) - <AUTHOR> https://www.translatetheweb.com/?ref=TVert&from=&to=en&a=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bundestag.de%2Fdokumente%2Ftextarchiv%2F2010%2F28642186_kw06_stenografen-200926 <comment><USER2> What system are they using? It's translated as the "traffic" system of stenography, but a google search comes up with nothing.</comment>


Cmix is lossless data compression aimed at optimizing compression ratio - <AUTHOR> http://www.byronknoll.com/cmix.html <comment><USER2> > cmix has surpassed the winning entry of the Hutter Prize (but exceeds the > memory limits of the contest)...cmix uses a similar neural network > architecture to paq8l. cmix uses a four layer feedforward network with > 414,273 neurons (paq8l uses a three layer network with 3,633 neurons).

This is something I've suspected for a while: the Hutter Prize has become obsolete. I agree with the 'prediction is intelligence' paradigm, but the Hutter Prize cannot show any meaningful progress in AI for the simple reason that the corpus is too small and the resource limits are too stringent. 4 layers with 414k neurons is nowhere near what deep learning researchers use to create intelligent systems. You couldn't fit char-rnn into the Hutter Prize constraints! At this point, all the prize incentivizes is finding an algorithm which fits into the allotted resources, no matter how dumb and inferior that algorithm is to the state of the art which requires more resources to run. Bit-twiddling to optimize the current approaches may be fun for a certain kind of people, but it's hard to see how the contest has contributed at all to progress in AI in the past decade, which was the original purpose.

Perhaps what is necessary is a Hutter Prize 2: expand the corpus to the modern English Wikipedia (not one from a decade ago), perhaps add in other language corpuses to increase it further to get a multi-gigabyte corpus, and then increase the resource limits drastically (32GB RAM for starters so cmix can get in), and shut down the old one for diminishing returns. A desktop machine these days can certainly support a decent amount of RAM and computation (on Newegg, you can get a desktop tower refurb with 32GB Ram for <$1000), so there's no cost excuse if one can afford to offer thousands of euros as a prize...

</comment><comment><USER3> > At least 32GB of RAM is recommended to run cmix.

Youch! I _totally_ get what they're trying to do here and that one day even the cheapest toy will have 10x that RAM. But still...

<comment><USER4> Considering it is is 30-300x slower as its nearest competitors, ram is your smallest problem ;-)

(see [http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html](http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html))

Note that sadly, decompression is equally as slow, so it doesn't even make a lot of sense for something that is "compress once, distribute billions of times".

<comment><USER5> The aim of cmix is to use as many context mixing models as is necessary to get the best possible compression ratio as an academic exercise. Little attempt was made to make it faster or use less memory. That said, the author recently communicated to me an idea to make it use orders of magnitude less memory. Instead of running all the context models in one pass while storing all their states, one could run each model in a separate pass, so that only the memory for one context model needs to be stored at any point in time. Since the original program was not multithreaded, this does not affect the running time. Unfortunately that requires rewriting the whole thing and he is preoccupied with other projects at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> what's its weissman score?</comment>


Techie Owes His Fortune to Electronic Devices. Now He Thinks They're Dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/silicon-valley-cellphones-wifi-sickness-emf-hypersensitivity <comment><USER2> I was hoping there would be something in there about how he could detect active RF transmission from devices even in a blinded trial. _That_ would actually be interesting. Otherwise this is just another story about someone who has managed to fool himself, like a doctor who believes that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, or a biologist who believes in Young Earth creationism.</comment>


Any other vets floored by this? - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/15/politics/navy-internal-investigation-hand-gesture-video/index.html <comment><USER2> I'm a vet. Absolutely not floored.

What's got you so blown away?

<comment><AUTHOR> I learned to play that game in bootcamp... actually from a buddy of mine that was definitely not white. And it definitely had nothing to do with racism. However it had everything to do with punching the person that looks! :)

<comment><USER3> You are correct to be surprised and confused.

> _And it definitely had nothing to do with racism_

This is entirely the point of the gesture. They pointedly co-opted a harmless symbol to create confusing situations just like this one.

It seems to be playing out (according to plan) in two scenarios:

1) People unknowingly use the gesture and are then vilified for it.

2) White supremacists use the gesture publicly and have plausible deniability.

