Your Startup Is Spam - <AUTHOR> http://blog.metamorphium.com/2012/10/14/your-startup-is-spam/

<comment><USER2> To implement this correctly, put your service's email address in the "Sender:" header (and also for the "mail from" when establishing the SMTP connection) to remain SPF compliant while still keeping the user's email address in the "From:" header:

<http://www.openspf.org/Best_Practices/Webgenerated>

Note that this will show up as "(user's info) on behalf of (your app's info)" or "(user's info) via (your app's info)" depending on the recipient's mail client.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, in the most widely used Email client (Outlook), it will show up as

"(your app's info) on behalf of (user's info)"

So at a casual glance, the mail will still look as if it's coming from your app. Replies will go to your app's address too.

While a good idea in theory, this behavior of Outlook kind of renders the Sender header useless.

<comment><USER4> No it doesn't. The information on who this is supposedly from is useful, but hiding the actual sender is potentially harmful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love how Blackboard, despite years of legal intimidation and generally anti- competitive practices, is slowly being picked away at by the competition, not from some monolithic replacement but by smaller, targeted services that do one thing really well. Tabule looks very interesting. Two of my classes this semester are using Piazza for online discussions. What Piazza does to stop spammy emails is let you set a digest to aggregate all messages every n hours, which I really like.

<comment><USER6> My school has recently switched from a branded variant of Blackboard, to Desire2Learn which bills itself as open, etc. From a student perspective, the usability is not much different.

One "feature" that drives me insane is it creates zips on the server side every time you download a file (e.g., lecture slides, PDFs) even if the download is only one file. Effectively blocks one from using it on an iPad.

<comment><USER7> iPad can't open zip files?!

<comment><USER8> There's nothing to prevent it, but none of the built in apps handle such file types.

There is plenty of support via third party apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I cringed, thinking this was going to be a rant about startups, but it was actually a great piece of input on customer interaction. Tip of the hat to you.

<comment><USER10> I also felt that way. I think the title would be better rephrased (something along the lines of "people think your startup is spam") or put in quotation marks to indicate this aspect better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe my english isn't good enough for this article, but I don't have any clue what is meant with "RA" in this context. Neither the dictionary nor a quick google/wikipedia search gave any sensible explaination.

What is the "RA" of a student?

Is this story supposed to be fully understood by US citizens only?

<comment><USER12> Resident Assistant <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_assistant>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This hasn't solved the problem though, it's just passing the buck. If the app facilitates what people perceive as spamming, shouldn't that be something you want to look into? If you can improve the experience for the recipients of these e-mails, then you can be more honest about the app's association with them, and possibly draw more customers in from a "secondary" userbase.

Yeah, maybe this is hard to solve, but startups are always claiming that they're solving hard problems. So...solve!

I also enjoy enchiladas by the way.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's absolutely a valid point. This solution is more like a band-aid than a cure. We are still actively trying to solve the root problem.

The issue for us is that it is difficult to accurately classify something as important or useful, and something as merely informational, since that classification can be different for each person. As we collect more data, this will become easier to do over time. In the meantime, we are looking at modifying our interface to encourage more targeted content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a neat/good idea. I would love to hear if there is a counter argument why NOT to do this, though. However, your current logic makes a lot of sense to me. It's awesome that you (the OP of the article -- if it's not the HN op) could think outside of the box for this great solution.

The only argument I could potentially see is that by coming through the provider and not the "sendee" is the "real" mailbox spam filter. Maybe "firstname.lastname@example.com" gets marked as spam in the mail client but not if it's from "Google+", etc.

<comment><USER15> > _Maybe "firstname.lastname@example.com" gets marked as spam in the mail client but not if it's > from "Google+", etc._

I'm assuming they're just changing the display name on the email, rather than the 'From:' email address itself.

That is, instead of "Tabule <firstname.lastname@example.com>", it's now "John Smith <firstname.lastname@example.com>". The email doesn't get marked as spam because it's still claiming to be from the server that sent it, and it has the appropriate MX records and those sorts of things.

<comment><USER16> The thing that worries me with that approach is overzealous "add to address book" functionality. I don't want to be clicking "John Smith" in some dropdown and have it go to some noreply address at some third party.

I personally solve this by typing in full email addresses and memorizing my friends' email addresses, but I gather that's not how the world at large works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hey I was wondering how you do this technically? Do you for example give Joe Smith a new email address (i.e. email@example.com)? Or do you change the name-addr for a firstname.lastname@example.com?

What about triggering scam warning?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're just changing the from name for the email, and each notification has a unique email address associated with it, so it shouldn't trigger any scam warning.

<comment><USER17> Cool thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Your mascot is a Koala, but you don't allow students from UNSW (an Australian university) to use your service?

> @student.unsw.edu.au not accepted

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the product looks awesome, but I would never use it. (I am a student.)

Here's why: For me, it appears to attempt to solve the problems of: a calendar, reminders, and school-related task management.

During the first week of each class, I "process" the syllabus by adding the major assignment due dates (usually 3-5 over the course of a quarter), and exam dates to my Google Calendar. This is a pretty quick process. It's so little overhead that I think setting up a sharing system with others to try to share the data is actually more overhead. (I have used a setup like this for 10 years myself, and I expect most students have something similar.)

I get text-message based reminders a week in advance for these special events (a separate calendar from my usual one for easy color differentiation). The professors always list and review contents of major exams and details of upcoming projects already anyway.

And finally, my student / project tasks are managed separately in another system alongside all my other projects and areas. It never made sense to me to separate the student side when really my entire life is project-based. For this type of system, I've used text-based GTD, Wunderlist, Taskpaper, etc.

 _That said_... If I could sign into your app the first week of my class and have all this done automatically for me, I would be very happy.

<comment><USER19> Hi, I'm a (fellow) cofounder at Tabule.

You make a lot of valid points. As guptaneil alluded to, the ideal case would be if we could get teachers to post their assignments on Tabule. Teachers for the most part already post assignments online, but the education market lacks a good central homework management system that aggregates assignments between classes.

What we're trying to achieve is to bridge to that ideal case with student- submitted assignments. There's an interesting dynamic at play here, because inputting all of one's assignments is trivially better (perhaps even worse if we consider switching cost) than using Google Calendar. For the second person to join the course though, the experience is already better, because all of their assignments are already available to them. It's an interesting chicken- and-egg problem. If my assignments aren't already in the system, then there's no immediate value for me, but there will be for everyone that comes after me.

<comment><USER20> No idea how your actual finance side works, but the obvious way to solve this seems to be to offer a reward to the first student to enter assignment data for each class. A couple of checks would be necessary, i.e, reward is only valid after two other students confirm the data, to prevent students just adding junk. Have you considered something like this? Market it like 'all your assignment dates ready for you, or get a red bull on us!'

