Ask YC:  Are there ideas that are "done to death"? - <AUTHOR>

I've often had grand epiphanies...  Huge, earth-changing, multi-zillion dollar ideas!  Only to find out (usually 5 minutes later) that the idea has not only been done already, but it's been done by a couple dozen different companies.  More often than not, these companies also include huge companies, such as Facebook or Google, that would be nearly impossible to compete with.
My question is this...  Is it true that there are ideas that really are "done to death"?  I look at the online dating market.  Match, eHarmony, jDate, PoF, etc. have saturated the market and taken up a huge amount of marketshare.  At the end of the day, though, they're really all the same.  They may target different interests or demographics, but there's really no difference.  Is online dating done to death?  Should someone even bother getting into that market again?
A more recent example is in messaging apps.  Once the Snowden docs went public, it seemed like everybody and their brother put out a "secure" messaging app.  Are there too many of them now?  Could one really gain any traction in a market that has literally hundreds of messaging apps on the iOS AppStore?  I've had an idea for a while on how to increase the security and anonymity of messaging apps.  But, with the sheer volume of competitors it almost seems to me like I shouldn't even bother coding it up.  Is this an idea that has been "done to death"?
Or, is the whole notion of something being done to death merely a logical fallacy?  Is it worth competing?  Is there enough money/eyeballs to go around?  I'd REALLY be interested in hearing your thoughts on the subject.  Having good ideas is really inspiring; but, seeing that there are already a LOT of other people in that space has become really discouraging. <comment><USER2> Nothing has been done to death, nor will it ever be. There's been a lot of research that first-movers are almost never the ultimate victors in an industry. Furthermore, being a "victor" (no matter how huge) doesn't last forever. Every company has a rise, decline, and death.

Small companies can always, _always_ disrupt a giant. The reason is that a giant, in order to sustain itself, must cater to everyone. It's impossible to do that well, and they'll always leave niches that are under-served. That's where a small company can come in, dominate that niche, and slowly take over the market. Clayton Christensen has famously researched and written about that process.

That said, ideas are meaningless. No one succeeds because they had a great idea, except maybe the Tim Ferrisses of the world who "bend the rules" and screw people over.

All that matters is execution. You might have an online dating idea, and it might be great, but can you actually execute? Launching a consumer brand costs millions these days because of the high costs of customer acquisition. Do you have that money? Would investors feel confident giving it to you?

Or, if you want to start a B2B company, do you have an unfair advantage that will catapult you over all the other people doing the exact same thing? Do you know lots of people in that industry, or were you yourself one of them, so you understand them particularly well?

Don't get hung up on ideas. No idea is new, and usually if you have an idea that _no one_ has done, it's because it's a terrible idea. Don't be afraid of competition. You don't have any until someone is actually taking your customers away from you, and tiny startups don't tend to have that issue for a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on your definition of "done to death."

There are definitely solution spaces where it is impossible to be profitable right now. Especially if two tech giants (FB/Google) are competing in that space - they likely can't even profit in the space because if their competition with each other.

You also have to consider traction. Facebook is not the paragon of social networks (in fact they're a bit ass), but no one is going to pull the reins from them while they continue to have as much user traction.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, if you've never heard of a company offering that service/product, then you're probably not alone there.

Someone offering a product doesn't mean they have saturated the market for it, or even made the average customer aware that they exist.

Even if they do exist, and they have saturated the market, the fact that you still want to build a different product might mean there is innovation left to do in that space.

So no, I don't think anything is really done to death. If you want to do it, go with your gut.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had an elderly friend who got into on-line dating, a lot of those apps use the same engine (or really similar ones). Of all those they weren't really user friendly for the 70+ crowd. In fact a lot of things are very unfriendly for the 70+ crowd.

Secondly, from observation I see that every time there is a new platform, there is room for a few more instances of X.

</comment><comment><USER6> Slightly off-topic: you probably shouldn't do a secure messaging app.

Security experts agree: if you're not an expert, don't build security apps / systems.

Back on topic: I say if you can come up with a plan to compete with existing competitors, and it seems reasonable to you--go for it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think there is always room for a better mouse trap.

</comment><comment><USER8> search was considered done to death before google. of course, it really is done to death now...

<comment><USER9> What about DuckDuckGo's recent explosion in popularity?

<comment><USER8> The excessive certainly combined with ellipses was meant to imply irony.

Essay Time. But DDG + NSA is interesting. Google was attractive to users because it gave them what they wanted - instead of the busy "portals" and paid placement. It was fast, honest, clear and had a better ranking algorithm.

Today, people don't want to be tracked/monitored, and unfortunately that is key to Google's business model. They were right to aggressively try to head off facebook, but wrong to abuse users to do it. They are definitely "evil" (their "don't be evil" meant don't be like microsoft or IBM, who pushed users around as it suited. Arguably, a publically traded corp is legally obliged to put profit above people - ie be "evil"; but it is possible to serve both, as google once did).

So, DDG is giving users what they want, and out-googling google, in a specific sense.

It's been said it's difficult to create _sustainable competitive advantage_ in search, because users can trivially switch. But one thing google has been great at is fast response times. Users really care about this, and because it's so expensive to build huge server farms all over the world, this aspect is a SCA. DDG is far slower than google; and google suggest often feels local to me. Perhaps this could be replicated with AWS, but DDG hasn't done it.

But I think you're right: previously DDG was a niche success. But with the change in what users want (because of NSA/snowden revelations, and likely there'll be others), that is absolutely inconsistent with Google's business model for ads, then DDG really could overthrow them. But DDG make enough money to afford comparable server-farm investment? (Still, that gets cheaper all the time...)

Google could of course go back to being purely about search, and not acquire user data so aggressively... but giving up user modeling would massively undermine their ad profits, and they are now slaves to Wall Street.

So... interesting.</comment></comment></comment>


Vinyl LPs Sell More Than CDs for the First Time in 3 Decades - <AUTHOR> http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2020/09/10/vinyl-lps-sell-more-than-cds-for-the-first-time-in-3-decades/ <comment><USER2> I grew up with records and cassettes, but got rid of the few that I still owned about ten years ago. MP3's and streaming were much more convenient and everything was available in an instance. I kept the ~50 CD's as they don't take up much room.

Three years ago, I started buying records again, the first being Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. My main interest in music nowadays is in Fusion Jazz, R&B, Funk and Soul Music from the early 1970's. I also got a decent Dual turntable from the 1980's to go with the nostalgic vibe.

To me, playing a record is a totally different and more conscious experience than playing a song on Spotify. Even just the necessity to remove the previous record before playing the next one feels archaic in these days where everything is available immediately. Limited availability is similiarly humbling: not owning every record I would like to, but also not even being able to acquire every record I'd like, as some are simply not available or expensive collector's items.

Then of course there is the haptic sensation, plus all the information you can get from studying the album cover. My generation's music discovery was full of surprises, when you had a record played for you at the record store that you mainly picked for the weird cover graphics or artist's name.

But the most important reason for me to buy records is to one day allow my daughter to discover this strange music from more than half a century ago that was always playing in the house when she was still young. Good luck trying to convince a teenager to have a listen at your Spotify playlist ;)

<comment><USER3> Sorry to delve off topic but I have recently found myself in a similar point in music but have very little background knowledge of the area as I have basically just relied on following the rabbit hole of hip hop samples.

Can you recommend some albums to get me started?

<comment><USER2> Some of my favorite records:

      Donald Byrd - Ethiopian Knights (1972)
      Cannonball Adderley: The Black Messiah (1972)
      The Cannonball Adderly Quintet - Country Preacher (1970)
      Jimmy Smith - Root Down (1972)
      King Curtis - Live at the Fillmore West (1971)

      Donny Hathaway - Live (1972)
      Baby Huey - The Baby Huey Story (1971)
      Various Artists - Wattstax (1973)
      Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1974)
      Marvin Gaye  - What's Going On (1971)
      The Temptations - Masterpiece (1973)
      The Meters - Rejuvenation (1974)

      Miles Davis - Bitches Brew (1969)
      Miles Davis - A Tribute To Jack Johnson (1971)
      Miles Davis - On The Corner (1972)
      Weather Report - Black Market (1976)
      Jaco Pastorius - Jaco Pastorius (1976)
      Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters (1973)
      Herbie Hancock - Thrust (1974)
      Billy Cobham - Spectrum (1973)

<comment><USER4> You must include Miles Davis - "Live - Evil" on that list!

Other than that, I have some new albums to check out this weekend. Thanks for the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love records. There are plenty of reasons why records are great that don't usually get mentioned here.

* The big one: There is tons of music out there that isn't on streaming services. If you like punk, breakcore, UK dubstep, noise, really anything even a little bit out of the mainstream, or from the past - you can't find the best stuff on any streaming services. If I could only make one point, this would be it. Spotify! Doesn't! Haven't! Everything! You'll never dance around your living room to the good version of This Bike is a Pipebomb's 'Better Off Dead', because you don't have the split 7".

* Vinyl is a good value store. If you keep good care of your records - and you have good taste - you'll find that your collection _appreciates_ in value over time, unlike other forms which _depreciate_. Some of the records I picked up in high school are worth over a hundred bucks now! Not that I plan on ever selling them, but it's nice to know I could.