More info:

\- [https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign- white...](https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white-power- symbol-or-just-right-wing-troll)

\- [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/03/ok-sign- gestur...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/03/ok-sign-gesture- emoji-rightwing-alt-right)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm interesting... thanks</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hire a former SoundClouder - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ZP8FNlL0a-SvSpZFflxOj2LioK66lmB3S095A5FmOjg/htmlview?sle=true# <comment><USER2> OK, completely out of topic, but it's interesting to notice how broadly they use the term "data science". This goes to confirm my thinking that data science is becoming more and more an "all around data". The various facets of data science I am seeing in this spreadsheet:

\- BI \- Data visualization \- Data engineers \- Statistician \- Warehouse \- SQL \- Python-fu \- Marketing

I look at it and I think it's a great prove that data science is not only phd territory, there are so many ways to bring value to the field.

<comment><USER3> I welcome the breadth. Data science is science with data, right? What could be more broad? If anything, it will be nice to break the association somewhat between data science and AI hype.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also think thats justified. A newer, and more specific term I particularly like is "Machine Learning Engineer", which will probably soon be recoined to "AI Engineer". We (www.datarevenue.com) basically have to use "AI" now to make it clear what we do. Something that would have made me feel awkward just 3 months ago.

<comment><USER3> Do you see a substantive difference between AI and ML? "Machine learning" to me is pretty cut and dry, in that anytime something is automated we are employing machine learning, literally teaching a machine to do something. "Artificial intelligence" I have a hard time defining, because I don't have a good definition for "intelligence".

<comment><AUTHOR> Behind AI I would always expect at least Deep Learning. Machine Learning I use for everything that _learns it 's own decision boundaries_. When it's humans teaching a machine, I'd call it simply automation or expert-system. Although a lot of "teaching" still goes into feature engineering ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the founders of Underdog.io ([https://underdog.io](https://underdog.io)) here. Almost goes without saying, but we'd be happy to help any SoundClouders looking for something in NYC or SF (our two main markets). We work with ~350 of the best tech companies in those locations.

[https://underdog.io/candidates/apply](https://underdog.io/candidates/apply)

It takes 60 seconds to apply and we can get you fast-tracked to an upcoming batch. Can also email us with questions -- support[at]underdog[dot]io.

</comment><comment><USER5> Two questions ... 1\. This is a somewhat odd spreadsheet to find semi-randomly posted to HN. Can anyone speak to its provenance?

2\. Is something, not so public, going on at Sound Cloud or is this just normal turn over for a company of there size?

<comment><USER6> Hey there, this spreadsheet was made by SoundCloud employees of the Berlin office who are now looking for work. We are just helping to share it and hoped the HN community could help. Any companies hiring please post - [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JDx5acZPvdmmSeMyEr77...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JDx5acZPvdmmSeMyEr778TmdE52c1etHEBr-3FrIHQU/edit#gid=0)

<comment><USER5> And that answers the big question running around in my head. Thanks !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The top of the spreadsheet says, "For companies currently hiring, please add your details to the second tab", but I'm seeing the spreadsheet in readme-only mode. Can the creator of this spreadsheet comment on how companies can edit it, please (or whether it's permanently locked now)?

<comment><USER8> The editable link is: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZP8FNlL0a-SvSpZFflxO...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZP8FNlL0a-SvSpZFflxOj2LioK66lmB3S095A5FmOjg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As I'm living in Berlin, where most of the layoff is happening, and knowing that SoundCloud is known for good talent, I'm wondering what impact that will have on the job market here. I track the amount of weekly recruiter requests on LinkedIn&such, curious if this will have an impact on this.

<comment><USER10> I was of the impression that the situation was the reverse: the Berlin office was spaired while the San Francisco, London, and New York offices were entirely laid off.

<comment><USER9> As far as I've heard, the Berlin office headcount will be reduced by 140.

<comment><USER10> Ouch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Definitely a shame - we're big fans of SoundCloud at Iris.

Please add IrisVR to the list. We're building AR / VR collaboration tools for 3D design pros, so lots of interesting challenges here for the right designers and engineers.

We're hiring a DevOps engineer (kubernetes, google, terraform, golang) and a Software Engineer for our desktop app (web/cloud technologies, electron, javascript, node) and would love to talk with anyone in NYC or Boston.

</comment><comment><USER12> If anyone is looking to maintain an entire team (especially in the areas listed in my profile, but any good dev+cloud team actually), I will hire you as an entire team.

Unfortunately, not many names on this list in NYC which is where we'd prefer, but I can also do L.A., Phoenix/Tempe/Chandler, S.F., San Diego, Charlotte, or other options.

Of course, happy to hire individuals as well.

My username at gmail.