<comment><USER6> Guptaneil and etrinh, I appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

Regarding a reward-based or gamification system, this is an excellent idea. Of course, it would not necessarily be monetary. To give a specific example, Dropbox has become very good at gamifying their recruitment by posing their challenges for expanding storage space. A similar adoption here could be interesting. I plan to follow Tabule's development and adoption curiously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it possible to do this if you use Amazon SES? IIRC you have to validate every address you use to send outbound mail.

<comment><USER22> You can now validate an entire domain.

[http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2012/05/15/amazon-...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2012/05/15/amazon-simple-email-service-announces-domain-verification/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> When facebook started doing this for groups it took me a while to work out how to filter the emails (I don't read email unless it comes from a real person - facebook group interactions, since they are scattergun announcements, don't count as real people..)

The answer ended up being to configure facebook's byzantine settings on a per- group basis, which still means I get hit for 5 or 10 messages when someone adds me to a group, and before I can get to the web interface to 'unsubscribe'.

This spammy RA would be less of a problem, as it would be easy to filter _one_ Tabule user - but it does make it a pain to have a "MailingLists/Tabule" gmail label containing all the Facebook/Tabule/whatever messages!

<comment><AUTHOR> One option is to catch any email that ends with @tabuleapp.com or @facebook.com to label notification emails from those services.

<comment><USER23> this only works if the email comes from that domain. Facebook, I think, switched to setting the 'from' email using the users' registered emails (i.e. the user who posted on the group wall seems to have sent you an email by doing so...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have the same sort of reaction to Piazz(z)a, and I think they try the solution you propose. I think it's because I perceive Piazza as encouraging the course staff to send more emails than they otherwise would. This may or may not be true, but I subconsciously think it is.

It _is_ true that I get more random invitations to things I only slightly care about via social media, and those rare invitations I get by actual personal email tend to be things I strongly care about. So the argument can be made that Facebook and G+ _are_ spamming me, by encouraging my acquaintances to spam me.

<comment><USER24> The content matters too. They are certainly spamming you if the email they send just says "<Person You Know> just sent you a message on <Service>!" and force you to log in to read the actual message. Just put it in the email, willya?

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't worry, we put the actual message in the email. We hate those types of notifications too :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I loved the "Don't click this" on the main homepage <https://tabuleapp.com/>

<comment><USER26> I didn't. Whenever I see someone who thinks they're clever saying something like "don't click this" or "I know I'm going to be downvoted but..." I immediately take the action they don't want. It's not clever. It has been done / said 1000 times before.

Tabule's website is terrible. It says absolutely nothing about what it is. I bounced after 5 seconds and will promptly forget about them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I would normally agree with you if this were a service targeted to the HN crowd, who has probably seen this or other clever marketing techniques too many times to be amused. But keep in mind that our target market is college students, who spend less time looking at startup launch pages and are far less likely to have seen that. For that audience, our "don't click this" button has been very positively received, as it always seems to get a giggle from what we've seen so far.

As for saying exactly what it is, that can and will be improved :) thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I tried to sign up for Tabule and the activation email was filtered as spam. I laughed a good bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually something we haven't managed to figure out why that happens. I'm no expert in email optimization, but I can't figure out why Google insists on marking our welcome email as spam. Is it something in the wording? If anybody here knows more about getting email past spam filters, I'd love some advice!

<comment><USER28> The html to text ratio is a bit high. I would suggest sticking with a plaintext email for now.

If you stick with html, make sure it validates. The font tag's 'face' attribute doesn't look legal as it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm thanks for the tip, I'll try switching to plaintext. I wish we hadn't wasted so much time building an HTML template now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I n addition to "changing all notification emails for Tabule to be from the person who triggered the notification" you could also give the user control of how many emails they receive. i.e. address the actual email volume problem, not just the perception of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The user already has control of which emails they get. The problem is that these notifications actually are important to receive, since it would be bad for him if he never got an important announcement from his RA. If Tabule did not adequately notify him, his RA would have to just directly email him instead, which would result in the same number of emails in his inbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> To avoid being spam filtered you should set the from name to the person sending it, use you system address as the from email and use the sender's personal email as a reply to.

<comment><USER31> Do you know how precise the reply-to has to be? Example, a user in our system is known to us as James Hendrix, but he commonly goes by Jimi Hendrix or Hendrix, Jimi. Thanks...

<comment><USER7> Doesn't matter. Only the From: and Sender: matter.

<comment><USER31> thanks, this helped me: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2231897/potential- issues-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2231897/potential-issues-using- members-from-address-and-the-sender-header)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hi Neil! Nice to see you on here. Good to hear your product is gaining traction

-Benglert

</comment><comment><USER33> Good story.

</comment><comment><USER34> Sooooo... Can you not do this, so I can haz more cloak spamz?

</comment><comment><USER35> I would have just said "haters be hating" and spammed some more.</comment>


Django 1.11 beta 1 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2017/feb/20/django-111-beta-1-released/ <comment><USER2> This is a bit off topic, but can anyone suggest a decent Django tutorial? I've just recently learned python, and would like to build a few projects using Django. I completed Django's official tutorial[1], but when it came time for me to actually start building something, I found I didn't really understand what was going on. I should mention I'm inexperienced in both web application development and python in general.

1: [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/intro/tutorial01/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/intro/tutorial01/)

<comment><USER3> I highly recommend Two Scoops of Django and have recommended to every engineer at my company. The one caveat would be that the newest edition is for Django 1.8, so it'd be good to check against the docs periodically if anything looks off. Off the top of my head, the main thing I'd keep an eye out for would be changes to Class-Based Views like permissions mixins, although if I remember correctly, most of those changes were just moving things in django-braces to Django core.

<comment><USER4> I think this book is generally good, but I am not a fan of their espousal of class based views. HTTP is not class based, it's functionally based.

<comment><USER5> If your Django project is a million lines of code you're going to appreciate mixins and CBV's. Most built in views are moving to CBV's as well (see login/logout/password reset/etc in 1.11).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Release notes with the new features in 1.11: [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.11/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.11/)

Highlights:

\- better support for creating indexes on your Models with class-based indexes

\- widget rendering in forms now uses the templating system instead of python

\- Explicit subquery expression support via Subquery and Exists expressions.

<comment><USER7> _widget rendering in forms now uses the templating system instead of python_

I haven't looked at how it's implemented yet, but that sounds like a real godsend.

<comment><USER8> They did the same with the login views, they are now class-based and easy to customize.

