Digg Version 4 - <AUTHOR> http://about.digg.com/blog/digg-version-4

<comment><USER2> Yahoo! cache since the blog is down: [http://22.214.171.124/search/srpcache?ei=UTF-8&p=http%3A%2...](http://22.214.171.124/search/srpcache?ei=UTF-8&p=http%3A%2F%2Fabout.digg.com%2Fblog%2Fdigg- version-4&fr=yfp-t-701&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fabout.digg.com%2fblog%2fdigg- version-4&d=777075753921&mkt=en-US&setlang=en- US&w=255d3bef,c7e4d0e0&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=XWRyJp4AhUUEpwqTHXz.FQ--)

</comment><comment><USER3> God I really hate this whole "following" bullshit. They turned Digg into the bastard child of Digg V3 and Twitter. Never gonna use it now.

<comment><USER4> yeah, I can't be bothered either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> He turned it into _Twitter for Just Links_

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been in the beta for a while now (they sent me an invite). I like it a lot better. I joined Digg when it was just a technology news site, and I used it less and less as it become more about other news than tech news, especially all the images and videos.

With the new Digg, I just friend those news sources I like so My News mostly shows things I'm interested it. The hard part is finding the right people to friend. I find articles that people submitted, but then I have to see if they've submitted a lot of stuff I don't like. If I friend them I may end up seeing a bunch of news I don't care about.

Still, I find Hacker News to be a much better tech news source.

<comment><USER7> The RSS autopost stuff puzzles me. Are they turning into an on-line RSS reader, with a shared discussion space?

<comment><USER8> "Big Site" were manually posting each story, so this just make it an automated function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tried it today, but it had a lot of bugs, almost every link I clicked something weird happen, now it's even down for quite some time. I guess they are fixing it like there's no tomorrow.

This is not good for the company rep. I mean, how can they launch a new version and the god damn thing it's crashing already ?

Com on Kevin, get Digg back to it's roots, this is Technology related + simplicity + ?? = profit.

</comment><comment><USER10> Topics bar on the side takes a lot of space on a small laptop.

Voting on the right feels weird (used to HN on the left)

In comments, avatar+username take a lot of space.

Same digg, just a few weird visual changes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Woah, their blog is powered by drupal. Odd. I guess their entire "about.digg.com" is probably Drupal. Looks like they're not doing a very good job scaling it :)

</comment><comment><USER12> At least the V4 loads way quicker than the previous site, I might actually use it more now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Upvoted! Heading to the DiggV4 event in NYC tonight. Any fellow HN readers gonna be there?

</comment><comment><USER14> Kinda. Is Digg still relevant?

<comment><USER15> Is this just snark or a real question? AFAIK digg is still one of the largest news aggregation sites on the web and is right now still looking for both a sustaining revenue stream and (maybe) an exit.

They're relevant on a whole ton of fronts.

<comment><USER16> Agreed they are very relevant.

However, in the tech community there are a lot of eyeballs on them because they've taken so much funding that they need a huge exit to make investors happy and for the acquisition to look like a success on Digg's end. They've yet to find that even though they've talked to many companies including Google. Also, they are no longer experiencing the growth they used to have and have somewhat flatlined, so many are skeptics that the new Digg will really help bring more traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Clicky to digg: <http://digg.com>

</comment><comment><USER18> umm is it down?

<comment><USER19> Looks like their blog is down. The actual site is up.

<comment><USER20> Their API isn't faring much better. I woke up to CI tests blaring alarms at me. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> anyone else get an http basic auth popup upon loading the main page? something about dads.digg.com, which I presume has to do with Digg Ads or something.</comment>


Theranos voids two years of Edison blood-test results - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-voids-two-years-of-edison-blood-test-results-1463616976?mod=e2tw <comment><USER2> Man this is not going to be good for the Clinton campaign.

[http://fortune.com/2016/03/21/clinton-campaign- theranos/](http://fortune.com/2016/03/21/clinton-campaign-theranos/)

(but the Clintons have a longer involvement with Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes through their Global initiative and even before that)

This sucks, I would really like something like the Edison machines to work. I really, truly hate needles myself.

</comment><comment><USER3> How's this company still in business? The entire operation seems to be a massive scam.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11727085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11727085) (29 points, 1 hour ago (a few minutes earlier), 2 comments)</comment>


Animatron: HTML5 Animation Editor Inspired by Middle-School Homework Assignment - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2014/04/17/animatron-html5-animation-editor-inspired-by-middle-school-homework-assignment/

<comment><USER2> If you like this sort of thing, and are on a Mac, you have Quartz Composer available, which I find fun to play with and which is actually pretty powerful.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer)

Among other things, you can make your own screensaver, and have access to various inputs and outputs such as the built in camera, mic, URL's, etc.

<comment><USER3> I've been using this QC toolkit for UI prototyping: [http://facebook.github.io/origami/](http://facebook.github.io/origami/) . Works pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why isn't the first thing I see on the Animatron website an animation made in their own app? [http://animatron.com/](http://animatron.com/)

Webflow did this with yesterday's post: [http://interactions.webflow.com/](http://interactions.webflow.com/)

<comment><USER5> it's coming in new website.

the video on the front page made in animatron [http://www.animatron.com/project/6487dd52e5835971c6bec25d](http://www.animatron.com/project/6487dd52e5835971c6bec25d)

and there are others of course [http://www.animatron.com/explore#staff- picks](http://www.animatron.com/explore#staff-picks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny that there is a link in that post back to an original earlier post on Hacker News: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7360296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7360296)

Interesting the team used GWT. I would like to see a post about how they found it, and if they would choose it again for a new project.

<comment><USER5> I would use GWT for any big webapp. tooling is way better for java than for js. having the same model on server and on a client is a huge plus as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Loved the article. I was happy to see something materialize out of GWT too!</comment>


The DIY PhD: Doing Independent Machine Learning Research - <AUTHOR> https://www.harshsikka.me/the-diy-phd/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

I've been contemplating doing independent research in ML and DL, and am really interested in building some informal structure around the activity. I just wanted to share my thoughts on the topic and get your feedback!</comment>


Analyzing fuzzy rankings of colleges - <AUTHOR> http://bit-player.org/2010/four-questions-about-fuzzy-rankings

<comment><USER2> Some questions to ponder while we all continue to wait for the new NRC rankings:

Are the data that will be used in the rankings losing their analytical validity since they will be from the 2005-2006 academic year?

Why wasn't the NRC able to produce its rankings more quickly, using more up- to-date information?

How many faculty members have switched institutions and departments since the NRC first started collecting data in fall 2006? This is very important because faculty data are a key part of the NRC's analysis.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great post. A quibble about the changed title: the NRC rankings are largely for university graduate-level departments such as math, not really for colleges.

</comment><comment><USER4> this post is really good. thx</comment>


2010: The year of the microslice server - <AUTHOR> http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/11/30/2010TheYearOfMicroSliceServers.aspx

<comment><USER2> The biggest take-away for me is this gives you an oppertunity to (somewhat) rebalance the performance equation of the server.

Currently, your typical dual-socket, quad/six core CPU, is quite top heavy: LOTS of CPU performance, only a satisfactory amount of RAM bandwidth (and in certain cases not limited by bandwidth but by the DRAM command rate), along with piddling disk and network performance.

You could create a dual or quad-core ARM Cortex A-9 chip with a dual-channel memory controller (more memory bandwidth/ops per degree of CPU performance), dual or single gigE (more relative bandwidth per node), and finish it with a single SSD (lots of IOPs). Since these nodes are fairly affordable (probably $500) and relatively low power (probably 10-15 watts, you're left with nodes that 1) offer 1/3rd the performance but are 1/5th the price and use 1/20th the power 2) can be scaled cheaply and predictability, particularly as it pertains to laying out your datacenter power and cooling infrastructure.

Also, for people who don't have complete control of their data center (they're renting rack space), it eliminates a significant amount of headache finagling your datacenter to provide enough amperage to your rack, and eliminates surprise deficiencies in their cooling infrastructure.... lessons I've learned the hard way. Micro-servers let you scale at a much more granular level so that you aren't rolling out several kilowatts of servers at a time, and let you avoid carrying excess capacity as you wait to grow-into it (only to scramble to scale after you're full-up again)

<comment><USER3> An aside reminder to everyone whose system shows spare CPU and bottlenecked IO: are you compressing everything you could?

It can be hard to get over the sense that always compressing and decompressing _everything_ that goes to disk is wasteful. But available CPU cycles left unused are marginally free and can't be stored us for use after the moment passes. They should be "wasted" to achieve even a slight improvement in overall throughput.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, the transparent compression built into WinXP and, I assume (perhaps wrongly) in Vista and Win7, makes everything slower, even on a system with lots of CPU and a slow disk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is so not my area of expertise. However, I wonder, wouldn't more small servers imply more hardware failures? Exchanging one HD in a big server might be less work than exchanging 10 HDs in small servers. Of course the HD in the big server might take down more "applications", but I think that is taken care of in other ways (hot swappable HDs, redundance?).