</comment><comment><USER13> Please add Squarespace! We're hiring all kinds of technical and non-technical talent in NYC and we're working on building a more beautiful web. Interested parties can reach out directly to our lead tech recruiter Kelly Jeanes (firstname.lastname@example.com) or apply here: [http://grnh.se/dn27gt1](http://grnh.se/dn27gt1)

Here's all of your columns: Company: Squarespace

Role: Creative Developer / SRE Manager / Android Eng / Frontend Eng / Product Backend Eng / Analytics Eng / App Infrastructure Eng / Data Pipelines Eng / Core Services Eng / Security Eng / SRE Eng / Recruiters / PMs / Designers

Location: NYC

Remote: No

All job listings: [http://grnh.se/dn27gt1](http://grnh.se/dn27gt1)

Contact Kelly (email@example.com)

</comment><comment> wc- Copying my post from the who's hiring thread to here. Always been a fan of SC and clearly there were a ton of talented people working there. If you are anywhere along the spectrum of data scientist to data engineer and interested in python and go, shoot me an email.

Short term contract-based jobs are available if you are just looking for something to generate a little income while you explore the market.

Job posting:

Exigent Capital | Chicago | Data Scientists, Data Engineers | Full-time, Contract, Part-time | Onsite or Remote

Market Making / HFT group focused on cryptocurrency exchanges. Looking for quant / data scientists to find new edges in the market and talented Go/Python engineers to expand the trading platform.

Contact wes+hnsc ||at|| exigentcapital.com

</comment><comment><USER14> If anyone from SoundCloud is passionate about podcasts get in touch at hello at zencast dot fm ([https://zencast.fm](https://zencast.fm))

I'm currently in Berlin if anyone would like to grab coffee.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can add Sprout Social in Chicago to this list (assuming OP has write access).

Sprout Social | Chicago | ONSITE | [https://sproutsocial.com/careers/open- positions](https://sproutsocial.com/careers/open-positions)

We are hiring people in all engineering and product roles. We are looking for Python engineers, React.js engineers, SREs, QA, Mobile (iOS, Android, and React Native), etc.

Also, if you would like to add our resident recruitment lead to the list on the "recruiters" tab, here is their contact info (and info for the columns in the sheet):

Amy Wolcott | firstname.lastname@example.com | Sprout Social | Talent Lead

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow... based on this list - Companies might consider hiring in Denver/Boulder... because SF looks like a mad house.

</comment><comment><USER17> [http://www.avclub.com/article/soundcloud-has-laid-40-its- emp...](http://www.avclub.com/article/soundcloud-has-laid-40-its- employees-257793)

<comment><USER18> Forgive my naivete, but _what happened to AV Club_?

<comment><USER19> Do you mean that you wouldn't expect them to write an article about this? The "A" in "AV" does stand for audio

<comment><USER18> Newswire business stories aggregated from Bloomberg are not that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Adobe Ad Cloud is hiring !

Want to help us build the best data engineering platform in the industry that handles billions of ad events every day including a vast distributed system that makes 250,000+ decisions per second ? Join us build the first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats, simplifying what has been a complex and fragmented process for the world's biggest brands. We're hiring for senior & lead dev and qe roles

[https://adobe.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/external_experienced/job...](https://adobe.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/external_experienced/job/Emeryville/Lead- Software-Engineer_52914)

[https://adobe.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en- US/external_experienc...](https://adobe.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en- US/external_experienced/job/Emeryville/Sr-Developer_48813)

[https://adobe.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/external_experienced/job...](https://adobe.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/external_experienced/job/Emeryville/Senior- Software-Engineer--Test-Engineering_52900)

</comment><comment><USER21> Hi, alexis richardson here from weaveworks. We have a berlin office and would love to hire people who want to work in our main areas. See [https://www.weave.works/company/hiring/](https://www.weave.works/company/hiring/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Very sorry to hear about the news SoundClouders. I was an avid user and loved the site, especially how you could comment on specific parts of the songs.

We've got a bunch of engineering positions (everything from entry level to Sr level) at The Trade Desk in a variety of different locations such as London, Sydney, San Francisco, New York, Boulder, San Jose, Aliso Viejo, Ventura and Bellevue.

Here's a list of our open jobs: [https://www.thetradedesk.com/join-us/open- positions](https://www.thetradedesk.com/join-us/open-positions)

Please feel free to email me directly as well if you'd just like to hear more. email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER23> Context? Were there layoffs at SC?

<comment><USER24> Discussion yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14711461)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If anyone on this list is interested in working at Reddit, we're hiring a ton of people in Engineering and other departments in SF! Check out our jobs page: [https://about.reddit.com/careers/#jobs-16253](https://about.reddit.com/careers/#jobs-16253)

If anything seems interesting, you can email me at saurabh.sharma at reddit.com

From an engineer's perspective, it's a wonderful opportunity to be part of a company that's only now building out most of their tech stack. We get quite a lot of traffic and it's very interesting to work at this scale.