Very useful when you have an exotic templating engine for example and can't inherit the `registration/login.html` template

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The new way of rendering form widgets is something I've been waiting for a long time. Now using custom form widgets like those in Bootstrap, or more complex fields like datepickers and the like should be as easy as dropping the HTML templates for those widgets in the proper folder, which is great.

</comment><comment><USER10> my favorite feature so far is search, this is first LTS release with search support builtin (was introduced in 1.10)

[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/ref/contrib/postgres/...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/ref/contrib/postgres/search/)

<comment><USER11> Rather looking forward to this. Got a number of use cases that don't justify using a 'proper' search engine but would really benefit from a more flexible search than an icontains filter.

<comment><USER12> Have you had a look at Whoosh and Haystack?

Whoosh is pure python and Haystack is a nice Django-like wrapper around search engines.

* whoosh.readthedocs.io

* haystacksearch.org

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been building a project with Django Rest Framework (DRF), it's my first time using anything Django-related. Does anyone know whether new versions of Django tend to drop right into DRF, or whether DRF has to do some work to be compatible with a new version?

I ask because I like the sound of the fulltext search mentioned in another comment, because it would mean I don't have to install a search engine to support that feature. So I'd switch to Postgres and start using Beta 1 pretty soon, if DRF will just-work with it.

<comment><USER14> I really don't mean this in as aggressive a way as it might read without this prefix but...

Why don't you just try it?

<comment><USER13> I guess I could try grabbing the beta with pip, and I suppose there's probably some test suite for DRF that I could find and run. The thing I don't know for sure is that if the test suite passes then I'm good to go.

<comment><USER15> Things generally tend to break loudly, so if _your_ test suite (for your app) passes, you should be good to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The Django 1.11.x series is the last to support Python 2. The next major > release, Django 2.0, will only support Python 3.5+.

Really the most important part of this release, out of all.

This is the time where enterprise companies using Python and Django really need to switch to Python 3. In fact, anyone using Ubuntu 16.04 should already find themselves going "ugh" because they needed Python 2. More reasons to push forward.

<comment><USER17> I like the model of [https://railslts.com/](https://railslts.com/)

It's reasonable that volunteer developers working on an open-source project sunset old versions, and old versions of language runtimes or dependencies. Nobody wants to keep maintaining 5-year-old versions with 12-year-old dependencies when they could use their time to improve the latest version instead.

Django is one of the most "responsible" projects in this regard - having LTS releases that are maintained for three years for free. Some projects even say "you should stick with github master" for fixes :)

But it's cool that Rails has a company providing paid enterprise support after the community support ends. Their pricing is surprisingly cheap - I would expect that if an enterprise has a legacy application that must be kept "stable" and never upgraded, then they would be willing to pay $10k and upwards per month for that privilege.

<comment><USER18> Yes, very likely 1.11 will end up getting unofficial community support after 2020.

Django 1.6 (the last version to support Python 2.6) is still getting unofficial support: [https://github.com/beanbaginc/django](https://github.com/beanbaginc/django)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Subquery expressions looks like it would be just easier to write SQL, instead of going through the Django ORM. This is where SQL starts to show its expressive strength over ORMs.

<comment><USER20> Absolutely. The amount of "magic" Django does slowly became a real detractor for me.

The way I define queries by using a custom language in the form of keyword arguments makes me wonder why I don't just learn SQL instead?

I would much rather do something like:

      models.Foo.objects.filter(sql=my_sql_query_str)

Instead of something like:

      models.Foo.objects.filter(name='bar', parent__siblings__count__lt=3)

And no special abstraction on SQL in the form of special classes. Just a string of SQL that I compose with Python string formatting. SQL isn't scary. I don't see the need to try and hide it.

<comment><USER21> > The way I define queries by using a custom language in the form of keyword > arguments makes me wonder why I don't just learn SQL instead?

You _have_ to learn SQL to use the Django ORM anyways; it's required knowledge in order to be able to wield the higher level abstraction effectively. However, the way you write a lot of these things in SQL is substantially more verbose and harder to compose.

<comment><USER22> >"However, the way you write a lot of these things in SQL is substantially more verbose and harder to compose."

Could you give an example of something that's hard to compose with SQL? I'm sure ORMs have their advantages, I just want to understand how much benefit I could get from using one.

<comment><USER23> Queries across joins are the simple example. The ORM takes care of the join bit for you so you can write:

        Book.objects.filter(author__address__country='GB')

Rather than having to manage the joins with the author and address tables yourself.

<comment><USER22> With that example, do you have control over how the records are joined?

For example, in SQL if I wanted to return records where an records could be found in both tables, I would use an inner join, whereas if I wanted to return all records from 'author' and any related information from 'address' (and return NULL if a suitable address entry couldn't be found) I could use a left join. Does the ORM you have in mind give you that flexibility?

It's probably worth mentioning that some SQL tools will suggest fields that can be joined on, if this is a concern.

<comment><USER24> Django will generate a LEFT JOIN for nullable keys, and an INNER JOIN for non nullable keys. The lack of control over joins and conditions is a weakness of the ORM, but Django generally does the right thing. Of course, you can do an `__isnull` on the relation to create a pseudo inner join from the generated LEFT JOIN, but admit it's not the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Class based indexes - looks great, is there support for CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY for postgres ?

<comment><USER26> I also wondered that but seems from [https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/21039](https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/21039) they'd prefer devs to do that manually in migrations marked as non-atomic

<comment><USER27> Makes sense, would be weird to start testing while indexes are building

<comment><USER26> CONCURRENTLY doesn't build indexes asynchronously - it just builds them in a way that doesn't lock the table.

<comment><USER27> Oh I thought it returned control after you hit it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do Our Questions Create the World? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/do-our-questions-create-the-world/ <comment><USER3> Towards the end of the article was the question I had all along reading it:

"Where was mind when the universe was born? And what sustained the universe for the billions of years before we came to be? He nonetheless bravely offers us a lovely, chilling paradox: At the heart of everything is a question, not an answer. When we peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, we see, finally, our own puzzled face looking back at us."

Can someone explain how his 'answer' is chilling or lovely? It's fine if he wants to offer his own pet theory of reality, but to give a cop out answer to its most fundamental question doesn't go far to support it.

<comment> s-shellfish I find it both chilling and lovely. Because on one hand, life, endless adventure, full of surprises, insights, new understandings and experiences, feelings, etc. On the other, absolute, fundamental, loneliness (sophistry?) of our own nature - having an individual sense of self but also feeling related to everything we define as not 'I'.

Why this life, why is this the one I have? Where did all of this come from? How did all of this happen?