* Vinyl is something to do while traveling! It's great going to another country or city and browsing the record shops and finding something you're after, or something funky looking in the $2 bin. Random finds in dollar bins are a bit like Magic: The Gathering cards - usually crap, but occasionally brilliant. Plus, whenever you take it out, you get to remember the trip you got it on.

* Sampling. I make hip hop, and samples from vinyls just sound better with that real grit. They just do.

Records! Yeah!

<comment><USER6> Don't buy vinyl to make money in the future. You don't know how long the fad will last. I've seen many other collectors markets be strong for years and then die. Buy vinyl because you love it, and don't worry about long term value, if it goes down it just means you can get more for less money.

Don't confuse the above with making money now. There is currently a market for vinyl and there are a number of ways you can go into business selling to that market. However this is about flipping your inventory, not investing in it.

<comment><USER7> > You don't know how long the fad will last.

Also, note that if you were like me and bought records because of the music on them, and think digital music is a very recently unimaginable blessing; this is the time to sell. Don't wait until the bottom drops out (like baseball cards in the 90s.)

They paid me a fortune for my record collection. My mindset was 20 years old, and I only brought records to sell that I thought were "good" or "rare." The prices paid for even the marginal ones convinced me to go back and fetch the leftovers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Been buying records pretty much non-stop since 97. Aside from a few pictures, photos and gig ticket stubs, they're pretty much the only physical form of reference to my cultural interests I have from the last 25 years.

This is probably anecdotal, but I can recall a huge amount of my collection pretty much instantly when someone asks me which records I have by artist X, or which records did I buy in 2019. I have the complete opposite for books I read on my Kindle - if someone asks me which books I read last year or who the author of the last book I read was then I find it a challenge to recall.

The tangibility of physical media just seems to give me a better connection to the album, artist, label and songs.

But yes, moving house is an absolute pain and it's a ridiculously expensive hobby.

<comment><USER9> Who's records (new music) were you buying in the early 2000's? Genuine question; I cant recall anyone selling releases on vinyl around then.

<comment><USER10> Can't speak for the OP, but in the early 2000s, I was buying new-pressing indie, electronic, and some classic rock musicians (e.g. Neil Young) on vinyl. But mostly I was buying older used records, which at the time were cheap (they've gotten much more expensive around here). Some of the new pressings I bought back then go for a fair amount used now, because they were pressed in very limited quantities and there were way fewer people buying vinyl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Guy I know owned (owns) a music store. In the late 90s, he thought he knew were things were going. He started saving up for his pension, thinking that by 2015 or so no one would be buying cds anymore.

Now, he says, his music store is doing better than ever. He was correct in that no one buys cds anymore, but vinyl is selling like crazy. The store, which has always been popular ever since the 1980s, is making crazy amounts of money and his pension is becoming _very_ comfortable.

Only thing he can't come to terms with, however, is that his younger patrons for some reason insist on buying Dire Straits records. He can't for the life of him figure out how something that used to be a signifier of having absolutely no taste in music has become so popular with music connoisseurs.

<comment><USER12> Your bar is _way_ too high if Dire Straits is the bar for poor taste. Even for the 90's.

Mark Knopfler's americana-spirit might be a bit much for some people, but ALL those guys are A-class musicians and they've never done a bad song.

<comment><USER13> Twisting by the Pool? :-) I don't dislike any others. I think this poor taste thing seems to occur if something becomes too popular, it becomes poor taste in the eyes of many people, even if that thing is actually good. I'm not convinced anyone can seriously listen to Telegraph Road and say that doesn't have artistic merit. Similarly there is Phil Collins that has a huge background in prog rock and is a top class musician, that is now maligned by many people because he wrote some highly catchy and accessible pop songs.

<comment><USER14> Dire Straits is better if you forget that they made anything past Brothers in Arms, just like U2 probably should have stopped somewhere around Rattle and Hum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The supremacy of vinyl over CDs is the result of several factors.

And then goes on to cover none of those factors. I like the topic and am interested in more info, but this tiny article is written very poorly.

I would love to read a deep dive on the pros and cons of the two, especially about how each medium holds up over the long term. Isn't vinyl much better for archival purposes because cd's can start to disintegrate over time? Or have manufacturing processes improved?

<comment><USER16> Speaking anecdotally: people I know who buy vinyl tend to do it for the novelty/because they're audiophiles. These are the kind of people who buy/build fancy sound systems specifically for listening to music. They usually get a vinyl record player to go with it.

Whereas CDs are stuck in this awkward middle-ground: they're not as evocative/interesting as records for the enthusiast, but they're not as convenient as streaming or even MP3's for the casual listener.

Personally I still buy a CD on occasion when I want to actually own an album, because it's a high-quality source that's easy to get onto a computer. But there aren't a ton of usecases for doing so these days.

<comment><USER17> > because it's a high-quality source

I wonder - does anyone produce and distribute streaming audio at a higher quality than CD? A lot of people talk like CD audio is a definitive source, but I mean it's still a limited sampling rate and a limited bit-depth.

<comment><USER18> The full bit-depth is present on the audio cd. You can buy 24-bit 196 hz flac from tidal as a download or you can rip it from a cd.

<comment><USER17> > The full bit-depth is present on the audio cd. You can buy 24-bit 196 hz > flac from tidal as a download or you can rip it from a cd.

Well this is exactly what I mean... what do you mean by 'full' bit-depth? It's finite. It's 16-bit on a CD. It could be higher.

If you rip 24-bit audio from a 16-bit CD... you don't actually get any more data, do you? What would be the point in doing that?

I'm asking - does anyone sell audio mastered and distributed at 24-bit? Or 32-bit? Better than CD quality. According to the comments here 'yes' so it clearly isn't 'full'.

<comment><USER19> 24bit audio makes sense in the studio to avoid compounding errors from all the effects used to produce the track, but it doesn't make sense for the final piece because 16-bit perfectly represents everything we humans are able to hear [1].

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200202124704/https://people.xi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200202124704/https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil- young.html)

<comment><USER17> > 16-bit perfectly represents everything we humans are able to hear [1]

[1]:

> It's true that 16 bit linear PCM audio does not quite cover the entire > theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions.

<comment><USER19> Keep reading. Later on:

> Thus, 16 bit audio can go considerably deeper than 96dB. With use of shaped > dither, which moves quantization noise energy into frequencies where it's > harder to hear, the effective dynamic range of 16 bit audio reaches 120dB in > practice [13], more than fifteen times deeper than the 96dB claim.

> 120dB is greater than the difference between a mosquito somewhere in the > same room and a jackhammer a foot away.... or the difference between a > deserted 'soundproof' room and a sound loud enough to cause hearing damage > in seconds.

> 16 bits is enough to store all we can hear, and will be enough forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Makes sense. Vinyl and cassettes are both cool retro tech. CDs are just... meh.

I have one friend who listens to music on (or at least collects) vinyl. I have another friend who listens to casettes and makes mixtapes. I don't know anyone who uses CDs.

<comment><USER21> Personally, I consider CDs to be retro tech, after all they go back to 1977. Though not perfect, they are the ideal audio format - uncompressed, high resolution, excellent dynamic range, DRM-free, and compact enough to reduce space while being large enough for at least some artwork. I do enjoy the "experience" of vinyl records more, but after years of messing with finicky turntables, expensive cartridges, and preamps to achieve marginally better sound, I realized CDs had perfect sound in the first place with no fuss aside from the occasional scratched discs. One of the problems I have with vinyl is that with every usage you're degrading it. For that reason I've stopped playing some of my most valuable and treasured vintage records for fear of making them unplayable. I typically make a high-res recording of the vinyl and listen to that instead (and yes I realize that defeats the purpose of the all- analog signal chain, but my ears can't tell the difference).

<comment><USER22> > that defeats the purpose of the all-analog signal chain

What is this purpose?

<comment><USER23> Analog is continuous and digital is discrete and that implies a loss information. Theoretically at least, any digitalization in the signal chain involves a significant, if not perceptible, loss in signal information content.

Personally I'm borderline tone-deaf so I can't tell the difference, but I'm not going to call the people who say they can tell the difference liars.

<comment><USER24> > _Analog is continuous and digital is discrete and that implies a loss > information._

Analog loses even more information.

First, something being "continuous" doesn't make it an accurate representation of the original continuous signal, or a better than digital representation. Among many factors, how deep/heavy the head goes into the groove for one affects the fidelity of the signal and how much DR you can have (that's why heavier vinyl is for more expensive/premium releases).

There is other loss of information between the signal (e.g. voice) and its transfer to the vinul, more so than with digital.

Vinyl also has more compression and more equalization thrown in to cut frequencies (heavy bass can make record player heads skip, so it's cut at mastering).

Cassete tape also has more compression (loss of signal dynamic range), more noise (loss of signal), than CDs, plus wow, flutter, etc. It's not even comparable, despite being "analog".

Also, contrary to popular belief, and simplified "layman" posts, digital doesn't produce "square-ized" versions of waveforms due to quantization.

If you digitally sample a pure sine wave, it comes out as a pure sine way when you play it (you can check that on an oscilloscope).

What vinyl does offer better than CD/streaming is lack of convenience (I consider it a pro: it forces more focus and dedication when listening), better tactility, better collectible value, better sentimental value (patina, etc), and extremely better showcase for the cover art.

<comment><USER25> > Also, contrary to popular belief, and simplified "layman" posts, digital > doesn't produce "square-ized" versions of waveforms due to quantization.