</comment><comment><USER26> We'll triage at [http://www.layoff-aid.com](http://www.layoff-aid.com) starting with SF, where we launched last week.

We've been building a solid list of hiring companies for several months already. Our mission is to help people affected by layoffs and we're now ready with a network of local companies specifically hiring SF tech talent affected by layoffs.

May expand to NYC pretty soon given demand. NYC/SF/Boston Hiring companies can sign up now to get people from the next SoundCloud, Etsy, Twitter, etc

</comment><comment><USER27> If anyone is interested in the future of Network Automation and Orchestration, Itential is a start up in Atlanta looking to make big waves. Check us out. [http://www.itential.com/careers/](http://www.itential.com/careers/)

</comment><comment><USER28> If any of you on that list are interested in hacking on docker, kubernetes/docker swarm, aws/azure/google cloud or infrastructure provisioning tools (terraform, cloudformation, cm tools like chef and puppet) and making scalable and testable infrastructure a reality at really large companies, email me at firstname.lastname@example.com.

I've been working with some amazing folks on some really interesting projects, and we have clients all over the world. We are located in NYC, London and Melbourne but hire from anywhere (I live in Dallas.)

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting, was this set up by someone from soundcloud or independently?

<comment><USER30> Does it matter?

<comment><USER29> Yes. If it was set up from outside it has the feel of imposing a job hunting strategy on people without their involvement.

<comment><USER31> Given the skill summary of each employee I'm guessing this is an insider effort. And kudos to them! This is a great way to turn a sad situation into a springboard for new opportunities. Would love to see it repeated in the future.

Also what would be the benefit to a head hunter in sharing this data?

<comment><USER29> That's a fair guess. It was more a "maybe some of them want time off without getting above average interview offer spam". Overall I think it's a good thing too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Markus, Founder of DataRevenue here - we can't open the original sheet for editing as that would put the employees data at risk. So here's another sheet for companies to post and edit directly - [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JDx5acZPvdmmSeMyEr77...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JDx5acZPvdmmSeMyEr778TmdE52c1etHEBr-3FrIHQU/edit#gid=0)

</comment><comment><USER32> The spreadsheet columns are not matching the right companies.

For example, the link for Modomoto points to jobs at Oberlo. The link for Modomoto jobs is under Zalando.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, had to go in and fix the entry I put up yesterday for SeatGeek. We're hiring, NYC, CPH, Portland and Remote! [http://seatgeek.com/jobs](http://seatgeek.com/jobs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If any Back-end and Mobile engineers from SoundCloud is looking to make a transition into healthcare. do get in touch jobs[at]outcomes4me[dot]com or visit this landing page outcomes4me.com to see our open positions.

Short term contract-based jobs can also be arranged if you are just looking for something to generate a little income while you explore the market.

</comment><comment><USER35> We're building out the future of TV at Philo in SF. There are lots of hard/fun engineering challenges to take on all across the stack. We're hiring core engineering members who will get to launch our product into the market and grow our user base by an order of magnitude.

If you're curious to learn more please reach out to me at maxg at (company name) dot com

</comment><comment><USER36> Seeing so many presumably youngish and modern companies listed, I was struck by how many of them offered no remote work. Is remote work an idea whose time still hasn't come yet for many companies, or is it actually declining ? (Yahoo! was one of the companies listed, and they famously abolished remote work some years ago)

</comment><comment><USER37> CTO of PolicyGenius (NYC) here. We'd love to have former SoundClouders come join. Not just for engineering, we have a bunch of openings across the business. You can also email email@example.com.

[https://boards.greenhouse.io/policygenius](https://boards.greenhouse.io/policygenius)

</comment><comment><USER38> Please add Gigster to the list of companies hiring (www.gigster.com). We're hiring for Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, Product and Ops. Open roles are here - [https://jobs.lever.co/gigster](https://jobs.lever.co/gigster).

Roles are in SF and in some cases remote.

</comment><comment><USER39> Capital One is hiring for all kinds of roles in SF, New York, McLean and Richmond, VA, and other places as well: [http://rolp.co/oZ3Nb](http://rolp.co/oZ3Nb) and/or you can email me with questions at josh.rotenberg at capitalone.com

</comment><comment><USER40> CB Insights is hiring across the board in Engineering, Marketing, BD, Research and more in the NYC office: [https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs](https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs) or you can email me directly at: mchang at cbinsights.com

</comment><comment><USER41> A bit late to the party, but does anyone now how to add a company to this excel sheet with their former employees seeking new jobs?