Overall I wonder if maybe a new OS for the cloud is called for? It seems inefficient to have seperate VMs running full OS for every tiny application. Maybe in the future not only storage will be a service (like S3), but also CPUs and RAM could be plugged together at will? Like there wouldn't be lots of small or big server instances, there would be farms of CPUs, farms of RAM, farms of storage, that could be combined at will. Maybe networking would be too much of a bottleneck, though :-/

<comment><USER6> The number of disks you have should be determined by your workload, not the number of servers. Think of it more like 12 disks in a big server vs. one disk in a small server -- the total number of disks (and disk failures) is the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/>

tl;dr IO is the bottle-neck, not the CPU. So slow CPUs on lots of nodes gives you more cost-effective (in terms of power costs) key-value lookups.

Of course, this makes layer-7 load balancing a huge problem, which is my own little project in this world. More on that later :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm hoping that these will shortly a) exist and b) be produced in enough volume that they unit cost will come down to <$100 levels. I'd like to buy a small, low-power cluster for hobbyist use but the current low-water mark is about $200 plus memory (which is limited to 2G). Hopefully there would be some standard on DC-DC distribution but that would just be gravy.

<comment><USER6> I doubt they'll be that micro; the optimal point looks closer to $500. Also, the minimum order tends to be a full rack. You should look at mini-ITX boards.

<comment><USER9> <$500 is totally doable. I'd ballpark retail for $350-$400 with an eventual volume price point of $300. Specs looking something like:

Dual core atom processor 2 GB Ram (expandable to 4gb) Solid state disk for OS Mini itx form factor

<comment><USER8> That's pretty close to doable today:

Supermicro 1U 230 barebones chassis is $200 [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101263&cm_re=atom_supermicro-_-16-101-263-_-Product)

$50 for ram and <$100 on storage for a HDD or $200 for a small SSD. Bulk prices would take that down by probably 10-20% today so you could probably do this for $300 today. I believe Dell is selling systems like this as private integrations just not retail, I'd imagine their costs are substantially lower.

Bump the CPU to a 330 or whatever, bump the ram sure but you're still talking $300 when a normal 1U HP server is <$1k list and is vastly more bang for buck. The cooling and power density arguments aren't going to be very persuasive (IMO) unless the price is there as well, hence my hope for very low per-unit costs, even if there are chassis/bladecenter components as part of the package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Traditionally, Intel and its partners have prevented the microserver market from taking off by limiting their Atom (and other low power) platforms to small amounts of RAM, usually 2-4GB.

It sounds like they're finally willing to open this up and allow a decent amount of ram (8GB and beyond) on low-power, tiny motherboards.

<comment><USER11> The upcoming ARM Cortex-A9 processor will own the microserver market if Intel doesn't let Atom compete. So if this is coming, then it's coming no matter what Intel does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I need to do more research, but you could build one of these for about $200-$300 depending on volume. Assume that the storage would be an SSD connected a larger storage block.

</comment><comment><USER9> The "netbooks of servers"?</comment>


The U.S. National Academies Reports on the Prospects for Quantum Computing - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/the-us-national-academies-reports-on-the-prospects-for-quantum-computing <comment><USER3> TLDR; Several experts in the field have published an academic research report on the progress and made the following statement:

 _Given the current state of quantum computing and recent rates of progress, it is highly unexpected that a quantum computer that can compromise RSA 2048 or comparable discrete logarithm-based public key cryptosystems will be built within the next decade._

The report can be found here: [https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25196/quantum- computing-progress...](https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25196/quantum-computing- progress-and-prospects)

A highly skeptical but less academic article is here: [https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-case- agains...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-case-against- quantum-computing)

<comment><USER4> This echoes my thoughts on the matter. I'm weakly pessimistic I'll live to see RSA 4096 broken in my lifetime. I'm also weakly pessimistic I'll see RSA 2048 broken in the next two decades.

It's a funny place to be in for me, because I'm generally skeptical the majority of my research will be practically useful in any meaningful way in the near term :)

<comment><USER5> I do some QC research. With the need for error correction, cracking real world encryption will require millions of qubits and that's unimaginable from where we are. I'd be surprised by 20 years and impressed by 50.

Note however that cracking crypto is unlikely to turn out to be super exciting - really secure systems have moved on and there will be plenty of time to upgrade before QC is widespread.

There are exciting applications of QC that are less than a decade away, eg quantum simulation.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that if you assume your encrypted traffic is being collected and stored today, and you want it to stay secret indefinitely, and you anticipate quantum computers will break discrete-log-based crypto in 20 years, then you need to deploy a post-quantum cryptosystem today.

<comment><USER7> This is a problem we face training activists and journalists in a number of countries. Esp places like China, Russia etc. We have to work hard to help people get the idea that a lot of the encrypted, password protected stuff etc they send now is potentially at risk in 5-10+ years. To a certain extent (but different context obviously), the lessons of the Venona Project comes to mind.

<comment><USER8> IIRC that's one of the big things the NSA's data center was doing - <USER2> Tor traffic with the assumption QC could break the public key crypto and either see where it was going/coming from or maybe even what was being sent (traffic itself)?

<comment><USER9> So use TOR today but expect a knock at the door sometime in the next 10 years, Scary Thought!

<comment><USER8> Take what I say with a grain of salt, I'm not a cryptographer.

It's my understanding the onion routing (what went where) could be cracked since it uses public key. The data itself may be fine because it uses private key, but if you sent the private key using a public key then you may be burned (IIRC there's a protocol where you send the symmetric key using public key crypto then fall back to private key since it's faster)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This report focuses so much on gate-based computation and says nothing about measurement-based schemes other than "they have attracted substantial interest". This is a massive omission and frankly undermines the entire report. This is disappointing given the prominence of the authors.

<comment><USER11> Ironic that news about "quantum computers" which so often overlook other schemes will often be accompanied by an image of a D-Wave chip and sample holder...

<comment><USER11> In fairness; breaking real crypto on D-Wave's hardware is still a very very long way off -- IIRC factoring 16 bits is plausible but still quite optimistic

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Glad to see this but it doesn't eliminate the issues surrounding how many less sophisticated encryption algorithms have been used.

The millennium bug got fixed only because we put money into solving it. That kind of emphasis needs to be put behind addressing the forthcoming encryption crisis.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that there is an encryption crisis because there are post quantum schemes : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- quantum_cryptography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography)

I think that it is expected that these can / will be brought into use well before QC becomes widely used and therefore attackers will only have the opportunity to decrypt public key traffic that is many years old. Very short keys can already be attacked using GPU clusters, and it is clear QC will be limited in power for a long time, so traffic encrypted with long RSA keys will be safe for many years.

Should extremely powerful QC be rapidly available, and should the public key quantum safe stuff be unworkable for some reason (for example very high speed transactions) then Quantum Key Distribution will provide an infrastructure to protect important traffic (financial institutions, markets, defence). The point here is that symmetric keys which are rather hard to break but fast to use can be distributed securely and rapidly and so can be changed very frequently meaning that attackers armed with fantastical QC would still have to spend vast resources to have any chance of reading traffic.

I think that the moderate resources being employed today are a good hedge for society dealing with this issue.

<comment><USER4> _> Quantum Key Distribution will provide an infrastructure..._

No. Quantum key distribution is a fugazzi. It's the red headed step child of actual cryptographic research in the quantum setting. Using quantum key distribution as the basis for a PKI would be ridiculously brittle and over- engineered. Note that the vast majority of interest and research on it comes not from cryptographers, but from physicists who are seeking a cryptographic problem to solve.

It's like saying we should abandon the computational complexity theoretic model of cryptography and go back to the information theoretic model. Basically, it's fairy dust sprinkled onto a one time pad. In modern cryptography the one time pad is (approximately) never used because pseudorandomness is sufficient. Key distribution is not a problem which requires quantum computers to solve. Orchestrating a key distribution ceremony using computers that must extraordinarily well calibrated and synchronized using quantum entanglement would be inefficient and asinine, to put it bluntly.

<comment><USER13> Quantum computers have nothing to do with QKD as far as I know. Instead you need things like this : [https://www.toshiba.eu/eu/Cambridge-Research- Laboratory/Quan...](https://www.toshiba.eu/eu/Cambridge-Research- Laboratory/Quantum-Information/Quantum-Key-Distribution/Toshiba-QKD-system/)

Which detect photon's one at a time (also there is spitting out of photons via lasers) The idea is that you have an infallible alarm for when the optics have been tapped, which means that you can then send lots of symmetric keys and know that they can't be intercepted (provided you are only sending them ~50km. So it's nothing to do with cryptography (really) either - which explains why cryptographers aren't that interested in it.

Also it's not a fugazzi as there are several working testbeds in the wild.