Life is a waking dream, because we often completely forget that we really just don't know at all why we are here. But we pretend, we forget, we make up stories, we do anything we can do to run away from that question. Why. How did all of this happen? Why does everything happen the way it does? What does that mean, for what I am, all the way at the core?

It's not really nihilism, but it sort of is. It's just, that's the perpetual question that never gets answered directly.

I've thought of myself before as a monad - a being so fundamentally lonely in their own existence that they split themselves up into infinite pieces, just to forget, there's nothing more than what they are. Maybe some buddhist influences, but, we all have our struggles in life. It's not really intended to be sophistry. It just is a very beautiful, but very chilling awareness. What if I go back into what I was when I die?

You could see this as a mental metaphor my mind has arbitrarily made up for all events I've witnessed and been a part of, some sort of perpetual social ostracism I keep walking myself into. But I still think it's more than just that. I loved science growing up. But I can never answer that question - and I know absolutely, that I never will. What happened before 'I exist'?. For any of us. My father often has had a variant of this question, and in the past, it's rubbed people the wrong way because, only a fraction of it gets expressed. We all wear masks. Sometimes there's just a profoundly deep sadness that no one can see.

Chilling, and lovely. In perpetuity.

<comment><USER4> Whenever anyone asks me: why do you live? Where do we come from? I just ask back: why do you care?

<comment> crooked-v > The history of every major galactic civilisation tends to pass through three > distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry and > Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.

> For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question "How can we > eat?", the second by the question "Why do we eat?", and the third by the > question "Where shall we have lunch?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No. No, I think the world would still be there if we didn't question it.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K. Dick)

<comment><USER6> My metaphysical philosophy has always been:

\- Objective truth: the physical world as it is. There are no "chairs" in this world (would an ant recognize a chair, or a bacteria?) - only data from which we can derive patterns.

\- Consensus truth: what people have agreed to be true, often via perception or abstract logic. This is math, that is red, this is a chair, that is democracy.

\- Subjective truth: what I believe to be true, by my own rationality or my own perception. This can sometimes deviate from consensus truth (eg. optical illusions).

There must be a term for this philosophical position, but I haven't found it yet (or the thinker associated with it). Obviously this is due to my ignorance because this is not a particularly profound metaphysical position to take.

Does anyone know the name of this?

<comment><USER7> There's also:

\- Survival based truth: what we believe in order to keep being alive and make more of us. The moment we mess too much, we're not there any more. An unforgiving, but strangely, also somewhat flexible truth.

I think this is the winner, at least for people and animals. It's got an internal self-righting system and transcends distinctions such as objective, subjective and consensus - it's all of them. It's the kind of truth that keeps existing by adapting to the world, or else it gets eradicated.

<comment><USER6> I believe this is what Jordan Peterson calls "Darwininan truth." He thinks it is the ultimate truth, but Sam Harris (on the side of "Newtonian truth") would certainly beg to differ.

I can only imagine that there are both, the "Darwinian" one that we humans use as an interface to an underlying, patternless, data-oriented "Newtonian truth."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't claim to understand the first thing about quantum mechanics, but whenever I read about it I always come to think of lazy evaluation. Then I want to know if it's there simply for performance reasons or if it's to enable an infinite universe.

<comment><USER9> If you were simulating the universe it certainly doesn't help performance having to simulate an exponential quantity of interfering states rather than a single classical one. It's anything but lazy evaluation.

<comment><USER10> I remember when the "proceduraly generated" games first showed up - 30 years ago?

You could get a billion different scenarios, each one involving a million locations.

None of them existed before you started playing the game. And generating all of them in advance would be a) impossible, given the memory requirements and b) a huge waste, considering that 99.99999% of the players never needed to experience 99.99999% of the scenarios.

So what they did, they only presented up what is "observable" to you, the player.

So there is some saving there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I immediately became lost in quest to trace the source of a quote near the top of the article, and returned to bookmark this piece to read thoroughly, but here is the fruit of my almost instantaneously easy etymology search:

The quote "" "Unitarianism [Wheeler's nominal religion] is a feather bed to catch falling Christians" (Darwin); "" is from not one, but two Darwin's.

Here is Charles Darwin quoting Erasmus Darwin in his own slant: [https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS- DAR-00115-00015/5](https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00115-00015/5)

The source is a Charles Darwin ancestor, Erasmus Darwin. [https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/566632-the-life-of- era...](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/566632-the-life-of-erasmus- darwin)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm too materialistic for taking those views seriously, but I recommend a nice Science Fiction book that deal with this:

"Distress" by Greg Egan [1].

1\. [http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html](http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> for the physics people: first look up charge whitout charge and mass without mass. once you understand what Wheeler says about fundamental particles, and how charge and mass could be topological properties, and how Wheeler coined the term "wormhole". then go and read Maxwell (the original king of unification [of magnetism and electrostatics]) treatise on electromagnetism. There is a chapter on monodromy of electric potential, which would be senseless in an euclidean sense,... i.e. Maxwell himself considered wormholes, but skips over them rather quickly and turns to what is more easily modeled with R^n... On wikipedia "wormhole" concept is attribute to Einstein and Wheeler, but as I read it, even Maxwell considered the possibility that discrete charges were a topological effect in exactly the same sense as "charge without charge"!!

</comment><comment><USER14> Brilliant reply to the parapsychologists 'incident':

"Where there's smoke, there's smoke." John Archibald Wheeler

</comment><comment><USER15> "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov is a quite literal take on this question: [http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html](http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Questions require a questioner. The normal scientific view is that the world, in part through Darwinian evolution, produced beings that can ask such questions. To have the questioners exist first and then create the world assumes they must be non-material spirits.

</comment><comment><USER17> "The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing" \--Einstein

</comment><comment><USER18> Reality is a distributed consensus algorithm.

Work in the blockchain somehow, sell a million books.

<comment><USER19> It'll be like "The Secret" except that if you believe hard enough, Satoshi will add bitcoins to your account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What a vapid piece of a garbage:

books by wheeler worth reading?

</comment><comment><USER21> Mmmhkay, so that's a rehash of good ol' George Berkeley's philosophy, then? That's cute, only coming 300 years later :)

<comment><USER22> There's a world of difference between solipsism and viewing observation as an act of creation.

<comment><USER21> Berkeley is not solipsist. He posits that reality exists only as much as it is perceived or thought; perceiving is creating. Therefore the world persists only because God perpetually perceives and think it, and the Creation is a continuous process from God's thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If so, by Betteridge's law, the Universe must disappear.

</comment><comment><USER24> Ugh. Has Scientific American become PseudoScientific American?