</comment><comment><USER42> Credit Karma | San Francisco, Charlotte, LA | Full Time, ONSITE | [https://creditkarma.com/careers](https://creditkarma.com/careers)

If you're a scala engineer in sf who knows finagle, we're hiring. Plus, pretty much everything else.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sad for Berlin.

But what great times we live in actually, a community caring for people they don't even know.

</comment><comment><USER44> You can ADD LADDERS in NYC to the list of willing to hire! Javascript React front end Java/Clojure backend! also looking Technical Product Manager and account managers

I am INTERNAL technical recruiter please feel free to reach out firstname.lastname@example.com

Douglas Rosa 646-307-7522

</comment><comment><USER45> We (Searchmetrics, [http://www.searchmetrics.com/](http://www.searchmetrics.com/) ) are happy to hire Data Scientists, Frontend Developers, and Backend Developers in Berlin :-)

</comment><comment><USER46> Please add MakerSights, Inc to the list of companies hiring. ([https://www.makersights.com](https://www.makersights.com))

\- Hiring engineering, UI/product design (in SF, will consider remote).

</comment><comment><USER47> C++ devs - zenAud.io GmbH wants to meet you. We make the world's first AU/VST hosting and MIDI capable _sequenced_ live looper.

[https://zenAud.io](https://zenAud.io)

email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER48> Can you add Zenly please?

We work with Go, Go Mobile, C++, gRPC, Maps, UE4/Unity/Vulkan, distributed systems, low level systems development, Spark, iOS, Android.

We're located in Paris, France.

Reach out to me directly at steeve at zen dot ly.

</comment><comment><USER49> Most of these people are listed as still working at SoundCloud - what is the "explain it like I'm five" about this document? Did all of the employees just get laid off and I missed that news?

<comment><USER50> looks like ELI5'd it to yourself haha

<comment><USER49> lol.. yeah

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Jet.com are hiring in Dublin for all you Berliners

[https://jet.com/careers/locations/dublin](https://jet.com/careers/locations/dublin)

</comment><comment><USER52> Please add to the list of companies hiring :)

SketchDeck, Full stack engineer, Sunnyvale California, No remote, Join our little dev team to grow our design marketplace - happy to talk: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER53> Is there a way to add my company to the list of recruiters or export it as a .xls/.csv.

GrowingStartup.com would love to work with some of these people. I'm glad to see how supportive everyone is.

</comment><comment><USER54> Do the people listed know that their email addresses, possibly personal, are listed on a public spreadsheet with massive visibility?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the list was built by SoundClouders asked to share. Everyone on the list added themselves to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> BTW what are notice periods for Berlin and London based SoundClouders?

For SF it's 2 weeks I assume?

<comment><USER56> Based on the contracts I've seen in Germany the notice period is usually around 3-6 months, though the mandatory periods are a lot shorter (~4 weeks if you have been with the company for at least 6 months, up to 7 months if you have been with the company for a long time). IANAL and I don't know the SoundCloud contracts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Wow, I had no idea Phil Collins worked for SoundCloud! :D

</comment><comment><USER58> What a shame, SoundCloud is/was a great service.

</comment><comment><USER59> Gib job.

</comment><comment><USER31> You can add SoundHound (the confusingly similarly named and colored startup with not unrelated lines of work) to the list of companies willing to hire!

I'll copy paste my usual Who's Hiring message here:

SoundHound | All roles available in Santa Clara/San Francisco. Engineering roles only in Toronto. NLP only in Sacramento/Baltimore | ONSITE - [http://soundhound.com/careers](http://soundhound.com/careers) I'm an NLU / Data Engineer at SH. We've just raised $75 Million from NVIDIA, Samsung, KP and others to take on Amazon and Google in AI with our "Collective AI" Houndify platform. Our open Houndify platform has the world's fastest speech recognition and most sophisticated natural language understanding. We've had a lot of interest from partners and there are a LOT of really interesting projects being worked on requiring complex problem solvers who can work well independently. Things have come a long way since our leaked demo video took top spot on Reddit a year ago! [https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/38fdyl/this_is_insa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/38fdyl/this_is_insane/) [https://www.houndify.com/](https://www.houndify.com/) [http://app.jobvite.com/m?3uCiQhw0](http://app.jobvite.com/m?3uCiQhw0) If you have any questions you'd like to ask an engineer here just email me: rob at (company name) dot com. I respond to all emails but please no agents!