<comment><USER4> A system for providing assurance against tamper detection during key distribution is pretty clearly germane to cryptography. Cryptography already provides very mature solutions for tamper detection. Like I said, information theoretically secure tamper detection is over-engineered and unnecessary.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Worst Hyperinflations in History: Hungary in 1946 (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.globalfinancialdata.com/gfdblog/?p=2382 <comment><USER2> The article explain the real reason for almost all the cases of hyperinflation in history (maybe all of them):

"half of Hungary's industrial capacity was destroyed and 90% was damaged. Transportation was difficult because most of the rail lines and locomotives had been destroyed. What remained had either been taken by the Nazis back to Germany or seized as reparations by the Russians."

How can you avoid inflation if your productive capacity is destroyed? You can't.

How can you avoid "to print" more money if that destruction of real capacity is making your money less and less valuable? You can't.

The exact same case happened in Germany (because the war and the war debt 'reparations') and Zimbabwe (because the agriculture capacity was destroyed by a redistribution of the land) (1).

Obviously, it's the real economy what is important.

(1).- [http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3773](http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3773)

<comment><USER3> There's a big difference between supply problems leading to inflation (which has an equilibrium,) and government problems leading to inflation (which has no fundamental limit.) In one case it's best to imagine it as the price of scarce goods rising, in the other it's best to picture it as the value of notes falling. Then, it's clear that one has a bound that the other doesn't.

<comment><USER2> Maybe you can point me to an historical case of hyperinflation that was not due to a supply problem?, because I can't think of one.

Zimbabwe and similar are used continuously, by some people, as an example of the problem of running government deficits. That it's dishonest or ignorant.

<comment><USER3> Hyperinflation can't happen without a government problem, because if they were to just do nothing the prices would reach equilibrium with the supply scarcity and then stop rising. The _real_ question is, what happens to governments that causes them to respond to supply problems with inflationary policy?

Edit: Nonexistent government is also a government problem - I didn't mean it in _that_ way, I meant it in the sense of "problem related to government!"

As for "how can you keep things running when the supply-side collapses," you could replace inflation with taxes. You could achieve the same re-assignment of value explicitly instead of implicitly: people would end up just as robbed, but the currency wouldn't have to end up devalued. (This might end up helping the economy and making people less poor in the end, since it would mean that you still get to think about your inflationary/deflationary policy decisions. Essentially nobody would choose the regressiveness/progressiveness profile of hyperinflation if given the option, and would instead probably prefer to arrange the necessary pain in some other way.)

<comment><USER4> _> Hyperinflation can't happen without a government problem_

Somalia hasn't had a national government in 25 years, so there's no central authority to regulate the money supply or print currency.

Consequently, 98% of the bank notes in circulation are now poor-quality counterfeits, and buyers and sellers know they're fake.

The market has reached an equilibrium, with a single 1000-shilling denomination that trades at approximately the cost to print it.

Hyperinflation ends when the value of the currency equals the cost to print it, and when the population won't accept arbitrarily larger denominations.

You don't need a government to create a useful currency. Hyperinflation can begin and end with or without a government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somewhat related, the Forint still officially has minor units but practically they're never used except in some cases where they're for display only. Frustratingly some banks don't use them in transactional data, which can lead to interesting bugs: [https://leejo.github.io/2015/08/02/a_lot_of_huf/](https://leejo.github.io/2015/08/02/a_lot_of_huf/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Misleading title! " As devastating as the German inflation was, there were three hyperinflations that made the German case look amateurish: _Hungary in 1946_, Yugoslavia in 1992-1993 and Zimbabwe from 2004 to 2009. Of these three, Hungary's was the worst of them all."

<comment><USER7> From what I know of Zimbabwe's inflation, anecdotally, I can't imagine worse inflation. Makes me wonder if technology made it more manageable than the earlier inflation of Hungary. I could imagine having bar code scanners and comouter pricing would make it easier to update prices throughout the day. This would mean merchants still wouldn't want to sell earlier in the day, knowing they'd get more currency later, but at least the merchant knew they hadn't forgotten to put a new price sticker on that can of beans from this morning.

<comment><USER8> I lived through the entirety of Zimbabwe's hyperinflation era. I don't quite recall how the updates of prices were done, whether you would pick the item up, and it would just be updated by computer while you were waiting in line, or if you'd only hear the price at checkout, or if you would just learn the price at checkout. What I do recall is how utterly empty every store was, and the massive queues that people would stand in to get a loaf of bread.

Also, a lot of money in the streets, in the literal sense. As greater and greater denominations were printed, and earlier denominations became worthless, people would toss the old bills out. It's somewhat amusing that tourists actually buy this 'worthless' money for its novelty.

Realistically, by mid to late 2008, you would have had to purchase basic necessities (and certainly petrol) in South African rands or USD.

<comment><USER9> The whole thing sounds to me like a method of forced equality. Everyone had nothing, and everyone had to try their best to participate in the economy in order to get any of the limited supplies that were available. If you didn't work today, you wouldn't have anything of value to buy food today. Only after rebuilding a foundation for a more normal economy could the pressure be decrease. Is this a reasonable way to view it?

<comment><USER2> From what I've read, it seems that the reason for Zimbabwe hyperinflation was an attempt of "forced equality" but in a different way.

As an heritage of colonialism, 1% of the white people owned the 70% of the land, and agriculture was the main product of the economy and the main source of employment.

Mugabe decided to take the land from the whites and give it to their soldiers and mates who had not idea what to do with it. The production fell spectacularly. The following supply shock created the hyperinflation. The "printing" of money was just a consequence.

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not saying that a minority owning most of the land was a good thing. Just trying to explain my understanding of what happened.

<comment><USER10> Supply shocks can't cause general or sustained inflation. If farms stop producing anything, that should cause a shortage of farm-originated goods, and the prices of those things should increase. But the prices of other things should not change much; some prices will actually go down as people aren't as willing to pay as much as before.

If the farm workers all aren't getting paid anymore or a lot of loans are cancelled, that should cause deflation, not inflation.

Hyperinflation is always caused by inflationary treasury finance.

<comment><USER2> Well, following your theory, a dollar in the desert have infinite value ;-)

If your only export is farm-originated goods (as it's basically the case of Zimbabwe), that means that you have to import everything else.

That means that you need foreign currency for getting everything that it's not farm-originated goods.

If you stop producing farm-originated goods, the value of your money will drop respect the other currencies and you will need more and more or your currency to buy imports.

But even in a closed economy, less production and the same quantity of money, means, obviously, more expensive prices.

How could be otherwise? After all, you agree that the same production and more money means more expensive prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hyperinflation can have positive effects too for the population: borrow money from a bank to buy a house, see the currency hyperinflate, pay off the debt with a week's worth of work. It's obviously terrible if you have savings, but for those in debt it is pretty good.

<comment><USER12> Aren't most mortgages effectively inflation-adjusted nowadays? I know that my parent's monthly payments have been pretty low, thanks to the low levels of the Euribor rates.

<comment><USER7> You'd think so. When I looked at my mortgage paperwork a few years back in the US I looked for what I thought was standard "3 consecutive quarters of high interest rates" and couldn't find anything to imply my rates will ever change. I'm still not convinced I have a truly fixed rate mortgage, but it seems inflation has been so low for so long in the US, it's fallen out of standard mortgages here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > 150,000% PER DAY

That's quite something - so you'd have to stick three zeros on daily

</comment><comment><USER14> Misleading title. 2014 is the date of the article, not the time of inflation.

<comment><USER15> Thanks, we've updated the headline to clarify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Note that this isn't about Hungary in 2014, as I thought (and which shocked me). It's about Hungary in 1945–6.

</comment><comment><USER17> For such a short article it repeated a lot of things.

</comment><comment><USER18> >As devastating as the German inflation was, there were three hyperinflations that made the German case look amateurish

Well, even though Hungary and Zimbabwe had larger currency depreciation, I think the fact that neither ended with the Holocaust makes Germany's "worse"

<comment><USER19> That sounds like "post hoc ergo propter hoc" to me

<comment><USER18> And you have a perfect method of attributing causality in the social sciences? If this monetary crisis wasn't used as a tool to fuel antisemitism in Germany, I will eat my shoe.

<comment><USER20> During the period Hitler came to power, there was deflation, not inflation.

Inflation means your saving go to zero. Deflation means your mortgage and mortgage payments stay constant, while your salary and the price of your home falls by X% per year.

<comment><USER21> how does your salary fall during deflation?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linus Torvalds Says Linux Binary Packages Are Terrible - <AUTHOR> http://m.softpedia.com/linus-torvalds-says-linux-binary-packages-are-terrible-valve-might-save-the-desktop-458087.html

<comment><USER2> Just from a users perspective, this approach sucks. Ever tried to install a package on an older Ubuntu box only to find that the binary for this version has not been updated in over a year? Then you find out why: installing the (old versions) of shared libraries inevitably breaks installation of normal packages, and is usually followed by headaches and backtracking. I'm sweating just thinking about this!