Recently they published this [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could- mult...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple- personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/) by an author who believes ""There is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the revealed appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the revealed appearances of other dissociated alters. This idealist ontology makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism ..." [https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000...](https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000025/f0020005/art00006)

<comment> s-shellfish For as much as reality is patterned, and can be comprehend 'absolutely' in a pragmatic, utilitarian sense - there's also another side to awareness (or many, I can never be sure). Imagine that everything that has to do with 'mind' is just as comprehensible in a different way. Or rather, imagine that that awareness 'takes over' or 'overrides' the natural awareness one was taught or learned to comprehend 'reality' with.

Science is vitally important to understanding things, making progress (however humanity defines it), building things, etc. But deep insight philosophically, I mean in my opinion, that's just as important, because they go hand in hand. One becomes a tool for the other. Or a tool turns into an awareness.

As someone whose had more than their fair share of experience wading in the somewhat deep (as in 'crazy') parts of the conscious pool of thought, yea, reality, comprehending it in the same way it's known to others - <USER2> vital. But also not.

Doesn't make it pseudoscience. Just different questions, different things being noticed, taken apart, figured out, asked about, pondered on. Just like anything else, like ants on a trail to Feynman. Just because it looks 'weird', misinformed - whatever - for a brief instant, doesn't mean that's what it's going to turn into.

<comment><USER24> Over a few decades Scientific American has gone from deep research reports, to pop science, and now to untestable cosmic thinking and other clickbait. If it is not testable it is not scientific thinking.

Philosphical thinking may also be grounded in recurring phenomena or be completely blue-sky. A philosophy that premises alternate reality begins by ignoring how underdetermined is the human brain when reflecting on itself. A scientific exploration is grounded in physical premises even if no objective data is possible.

<comment><USER25> I think you may be looking at the past through a filter. Perhaps you definition of pop science has drifted over the past few decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >"I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination,"

I can't take anyone seriously if he suggests that. Is hunger figment of imagination? The war crimes and multitudes of unspeakable injustices? Nature is really real. The effects seen in the atomic world must not be conflated to the big.

<comment><USER27> Those are strange examples. How is "hunger" or "injustice" anything but imagination?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> >Quantum theorist John Wheeler's "it from bit" hypothesis anticipated ongoing speculation that consciousness is fundamental to reality

Flagged for pseudoscience.

<comment><USER29> John Wheeler is a highly respected physicist and his "it from bit" is still referenced in many papers every year. It's speculative and still not rigidly defined, but definitely not pseudoscience.

<comment><USER28> Wheeler is a fine physicist. Claiming "consciousness is fundamental to reality" is not.

<comment><USER29> I personally wouldn't characterize it from bit that way, but it's not as crazy as it seems.

We know that subjective reality exists because we directly experience it. But the evidence for an objective reality is shaky at best.

If it exists it isn't anything like the classical world we inhabit - that has been proven multiple times over.

<comment><USER28> >We know that subjective reality exists because we directly experience it. But the evidence for an objective reality is shaky at best.

Objective reality can kill me, so I'd consider that rather less shaky than the images that appear when I sleep.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Is it possible to fly backward if you have strong headwind?" - <AUTHOR> https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/65219/is-it-possible-to-fly-backward-if-you-have-really-strong-headwind <comment><USER2> It shouldn't be all that different than swimming against the current in a wave simulator or one of those home jet pools people use for practicing laps.In both cases you retain the sense of moving forward, but _will_ go backward if you are too slow about it.

Come to think of it, a running machine or even walking/running the wrong way on an escalator is essentially the same case.</comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with google cache poisoning? - <AUTHOR> Cached result of www.productkeysfree.com/2016/08/windows-7-product-key.html Site:site:www.productkeysfree.com/2016/08/windows-7-product-key.html search in google and click on drop down to get the cache url. looks liek below: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:B79LxzQ... Now check domain it shows different "http://outing.wustl.edu/" Can any google employee say how could blogger site be hacked and shown up with different url in cache of google? <comment><AUTHOR> Cached result of www.productkeysfree.com/2016/08/windows-7-product-key.html

Site:site:www.productkeysfree.com/2016/08/windows-7-product-key.html search in google and click on drop down to get the cache url.

looks liek below: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:B79LxzQ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:B79LxzQjK1EJ:www.productkeysfree.com/2016/08/windows-7-product- key.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

Now check domain it shows different "[http://outing.wustl.edu/"](http://outing.wustl.edu/")

Can any google employee say how could blogger site be hacked and shown up with different url in cache of google?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One more "windows 7 product key" outing.edu page 2 it redirect to some product key site. But when you open the domain direct it redirects somewhere else.</comment>


Apple censors song about Tiananmen Square protests - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18305087/congress-apple-criticism-china-communist-tiananmen-pro-democracy <comment><USER2> Worth noting that Apple "gets away" with more in China than most:

\- iMessage, one of the only end-to-end encrypted messaging systems widely available in China.

\- iCloud Keychain, which they've designed to work securely on "adversarial clouds"[1]

(Of course this may only be because not many people actually use these features versus WeChat...)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U)

<comment><USER3> > \- iMessage, one of the only end-to-end encrypted messaging systems widely > available in China.

And those encryption keys are stored in China because the Chinese government demanded it be so [1].

I believe it's also more subtle than that too. For example, if you (a non- Chinese iMessage user) send a message to a Chinese iMessage user the key to that exchange is now stored in China.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud- insigh...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud- insight/apple-moves-to-store-icloud-keys-in-china-raising-human-rights-fears- idUSKCN1G8060)

<comment><USER4> What? The point of end-to-end encryption is that Apple doesn't retain the keys.

iMessage and FaceTime are end-to-end encrypted. And after Messages in iCloud, you get the benefit of E2E while everything stays in sync across all your devices [1].

It won't be long until this dumb narrative that ignores Apple's leverage in China goes away. Once there's a trade deal they'll be allowed to own data centers without JVs again [2].

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17405420/messages- icloud-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17405420/messages-icloud- ios-11-4-imessage-syncing-apple-iphone-feature)

[2] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-sweetens-its-cloud- offer-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-sweetens-its-cloud-offer-in-u-s- trade-talks-11554976562)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm so sick of this story. Essentially the same story comes around once a month. Apple is following the laws of a country they do business in. Full stop. They are not censoring anything. The Chinese government is censoring.

There are plenty of things that the US government wouldn't let Apple publish. We may all agree that they shouldn't be allowed to publish those things, but it's not like China is the only country with laws.

It's naive and childish to expect a corporation to ignore the laws of a country they operate in and forego a billion-person market over something as petty as this. It's not Apple's job to fight your social justice battles. Quit whining and take China on directly.