I've known musicians who think this way! So it's not just layman.

Anyone who thinks this should look up the Nyquist–Shannon Theorem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I got into the whole thing and now my records are shelved in the attic and tone arm has been dead for over 5 years. Records are a real pain in the ass. I understand its a hobby, good for you.

[https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b2/7d/cb/b27dcb7a032184951f28...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b2/7d/cb/b27dcb7a032184951f287de69c6fd63f.jpg)

<comment><USER10> I got into vinyl in my teens (I'm in my mid 30s now), before the "vinyl revival" really started. I still listen to and buy it as much as I ever did, and my collection is quite large. I also listen to digital music, both streaming and stuff ripped from my CDs, downloaded from download cards that come with vinyl, and digitized directly from my LPs. There's certainly room for both. But when I put music on for the family, or want to sit down and really _listen_ to a record, it's always on vinyl. To each their own, but this statistic itself shows that there are plenty of people who truly enjoy and find value in vinyl.

<comment><USER27> Does vinyl work well for classical music (what I listen to mostly)? I've seen posts like the following saying that the large dynamic range isn't captured well (in particular, soft sections sound too noisy):

[https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/what-s-wrong-with- cla...](https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/what-s-wrong-with-classical- music-on-vinyl)

Curious to hear your/others' more recent/informed experience.

<comment><USER28> Vinyl is terrible for complex classic music - orchestral. ~40db of dynamic range against nearly 100 on CD and more on SACD

<comment><USER26> People have downvoted you because you speak truth and provide facts. HN, we can do better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the main reason CDs outpaced vinyl records in sales in the last decades was convenience. CDs are smaller, players are more compact and they can be read and burnt by computers easily and on the cheap.

Nowadays you can just connect your phone to your car and stereo using bluetooth, or stream everything everywhere from Spotify or Apple or Youtube, so physical media such as the CD or a record has become more of an experience than a necessity, and I think that taking a record out of its sleeve and playing it is much more satisfying than just popping a CD in; it's a pleasurable experience in itself, and not just a way to play music.

I think it's like how riding a horse has become a leisure activity nowadays, because people don't need them as a tool for their daily activities any more.

<comment><USER30> ...and as CD burners and players become less ubiquitous, it follows that CD's are becoming less convenient. New cars still have CD players, but not necessarily new computers or home audio players. In the mid 90s, there were at least 5 CD players in the house: 2 stereos, 1 discman, PSX, PC. Now I have 1: PS4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If only they would master CD's properly... The loudness wars really killed the audio quality and persists to this day. That's probably one of the reasons why people associate harsh and sharp to digital audio, even though CD made before the loudness wars sound absolutely brilliant.

<comment><USER32> No, the very earliest brick-wall filtered CDs were far, far worse, and largely where the CD's poor reputation came from. The ability to oversample and downsample largely dealt with the truly grating effects of phase shift in the higher frequencies (harmonics being nowhere near in proper phase with the fundamental tones). The godawful remasters once the technical problems were overcome just added insult to injury, really.

<comment><USER33> Either way, it seems like the whole debate is kind of misplaced. Analogue and digital systems have pros and cons, but crappy mastering will make almost every single one of them irrelevant in terms of sound quality.

Personally I think vinyl often sounds better simply because it takes a higher quality of engineering to make it work at all. It's the limitations of the medium that mean you can't just compress it halfway to buggery and crank the loudness up like you can with a CD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I bought Ladytron's new album, i got FLAC+Cassette.. I have a cassette player in my car, and was looking forward to listening to it there. I was very dissapointed to find the tape of absolutely horrible (by tape!) quality, it sounded so bad I couldn't use it.. Totally a gimmick. I ended up just recording the flac files onto another, blank tape and they sound just fine (by tape standards, actually, by most standards).

I hope the new-vinyl is not as gimmicky as new-cassette.

<comment><USER35> The mastering of the newer generation of metal records is usually done for digital, and they don't really re-master anything for the vinyl release. Most new vinyls sound OK, but in most cases a record released in the late 70's or late 80's will blow a new one straight out of the water.

Many, many vinyls come with digital downloads, though. Personally, I like having a physical media to hold on too. I'm almost too old to hear any actual difference anyway. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> By dollar value, not by units sold. In 1H 2020, CDs sold: 10.2 million, records sold: 8.8 million.

So the headline is extremely misleading.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I agree that's misleading, but I don't know about _extremely_. The fact that sales are within a few 10s of percent is pretty remarkable, and I say that as someone who has been avidly buying vinyl since the early 2000s when CDs were still selling an order of magnitude or more units. Of course, vinyl sales have grown, but just as importantly online music sales and streaming have caused CD sales to decrease sharply over the past 10-15 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm a DJ that likes pretty underground house and techno. Most of the vinyl I purchase isn't available in any other form, and will tend to be made in a limited quantity. I find that this creates much more memorable performances that make them stand out from others. Vinyl's fun to DJ using turntables but I can't say the same with CD's. They're just inconvenient and I'd rather use an USB that stores more files. I think there's also a pretty big myth around vinyl sounding better, which might contribute to the popularity of it.

<comment><USER38> For me the trend of labels releasing vinyl-only limited edition feels quite elitist, i.e. if you're somehow not 'in the know' than you don't get to enjoy the music. I prefer labels offering the choice between a limited edition vinyl and an unlimited edition digital download. That way the people that care about owning and spinning the rare object still get that experience and those who discover the record two months later can still buy the digital version and experience it.

It happens all the time that I discover music on Bandcamp, and since I'm not a super connoisseur it has been released for some time and the vinyl has long since sold out, but I can buy the digital version and enjoy it and spin it at parties and thus share the experience.

<comment> globular-toast Back in the day, it wasn't done due to elitism but rather necessity. Vinyl was the only distribution format for club tracks because of the unique way the DJ can physically manipulate the record for the purposes of beat matching, cutting and scratching. Since a mass production of vinyl incurs a large initial overhead lower quality "white labels" were produced in small numbers for newer releases.

Nowadays I'm sure it's just done for marketing purposes, though, as there's no reason not to release the track digitally.

<comment><USER39> A lot of the releases I listen to are only sold as short runs of vinyl due to unlicensed samples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's not too shocking. To be fair, CD's, Vinyl and Cassette are _all_ legacy media at this point.

A real shocker would be a decline of streaming in favor of Vinyl/CD. That ain't ever gonna happen. Welcome to the future.

<comment><USER41> I wouldn't be so sure about all of this. I just bought a copy of the You Only Live Twice soundtrack in physical CD format because my streaming provider (Spotify) only offers 3 tracks from the album. Repeat this story for anything not created in the last 20 years.

The realization that I could permanently lose access to some older media just by way of my streaming providers not caring to continue carrying the tracks has reignited my datahoarder spirit animal.

For some reason the thought of losing access to movies and TV shows is substantially less troubling to me than the thought of losing access to more obscure forms of music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I recently made the decision to only buy 2nd hand vinyl (and thus not often), and for all my new music to be digital. Bandcamp, Bleep.com and Beatbport are simply amazing in their own ways.

Digital music is easier to carry (I sometimes DJ). I also wonder if digital has a lower environmental burden overall, compared with new vinyl. I've not done any research; in fact, I don't even know how to begin such research.

I used to love "albums". I've definitely moved to playing more singles. Partly through DJing again, partly through the convenience of Spotify... but I think mostly because there's so much new music that if I'm listening to an album and don't enjoy half of it, that's time I could have used finding the good singles from another album. I don't claim this is a good practice, only that it's a novel perspective I've gained recently and offer it up for inspection.

<comment><USER43> For me it's vinyl for the albums I _really love_, and digital/streaming for anything else. I understand buying digital ultimately supports the artists more, but as a library/collection, digital files just can't compare to LPs or even CDs.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I do the same. And most new LPs come with digital downloads anyway.

These days I have kept my existing album downloads but I sub to Apple Music so I can grab almost anything on the fly, download it so I'm not constantly streaming (I listen to whole albums, not shuffles or playlists really) and listen to that often at work or on the move but buy LPs for everything else. It can just be an expensive hobby so it's usually pretty filtered.

Also used LP shopping is just a hell of a lot of fun. Seeing how much good stuff you can find for what it would cost for a new copy elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, with psycical formats dwindling to little as a total of sales, it makes sense that the more collectible/nostalgic/hip(ster) one will win over the other that mainly had covenience on its side (and which is now better served by streaming)

</comment><comment><USER44> I remember reading a story about some folks setting up a manufacturing/pressing shop a year or two ago. From what I remember, pressing vinyl has a high error rate/low yield and that newer equipment improves upon this, driving down the costs significantly.

You can probably assume that people are setting these up in most every mid- sized or larger city, possibly even some small ones as well. So it's likely that with a mature supply chain and a distributed manufacturing base, vinyl will be able to have a wider variety of music and low prices (even more so than now).

I doubt that CD manufacturing facilities are seeing any expansion at all; probably still consolidating and controlled only by the large labels.

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't buy CDs any longer, I certainly don't buy LPs (the last time I bought an LP was in the early 90's), and I don't stream. I _do_ buy a lot of music on iTunes. I've stopped buying select songs too, preferring to buy albums. You get to know the artist and their work better. When listening to music I tend to listen to albums. For better or for worse my iPhone is now my sole music player. The audio engineers mastering for iTunes are doing an excellent job.