</comment><comment><USER3> GoboLinux for the win!

[http://gobolinux.org/](http://gobolinux.org/)

Oh .. wait. Its dead. What a shame. Well, maybe its time to revive it - or at least, its concept of packages - so that we can solve this problem.</comment>


Show HN weekend project: Yet another HN reader - <AUTHOR> http://yahnr.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I was inspired by the NPR web apps post on here a week are so ago and just wanted to play around with hosting a static site on S3 that's generated via a cron job.

It's pretty simple but gave me an opportunity to play around with a few new technologies.

<comment><USER2> Looks great. I wish there was a mobile view that looked similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I should be able to make it responsive pretty quickly. I'm pretty much using Bootstrap with minimal customization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not bad, not bad at all!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's super minimal but I'll work on improving it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best database framework for storing user accounts? - <AUTHOR>

Would Redis be an acceptable solution? Perhaps a relational db would be better? <comment><USER2> You have not provided us with enough data to formulate an answer.</comment>


Asking Apple for all my data - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-request/ <comment><USER2> > DS Store is a long list of every time you logged in to iTunes and from which > specific device, and contains peripheral information like if the login > failed.

Coincidental acronym or some confusion over the presence of a .DS_Store file? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store)

<comment><USER3> From the screenshot, should be "DS Signons".

<comment><USER4> I missed that. I'm an asshole, sorry :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Partly as a result of regulation it seems all companies are offering ways of giving you your data. E.g. Google Takeout and Facebook's data download etc. One thing that's missing are software tools to allow you to do interesting things with your own data (in private). E.g. Google's MyActivity interface could be a lot better. My interest is partly out of frustration with things like Evernote's search, and also my desire to be able to ask questions of my data: When was I last at Costco? What was that web page I found from Hacker News during the morning last Monday or Tuesday? When did I last FaceTime my cousin?

Maybe some tools could be natural language based maybe others would be more visual.

It seems to me it would make a great open source project to build such a suite of tools.

It would also be a first step towards bringing individuals more in control of the value of their data.

Does anyone else agree (or disagree)?

<comment><USER6> > Partly as a result of regulation it seems all companies are offering ways of > giving you your data.

Entirely as a result of legislation or lawsuits, like stuff done by Max Schrems. The companies aren't doing this voluntarily at all.

<comment><USER5> Google Takeout may at least partly have been the result of (some) employees thinking it was the right thing to do. It's gotten a lot better over time, it used to be something much more crude that did seem like an internal grassroots thing....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The package is missing a lot of data: emails, photos, contacts, iCloud drive files.... it's the author using Google or some other services for that?

</comment><comment><USER8> Tinfoil hat on:

>What's interesting about the data is what Apple has -- and what it doesn't.

should probably be rephrased as:

What's interesting about the data is what Apple _decides to send me_ \-- and what it doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER9> Someone in China should ask

"Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud users"

[https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple- privacy...](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy- betrayal-for-chinese-icloud-users/)

</comment><comment><USER10> So how do I get Apple to delete all my data?

<comment><USER9> You can't. I wish Apple would create the exact same dashboard Google has.

Everything on one screen with the ability to remove and/or download.

My favorite part is you can see apps installed on each of your devices and permissions granted for each app.

That is what I also need from Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> it is quite funny that not even apple is using Apple Numbers internally

<comment><USER4> Who knows if they are, but it's generally courteous to ship data to an external party in a fairly universal format. For tables, it doesn't get much more universal than CSV.

<comment><USER11> on the screenshots there are .xlsx (on top) and .csv formats i was commenting about the .xlsx</comment></comment></comment>


Launched a payment processor that accepts XRP, DOGE, BTC, and LTC - <AUTHOR>

Yanni here from SNAPCARD (www.joinsnapcard.com), a browser bookmarklet that allows Bitcoin users to shop on ANY website using their BTC.
We just built a payment processor that allows us to now accept LTC, DOGE, and XRP!
You can check out an image of it here: http://imgur.com/WDaYUgN
Or, you can test it on our website @ https://www.joinsnapcard.com/
Let me know what you guys think.
Thank you! <comment><USER2> How do you guys make money with the main service? 2% seems too low for the manual work involved. Miles earning credit cards?

</comment><comment><USER3> Great job guys! Looking forward to new developments

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice - snapCard is rocking it!

</comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome!</comment>


Best solution for eBay Magento integration - <AUTHOR> Looking for an eBay Magento connector that can offer automatic inventory and sales processing. <comment><USER2> That'd be the 9th Magento question in 14 days, all without an answer. I think you should try a Magento-specific community like [https://magento.stackexchange.com/](https://magento.stackexchange.com/)</comment>


Ghost Producing: What the EDM Industry Doesn't Want You to Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.crossfadr.com/2013/04/10/ghost-producing-what-the-edm-industry-does-not-want-you-to-know/ <comment><USER2> Thing is, DJing and producing dance tracks are entirely different crafts. Somehow, when DJs playing other people's records achieved stardom, people started expecting them to release their own tracks, too. Some were good at it, but some weren't, so they hired someone else to help.

It isn't a very big problem, really, in my opinion. Most dance music fans can pick out the good from the bad anytime. An artist who consistently produces good records (acts like deadmau5, laurent garnier, and, yes, skrillex, come to mind, but there's a gazillion more) probably has control over what goes on in the studio. Ibiza deejays who have a dance chart hit or two, well, not so sure.

In fact, the amazement is a good thing. It means we expect dance producers to be original, the real thing. In other genres, most notably pop, we all expect the writing and composing and arrangement and everything else except the singing to have been done by anonymous, behind-the-scenes people.

As an example I was more amazed to discover that Take That actually write their own songs, than to find out that Afrojack hired a studio guy.

ps. As an interesting aside, great reading material is "The Manual" by the KLF[1]. Written in 1988, a big part of it is about how to get hired studio engineers and programmers to basically produce your hit record for you, without any necessary talent from your side. You just sit there and encourage them.

[1] [http://www.kirps.com/web/main/resources/music/themanual/](http://www.kirps.com/web/main/resources/music/themanual/)

<comment><USER3> Haha that's an awesome book, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was standard back when I was involved in the UK Hardcore scene. Novice producers would take a rough draft or an idea to a sound engineer and have it made into a song. The engineer was often a big name himself and sometimes the artists would use "engineered by X" when marketing their tracks.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only reason this is a problem is because, in the EDM scene, "producer" has somehow become confused with "artist"

Or to put it another way:

George Martin didn't write play a note or write a single song on the Beatle's albums but there was no taint attached to him being credited as the producer.

Language is a funny beast.

<comment><USER6> In hip hop and electronic music, "producer" is pretty much synonymous with "artist". In hip hop the MC is the one whose voice you hear, and the producer is, well, everything else: the beats and melodies in addition to the more traditional producer stuff like arrangement and mastering. Electronic music also follows this paradigm. As there is typically no live voice (any voice is typically coming from samples), the producer is the entirety of the production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Original forum thread: [http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/showthread/t-523822.html](http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/showthread/t-523822.html)

First comment: _This is hardly new information._

Anyway, nice to see trance making the HackerNews headlines! I just realized 1997 when I first met Assange was about the time _Ecuador!_ came out. Hehehe.

<comment><USER8> Escucha me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This has been an open secret for years and years, or so I thought anyway. There's plenty of bedroom producers smashing out EPs, but when you're working on big, stadium hits it requires a production team to get it right. Or, if you're a biggish name DJ you're expected to drop some tracks of your own but being a good DJ doesn't mean you can produce a track for toffee, you just know what works for your sets.

<comment><USER10> Nothing new here, although I am amazed that it is still considered a 'rumor'. Just fly to Breda, the Netherlands and look around in the EDM-scene. Many, if not most, of the upcoming DJs make and share with Tiesto. It's like a local business clique. Many of those guys even have full-time jobs next to producing, to pay for (lol) their hobbies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's funny he does not seem to mention Milli Vanilli... [1], winners of a Grammy (which was later revoked because, you know, they actually did not sing!).

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty commonplace and how a lot of producers get started. Danja ghosted a TON of Timbaland's mid-2000s work (think Nelly Fertado, Justin Timberlake, etc.) and was able to land his own gig with Britney Spears shortly thereafter.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't really understand the big deal here. It sounds like some artists collaborate or have some help writing parts of hit songs... what am I missing on why this is important?

<comment><USER14> It creates barriers to entry for new participants in the market. I don't lose lots of sleep over it but as someone who makes electronic music it's quite annoying to see that people with no talent or technical skill can just buy their way to stardom. It's an open secret that many of the top earners don't make their own music, but just trade on their brand or outrageous antics; eg Steve Aoki's party trick is throwing cake into the faces of girls during his live 'performances' \- [http://www.edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/superstar+Steve...](http://www.edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/superstar+Steve+Aoki+will+tell+there+throwing+cakes/7770410/story.html).