<comment><USER6> The US has the first amendment. Can you give an example of something the US government wouldn't let Apple publish?

<comment><USER5> Classified information, threats, bomb making instructions (borderline), categories of pornography, pirated media, libelous statements, trade secrets. Like I said, we may all agree that those things shouldn't be published--almost the entire world would--but some of them may be legal in some jurisdictions and not others, and there's a whole lot of grey area around the edges.

<comment><USER7> Classified information is regularly published in the news media, including through Apple News.

Bomb making instructions are available in books on the iTunes Store. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/u-s-army-special-forces- gui...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/u-s-army-special-forces-guide-to- unconventional-warfare/id1448347645?mt=11)

In general you can legally publish pretty much anything in the USA besides child porn or copyright infringement, everywhere else has stricter laws though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They have to to appease the next big growth market: China. Courage would be not doing business with China and their abhorrent government but alas even Apple fears its shareholders more than its laurels.

</comment><comment><USER9> What would you prefer?

* Apple censors a song to comply with Chinese laws, so you can't hear that song

* Apple doesn't censor the song, China blocks Apple Music, so you can't hear that song

Either way, you can't hear that song. Apple has to follow the laws of the countries they do business in, and in China, that unfortunately sometimes means censorship. This way people in China still have access to the rest of Apple Music.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is interesting that Apple will take such a strong stance on privacy (Apple vs. the FBI, for example), but they simply won't make a stand on censorship.

In fact I'd argue that censorship is part of their DNA. They've always removed controversial apps from the app store [1][2], they've always deleted forum threads that they don't like [3], and they're taking a very heavy handed approach to their new TV service [4]. And, of course, they've never really pushed back against China's demands. I admire their stance on privacy but they don't seem to have any issue with censorship.

1 [https://www.digitalspy.com/videogames/a655089/games-that- dis...](https://www.digitalspy.com/videogames/a655089/games-that-display-the- confederate-flag-are-being-pulled-from-the-app-store/)

2 [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/30/apple- rem...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/30/apple-removing- drone-strikes-app)

3 [https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-defensive-over-consumer- repo...](https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-defensive-over-consumer-reports- findings-deletes-forum-threads/)

4 [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/apple-will- invest-1-b...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/apple-will- invest-1-billion-in-tv-but-dont-expect-game-of-thrones/)

<comment><USER11> What's interesting is that people like yourself think the world is the same everywhere.

China has a different culture and different laws that we do not control.

Companies have two choices: play by the rules or don't play at all.

<comment><USER12> > China has a different culture and different laws that we do not control.

That's true, but it's also not that simple. That different culture is not uniform, and those laws may be illegitimate from many perspectives.

> Companies have two choices: play by the rules or don't play at all.

The two choices company should have is play by _moral_ rules or not play at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a way to see what else is accessible from the Chinese iTunes store? I'm curious if "Hypnotize" by System of a Down is accessible; the first line is "Why don't you ask the kids at Tienanmen Square?"

<comment><USER14> [https://applecensorship.com/](https://applecensorship.com/) currently only covers the app store.

EDIT: There's a Chinese iTunes page for Hypnotize, and GreatFire's test indicates that the same response is served to users in China as in the US [https://en.greatfire.org/https/itunes.apple.com/cn/album/hyp...](https://en.greatfire.org/https/itunes.apple.com/cn/album/hypnotize/159457194)

EDIT 2: Actually, that GreatFire check would have been unnecessary, since the censorship appears to be applied depending on the display language. Note the conspicuously absent song #14 here, then change "cn" in the URL to "us" to see it [https://itunes.apple.com/cn/album/%E4%BA%BA%E9%96%93%E9%81%9...](https://itunes.apple.com/cn/album/%E4%BA%BA%E9%96%93%E9%81%93/41760298?i=41760411)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The price of doing business in China is losing his soul.

</comment><comment><USER16> Apple has also apparently disabled ratings on an official Chinese propaganda app that is used against its citizens:

[https://imgur.com/a/60gdRZs](https://imgur.com/a/60gdRZs)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19603668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19603668)</comment>


Is Darwin wrong on how we pass our DNA from one generation to the next? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/is-darwin-wrong-on-how-we-pass-our-dna-from-one-generation-to-the-next/2018/08/23/cfb3374a-8f6d-11e8-8322-b5482bf5e0f5_story.html <comment><USER2> This is an interesting article about horizontal gene transfer, but the title is horrible, very horrible. I propose to change the title to the title of the book "The Tangled Tree".

The evolutionary tree is like 99% correct for animals. Bacterias and Arqueas are more messy. Plants are weird, really weird, with lot's of viable hybrids and even more strange things. If it were a general article about how misleading the evolutionary tree is, it should include plants, but it's an article about horizontal gene transfer.

(Also DNA was discovered much latter, something like a hundred years after the death of Darwin, but this may be an excess of nitpicking by me.)</comment>


GnuPG 1.4.15 released - <AUTHOR> http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2013q4/000334.html <comment><USER2> And GnuPG 2.0.22 — [http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg- announce/2013q4/00033...](http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg- announce/2013q4/000333.html)

<comment><USER3> I know GnuPG-2 is preferred over GnuPG-1 now but I only see 1.x binaries available for Windows. Do they provide official 2.x binaries as well?

<comment><USER4> Under binaries, they link to GPG4Win. Other Windows front-ends: [http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html#win](http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html#win)

I suspect GnuPG only officially distributes source code now, which is slightly safer to use for obvious reasons. :)

<comment><USER3> Yeah I saw it was provided in GPG4Win but I was hoping they provided a barebones installer for 2.x like they do for 1.x guess they don't. I might drop Werner a note and ask.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The recursive decompression reminds me of the zip quine.

www.steike.com/code/useless/zip-file-quine/

</comment><comment><USER6> Fedora 1.4.15 updates built. They could use some testing and karma:

* [https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/gnupg-1.4.15-1.fc18](https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/gnupg-1.4.15-1.fc18) * [https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/gnupg-1.4.15-1.fc19](https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/gnupg-1.4.15-1.fc19) * [https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/gnupg-1.4.15-1.fc20](https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/gnupg-1.4.15-1.fc20)

</comment><comment><USER7> Anybody have any idea on when we'll be able to use elliptic curve encryption with GPG?

According to tptacek, that's in the works, but seems like that didn't make it into this release.

<comment><USER8> I wonder when we will be able to use some GOST ciphers with it, just for fun and diversification from NIST ciphers.

Does anyone know what the Chinese equivalent of NIST is? What does China use?