</comment><comment><USER46> One thing I've noticed is that the quality of vinyl presses for recent songs is not good. It seems worse with colored records like pinks and reds and the like. I had to return an album three times to get a record that wouldn't skip all over!

</comment><comment><USER47> My favorite thing about vinyl collecting is that there's no digital obsolescence. You can build a record player out of a motor and a piece of paper. It's like having a paper book vs. an e-book or photographic slides vs. a terabyte of JPEGs.

<comment><USER48> The text in the _book_ whether paper or electronic is digital, like PCM or JPEG. The slides and vinyl decay gradually and irrecoverably even within a lifetime.

You can illustrate the principle well enough with your player built "out of a motor and a piece of paper" but the music will be too distorted to want to listen to it. So I don't think this has much practical meaning.

The use of digital data means the CD transport is completely independent of the music on a CD, if you aren't interested in spinning plastic discs and laser diodes you can dispense with that part and keep all the audio as it was - and indeed of course in fact we mostly did. The sound of vinyl is wedded to the physical manifestation, the grooves, the stylus, the rotating disc, but PCM data doesn't care how it is stored.

<comment><USER47> True all this. But still there's a joy in holding a record or photographic slide because there's no inscrutable digital device in between the artifact and its sensory experience. If you have a hard drive of photos you need a device that you can't build, can't see (at the transistor level), and probably can't fully understand to see the photos. And a hard drive of photos looks the same as a hard drive of songs -- the specialist media has a form molded to its content. Can't describe the joy. Just like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> it's great that it's selling more than cds, but that's like being the best in the losers bracket. i don't know a single person in my life who actually buys vinyl records. everyone i know has a spotify or panadora account.

</comment><comment><USER50> This doesn't really surprise me. Between music streaming, cars more commonly having extra inputs (AUX, USB, Bluetooth), the market for CDs is probably shrinking while vinyl appeals to the same enthusiasts year after year.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think this is really interesting information. As Vinyl has less quality than CDs, uses more space and its way more expensive. But I guess some people like to get the immersion of buying a piece of music and enjoying it in a more vintage way, of course there is nothing wrong with it.

On the other hand i find also interesting the discussion between streaming vs physical and what motivates people to go physical when there are less and less motivation to keep people buying physical. I speak even for myself where i hate the idea of paying 10 Euros a month to have _all_ "borrowed" music i want as long as i keep paying it. On the other hand buying 1-2 CDs per month exceeds the 10 Euros budget but at least i own the media, after one year would be more expensive than Apple Music 1y subscription. Difficult to decide which one is more reasonable.

<comment><USER52> > As Vinyl has less quality than CDs, uses more space and its way more > expensive.

Owning and listening to vinyl is a different experience. Parts of it is show. The modern vinyl pressings often come in a beautiful packaging, nice booklets, something to marvel at. You can look at your shelf and contemplate what you'd like to listen to, in a way that scrolling through a playlist doesn't. You also pretty much have to listen to the album in the order the artist intended to - no shuffle, no playlists, no skip.

CDs to the contrary offer little difference to digital and still use space. So if you're buying for the physical experience, it makes sense to go for vinyl.

<comment><USER53> > _So if you're buying for the physical experience, it makes sense to go for > vinyl._

I still buy CDs because I want to own a physical medium and CDs are far superior and more practical than vinyls.

It's also actually easier to 'contemplate' a shelf of CDs than one of vinyls. ;)

I think it is that practicality that actually makes CDs less desirable than vinyls by some. Vinyls are not very practicals and require a ritual to play, and that's what some people are looking for and that is visible in other trends (coffee, tea brewing, etc.). I think that 'less practical' is often seen as 'more authentic'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Previous prediction was by the end of 2019, off by a few months

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20908197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20908197)

<comment><USER55> I'm sad that I clicked on this article and the parent one and neither had a basic line graph showing the trend. It would answer so many questions I have about whether on is trending up etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I think it is worth pointing out that the figures are from the US only. I wonder how this compares to the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER57> Better title: CDs now sell even less than LPs.

<comment> globular-toast Neither title paints the whole picture. Vinyl LP sales have been growing year after year for more than a decade now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I've considered buying Vinyl LPs not to listen to them but to hang them on the wall and enjoy the large cover artwork.

</comment><comment><USER59> There is the concept that constraints drive artists to make better art within the defined limits. Vinyl has so much less tonal and dynamic information recording capacity than CDs... today's artists spend more effort and energy "exploring the limits" rather than creating great art. Outside of classical music and opera, what forms of music are unquestionably better on CD than vinyl or cassette?

<comment><USER60> I have some Dire Straits albums from around 1990 on CD, and they sound amazing. Mastering seemed to go way downhill in the late 90s.

Cassette has no advantage for me other than nostalgia, and the fact that a lot of music wouldn't exist without such a cheaply available recording medium.

[Edit] corrected year from 1900 -> 1990

<comment><USER61> nice typo. Made me laugh. Had to comment on it even though i know humour is frowned upon.

[edit] added explanation.

<comment><USER59> It's late and I've been drinking red wine... what did I misspell?

<comment><USER60> It was my typo. I have no CDs from 1900...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> There is a bit of a sad downside to vinyl: it seems to release toxic chemicals into the air where its being played or even just stored [0]. I hope there are ways to find alternative materials because I thoroughly enjoy the medium overall.

[0] [https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ?t=681](https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ?t=681)

</comment><comment><USER63> Awaits personal anecdote to contradict prevailing trend.

</comment><comment><USER64> Anecdote: I acquired a crowdfunded, limited run LP earlier this year, and it's one of the two audio recordings I've ever bought in physical format during the fifteen years I've managed my personal finance. I already owned the same album in FLAC and only wanted to support the artist.

The other one was a CD album that I also owned in a digital format, but which had to exist as a physical copy in order to be eligible for radio playback under the bulk license at that time.</comment>


Show HN: Chess engine on Pebble Watch - <AUTHOR> https://apps.getpebble.com/applications/53f2f37c702c63b90f000034

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you beat your Pebble Smart Watch in a game of Chess?</comment>


Direct3D9 Wrapper for Go (Golang) Programming Language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gonutz/d3d9 <comment><AUTHOR> Go programmers that only support OpenGL in their desktop application miss out on a large potential user base - people with a standard Windows installation that have not installed the latest graphics driver. On windows only OpenGL version 1.1 is supported by default but if you can fall back to a Direct3D9 code path you are on the safe side.</comment>


Desktop Tower of Money- How a casual flash game is raking it in. - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2007/05/27/desktop-tower-defense/ <comment><USER2> dupe - see front page "lone developer makes 6 figure revenue per year"</comment>


Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All the Time - <AUTHOR> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/39913.html <comment><USER2> I am only a casual user of Linux and have no axe to grind or sacred cows to protect. From my point of view, one of the biggest issues with Linux is fragmentation - which of the 2000 flavours of Linux do I choose for my home use and why. My perception of Canonical/ Ubuntu as an outsider, is they have come along and tried to make a one-stop shop for Linux for the masses. This is a good thing. If you are an expert you can still use one of the other flavours or even branch Ubuntu. They are not making it impossible to create "yet another Linux flavour" but they are not making it easy. From my point of view this seems to be a plus and not a minus.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you properly understood the article or FOSS in general. It is not about protecting a "sacred cow", it is about protecting the principles without which there will be no FOSS in the first place.

We FOSS devs rightly care less about market share because market share is not, and never has been, what sustains the FOSS ecosystem. What sustains it is the code content that attracts developers from all over the globe to look at it, learn from it, be interested and inspired by it, and the principles of freedom enables them to contribute to it and sustain this cycle.

(edit: downvotes are not for comments you disagree with. That's what responses are for. Stop abusing the system selfishly.)

<comment><USER4> > (edit: downvotes are not for comments you disagree with. That's what > responses are for. Stop abusing the system selfishly.)

I didn't downvote your post, but your statement about downvoting isn't true. It's certainly not in the guidelines[0]. And if one needs an appeal to the HN operators, as others have pointed out on separate occasions where your claim has been made, pg has previously said downvoting for disagreement is fine[1]:

 _I think it 's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness._

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

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171)

<comment><USER3> I don't know what the effect was historically but right now if there's too many downvotes a comment gets greyed out. Furthermore you have to have over several hundred karma to be able to do it in the first place. In other words, the behaviour isn't symmetrical with upvoting, so I find it very uncomfortable, even for myself, to downvote merely for disagreement (i.e. the opposite of an upvote).

<comment><USER5> Same here. I reserve downvoting for unhelpful comments.

One litmus test for unhelpful commenting is, that the word 'you' is used. I try to keep it on topic, and the topic is _never_ the other commenters.

<comment><USER6> There's gonna be tiny exceptions, but this is an excellent guideline for comments that I will try to follow in future

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find criticism of Canonical interesting. They are one of the most freedom respecting software companies out there. But people don't compare them to almost any company, they compare them against Red Hat. It seems that Ubuntu gets criticized not so much because they are really bad but because Red Hat is so awesome.

<comment><USER8> You raise a solid point. The Red Hat/Canonical comparison paints them bad. Yet the Apple/Canonical comparison on the other hand...

<comment><USER9> Except Apple isn't trying to subvert the intention of the GPL, it's just using code not covered by the GPL.