When I mention that I make electronic music and people ask me 'oh, is it like David Guetta' or suchlike I just want to cringe in embarrassment. Not because I consider myself a musical genius or anything, but being good at it requires years of study and practice like any other musical discipline, so it's depressing to see the market leaders that perpetuate the stereotype of electronic music as pushing a button and waving your hands in the air. I hope the fad either blows over over or audiences wise up a bit and demand a better standard of artistry, but that probably isn't going to happen :-/

<comment><USER15> Which inspired me to make this: [http://i.imgur.com/HwXGDmO.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/HwXGDmO.jpg)

I technically know what all the buttons and knobs do, have a basic understanding of music theory sufficient to make it sound like I almost know what I'm talking about, and half my friends are DJ's and some of them are producers, actually getting an idea out of my head and into the speakers is not something I care enough about to put the effort in to. I'm a physical infrastructure guy.

When people ask me what kind of music I listen to I'm a little cautious about saying "Minimal Techno, Drum & Bass, Psytrance, Dubstep, Trip Top", so now I just say "I used to listen to Minimal Techno, now I just to nothing", and see if they get the joke.

In my arrogant opinion, many of the "EDM" 'top earners' give 'electronic music'a bad name to those who think "EDM" and "Techno" are synonymous. My audiophile friends and I have introduced lots of people, young and old, to electronic music genres they didn't even know existed, and it's got them on their feet dancing.

Skrillex uses Prime Loops! [1] Anyone with GarageBand can do that. I always say "Skrillex isn't Dubstep, it's 'Commercial Shit-step".

[1] [http://primeloops.com/blog/index/post/title/skrillex-uses- pr...](http://primeloops.com/blog/index/post/title/skrillex-uses-prime-loops- vocals/)

<comment><USER16> >Skrillex uses Prime Loops! [1] Anyone with GarageBand can do that. I always say "Skrillex isn't Dubstep, it's 'Commercial Shit-step".

Which means absolutely nothing. Lots of very talented producers use loops and samples, and there's nothing wrong with that. As long as you use them creatively it says nothing about your skill as a musician or producer.

Yes, anyone with Garageband can use loops. But not everyone with Garageband can produce to a professional standard, or write a decent melody, or chord progression, or arrange a song, or create the perfect synth patch, or create something new-sounding etc.

<comment><USER15> You're entirely right, of course, and I agree. I was indulging in a bit of Skrillex-bashing.

<comment><USER14> You'll enjoy this: [http://afxaventurs.tumblr.com/](http://afxaventurs.tumblr.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In other news, Dr Dre doesn't build his Beats _by_ Dre in a shed at the end of his garden ;-)

A more serious parallel though, this is true of many artists (fine and modern alike) such as Damien Hirst with his spot paintings of which over 1000 exist and were supposedly mostly produced by other artists he selected. I think in the context of artist as _curator_ , this is quite acceptable.

<comment><USER14> Upvoted you, but disagree with the concept of artist as curator. That's just marketing, and IMHO highly destructive to art.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> GQ did an interesting article related to the topic.

[http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim- berg...](http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-bergling- profile-gq-april-2013)</comment>


Man takes emotional support clown to work as he fears being fired - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/man-emotional-support-clown-fired-new-zealand-joshua-jack-a9105871.html <comment><AUTHOR> _By the time the meeting was over, Jack didn 't have a job. But he did have two balloon animals: a unicorn and a poodle._</comment>


Hackers use parking tickets to attack victims with malware - <AUTHOR> http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/118488 <comment><USER2> I once had an idea to "hijack" cars/bikes. The criminal would install a lock on the car/bike, along with a note containing instructions on how to pay. Upon payment, they receive the key to the lock (it's theirs to keep, as a bonus) in the mail. Would be easier with a digital where the criminal would just give the victim the combo.

Anyway, my point is there's a lot of ways to scam people.</comment>


China Web Sites Seeking Users' Names  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/world/asia/06chinanet.html <comment><USER2> Should be easy enough. Just setup something like Facebook or have the Chinese version of MySpace ask for the user's real name.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting ... yet another example of convergence between Chinese and South Korean Internet cultures?</comment>


A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world - <AUTHOR> http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/01/20/a-brief-glimpse-of-nokias-popularity-outside-the-western-world/ <comment><USER2> Nokia has a pretty unparalleled manufacturing/delivery/logistics chain for low end phones. They like to claim they can put a phone on a shelf anywhere in africa for less than competitors' manufacturing costs. That's pretty impressive, if true. But we're talking about phones that retail for $35. The smartphones are a joke.

But the software! I sure hope Qt is starting to pay some dividends for them. When i was dealing with native Symbian/S40/S60 development a few years ago, I wanted to stick a fork in my eye.

<comment><USER3> The big threat there isn't Motorola or Samsung figuring out a way to ship phones around the world more efficiently -- it's local competitors in emerging markets. For example, India-based Micromax is gaining serious market share in the country at Nokia's expense.

<comment><USER4> This is not true. Micromax phones are just re-branded chinese/korean knockoff phones. There was a craze for these phone two years back because of dual-sim capability. Now everybody realized that the quality is very bad and started buying nokia/samsung/lg dual-sim phones instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nokia is also finally about to catch up on the developer side, which might prove to be a big advantage. If ease of development is in any way correlated with application quality, we might see some action in the Nokia world soon.

For the little glimpses that I've seen, UI development using Qt Quick and QML and is actually pretty nice. Nothing like the Symbian hell, and seemed a good deal more fun than developing for Android. (Can't say it's on par with iOS though, at least not yet.)

This is the first time I'm actually _excited_ by a Nokia technology.

Now is a good time to check it out, since the first phones supporting 4.7 are supposed to come out "soon" (my source at Nokia was reluctant at naming a specific date). And they just put out a new technology preview:

[http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology- pr...](http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-preview- released/)

If Qt / QML Quick seems a bit barebones, there's a library called Qt Components which adds things like checkboxes, progress bars etc.:

<http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components>

</comment><comment><USER6> I was in Rwanda last summer teaching a class on programming/entrepreneurship centered on mobile devices. The ubiquity and penetration of Nokia phones there is pretty incredible. Even some of the poorest of people have cell phones. Essentially, they are the only form of computing device for many of them, so it IS their smartphone. There are many services and businesses centered around SMS applications that are very useful. Rather than expensive plans, there are people lining the streets selling prepaid "airtime". Their 3G network is also just as fast as any I've had in the US despite not being connected to SEACOM (although this may be due to lack of traffic on the 3G network, I had a Nexus One Google provided while I was there). Nokia was one of the sponsors of my program because they see how valuable the African market is with their explosion of cell phone growth in the past few years.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't there quite a bit of data though to make this very static picture of the market somewhat irrelevant? I'm not trying to spread FUD. I would seriously like enlightenment if I'm wrong, but these are the conceptions that I have with respect to the more fluid nature of the market:

-The trend, throughout the world, is going heavily against Nokia

-Nokia's margins on each unit is a fraction of the competition

-Nokia's relevance is largely in a market (phones) which is being overtaken, faster in some parts of the world than others, by SmartPhones

-Profits for 3rd party developers of Nokia products are smaller than profits for 3rd party developers of the competition.

I'm sure there was a point in history when horses were more popular than cars in most of the world and we all know how that turned out.

<comment><USER8> Betting against high-selling low-margin products would be like betting against Wal-Mart. You can co-exist with them but you can't beat them at their own game, and their game is around to stay.

<comment><USER9> Betting that learning an app development framework plus Mandarin to sell apps on $35 phones probably isn't the best strategy for _developers_ is more reasonable though.

<comment><USER10> Why not? Long before the iPhone, several people got rich by selling J2ME apps to low end phones.

<comment><USER11> Can you name one or two J2ME apps that you ever purchased? I can't and I don't know anybody who did. It was a disaster trying to publish back then.

<comment><USER10> I published a J2ME app that was bought 20000 times. I also worked for a J2ME games company for a while.

Not sure if I ever bought a J2ME app myself. But then I have only bought one app for iPhone/Android so far: Monkey Island.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nokia sells alot of dumbphones right? Nokia sells more smartphones than dumbphones. Oh, and they've also been the most successful in transitioning customers to smartphones (60-70% of nokia dumbphone users become nokia smartphone users). Reading the US-centric blogs and tech-sites makes it seem like only the US companies are in the smartphone market (Google with Android, Apple with iOS, etc)

</comment><comment><USER13> While I understand the need for a metric to see where you should allocate R&D resources, most of these types of articles(as in not just this one, most of the iOS or Android as well) seem to be more interested in a branding popularity contest than providing any sort of useful info. Personally I dont care if swarms of people love or hate the device I use as long as it serves my needs. It just seems sorta tabloid-y to me.