<comment><USER6> Hey Robbo, thanks for the post we've created another spreadsheet so companies post directly - [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JDx5acZPvdmmSeMyEr77...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JDx5acZPvdmmSeMyEr778TmdE52c1etHEBr-3FrIHQU/edit#gid=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> You recently wrote: > It is hard to determine which is needed more, as a home has costs, loosing a job leads usually loosing a home.

It sucks to lose a job. These folks lost their jobs suddenly, and without having done anything wrong.

Simultaneously, the industry struggles to find qualified talent. Somebody put two and two together, and realized there's a quick, easy, and inexpensive way to slightly help reduce the pain of a layoff.

I'm sure these folks would've found jobs anyway, but this might help a few find it faster.

Frankly, I find it very disturbing that you understand the pain of job loss, but mock people who are reducing the pain. It says a lot about you; but those people are good people. Better than you'll ever be.

<comment><USER61> It looks like you've created several accounts to post this kind of personal attack today. Would you please not do that here?

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14720640) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> MemSQL here! We have open positions for a number of roles! You can see the full list here: [http://www.memsql.com/jobs/](http://www.memsql.com/jobs/)

Some highlights from the list:

* Javascript engineers who want to work on React.js based single page browser applications. We are pushing the boundaries with what you can do in the browser. From running the entire binary protocol on the client to rendering an amazing user experience, everyone is able to find something they love to do at MemSQL.

* SRE's with experience with both cloud and on-premise - come work with a team of experienced SRE's managing infrastructure spanning multiple international locations.

* Software engineers with a focus on systems - MemSQL delivers a advanced, enterprise ready database to customers worldwide. Come work on hard problems like code-generation, query optimization, vectorized execution, and more.

Please add MemSQL to the list, and for people who want to learn more feel free to email me directly or apply on our website. carl at (company name) dot com. I will respond to all direct (non-agent) communication.

</comment><comment><USER63> I am pretty sure all ex-soundclouders are going to be super happy when low- ball offers start coming to them. They should consider their next job a temporary one and immediately start searching for another, better one...

EDIT: for downvoters, you probably never worked for Berlin startups, right?

<comment><USER64> To get a job in Berlin one has to answer itself an important and fundamental question "what's the lowest salary you can accept?" (it gets lower as one becomes more desperate so it's worth to play ontime, the rent will not become any cheaper, and the monthly health insurance contributions - oh boy).

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I may have lost current trends, but this is very disturbing to me.

Putting up this data together is very disturbing and to be honest somewhat desperate in my eyes. Cannot these guys find jobs themselves, they must be sold in a bundle, or what is the idea behind?

I believe the startup bubble is starting to slowly drain, and we'll see more and more of this.

<comment><USER66> The reason I usually hear: Good engineers almost always have jobs and usually aren't looking to change. When large layoff events happen good and bad engineers lose their jobs. This gives other companies an opportunity to recruit better talent with less effort than usual and, if they're really lucky, recruit entire teams that have worked together before.

<comment><USER67> One concern with that would be that good engineers would usually see this on the horizon and leave for better / more prospective jobs in advance. So those who stayed until mass layoffs might not be the top talent that used to work at the company before when it was doing better.

I am not sure it applies in this case as this was quite sudden and we don't have enough visibility to see how many red flags were there few months / a year ago. In this case it seems to have been so sudden that lots of great people have been caught off guard.

<comment><USER68> There are actual a host of real life circumstances such as family, babies, health etc. that might prevent or make it difficult for someone to conduct a preemptive job search or job change.

<comment><USER67> Yes I think this is actually a big factor I had not thought about.

People with families, children, mortgages etc might be more prone to staying and hoping for the ship to be righted rather than preemptively moving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> JSavage-Toptal Take a moment to check out Toptal opportunities! [https://www.toptal.com/careers](https://www.toptal.com/careers) We're a 100% remote company that allows people to work from anywhere in the world. Our people make up the top 3% of freelance talent. The people at Toptal are truly some of the smartest, most interesting people you will come across in your career. We currently have a number of open Core Team roles in addition to freelance opportunities: Client Experience Roles, Back-end Developer, Content Strategist, Sales Recruiter, Client Partner, Engineering Manager, Desktop Developer, Front-end Developer

<comment><USER69> I didn't make the 3% cut, and had a pretty awful experience going through the interview process at Toptal. I was given a Euler-project type of problem that I had to live-code under a (I believe) 20 or 30 minutes. After I didn't succeed the interviewer basically hung up on the Skype call, and I wasn't really given any further feedback after soliciting it, other than 'you're allowed to try again after 30 days'. The whole thing seemed a bit ridiculous, as they approached me specifically for my (10+ years) PHP experience. I was told there was a lot of demand for it by their customers.