<comment><USER10> Torvalds explicitly said he doesn't like the GPLv3 because the GNU people tried to subvert the intention of the GPL and lied to people about what it meant. The GNU people are the same ones as the main article refers to when looking for a definition of 'Free Software'.

So we find ourselves in a situation where the article author is apparently arguing against group X because they're trying to subvert the intention of the GPL, and using as evidence a definition provided by group Y, who tried to subvert the intention of the GPL.

<comment><USER11> It's kind of hard to make the argument that the FSF tried to subvert the intention of the GPL, since they wrote _both_ the GPL itself _and_ the four freedoms (the philosophical principles on which the GPL is based) .

You can make it, yes, but it's not a very convincing one.

<comment><USER10> Well, have a crack at it, then. Here is Torvalds talking about how he sees the point of the earlier GPL being subverted by v3, and that he thinks that the FSF lied to people about it. In his opinion, it should have been named a different license. He goes into detail about how it's not the _license_ he hates, but how the FSF behaved around it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU)

> _since they wrote both the GPL itself and the four freedoms_

Also, having been part of organisations that have operated against their own philosophical principles and mission statements, I don't accept that the FSF is immune to changing their angle on things. And having hung around plenty of radical progressives growing up, I've seen some handy re-rationalisations of earlier positions.

Overall, I'm on the side of the FSF. But fucked if I'm going to be part of this thing that progressives do, which is piss all over their allies (in this case, ubuntu) just because their opinion is _slightly_ different to one's own. If someone's going to raise the "nuh-uh, subversion of license = evil", then fuck it, here is a video of someone at the heart of the whole licensing debate literally saying that the FSF behaved immorally about licenses too.

<comment><USER12> But isn't it healthy to re-examine your core beliefs and made tweaks or even whole substitutions? I don't see anything in GPLv3 that directly contradicts the original four freedoms. It was evolutionary to close loopholes like Tivo.

But you have a second point: how you treat your allies and other sympathetic parties. Sadly, idealism seems to trend towards that behavior and it's pretty counterproductive.

<comment><USER10> I absolutely agree that you should be allowed to change your opinion over time, as long as you do it 'honestly'. For example, it bugs me when people lambaste politicians for having a different opinion now as opposed to 20 years ago. But at the same time, by 'honest' I mean being open about the changes and not quietly twisting them or hiding them, which is what Torvalds is complaining about in that video. In the organisations I mention I was part of, the same thing applies - lip service paid to the (sometimes stale) principles, but the behaviour was rationalised very baroquely to fit those principles.

Re: the idealism stuff, my armchair psychology take on it is this: conservatives are passionate about things not changing, so minor differences don't matter so much because the overall goal is the same; progressives are passionate about things changing, so if the cart is going to move at all, it really needs to go in _my_ direction. Add in the human predeliction for not seeing the forest for the trees, and the progressives will squabble over what really are minor differences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My bigger problem with Ubuntu was that they went away from creating a really nice and easy-to-use distro that I wanted to throw money at to breaking everything just to be like Apple (don't get me wrong on this, I'm an Apple fan, I just find their ux hard to use and think people should copy the rest of what they do, not the menus etc.)

</comment><comment><USER14> I notice that there's an inherent conflict between the democratic approach found at Debian, Mozilla, W3C, etc versus the dictatorial approach of Apple and so on.

In a way, it mirrors the difference between free markets and command economies. Free markets tend to be resilient, offer individuals the most power, and tend to favor those with skill at the expense of lots of market fragmentation and inefficiency. Command economies, by contrast, can have everything working together towards one common goal, and allow for every individual to have some measure of equality and security. They can operate with either far more efficiency than a free market, or far less... and the fortunes can rapidly change.

Democracies respond by then copying the innovation of the risky dictatorial/command experiments.

Ubuntu is trying to do a little of both. It tries to be like Apple, and thus doesn't try to conform to the general FOSS community initiatives if it thinks they aren't innovating correctly or quickly enough. That is why they created Unity, Mir, and many other in-house projects. Tightly integrating branding into the products is just par for the course.

By not trying to go along with the program, they annoy everyone else. But since the Debian Technical Committee, X Foundation, Linux Foundation, and W3C committees are not like the Comintern or the Apple board of directors, they have no power to enforce that program. Hence the fragmentation.

<comment><USER15> An aside regarding the details of your analogy. I have to contest that command economies can be more efficient than free markets. Please note that this does not mean that free markets are perfectly efficient: they aren't. But even if we dismiss the outsized impacts that leadership personality can play in determining the functioning of a command economy, they cannot be as relatively efficient as a free market.

We need to define what it means to be efficient: I use efficiency to mean the measure of how market producers meet the demands of market consumers. In these cases a central planning authority cannot obtain enough actionable data from the market nor can it act on it in a timely enough way as to actually meet that definition of efficiency. Individual consumers have differing wants and needs: differing to the point that you would be hard pressed to define the difference between what constitutes a want vs a need in all cases. Even the best central planners would be hard pressed to deal with such complexity. You may be able to use prior consumption numbers to plan the next cycle, but things change. Also adoption of new technology (not just computer technology) is difficult to understand. When the car is invented does the command economy order a bunch to see how it plays out? Does it order none because there were no prior demands expressed? Can it even be invented or manufactured because the likelihood of seeing it even get considered so small as to make it not worth it... or needed enabling technologies like, say, better lathes (or some such thing) not developed for a car that may exist because there is no purpose for it now, or because there is no reward for pursuing such a path to the inventor? How does one set prices or does one dictate consumption as well? Fail in pricing and you have shortages for one thing and over-abundances for another. This goes on and on. And again, these are the questions outside graft and ill-will from the central authorities.

Free markets on the other hand distribute the penalties and rewards based purely on how well a producer meets a consumers requirements (note that this is different from producing a perfect world for the consumer... consumers have a limit of what is acceptable, so you may buy something you wish was much better/cheaper/etc than it was, but you still concluded that you'd be worse off having the money rather than the product so you traded... a need was met). An individual producer can focus on a an individual area of need for specific consumers much better than a central authority can; and if the existing producers fail some consumers, an opportunity for other producers to enter the marketplace exists. If a producer meets consumer demand in a way that maximizes the resources that production itself consumes, they have the resources to continue to serve the market; if they fail to meet consumer demand in a resource efficient manner, they cease to be in the market.

Profit is the measure of efficiency of meeting a consumer demand: you have bad profits, you're not efficient in some way, good profits and you are. Rewards and "punishments" from the market itself coordinate resources and do so quickly and without needing to wait for the next 5 year plan. In command economies, if consumer needs aren't met, rarely are there any bad outcomes for the producers (the state). You can't choose to buy from the other guy because there is no other guy. And to reward good outcomes? Why bother when you control the rewards and the penalties either way?

Anyway, to bring it all home, fragmentation in the Linux world is really about this random walk of producers trying to meet needs: the interesting question is, "who's needs"? Ubuntu is shooting for customers: those not interested in building the operating systems/tools and those that just want to use it. Red Hat is similar except for a narrower set of consumers. But, say, Debian (to some degree), or even better Slackware (a personal old favorite)... who is the consumer? I would argue that often times it is the developer/maintainer that is actually the consumer: they consume their leisure time and make other consumer expenses because of their desire to engage in the activity of developing or maintaining a distribution; OK, maybe less so Debian than Slackware, but I think the point still applies. Many of these distributions don't exist because an entrepreneur was trying to reach an underserved market... they exist because the developer/maintainer set out to achieve personal goals. As such a distribution cannot fail on adoption rates or by using monetary success measures since the reward/punishment is really a matter of developer satisfaction in the pursuit. That's also not to say that these personal pursuits cannot also be commercial pursuits or that developers don't want to see their work adopted by others, but the primary motivation will not weed out less successful distributions because they are actually successful for what the makers tried to accomplish. And in that sense, they are meeting a need and that is actually efficient... just not in the way you may desire or expect.

<comment><USER14> Command economies can make risky bets on particular technologies or strategies, and just reorganize everyone's life around this goal. It is very authoritarian, often tyrannical, but the notion that it is necessarily inefficient is just stupid.

Planning occurs in markets too. A Boeing jet takes decades to bring it to market, and the organization must make risky long term plans and bets. They may pan out, or may not. But every entrepreneur and startup at YC is doing the same sort of thing. Taking losses for years, even, because of a belief in their plan.

Sometimes, risky bets pay out. Sometimes spectacularly. And sometimes they crash and burn. The resilience of a market economy means that not everyone has to be on board for such a venture. Indeed, the market is a collection of organizations that are all either slowly or quickly in the process of failing. None of them will last forever, but they generally won't all fail at the same time. A command economy can, and often does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I miss when Ubuntu was the unqualified choice if you wanted to recommend a Linux distro to a non-techie.

<comment><USER17> It still pretty much is along with Linux mint.

The average Joe does not care much about the open source philosophy. If it's free and works well out of the box without having to touch the command line, they would be happy. This is where I think Linux mint wins even though it includes many proprietary codecs.

<comment><USER18> I'm an Ubuntu user and I want to give Mint a spin (because my parents and acquaintances are a bit afraid of the "you have to upgrade your whole OS" prompt). Which desktop should I pick for a casual user?

<comment><USER17> Cinnamon would be a safe bet.

It looks and works like Windows 7 and most people would feel comfortable using it.