</comment><comment><USER14> Whenever I read an article like this, I wonder what exactly they'd like me to do. Build software for customers whose markets I'm not familiar with, languages I don't speak, and customs and tastes I'm ignorant of? Sounds like a recipe for failure to me.

<comment><USER15> they want you to have a perspective

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is the chart measuring? The article implies that it represents App Store visits. Do they buy anything, though? That's the metric that's important to developers.

<comment><USER17> Heya, author here.

That's the tricky thing. As far as I can tell, the graph shows what percentage of phone users (or mobile Internet users?) regularly access the stores.

Basically, it suggests that about 9% of app users have iPhones in China (which still seems very high -- but I guess they're all in affluent areas), 13% have Android phones, and the rest have Symbian/Nokia phones (65%ish).

Most of the top apps in the China Mobile Mobile Market seem to be Symbian/S60 apps, too: [http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh- CN&...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh- CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm.10086.cn%2F%23)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe Nokia has 41% of the market today, but back in 2006 they had 76% of it (source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian>). They're losing ground like an avalanche, Symbian is quickly becoming irrelevant in this world.

</comment><comment><USER19> Any tales of HN-ers experience with Symbian?

<comment><USER20> The only way to do productive Symbian development in a non-deprecated environment is to use Qt. Run away from anything that says "Symbian" but isn't Qt.

The latest Symbian ships with a version of Qt (4.6.3) that isn't the cutting edge, but is good enough.

In typical Nokia manner, they've managed to make a dog's dinner of the SDK options: there's a regular Qt SDK, a Nokia-branded Qt SDK, a Symbian^3 SDK, a technology preview of Qt 4.7 for Symbian, etcetera ad absurdum.

AFAIK, the "Nokia Qt SDK" is the one you want. (If you make the mistake of choosing the wrong download and ask about it in the forums, prepare for condescending replies from Nokia employees who seemingly can't come to grips with the idea that they should provide a service to developers. I hope the new management will be able to do something about the innovation-hostile, inbred, not-invented-here cultural factions at Nokia.)

\- -

Despite the confusing options and cultural issues, the Nokia QT SDK is really quite nice. There are a few other very good things about the new Symbian^3 platform:

\- It has GPU acceleration as a standard, so you can rely on advanced features like OpenGL ES 2.0.

\- The platform is more than merely a single high-end device. There's a very nice mid-range option available already (the C6-01). The total sales of this platform should turn out quite impressive over its lifetime.

\- Nokia has promised to ship new features as free updates to Symbian^3, rather than baking them into firmware on new devices only as they used to do. AFAIK, these updates will include Qt 4.7 and a rewritten browser.

\- -

Unfortunately, Nokia is also shipping devices with the older Symbian versions. Qt is also the best way to write software for these platforms.

There's a "Qt Smart Installer" that is sort of a package manager. It's supposed to ensure that 3rd party applications can easily depend on Qt by simply packaging the Smart Installer with their apps. I don't know how well it works in practice, but if the alternative is to write to the crusty old Symbian C++ API, I'd take my chances with Smart Installer any day...

<comment><USER21> Easier of cross platform development is a good reason to use JavaMe in lieu of Qt when developing for Symbian because Android does not fully support C++ development.

[edit] eSWT provides access the GPU under Java.

<comment><USER22> JavaMe is not that cross-platform from what I've been told. Qt runs on Linux (including embedded), Mac, Windows, BeOS and Symbian/Maemo.

<comment><USER21> Only one of those operating systems, Symbian, is used on phones to any extent. JavaME runs under both Symbian and Android - and that's a lot of Mobile platforms. So if one is developing a mobile app on Symbian, Qt may not be the most flexible option once other currently available mobile platforms are considered.

<comment><USER23> From what I've seen, all Android phones do not have JavaME installed as default. My Samsung Galaxy I5700 did have it, but another phone my college tested with didn't have it.

This killed "hey we can just use our current MIDlet for Android users" -idea for us.

If anyone knows better, please let me know. Working on porting a MIDlet to Andoid right now. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's not about the current data, it's about the trends.

This is like saying that "90% of people still uses horse-powered vehicles to make their trips" five years after the invention of the steam engine.

<comment><USER17> This is basically the default avid-tech-blog-reader response :)

The only real trend is that Android is gaining ground -- which is no surprise, given that Android phones are the cheapest to make, and will only get cheaper!

Nokia/Symbian phones have just as many 'rich' features as their iOS/Android cousins. They're just not marketed as well, and they don't have the orgiastic support of the tech blogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> nokia is ubiquitous in India.heck the subaltern has a song about it. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpKodZMQr8>

<comment><USER26> About 3 years ago in the UK, business people had Blackberrys and everyone else had Nokia or Sony Ericsson phones. Fast forward to now and business people have iPhones or Blackberrys while teenagers tend to use Blackberrys (they're cheap and good at messaging). Others have iPhones or Androids with the exception of people who haven't upgraded their phone in a while who still have Nokia or Sony Ericsson devices.

<comment><USER27> Nokia has very little presence here in North America for reasons I haven't been able to fathom.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that most people in the UK will have have owned a Nokia at some point in the last 10-15 years. The brand really is that common. It's the cheap first phone you get, or a fast replacement if your smartphone dies and you still have a contract to uphold, or the phones parents buy their kids 'for emergencies'.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Nokia owns much of the GSM standard, and thus dislikes making CDMA phones. This limits their major models to the AT&T network in the USA.

Nokia also dislikes selling phones trough carriers -- they prefer marketing directly to consumers, not tying their phones to carrier-specific plans.

Together, this means that in the US there is only one carrier where their major model phones work, and that carrier considers Nokia's strategy to be openly hostile to them.

So no wonder they don't sell much.

<comment><USER28> Nokia also doesn't cut deals with carriers to subsidize the cost of their phones like many Android phone manufacturers do. "$520 for a phone? I can almost buy a laptop for that!"

<comment><USER29> My coworker from USA couldn't believe that I have paid 200$ for smartphone. I'm from Europe.

<comment> Tuna-Fish You can comfort yourself with the fact that after comparing the contracts, he probably paid a lot more for his.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _While Americans carry dogs around in handbags, Koreans eat them._

This is racist shock-talk aimed at Americans. Yes, this happens in Korea. My understanding is that some older people believe that by eating a dog, you gain the creature's vitality. I know that the majority of Koreans who live in the United States do not do this and their only involvement with the practice is to find such talk embarrassing. In many european countries, people also eat horses, which many Americans would find just as shocking. In parts of Louisiana, a lot of people will happily cook and eat just about any mammal.

Personally, I find this hypocritical, as many Americans happily (likely unknowingly) feed their family dog the processed meat of other dogs.

[http://www.bukisa.com/articles/294021_is-there-dog-meat- in-d...](http://www.bukisa.com/articles/294021_is-there-dog-meat-in-dog-food)

</comment><comment><USER31> Nokia is still pretty popular with the average person here in Italy, I think. The OVI store is a big ugly hairball though and unless they seriously fix things up, I've given up on trying to get my applications into it. The signing process is extremely bureaucratic.

</comment><comment><USER32> Hey, we still keep a prepaid Nokia around for basic phone calls. If you're just needing to call someone, they still get the job done, and oddly enough, the calling experience is often better (better sound) than on a smartphone.

Plus, it has a built in flashlight. Who can argue with that? ;)

</comment><comment><USER33> The article doesn't consider India where Nokia is the dominant player. But most of the phones they sell here are low-end to mid-range. They aren't that popular for smartphones. I don't have any statistics to show for this just my experiences.

</comment><comment><USER34> Are those percentages of users? How about market share of revenue?

</comment><comment><USER35> Until I can get a proper asian localization (on a shoestring budget) Nokia can have 100% market shere over there. It won't be of any use to me :(

<comment><USER36> I believe that Android does a pretty good job if you can find a good 3rd party soft keyboard. I havent used done much more than kick the tires in hangeul but Android seems to be pretty popular here in Korea.</comment></comment>


The iPod turns 15 today - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/23/13359534/ipod-mini-nano-touch-shuffle-15-years-visual-history-apple <comment><USER2> They should have mentioned the iPod 6th G Nano. It was almost if the Apple Watch came out from its evolution.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Nano#6th_generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Nano#6th_generation)

[https://www.engadget.com/2013/09/04/confused-by-the- galaxy-g...](https://www.engadget.com/2013/09/04/confused-by-the-galaxy-gear- apple-released-a-better-cheaper-wa/)</comment>


Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1977) - <AUTHOR> http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug-00020 <comment><USER2> The episode with the poker-assisted demonstration of the "simplicity of matter" could probably be interpreted as an expression of Wittgenstein's belief that metaphysics (which presumably a discussion of the nature of matter would constitute) could not be meaningfully discussed in words. When it comes to metaphysics (and other "nonsense": poetry, ethics), "show, don't tell."