The Euler problem seemed to have a pretty low bearing on what most PHP programmers would do, so it all seemed super unfair. Had the challenge been anything related to API's, architecture or scalability I'm sure I would have passed. But doing math related to primes simply is not something that I practically ever need in my work so I was fairly dusty.

I would absolutely not recommend interviewing with them. Prepare to be disrespected unless you tick their specific boxes unrelated to the work you'll actually be doing.</comment></comment>


Dynamically generated iPhone App Buttons - <AUTHOR> http://blog.appsto.com/customized-buttons-for-your-app

<comment><USER2> What a great way to promote your iTunes affiliate links. This is genius! It's useful to app developers and silently makes money.</comment>


What's wrong with Android - paper mail - <AUTHOR> http://jawcl.com/post/10648454899/whats-wrong-with-android <comment><USER2> Dude, just toss cyanogenmod on it.

 _Android is an open source platform that any manufacturer can easily port it to their devices. This makes things incompatible, slow, and downright unusable in most instances._

So you trust apple as a manufacturer to deliver good software, then you buy from an untrusted manufacturer, that you know has the freedom to muck around with the software as they wish without finding out if its going to be any good or not? And then you blame google for giving them the freedom to do shoot themselves in the foot?

Yes, HTC dropped the ball with the thunderbolt firmware, but I did my research and walked out of the Verizon store knowing the first thing I would do when I got home was to put better firmware on it.

 _In the end, Android users have no idea what a nice phone is since they're used to such a sad piece of junk_

Fuck you too, buddy. I have my old iPhone in a drawer somewhere and could go back to using it tonight at no additional cost, but I don't want to.</comment>


What is a y-combinator? (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/93526/what-is-a-y-combinator <comment><USER2> This is what the factorial function looks like in (almost) pure lambda calculus:

        ((λ (f) ((λ (g) (g g)) (λ (h) (λ (x) ((f (h h)) x)))))  ; <-- The Y combinator
         (λ (f)
            (λ (n)
               (if ((λ (p a b) (p a b)) ((λ (n) (n (λ (x) (λ (x y) y)) (λ (x y) x))) n) t nil)
                 ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x)))) (λ (f x) x))
                 ((λ (m n) (m ((λ (m n) (λ (f x) (m f (n f x)))) n) (λ (f x) x)))
                  n (f ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (n (λ (g h) (h (g f))) (λ (u) x) (λ (u) u)))) n)))))))

You can actually run this code with an appropriate definition of λ:

        ? (((λ (f) ((λ (g) (g g)) (λ (h) (λ (x) ((f (h h)) x)))))
            (λ (f)
               (λ (n)
                  (if ((λ (p a b) (p a b)) ((λ (n) (n (λ (x) (λ (x y) y)) (λ (x y) x))) n) t nil)
                    ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x)))) (λ (f x) x))
                    ((λ (m n) (m ((λ (m n) (λ (f x) (m f (n f x)))) n) (λ (f x) x)))
                     n (f ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (n (λ (g h) (h (g f))) (λ (u) x) (λ (u) u)))) n)))))))
           ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))    ; <-- This is the number 6 expressed as a Church numeral
            ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
             ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
              ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
               ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
                ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
                 (λ (f x) x))))))))
        #<COMPILED-LEXICAL-CLOSURE #x30200214436F>
        ? (funcall * '1+ 0)
        720

Writing the code for λ is left as an exercise :-)

<comment><USER3> I have no idea what I am reading, where do you learn this sort of things? computer science? math? or else... how long would it take for someone to understand this topics?

<comment><USER4> It's just lisp(-y, an s-expression language). You can learn the language in under 10 minutes. After that, understanding the y-combinator is just sitting down and deconstructing that code for an hour or two.

Basically it looks so complicated because it lacks as much structure as a language can possibly lack while still being turing complete. This makes it easy to map to lambda-calculus, something mathematicians use for reasoning about programming.

edit: am I wrong?

<comment><USER2> You're wrong about LC being (necessarily) Lisp-y. Church's original notation for the lambda calculus was not based on S-expressions. (Those were invented 30+ years later by John McCarthy.) I only used s-expression notation for the factorial example to drive home the point that you can actually run this code.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I did not mean to imply that LC is Lisp-y. I just meant that the notation you used is valid lisp (as far as I can tell) and can therefore be read, learned about, executed and deconstructed rather easily.

I was downvoted a few times, but I actually think the line "it's just lisp" is a better response to the commenters question than any of the other comments that attempt to explain what LC is. Why explain an algorithmic construct to someone in mathematical notation, if there's an executable notation that's easier on the eyes (at least for a programmer)?