For old computer hardware choose the lightweight Mate edition of Linux mint.

<comment><USER18> Great, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Many groups are trying to reuse Ubuntu recently. I'm thinking about Linux Mint and Elementary.io.

One day, one new group will be more focussed on graphics and hire UX designers, and publish a polished, paid version of Linux. As in, you can redistribute, but if you want to subscribe to the repository which contains the latest bugfixes and the awesome UI design upgrades, you'll have to pay - and this is perfectly legal with free software, even GPL. We've only avoided that until now because so many groups have a huge disdain to making money off products (which is an awesome value - but just a value).

So it is understandable that Ubuntu tries to raise barriers of entry.

<comment><USER20> The purpose of GPL is not to prevent people from earning money. It is so that you can always modify your software yourself, or that you can seek a better alternative because the standards are open.

<comment><USER21> > you can seek a better alternative because the standards are open.

That's not really true, GPL says nothing about standards, you can create your own proprietary standard with your code covered under GPL. Funnily enough you can have GPL software and create a minefield of confusion like Oracle does with the OpenJDK which is GPL.

I fully agree on the first point though. Sadly many people forget that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I somehow have the feeling that the longer the software licenses are the more licensing-related drama is happening.

<comment><USER23> There was a lot of drama between BSD and AT&T even though the licenses were short too. There is also drama over MPEG formats due to patents, again, even despite the short licenses, which led to webm.

A short license does not mean that it will have fewer problems. It just means it addresses fewer concerns.

At any rate, the mjg is not complaining about software licenses, but about trademark policies. Trademarks are a very different set of laws than the copyrights that software licenses typically handle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> so, just use Debian.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you have the source, it shouldn't be difficult to build binaries, should it?

If you are building a new Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, I don't even understand why you would want to reuse binaries they built.

This post would be more meaningful if it literally quoted from unfavorable license terms used by Ubuntu to actually prevent people from making derivatives. Saying that Canonical "appears to require" something is using weasel words.

<comment><USER26> > If you have the source, it shouldn't be difficult to build binaries, should > it?

You'd think, but no - there's no guarantee that the shipped binary packages can be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies.

> If you are building a new Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, I don't even > understand why you would want to reuse binaries they built.

Because it's entirely unnecessary? Building the entire archive is a huge amount of effort.

> This post would be more meaningful if it literally quoted from unfavorable > license terms used by Ubuntu to actually prevent people from making > derivatives. Saying that Canonical "appears to require" something is using > weasel words.

The terms are at [http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and- policies/intellectual-...](http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and- policies/intellectual-property-policy) \- I probably should have linked them, I've just been writing about this enough lately that it's easy to forget that people might read a single post without context.

<comment><USER27> > You'd think, but no - there's no guarantee that the shipped binary packages > can be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies.

If the shipped source doesn't contain enough information to actually perform a build surely that's a straight-up GPL violation (and a far more serious one than any possible ZFS issue, and one that you're in a position to do something about as a copyright holder). If the shipped source doesn't include whatever their developers actually use to build (and I refuse to believe an organization like Ubuntu wouldn't have a unified "build it all" script, or at least a README that described the steps you needed to take) then how can it possibly be the preferred form for making modifications?

<comment><USER26> > If the shipped source doesn't contain enough information to actually perform > a build surely that's a straight-up GPL violation

Package A's source code contains some undefined behaviour that gcc 4.4 tolerates. The distribution upgrades to gcc 5.1 and the build now breaks, but nobody notices because no new version of Package A has been uploaded and so no new build has been performed. Is your position that it was in compliance with the GPL before the gcc transition, and in violation afterwards?

<comment><USER27> No. If the package A developers when working on the code just use whatever version of gcc's installed and don't have any process then they're compliant (but dumb). But if they have a script, or even just a "building.txt" that says "install gcc 4.4 and set these environment variables, build is broken on 5.x, known issue", and they exclude that from their source distribution then they're in violation. They need to ship the preferred form for making modifications i.e. what they would use themselves or give to a new developer on their team. It's no different from the example of C source generated by a perl script (you can't ship the generated source, you have to ship the original script), and it's exactly what's necessary for the four freedoms - end users need the same facilities that the original developers have when working on the code, not a watered-down version.

<comment><USER26> > But if they have a script, or even just a "building.txt" that says "install > gcc 4.4 and set these environment variables, build is broken on 5.x, known > issue", and they exclude that from their source distribution then they're in > violation.

They don't.

<comment><USER27> Really? They being Canonical? They just build their binaries with whatever happens to be installed on Bob's machine this week and then that becomes their official release?

<comment><USER26> They build their packages with whatever is in the distribution at the time, yes. It happens on the build daemons rather than on the developer machine.

<comment><USER27> Then how can you get into the situation that the shipped binary packages can't be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies - isn't that what the build daemons do, use the system to build itself? I mean if they use the previous release or something that's fine too. Whichever way they do it, surely it's documented internally, because it's the kind of thing developers would need to know when developing. I can't believe it would be a case of "if the build doesn't build ssh into the build daemons and update them until it does".

I mean a developer working at Canonical, trying to make a change to one of the packages they're preparing for distribution, has to have some way to answer the question "what version of gcc is being used to build this package". Whether that information is kept in the source tree, on their wiki, or on a post-it on the employee fridge - in any case, it's part of the source in the preferred form for making modifications, because it's, well, part of what the employees use to make modifications.

<comment><USER26> > Then how can you get into the situation that the shipped binary packages > can't be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies

The distribution isn't rebuilt every cycle. If no new source release has been uploaded, the existing binary will be used for the next release.

<comment><USER27> So if they need to apply a small patch to a given package they'll sometimes discover that it was built 3 versions ago and no longer compiles? Yuck.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Freelance software devs aren't reliable. What was your role in it? - <AUTHOR> https://cyberomin.github.io/tech/2020/05/26/dear-client-freelancer.html <comment><USER2> You get what you pay for. On shore freelance is worth the money.

Check out [https://toptal.com](https://toptal.com)</comment>


The radioactive boy scout: When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor - <AUTHOR> http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/0059750

<comment><USER3> Same story:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2202022> : harpers.org - no comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2004743> : dangerouslaboratories.org - <USER2> comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542905> : wikipedia.org - no comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=611583> : harpers.org - many comments</comment>


Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-administration-had-restrictions-on-nsa-reversed-in-2011/2013/09/07/c26ef658-0fe5-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html

<comment><USER2> Obama's presidency has been disastrous for the privacy of American citizens:

 _"The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans' communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners," Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. "Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant."_

The Obama admin hypocrisy on transparency is astounding. No public debate, no checks by Congress on the authority to wiretap and collect enormous amounts of data on US citizens. Yet the people who voted for him are still making excuses for this admin.

<comment><USER3> Impeach him. I'm sorry if you voted for him and you think it's a too "radical" move, but I really think it's actually a very "proportional" and reasonable move at this point.

More think he should be impeached if he goes to war with Syria despite a No vote from Congress and despite UN saying no, and breaking international law. I think the NSA thing is at least as big as that, and if he does both then it's that much clearer that he's acting as a _dictator_ with unlimited powers that needs to be overthrown.

He has no regard for the Constitution, no regard for human rights, no regard for due process, and no regard for international law. Not doing it would just send a message to other psychopaths running for president the next time, that it's okay to blatantly lie to the electorate, and then do stuff at least as bad as he did. Impeach him.

<comment><USER4> I would agree. However I think it is more important to impeach those in charge of the intelligence community first and then work up to the President.

I am not sure the President is in the loop here. As far as I can tell he gets most of his info in these areas from the same sources that we do.

<comment><USER5> The NSA sets itself up as the Fourth branch of government but keeps it a secret even from the original three?

<comment><USER6> It will not be the first organ of the state to morph into "a state within the state" though it is surprising to see it happening in a liberal democracy.

Or perhaps we were encouraged to look away from the curtain all this time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> particularly galling pull-out para:

"Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA's authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration's assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term "target" that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government's approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans' privacy later."

The Cheney administration was openly deceitful, as it were, a brazen set of liars fronted by an idiot stooge. This turn of events - particularly given Obama's rhetoric and the expectations of him - seems in many ways much more insidiously dangerous.

<comment><USER8> It's pretty hard to take your point seriously when your second paragraph is so clearly wrong and more a SNL sketch than reality. No President in the modern era has been stupid. The psychotic need to perpetuate this is one of the ideas making politics in the USA worse than it should be. The evidence and interviews with the former President show him to be very intelligent.

<comment><USER9> What evidence shows Bush Junior to be particularly bright or competent? His grades at Yale? His running into the ground of multiple business? His embarassing performance as President?

Don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of smart, competent conservatives I think are sometimes wrong and or just on a different side of class interest from me. Say, Dick Cheney, Bush Senior, Ronald, Nixon (off the charts smart, really). But George Junior was, indeed, an idiotic stooge.

<comment><USER8> The people who worked for him have pointed out he was quite a lot smarter than them[1]. The interviews he gave during his library's opening. Dick Cheney has said Bush is smarter than him. This SNL BS is seriously messing with how people think. It's like the number of people who believe Ford was an unathletic clutz.

1) one example [http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/](http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/)

<comment><USER9> Cool. His friends like him and wrote a blog post about it ;)

I still think history will judge his administration as being 8 years of screw- up, class warfare, and embarassment. Note that I am not saying that about his Dad, Ronald, or Richard....