This is how, for example, Janik and Toulmin's book Wittgenstein's Vienna, explain his obsession with Westerns (the film genre, not the people): they show what cannot be said about morality in their depiction of good, evil, loyalty, etc. Talk of "the simplicity of matter" would be nonsense, but we can definitely get something across by vigorously swinging a poker around. (There is general agreement, I believe, that Wittgenstein significantly revised his stance on what can be meaningfully said/done in language between the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations in the 50s.)

On the other hand, maybe he was just angry (he "threatened" Karl Popper with a poker during a philosophical disagreement).

Take all of this with a grain of salt, I am not a Wittgenstein expert.

</comment><comment><USER3> _A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring._ \- Wittgenstein

</comment><comment><USER4> Wittgenstein gave some lectures on mathematics and logic, where Alan Turing was present and they had discussions about mathematics (a book is available with the lectures on mathematics). That was 3 years after on Turing's paper on computable numbers.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, and Wittgenstein owns him if I remember correctly. Reading their conversations is like watching Frazier and Ali, absolute brilliance. I particularly remember one exchange where Turing argues that a solution to a chess problem could not be considered a mathematical proof, and W takes him down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't always agree with him but I always enjoy reading Hayek's writing.

Another little treat - Keynes and Hayek discussing the 2008 crisis in the US: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc)</comment>


Humans are the only animals who crave oblivion through suicide - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/humans-are-the-only-animals-who-crave-oblivion-through-suicide?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AeonMagazineEssays+%28Aeon+Magazine+Essays%29 <comment><USER2> It's alleged that a number of horses committed suicide (or more properly, _chose_ to die) rather than proceed on the Golden Staircase during the Klondike gold rush[0].

[0] [http://whatsupyukon.com/Yukon- Lifestyle/history/3%2C000-hors...](http://whatsupyukon.com/Yukon- Lifestyle/history/3%2C000-horses/#sthash.pg30i0t3.dpbs)

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe that turtle doves who have lost their mate also commit suicide.</comment>


The Absurdity of Detecting Gravitational Waves (2017) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphcyNWFD10 <comment><USER2> Happy to see Veritasium getting some attention on HN. You may have seen his previous video from 2014, Facebook Fraud: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

One of my favorite videos is on his alternate channel, 2veritasum. Survivor Bias: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w)

<comment><USER3> He's a great presenter, not the normal dumbed down documentaries that are fashionable these days. He actually tries to explain things, not just waffle and make the watcher feel good.

He recently made a full length movie:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got to visit LIGO in Louisiana a few years back. I remember they lamented that it was not as remote as they really wanted. The detector picked up nearby hunting activity, and logging activity in the woods. And they had to shut down measurements for a couple hours every week when the liquid nitrogen truck drove in due to the road vibrations it created.

It's an awesome experiment. And it requires huge computational resources to process all the data they take in.

<comment><USER5> The seismic isolation is much better since the Advanced LIGO upgrade completed in 2014 -- when were you there? (I'm also happy to answer any computing questions; that's my area.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if gravity wave detection could be ever be precise enough for communication.

I wonder this because it occurs to me that one possible answer to Fermi's paradox is that aliens don't use Radio or other EM to chat.

And maybe they don't leak it because they move energy and information around more efficiently than we do.

<comment><USER2> Another answer to the Fermi paradox is that a Kardashev Type 4 civilization is able to harness the power of an entire universe. We wouldn't be able to detect this by definition, since they exist outside of our perceived reality.

At first glance, this seems to be a useless theory, since it's not refutable. But it lends itself to a belief system: by studying the universe, we gain an understanding of whatever created it. This is helpful as a _motive_ : a reason for studying any of this at all, in absence of economic or social incentives.

This seems important. As the centuries tick by, and as we confirm and re- confirm that we are indeed alone and that we do indeed have a mostly-complete model of physics, there will become less and less incentive to analyze the corner cases. It's costly, and takes decades. But at one time, it was costly and took decades to build a cathedral. Yet we accomplished these impressive feats due to a shared belief system.

The reason I brought this up is that we often like to believe there is an advanced alien civilization tucked away in some corner of some galaxy, sending out messages via gravitational waves or neutrinos. But why do humans find this idea so seductive? It's because of an underlying loneliness: we want to believe that we are connected with the universe in some fashion, that our existence has a point, and that there is reason to do anything at all in a universe that will exist long after we've gone, long after our solar system and sun has gone. Because if there were an alien civilization, at least we would not be so alone.

In that context, a solution to Fermi's paradox is simply to believe that our very universe exists due to some higher-order phenomena not knowable within our reality. And by studying the laws of physics, we gain a glimpse into the boundary between our universe and its hypervisor.

<comment><USER7> > But why do humans find this idea so seductive? It's because of an underlying > loneliness: we want to believe that we are connected with the universe in > some fashion, that our existence has a point [...]

No. It's simply that statistically, we can't believe we are the first, nor that we are unique. It would be (statistically) extremely odd if we were, and there is a bias against anthropo-centric theories.

Heck, I'd be happier if we are alone (less risk and more free land), but if we appear to be, that seems odd, and worthy of investigation. No?

EDIT: Why do you claim to speak for all our hopes/dreams/desires? "We need this" or "We want that". Frankly, that's a little collectivist and creepy.

<comment><USER8> > No. It's simply that statistically, we can't believe we are the first, nor > that we are unique. It would be (statistically) extremely odd if we were, > and there is a bias against anthropo-centric theories.

Fermi's paradox does not ask about civilisations like ours. It asks about interstellar travelling or at least interstellar communicating species. We have not achieved this level yet so we are not the 'first' as you say. You might claim that our radio signals should be able to be detected, but they are so weak and have been travelling for such a short period of time that they may as well not exist to an outside observer. There may be millions of our type of civilisation out there presently and throughout history but they would all be undetectable to us and hence our civilisation doesn't play into the paradox.

<comment><USER9> Well one answer to the Fermi paradox is we get wiped out but barring that it seems unlikely we won't reach the stars in millions of years.

And you seem to ignore it, but the other part of the paradox is if we can achieve interstellar travel in millions of years, that's like no time at all on a galactic scale. So it would be a major coincidence if we are within 1 million years of the first.

<comment><USER8> As far as the Fermi paradox is concerned it's a much safer assumption to make that advanced civilisations will achieve interstellar communication before they achieve interstellar travel.

Even so, my point is that human technology tells us nothing about the probility of a civilisation ever developing interstellar communication because we haven't seen it happen yet. We are still at the 0 stage when going from 0 to 1. It doesn't make sense to extrapolate from our position on the technological timeline. It makes more sense to assume tabula rasa that aliens have developed this technology and then explore the implications of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I figured that one tube is stretched by the gravitational waves and the perpendicular tube is unaffected, so you're measuring the difference between the two tubes. Simple and easy to understand. However, the video mentioned that both light and the detection apparatus are stretched by the same degree and the physicist says "the light does get stretched and that part _doesn 't_ do the measurement for us"[1] -- which makes me think that the simple and easy explanation is not quite right. There's some subtlety that I think I'm missing.

[1] [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iphcyNWFD10&t=376s](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iphcyNWFD10&t=376s) (6min 16sec into the video)

<comment><USER11> Light takes different amounts of time to travel down the stretched vs squeezed tube.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the speed of light cannot exceed its limitation, and as one channel stretches in length, it simply requires more time to travel that length at the constant maximum speed.

The fixed channel remains the same, and covers the unstretched distance, so the light, traveling at the same constant speed reaches the end of the unchanged channel within less time than the other channel.

Or invert the same effect for cases where one channel is compressed to a shorter length, since waves oscillate. So both circumstances may be encountered. Some photons will traverse a compressed distance at a fixed speed, other photons will traverse a stretched distance. Meanwhile, the other perpedicular path is neither stretched nor squashed, and the photons in that channel demostrate the difference when compared to the effected channel.

So no matter what happens, the rate of travel is locked at the upper limit of 186,000 miles per second, whether all of space, energy and matter is squashed in a slightly smaller volume, or expanded to fill a slightly larger volume, the relativistic distances do not change, and the rate of passage of time does not change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No concrete data on actual funding increases, but it appears the success of LIGO and gravity wave detection has kicked off a renaissance in basic research into fundamental theories of gravitation itself. With a space-based gravity wave detector in various stages of development. And the possibility that gravitons have been indirectly observed already.

Is Gravity Quantum?

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-gravity- quantu...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-gravity-quantum/)

<comment><USER14> LIGO is scaled up version of Michelson-Morley experiment, so we should ask very different kind of question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One thing the book Black Hole Blues (Janna Levin) brought home to me was the absurdity of actually getting this project done. Now that it's complete, it's easy to say that it was obviously a good idea. It's another thing entirely to bet huge budgets on something that doesn't seem very likely to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER16> This seems like a thing to build on the moon.

<comment><USER17> Or even better - make it space based: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Antenna)

<comment><USER18> Unfortunate to see NASA was forced to withdrawal (for budgetary concerns).