<comment><USER2> I certainly used Lisp notation, but if you think it's "just Lisp" then you're kind of missing the point. It's not just "just Lisp", it's "just _lambda_ ". There is nothing else in there, no primitives, no numbers, no CAR, CDR, CONS, COND or QUOTE. And, to drive home the point that the Y combinator is in there, no DEFUN, LABELS or LETREC. (Well, OK, there's an IF in there, but even that could be gotten rid of with a lazy lambda.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are curious about the topic, I strongly recommend watching these videos:

Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs)

Programming with Nothing by Tom Stuart [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUhlNx_- wYk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUhlNx_-wYk)

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's a CoffeeScript fixed-point combinator I wrote some time ago:

      y = ((y)->y y) (y) -> (f) -> (n) -> (f (y y) f) n

Its a little different than the common implementation of y combinator, but looks cooler imo :)

edit: also, a question - a comment on stackoverflow says that fixed-point combinators are used to prove the turing-completeness of lambda calculus. Can't it be proved with something simpler, such as that?

      y = (f) -> (n) -> (f f) n
      fact = y (f) -> (n) -> if n is 0 then 1 else n * (f f) n-1

<comment><USER7> You don't need turing completeness to implement the factorial function, hence it is not a proof of turing completeness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recommend the explanations found here: [http://pl.barzilay.org/lec10.txt](http://pl.barzilay.org/lec10.txt)

</comment><comment><USER9> can't talk about fixed point combinators without mentioning my old favourite:

Yk = (L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L)

where:

L = λabcdefghijklmnopqstuvwxyzr. (r (t h i s i s a f i x e d p o i n t c o m b i n a t o r))

(see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed- point_combinator#Other_fi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed- point_combinator#Other_fixed-point_combinators))

<comment><USER10> Okay, now explain how it works.</comment></comment>


Will Google dominate the future?  - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Maybe. I actually feel like Google may be losing steam in some areas. They pushed themselves too wide and it feels like things are suffering. I know they want everyone to use G+ with their Google Drives and their Gmail accounts but I personally have never caught on to G+, and only used my Google Drive as last minute fix. Once I used my Drive I think I may like it more then Dropbox, but it's really not a large deal to me, especially when so many of my files are already on Dropbox. Gmail remains something which I use to send a quick email from, I don't know of anyone who really uses any of the other features (not that I could tell what they were anyway).

It's hard to say, I am excited for the self-driving car, though I really hope they would use it as a full-system and transfer it into the various car manufacturers, similar to an add-on.

It's also important to point out Google always has search too fall back on and as long as they don't change their webpage too drastically, they are a portal to the internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not that they are spreading themselves too thin, it's that their products aren't that great. They keep missing the mark, even when what the product should be (and what the user wants) is obvious.</comment>


The dynamics of correlated novelties - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140731/srep05890/full/srep05890.html?repost

<comment><USER2> Although these models are highly abstract that very fact enables them to form a foundation for many different fields.

* In thermodynamics the Ehrenfest model (or dog-flea model) was developed: [http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ehrenfest_model](http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ehrenfest_model)

* In spread of infectious diseases and vaccine efficacy models Polya urn models can be used.

* In exchangeable models (e.g. in classification where labels are assigned but without semantics!!) the Pitman-Yor (PY) process can be described as an urn model and exhibits power-law distribution (of items over the different classes) as well. The Pitman-Yor process is a (two-parameter) generalization of the Poisson-Dirichlet process. The "proper" distribution over the space of all partitions.

The urn model for PY is as follows. Start with a black ball with weight "b". At each step sample a ball proportional to its weight. If you sample a black ball, put it back in, along with another one black ball of weight "a", plus(!) a ball of a color - sampled from a base distribution H - with weight "1-a". If you sample a colored ball, put it back in, along with a ball of the same color and weight "1".

The model from Tria et al. is also a two-parameter model, but I've to check if it is indeed different. I guess it is, Strogatz rulez. ;-)

Edit: paper by Teh that describes Zipf's law (proportion of tables with n customers scales as O(n^{-1-d})) and Heap's law (total number of tables with n customers scales as O(n^d)) for the PY process: [http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~teh/research/npbayes/TehJor2010a....](http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~teh/research/npbayes/TehJor2010a.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> On chance and correlation to other discoveries.

"Novelties are a familiar part of daily life. They are also fundamental to the evolution of biological systems, human society, and technology. By opening new possibilities, one novelty can pave the way for others in a process that Kauffman has called "expanding the adjacent possible"."</comment>