<comment><USER2> If history will judge Bush poorly, how will they judge Obama in the context of continuing Bush's policies? Embarrassment? Check. Screw-ups (including Syria)? Check. Pressuring/intimidating foreign governments not to grant Snowden asylum? Check. Drone striking children? Check. Sending admin flacks out to say that Benghazi was caused by a YouTube video? Check.

BTW, the Obama admin has zero evidence in public of scientific samples or intel proving use of sarin gas by the Syrian government: [http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98603A20130907?irpc...](http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98603A20130907?irpc=932)

Reality check: Obama and Bush are cut from very similar policy cloth. Both warmongers and NSA expansionists who don't give a damn about the civil liberties of the American public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this not perjury? Kinda serious.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02ea3dBJAuI&feature=youtube_...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02ea3dBJAuI&feature=youtube_gdata_player)

>Perjury, also known as forswearing, is the willful act of swearing a false oath or of falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to an official proceeding.

<comment><USER11> Was he under oath to tell the truth at that press conference? If not, it's not perjury, just ordinary lying.

<comment><USER5> > If not, it's not perjury, just ordinary lying.

Even so, such a lie when delivered by PotUS might constitute a high crime and/or misdemeanor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "If we're validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don't have to close our eyes to that," Litt said. "I'm not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we've already collected."

Although I'm receptive to that argument in general, part of the whole idea that _generic_ collection is authorized at all, is that pre-emptively mirroring the data without looking at it (assuming that such mirroring is required at all) is still at least not doing a search on that data.

While I understand the Administration has tried to go away from that argument after it was first presented I see no other justification for capturing traffic that isn't clearly crossing national boundaries (which is admittedly a hard problem).

So the only way I could see for that argument to apply is if the data in question comes up on a legal search of foreign traffic, but __not __a new selector search into the entire pool of set aside traffic.

If you couldn't have legally run a search on the data as it came across the wire due to lack of a warrant then it wouldn't become OK unless another legal search window into that data opened it. It certainly doesn't become OK just because you happen to have custody of the data, just like we don't let the government open and read our mail without a warrant.

</comment><comment><USER13> > "The government says, 'We're not targeting U.S. persons,' " said Gregory T. > Nojeim

And again, the foreigners' right to protection of their privacy is not even up for discussion.

I'm tempted to say this is un-american. But thinking it over, it seems to actually have become the new "american".

In any case, this kind of attitude can not come from nation that sees itself as "the best country in the world".

<comment><USER14> Americans believe their country has been chosen by God: ordained by divine powers to be the leader of the world. So it's not surprising that they view the rights of foreigners with contempt or at the very least lack of interest.

"Un-american" supposedly means against freedom (and a range of other positive buzzwords) which is pretty hilarious given their behavior.

<comment><USER15> _Some Americans_. I do believe some actually _know_ they've just been lucky enough to get a fairly resilient constitutional framework designed in an era of Enlightenment, and then smart enough to be on the right side of history during the three major conflicts that shaped the last century.

<comment><USER16> Don't overlook geography. The fact that we have easy access to both major world oceans is also a _huge_ part of why we have been successful as a nation. It greatly simplifies both international trade and naval power projection.

We would have been on the winning side of those conflicts no matter which side we chose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could this be explained by a secret deal to support health care prgram in exchange of supportIng a security enforcement program ?

</comment><comment><USER18> My reading of Obama is that he is nearly terrified about being blamed for anything.

If the OP is correct, then this is some blame that might stick to Obama. In this case, my reading is that he will rush to correct the situation.

So, first step, pin the blame on Obama, and then let him suffer with it until he changes it.

<comment><USER19> May be more terrified of the next 9/11 and criticism that he didn't do enough to stop it. (I'm not condoning their decisions.)

<comment><USER18> Yes, of course, but now for Obama that possibility of blame for not stopping another terrorist attack can seem less important than the actual blame, now, for the NSA spying on US citizens, that is, will so seem to Obama if enough people raise heck over the NSA spying.

If I were the POTUS, then I'd have my staff draft a short statement and use it to address the nation. The main point would be that the US actually is vulnerable to an attack by terrorists, and even if we totally lock down our country, turn the US into a 'surveillance' state and a police state, trash most of the Bill of Rights, damage our domestic economy, shoot our international trade in the gut, etc., we will still be vulnerable. We can't be 100% safe.

I'd mention that often there are several courses of action, with some safer than others but none 100% safe. E.g., from B. Schneier, after 9/11 so many people were so afraid of commercial air travel and drove cars instead that the fact that cars are much less safe than air travel resulted in more deaths of US citizens than 9/11 caused.

Might also mention that a goal of UBL was not to defeat the US via force but just to trick the US into a response so absurd and wasteful that the US would bankrupt itself, and here UBL has had a lot of success.

Then I'd ask the US citizens to go to a special, nationwide referendum on what to do, (1) return to the US as it was before 9/11 with some prudent and legal improvements to stop terrorists or (2) trash much of what is great about the US and still be vulnerable to terrorists. In this choice, we have to notice that the terrorists are not totally stupid and will avoid confronting the defenses we do put up and, instead, exploit ways in which we are still vulnerable.

A review of the track record of just what good all our anti-terrorism hysteria -- NSA, 'militarization' of local police, trashing the Bill of Rights, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, the TSA trashing our domestic transportation industry, excesses by our Customs units, the money, etc. -- actually accomplished.

E.g., we should note the Boston bomber -- the NSA, etc. didn't stop him.

Then let the US citizens decide.

Good way for Obama to play CYA and also get the US back to a sane country away from some national neurotic hysteria from a few wackos with airline tickets and box cutters.

<comment><USER19> I wonder if it's possible that the NSA did have awareness of the Boston bombing in advance but couldn't stop it preemptively without giving up the info that they were tracking anything and everything. Remember the security detail looking guys Reddit excitedly found when scouring photos? Perhaps they wanted to catch the bombers in action but failed?

<comment><USER18> The real situation was much worse than that: The Russians nicely enough told us that the guy was a dangerous wacko. So, the Boston police investigated and then dropped the matter. The NSA could likely have had a really tough time using their electronics to get a lead as solid as that the Russians gave us. Net, the NSA electronic data is just not very effective against such a wacko; our police departments aren't either.

Maybe the hope of the NSA is catching another UBL planning another 9/11 and do so by grabbing cell phone data. Well, the terrorists know now to assume that telephones and e-mail are not secure; knowing that, the NSA will be even more useless than now.

The NSA is just a bureaucracy gone totally out of control because no one with authority wants to say "Stop" and then risk being blamed the next time something goes "Boom!". Any reasonable evaluation of costs and benefits would say that the NSA should be cut way back, say, to their original mission of arranging secure communications for the State Department. Then, maybe let them try to listen in on efforts to make loose nukes. Otherwise, save the money and the US Constitution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't blame the NSA for this, their rationale is "lets collect as much as possible and then see, gathering intel is in our mission...". After all it's all legal as far as they are concerned.

I don't even blame the Exec branch that much since they have a LE mentality of "if you have nothing to hide...protect lives...blah blah"

I do however blame the courts, they could've stopped or at least not-rubber stamped this. The judges also have lifetime appointments, yet they let this happen. And no, the Congress cannot order the courts to ignore the Bill of Rights, regardless of what any legislation says.

<comment><USER21> I blame them all, but even more so, I blame the people. Snowden isn't the first whistleblower to emerge; google William Binney, Mark Klein, and Thomas Drake. This knowledge has been within earshot of the public for nearly a decade now, yet people just don't seem to care enough to do anything about it. There seems to be some kind of implicit collective trust in the government, that whatever they're up to is for our own good. I don't think it's ignorance; I think that people generally have known that the government was spying on them for years, they just never really cared, and now that we have full-blown, concrete evidence that it's been happening, the majority still doesn't care. It's strange.

<comment><USER22> I think it comes down to rational ignorance. The whole thing is a negative feedback loop, nothing about it should be surprising. Breaking out of it is an uphill battle. Blame everybody, the NSA, the executive, the courts, and the population.

<comment><USER21> Should we also blame ourselves? As the informed, as the people with the capability to explain these technical issues to the masses, with the capability to foment a movement if we so desired, what blame should we place on our own shoulders, if any?

<comment><USER12> Even if you 'foment a movement', will it simply end up like the teetotaller movement which managed to foist Prohibition on a public that didn't want it?

The American people have for a long time been _extremely_ 'tough on crime' (e.g. the ongoing 'war on drugs'), and the reason people don't seem to care is that this is an extension of the same philosophy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Stretch – Free limousine rides - <AUTHOR> https://stretchcorp.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, author here. My phone is exploding.

I hear you on the Facebook login issue. I misconfigured the Facebook SDK and it's falling back to a web view rather than using native login.

I just pushed an over-the-air update to remove Facebook login entirely for now.

<comment><USER2> Hey OP, just wanted to let you know - the animation is making a horizontal scrollbar appear and disappear at the bottom of the page.

What I think is happening is that as .limo-container (which is 100% of page width) rotates, its "real" bounding box is expanding and contracting ever so slightly. Just open the devtools and focus on that div, you'll get it immediately.

(I'm on Chromium 57.0.2987.98 (Developer Build) on Linux, FWIW.)

<comment><USER3> > its "real" bounding box

The terminology is axis aligned bounding box (or AABB).