<comment><USER19> LISA has now been funded by ESA with a small contribution from NASA. It is slated for launch in the late 2020s / early 2030s.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thought experiment contradicting limit of Speed of Light - <AUTHOR>

Imagine a large volume of empty space. Approximately in the middle is a very small light source which produces exactly 2 photons. These photons each move away from the light in opposite directions in the same plane.
After 1 year, mark the position of each photon. Measure the distance between the 2 photons. The distance will be 2 light years. Yet according to relativity, the speed of 1 photon relative to the other could never be more than the Speed of Light, in this case 1 light year.
So now we have a contradiction, or do we? <comment><USER2> No.

<http://conduit9sr.tripod.com/> (Intro to relativity)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's all about time man - you can't measure time from the frame of a photon.</comment>


Amazon Argues Alexa Speech Protected By First Amendment In Murder Trial Fight - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/02/23/amazon-echo-alexa-murder-trial-first-amendment-rights <comment><USER2> I don't understand Amazon's position here. They're being asked for evidence in a murder investigation. I don't see how the first amendment could be construed to protect against this. The data being asked for concerns the two involved individuals and the request doesn't seem overly broad.

What this case does show is that Amazon puts a listening device in your home which has a very acute understanding of your live. As they argue themselves.

<comment><USER3> If they lose this case, this entire product category goes in the shitter.

No one wants a government listening device in their house, which is essentially what this is if the government can issue a search warrant for recordings.

<comment><USER4> I would love for that to be the case, but I really doubt that it would be. No one wants a government tracking device on them at all times, but I don't see people abandoning cell phones _en masse_ because the government can get a warrant for your location data from cell phone data towers and/or Google.

<comment><USER5> I see a huge difference between a device that records _its_ location (not mine, even if the two are largely correlated) and one that records the things I say in my own home.

A cell phone _can_ be used to record your voice or even video, but there are technical, legal, and logistical hurdles to cross to enable that functionality for a given phone. Alexa, in contrast, is _always on_ with the technical and logistical hurdles already leapt and the legal one a fairly low bar if Amazon loses here.

I can definitely see people abandoning a brand of phone that features always on audio and/or video recording that can later be used by law enforcement (although the frequency with which gf uses snapchat, maybe not...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> why isn't alexa scrubbing the data or anonymising it? presumably amazon is fighting this hard because they don't want it known that the government/amazon effectively has a listening device in your home

<comment><USER7> apparently they give the ability to access your communication with Alexa with a phone app. So they put themselves in a box by having features in an app that prevent anonymization of the data. Going forward they may have to drop the app or limit its functionality.

I don't have the app in question and am only extrapolating based on the text in the article. Does anyone here have the Alexa app? What are its features?

So is law enforcement going to try to go with voluntarily allowing recording of oneself allows them access? Push a claim that Amazon has no standing in the case and cannot object?

<comment><USER8> I have the app, it allows you to play back any prompt that Alexa was triggered with. For instance the maintenance people at my apartment complex decided to play with it and I can listen to them ask stupid stuff like: "how many apples are in a bushel"

<comment><USER9> Well how many are there?

<comment><USER10> ~120.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand the use of the 1st amendment in this case, which is about free speech, but Amazon is trying to avoid giving data to the gov which would fall under the 4th and 5th amendments. Does anyone understand their reasoning for this approach?

I would also like to add, And I said the same thing about Apple, this feels like public relations via the courtroom more than a genuine desire to protect data from the gov. Don't forget Jeff Bezos's CIA connections!

<comment><USER12> As a non-lawyer and not legally trained it seems like 1st amendment has nothing to do with this but 4th and 5th has everything. This is scary. It means the 4th and 5th amendment has no power with these devices?

<comment><USER13> The 4th amendment and 5th amendment don't protect you from having to hand over incriminating evidence pursuant to a valid warrant. If the government suspects _e.g._ you're part of a criminal organization and have tapes with your co- conspirators (for future blackmail purposes) hidden in your house, it can get a warrant and get those tapes. It can play those tapes to the jury. The only thing the 5th amendment protects you from is the government making you testify against yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So much for the rhetoric of the malicious company that's putting 1984 devices into living rooms for the government.

<comment><USER15> How do you know the exact number of devices, suspicious.

<comment> gm-conspiracy I think he meant the devices were first patented in 1984.

<comment><USER16> _Ahem_ Orwell's 1984. It's a book.

<comment><USER17> I bought that as an ebook on Amazon but it got remotely deleted for 'copyright' reasons from my kindle so I never got to read it. Is there something about listening devices in it?

<comment><USER18> Surely you're joking. Kindle himself deleting books that warn against Alexa technology, "for copyright reasons", is worth both a good laugh and a war.

If you're not joking, please write a blogpost about it and post it on HN.

<comment><USER17> I don't need to blog about it - it was headline news:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon- ki...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-kindle-1984)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This might be an important case for the future of robotics at home. Imagine a day when androids or highly capable home robots are inexpensive and commonplace. They will see and hear everything you do.

Let's extend that to the same kinds of robots at work. Working alongside humans, participating in meetings, completing various tasks internal and external to the business. Maybe even interacting with similar robots at other companies, vendors, etc.

Not sure any rights regarding these scenarios are well defined today.

<comment><USER20> Why would the situation be any different than a person or traditional recording equipment doing those things?

If you want to live with observers, you have always had to accept that they can be used in court.

<comment><USER19> I'll let an attorney answer this. I think there's a huge difference. Part of it being that, as far as I know, there's no case law for the scenario of a robot being a part of a person's daily life while recording data from an array of sensors, including vision and sound.

<comment><USER20> But how are robot sensors different than if I choose to have, eg security cameras around my house or a maid doing the cleaning? In fact, the robot sounds _exactly_ like a live in maid, who can _already_ be compelled to testify on my activities.

Both the camera footage and maid testimony can be demanded by the courts, so why would a hybrid of the two be different?

<comment><USER19> I think you might be confusing logical thinking with the way the legal system works.

I hope an attorney on HN can comment on this. Happy to be wrong but I don't think I am, at least not massively wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is bonkers. The idea that someone hearing you and being required to testify against you violates the first amendment is ridiculous, so why should a device be different from a person?

<comment><USER22> Maybe it's more akin to the fifth amendment rights of a spouse/significant other/close family? I don't think Amazon would have an easy case in either direction, but at least to this layman it sounds more like a fifth amendment issue than a first amendment issue.

<comment><USER22> This answers my question well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714797)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> gm-conspiracy So, is there any coincidence that this is where Walmart HQ is located (some proxy battle)?

Why has no other police department in the country attempted this?

<comment><USER23> The intersection of hard to prove murders and Alexa is going to be tiny.

<comment> gm-conspiracy I would guess tiny is > 1.

This took place what, two year ago?

5 murders per 100,000 people (US average).

318 million people in the US, so 15,900 murder per year.

Amazon has sold over 5 million echos in the last 2 years.

So, Amazon would have to sell over 159 billion Echos, before a second murder overlap in the US?

If we assume all are US based, that would be about 1.5% of the population has Echos?

<comment><USER23> I think it is an important factor that many murders are quite straightforward, so it isn't just the overall rate, it's the rate where the Alexa evidence is important enough to pursue.

I also wonder how many people own more than 1 echo (probably only hundreds of thousands so not all that important to estimating the number of homes being listened to. I guess Amazon could tell us how many users they have though).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Slightly off-topic but could we encourage (or automate) using HTTPS story links when available?

<comment><USER25> For what purpose, exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It was bound to happen. Next up, are robots people?

<comment><USER27> No, but companies are (sigh). This is really an expression of Citizens United. Alexa and Siri use cute names to cover it, but "Ok Google" reveals what you're really interacting with for these sorts of tools: You're talking to a company.

<comment><USER28> This isn't really an HN quality comment. It's dismissive, you don't make a strong point, and it's not really interesting - this is just a rehashing of a common political opinion/disagreement with Citizens United.

Please, please don't let HN become Reddit.

<comment><USER27> I respectfully disagree. The parent comment was insinuating this was about bots or robots, which it really isn't. Chat-like interface aside, Alexa is no more a "robot" than Gmail or the Amazon.com homepage: It's just an interface to a company's web service.

And while I added a (sigh) which indicates some disapproval for the Citizens United decision, my comment wasn't meant to start a conversation of the merits of that decision, but simply indicate that this was effectively a corporate personhood case. If anything, I added the (sigh) because of my concern that I would get downvoted into oblivion by other people who disagree with the Citizens United decision. :/

Please, please don't let HN become Reddit. Don't comment just to tell someone you think their comment is low quality and uninteresting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can we get the click bait title changed. Amazon is arguing that the consumer first amendment rights extend to alexa recordings.

<comment><USER30> No, they are also claiming it extends to Alexa's responses.</comment></comment>