<comment><USER9> In terms om symmetric ciphers we know of two chinese ones: sms4 and zuc. The latter has also been accepted as standard by 3GPP (SAGE).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS4)

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

Not sure why anybody would want to use them or the GOST standards unless required/forced to do so.

<comment><USER10> I think the idea is to encrypt with multiple cyphers, each endorsed by a different government (preferably mutually mistrustful governments). That way, in principle, the Chinese may have a backdoor to one layer and the US to another, but they'd need to work together to break your whole message.

I have no idea how useful this would be in practice.

<comment><USER11> I suspect that the NSA would be aware of weaknesses in Chinese ciphers as much as in American ciphers, so I doubt that this would help much...

<comment><USER12> It avoids backdoors. Assume that the Chinese government has backdoored its ciphers, and the American government has backdoored its ciphers, and the two governments don't want to cooperate.

If you cascade the two ciphers, the American government needs to find a real weakness in the Chinese cipher, and the Chinese government needs to find a real weakness in the American cipher. Which they might have, but they at least can't use backdoors at this point.

<comment><USER7> > If you cascade the two ciphers,

That assumes that f(g(x)) is harder to invert than either f(x) or g(x) individually, which is _not_ true in the general case for encryption schemes.

It is quite possible that (f∘g) can be cracked in a way that neither f or g can individually.

<comment><USER12> I've heard this before, and have no background in crypto so I can't dispute it, but I'm unsure as to how this makes sense. Certainly if I encrypt something with AES, and then encrypt it with Twofish, using different keys each time, how is this different from encrypting any other arbitrary data with either of those ciphers?

<comment><USER11> It is worth pointing out that composing two block ciphers like this only adds _one_ bit of security, due to the meet-in-the-middle attack (assuming that the composition is otherwise secure, etc.).

<comment><USER13> _If_ one of those ciphers is completely broken, so that can be decrypted as easily as ROT13, correct?

<comment><USER11> No, not correct. Suppose I know the message that was encrypted (i.e. a known plaintext attack). Then what I can do is to build a table of the decryption of the ciphertext under all possible keys (i.e. a brute-force attack on _one_ cipher), then encrypt the known plaintext under all possible keys with the other cipher (a second brute-force attack) and see where I get "hits" in the table. Those hits are candidate keys for the composed cipher; if the ciphers are secure then there will be a small number of hits. The total running time is simply the sum of the time required to attack the component ciphers, which only adds one bit of security.

<comment><USER12> So, it seems like you're saying that if you can brute-force two ciphers, you can brute-force the composition of ciphers.

It's still twice as hard, correct? And if you have two ciphers, one of which is compromised in some way, wouldn't this composition mean that you're at least as secure as the most secure of the two ciphers?

Also, how does 3DES get away with this? I read on wikipedia (after I looked up the meet in the middle attack) that 3DES encrypts, then decrypts with a second key, then encrypts, and presumably decrypts-encrypts-decrypts on 3DES- decryption -- how is this different?

(Thanks for answering these questions; it's contributed to my knowledge of crypto and I really appreciate it.)

<comment><USER11> "So, it seems like you're saying that if you can brute-force two ciphers, you can brute-force the composition of ciphers. It's still twice as hard, correct?"

Exactly, and "twice as hard" is another way to say "one extra bit of security."

"It's still twice as hard, correct? And if you have two ciphers, one of which is compromised in some way, wouldn't this composition mean that you're at least as secure as the most secure of the two ciphers?"

It took me some time to locate this, but it is relevant:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36.5309&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

You can think of it this way: the meet-in-the-middle attack is _generic_ and does not exploit the structure of the ciphers at all, whereas attacks that do exploit the structure of the ciphers might exist and might do better when the ciphers are composed. In general you should avoid carelessly composing cryptosystems (for that matter, you should avoid carelessly composing cryptosystems with other systems; e.g. the Skype attack).

"Also, how does 3DES get away with this?"

The security of 3DES is _twice_ the security of single DES; the attack still works, but it can only remove one of the DES applications. Note also that 3DES is DES composed with itself, and so attacks on the structure of the components would imply weaknesses in DES itself.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bringing back the iPhone headphone jack – in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA <comment><AUTHOR> From the guy who built his own iPhone from spare parts in China:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF- zoVzA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA)

</comment><comment><USER2> Can you charge and use the headphone at the same time?

<comment><USER3> Looks like it.</comment></comment>


How Yahoo Blew It (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This article is a great snapshot of a piece of IT history. Knowing that Yahoo almost bought Google in 2002, today I'm glad the deal never went through.

<comment><USER2> The merger surely would have been a boondoggle. I imagine the big beneficiary of that would have been Microsoft - if they managed to get their own act together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article is right that this came down to execution.

I remember managing ad campaigns (around 2005-2006) on AdWords, Overture and (starting at that time) MS AdCenter. AdWords was just great to use compared to the other two. With AdWords it's relatively easy to manually or automatically manage a campaign of 30,000 keywords and hundreds or thousands of adverts. Overture's UI was simply painful even for a handful of adverts.

MS's offering as I remember required Windows or IE or something so we tended to avoid it altogether.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. The bit about GoTo.com becoming Overture, which preceded Adwords was news to me.

I guess I subscribed to the often told story that Google invented "text ads for search keywords".</comment>


Prime editing: DNA tool could correct 89% of genetic defects - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50125843 <comment><USER2> No cell division required, much more accurate than CRISPR. That's a major advance.</comment>


I am one of the creators of the first "synthetic" bacterial cell. AMA - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c6kd6/i_am_one_of_the_creators_of_the_first_synthetic/

<comment><USER2> This is how science should be done. Allowing lay people to understand true significance of work by having an open exchange. Wish it were true for most of the discoveries/inventions.

<comment><USER3> Notice the "discussion" devolved into nonsense almost immediately. Reddit....

<comment><USER4> I noticed some, I also noticed a lot of real questions. I don't see complaining about it as much different than just having some level of nonsense.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, didn't notice I was complaining. Thought I was making an observation on the state of open discussion on the net. I guess that makes your post "complaining about complaining", and this one ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _You did: wget<http://opendna.org/dna/mycoides.txt> then emailed it as an attachment from your hotmail account to DNASyth LLC and they sent you back a vial, you pulled up a bacteria, put a needle in it, squirted your lols into it, and then wrote a paper. What parts are inaccurate? Was it a yahoo email address?_

hahaha

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c6kd6/i_am_one_of_the_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c6kd6/i_am_one_of_the_creators_of_the_first_synthetic/c0qgerq)

</comment><comment><USER6> How much of the work is Hamilton Smith's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_O._Smith> compared to Mr. Venter's? I know he's not the type, but I'm really surprised that at least his name isn't mentioned more often.