<comment><USER2> Oh, thanks! TIL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Request a limo" -> Surprise facebook login!

that's a shame, this looked cool

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't want to be this guy, but the required Facebook login doesn't seem to be safe. There is no way of knowing is the real Facebook as it's not going though the fb app or regular safari. A bit shady.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for mentioning this — I've removed FB login until it's configured correctly to use native login!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't make me give you my Facebook password. Facebook already has a way to auth in.

</comment><comment><USER7> Where is it right now? The screenshot shows an icon on a map, but I've zoomed out to the entire United States and it doesn't show up anywhere.

<comment><USER8> I believe it is in Oregon. Not 100% sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep we're currently docked in Portland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this taken at the salar de uyuni? [https://www.facebook.com/the.limo.diaries/photos/a.594902204...](https://www.facebook.com/the.limo.diaries/photos/a.594902204049397.1073741828.594842944055323/623662471173370/?type=1&theater)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's White Sands, New Mexico

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do things that won't scale!

</comment><comment><USER11> It would be great if there were a feature to notify the user when the limo is nearby, with a range away selector. Awesome concept and story, though!

</comment><comment><USER12> That's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER13> How much VC funding do you think this can attract?

<comment><USER14> They didn't mention it, but unlike Uber they aren't being sued by a rival company, their employees and their contractors while being actively boycotted by customers. Also, prob don't have a 10-figure burn rate.

So simple vc math would dictate a valuation like:

Absolute value of their earnings.

9999999 Growth Multiple

\+ $1M for having an app

\- $500k for not blogging about react

Basically already a unicorn

<comment><AUTHOR> The routing algorithm uses deep learning® in case that bumps up our valuation at all?

<comment><USER14> Oh man, I didn't realize the whole team had already been aquihired by Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Logan style adventures await!

</comment><comment><USER8> Are there any plans to post the cities you should end up passing through?

<comment><AUTHOR> We post semi-frequent updates on our Facebook page here: [https://www.facebook.com/the.limo.diaries](https://www.facebook.com/the.limo.diaries)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Love the idea!!! Have fun and share some stories!!

</comment><comment><USER17> Inaccurate title. This is Uber for ONE limousine.

<comment><USER18> OK, we changed the title from "Show HN: Stretch - A parody of Uber (free limousine rides)".

<comment><USER19> This is the first time I've seen you change a Show HN title. For my Show HNs I spend a lot of time thinking and coming up with a title that I can stand behind. I may be extreme but if I were the poster of whose Show HN you changed the title I would rather have the post removed.

<comment><USER18> We change Show HN titles all the time, just like other titles. In this case the submitter emailed us and was fine with it.

Actually I copied the original title incorrectly above. The original title was "Show HN: Stretch – Uber for limousines (but it's free)", which provoked objections in the thread. When a title provokes objections like that, it can easily take over the discussion. That's one reason we change them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> :-)

</comment><comment><USER21> What's the point of this anyway?

<comment><USER7> Fun!</comment></comment>


Ron Minsky (Jane Street) on working with legacy systems - <AUTHOR> https://signalsandthreads.com/build-systems/#1458 <comment><USER2> This poor clown carries the surname of a Once beloved AI founder who turned out to have paedophilic tendencies on the pedophile island.</comment>


Sodium in PHP: Asymmetric Crypto, Hold the Blood Pressure - <AUTHOR> https://scott.arciszewski.me/blog/2014/08/pecl-install-sodium-asymmetric-crypto-in-php

<comment><USER2> Oh hey, thanks for submitting this for me. :D</comment>


Google Turns Your Android Phone Into An On-The-Fly Conversation Interpreter - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/12/android-translations/ <comment><USER2> This is almost moving Kurzweil's prediction from "mostly correct" to "correct".

"Early 2000s

        * Translating telephones allow people to speak to
          each other in different languages.
        * Machines designed to transcribe speech into
          computer text allow deaf people to understand
          spoken words."

Every time he notches another victory, I pay closer and closer attention to his other guesses that are 10 - 30 years out.

<comment><USER3> How well does this system handle your second bullet point (transcription for conversation with the deaf)? I have a use for that but, not having an Android phone yet, I can't just try it out.

<comment><USER4> Dragon Dictate is available for both iPhone and Android which would seem sufficient for a face to face conversation (or at least better than the alternative).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's most interesting to me is that Google seems to be moving forward with a strategy of competing with iOS via services instead of just applications.

Services (like Conversation Mode translate, constantly updated turn by turn GPS driving directions, more deeply integrated Google Talks) give them leverage against the carriers, who have to meet Google guidelines for Android in order to include the flagship apps and represent a really high bar that Apple would have to overcome to compete.

I realize it isn't exactly as cut and dried as services vs applications, but it is certainly a strong move that plays to Google's strengths.

<comment><USER5> I suspect that mobile in general will move towards services instead of applications. There's a lot of data crunching that you can do when you have a data collection device in every person's pockets, but doing that crunching on the client will drain your batteries it to time. I predict that the really interesting mobile apps will have a thin (but native) client that only does data collection & UI, and then the most computationally interesting piece will be hosted in the cloud somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the last 6-12 months alone i'm really starting to see "the future" that I dreamed of as a kid.

Between this article, <http://questvisual.com/>, Microsoft Kinect, Nintendo 3DS, Microsoft Surface 2 (first version didn't impress me, was so huge and clunky), Amazon's Kindle 3 (huge fan of HHGTTG, the Kindle basically IS the guide) etc...

As a life-long nerd/geek, it's pretty awe-inspiring.

<comment><USER7> I would also add to that list the Emotiv kit (<http://www.emotiv.com>), which allows "to create applications that can be controlled by your mind" by making use of the same type of technology that allows paralytics to control robotic arms.

Actually, the technology alone is highly impressive, but that an SDK is available to anyone for $299 is nothing short of mind-boggling.

<comment><USER8> $299 for the device + $500 for the sdk.

<comment><USER9> No. The $500 Developer edition includes both the SDK and the device (headset).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Take this and Word Lens like capability -- if I was in junior high, I'd make the argument that there's no need for me to learn a foreign language. In a few years, I can speak and write any language there is!

<comment><USER11> This might save you some time/money, but it certainly can't bridge the gap between different languages. Keep in mind that "to translate is to betray" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traduttore,_traditore>

<comment><USER12> Doug Hofstadter of GEB fame wrote an interesting book on this called Le Ton Beau de Marot (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_Beau_de_Marot>) where he argued that 100% translation was pretty much impossible, and machine translation in particular. In that book he translated one poem from French to English thirty-six times, each time capturing some nuance of the original, but showing that no single translation could possibly capture everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just tried it, works only for the English-Spanish pair right now, but the reliability is pretty good considering that they're calling it an Alpha.

<comment><USER14> The real question is how far it will move from alpha, if at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My hovercraft is full of eels. Sorry, couldn't resist. Natural language processing, could we really see major improvements in our lifetimes? My gut tells me there are so many nuances to the way we work that the best we can get to will have to include many of the inconsistencies we have in understanding each other.

<comment><USER16> The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Except that if you actually travel in parts of the world where you would need this service, international data roaming charges for accessing this service will be so outrageous that it may just be cheaper to hire a professional interpreter to travel with you.

</comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone else been waiting for this 'invention' forever? Between speech recognition and machine translation it seemed to be a solved problem for the longest time.

</comment><comment><USER19> At first google should improve <http://translate.google.com> to show valid translations.

</comment><comment><USER20> Douglas Adams was mostly right. It's just not a fish.

</comment><comment><USER21> AnyOne know when this will be available to install? I'm itching to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have nothing meaningful to contribute, but I want to say this is a monumental step forward.

Some people here seem to predict this heralds the end of language education for most people. Maybe that's true. But I actually think this will contribute to earlier and more frequent exposure to foreign languages. And that may ultimately do more for language learning than compulsory education ever did.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Google is quick to note that this is very much an alpha feature. In other words, expect a lot of hiccups. They note that background noise, thick accents, and quick speech can all trip up the app."

Wow, so it's not practically useful very frequently?

<comment><USER24> dude.. google is getting closer to a real time universal speech translator and you find a way to be unimpressed. What does impress you ?

<comment><USER23> I didn't intend for that comment to sound quite as snarky as it did. But my point is that real time speech translation needs to work precisely in those situations. Voice recognition and computerized translation have been around for a while. They are nearly always stymied by the problems mentioned in the article we have been "close" to this for at least a decade. What would impress me is if they had developed new algorithms to overcome these exceptionally challenging problems.

<comment><USER25> _Voice recognition and computerized translation have been around for a while._

Now your reaction makes sense. If you're viewing at as an advance in the technology here (research wise, etc), then this announcement has nothing new. But from a standpoint of anyone with an Android phone having access to this whenever they want (accessibility and ease of use), this is incredible. I think most people are concerned with the latter, but you do have a point about there being nothing "new" here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Levitate Exploit Development Platform - Node.JS - Scala - <AUTHOR>

I developed a module for Node.JS and Scala(on his way). It is an exploit development platform and I am waiting for you contributions.<p>http://levitateplatform.org <comment><USER2> Your site gives little details about why somebody would use this over something like metasploit.

PS. Your github links point to a 404: [https://github.com/levitate/levitate](https://github.com/levitate/levitate)</comment>