</comment><comment><USER7> A question to those in the know: what kind of education / experience schedule would one need to even think about doing work like this?

<comment><USER8> What do you mean? You mean reproducing something like this in another lab? Any MSc can do it, under the supervision of a PhD. The bottleneck factor in this kind of experiments is money. I think they spent $1m only on the raw DNA production and Venter got something like $40m funding from Exxon.

I have no idea how he convinced exxon that this stuff is any useful technically speaking. It's very interesting scientifically, for sure, but technically? Meh. I suppose exxon went for publicity.

<comment><USER9> I suspect their goal is engineeting bacterium that will produce crude oil, or something of that nature.

<comment><USER8> The are talking about biofuel. The point is that no matter what you want to do, there is no point in doing it by artificial synthesis. You can always engineer one of the many bacteria/algae/whatever already present in nature, modifying something that already does what you want to achieve, just making it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He admits he's an atheist! :D let's hope FOX News doesn't see that

we need an outlet, a website, where this can be done more frequently..

</comment><comment><USER11> On an unrelated note, I hate it that reddit (where content is _not_ localized) defaults the interface language to that of my OS (why would I need that?), while most websites of multinational corporations (where all content is localized and country-specific) make me _manually_ select my country. Country != desired language, but both can be easily determined with comparable precision (although by different means).</rant>

<comment><USER12> Web sites need to just look at what your browser says is the prefered language. Google still shows me german because I'm in a german speaking country even though my settings are english. Drives me mad.

<comment><USER13> A lot of users run on misconfigured operating systems. I expect that Google has done some homework on whether language-by-GeoIP makes sense for the general case. They probably don't do it just to annoy you.

<comment><USER12> I know they're not singling me out, but I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy. Ideally, they would have a button that says "not your language? Click here to set the language and find out why sites keep showing you the wrong one".

EDIT: Actually, thinking about this more I don't think your point holds. Nearly everyone who buys a PC in a given country will buy one set up for their locale. Do you think that e.g. Germany is selling a bunch of computers configured with english as the prefered language? I seriously doubt that.

<comment><USER14> I'm in a non-English speaking country.

My best guess is that all normal users buy a computer with the local language, but all technologically-minded users buy an English Windows (like me, for example). It drives me mad whenever I visit Google on a browser whose cookies I just cleared.

"I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy."

Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do. They just want them to work. Google's job is to make the average users have the most seamless experience possible, a job at which they excel.

<comment><USER12> >Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do.

And this is exactly what should not be catered to. Especially when it's simple to show users how to fix this. By jumping through such hoops to guess what is correct they basically force everyone else to do the same thing or else appear to be less "friendly" than google.

This kind of thinking is exactly what got us the HTML/CSS misery we have today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting answers, but redditors are fucking morons.

<comment><USER16> Every time I go back there it's worse. Sometimes I read a thread on the main reddit and it's virtually incomprehensible.

<comment><USER17> You need to not read the default list. I don't.

<comment><USER18> Well somebody there needs to fix the problem that arises if you subscribe to subreddits that don't have many stories on them.

I unsubscribed from all of them, then started over...currently I'm subscribed to machinelearning, linguistics, and datasets. Often when I load the page, there are only 2-3 stories on it...other times it will say "there is nothing here".

I'm sure it's trying to just show me the newest stuff, but it would be nice if it showed me _enough_ of the newest stuff to actually fill the page.

<comment><USER17> In your preferences, do you have it set to hide things that you've upvoted?

<comment><USER18> No.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction - <AUTHOR> http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html <comment><USER2> Pretty common but useful advice. His advocacy of text editors is different though. I'm noticing a trend of SciFi writers like Neal Stephenson and now Cory Doctorow who use programmer's text editors such as emacs and vim rather than conventional word processors or novel specific tools like CopyWrite. I don't buy that spell check is that annoying. You can turn it off, and novelist specific tools claim not to be distracting, though I haven't tried any. Is emacs really that much better for creative work or do they want to appear smart/cool by using the same tools as the "hackers" they write about?

<comment><USER3> That sounds like a trend of two. I think it is more likely that both Stephenson and Doctorow were programmers earlier in their careers (implied in their Wikipedia articles -- Doctorow founded a software company and Stephenson switched to a physics major so that he could "spend more time on the university mainframe"). And once you know a text editor really well ( _any_ text editor, even Word), it is simply most efficient to keep using it; there are apparently still professional writers who won't use an editor that lacks WordStar keybindings.

However, it would not surprise me at all to learn that there is significant overlap between "people who learn to program" and "people who want to write sci-fi novels". I just don't think we'll hear about Toni Morrison picking up emacs anytime soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny—I linked to a bunch of articles making similar points in my post on students, laptops, and distraction at [http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students- di...](http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction- hardly-a-surprise) . I suspect the people who accomplish the most are often the ones who can concentrate the longest.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unremarkable lifehack-type article, but still a good reminder to cut out distractions and do some actual work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most lifehack articles are written by people of modest accomplishments, and, personally, I find it difficult to take them seriously. Doctorow has accomplished quite a lot - certainly, far more than most of the productivity "gurus" - and I think it's much more interesting to hear what he thinks is important.

<comment><USER6> It's true Doctorow is accomplished, but it is also true that most accomplished people cannot be objective about the factors behind their success. It is one thing to have all the skills and motivations to succeed; another to be able to report on those skills and motivations with enough honesty to teach others.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I do think that when advice is very detailed and specific, it's more likely to be accurate. When people are fooling themselves, or trying to fool their audience, with this kind of thing, they usually speak in generalities. It's too much mental hard work to make up something very specific, like "You should use vim or something like it", followed by detailed reasons why that's a good idea; that, to me, has the ring of something Doctorow has thought about a good deal. I'm _not_, of course, speaking of 'specifics' like the "20 minute" number he talks about; it's a detail, sure, but one that is very easy to make up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 20 damned minutes? That's what it takes him to bang out "a couple of pages"? It's easy to be productive if you're frickin' Superman.

<comment><USER8> Every fiction writer has a different working style, but I've seen lots of them suggest that it's good to bang out prose at a fairly steady pace. Jim Macdonald:

[http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=82327&...](http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=82327&postcount=40)

 _When you're writing, don't slow down.

Yes, you will do research ... you'll need to know exactly what kind of car your guy is driving, but during the outline/first draft stage isn't when I do it.

I'll research a bunch before, and after during rewrite and revision. The rule in the middle is "don't slow down."_

In fiction you're trying to describe a time stream of events and conversations, and it's easier to feel the pace of your prose if you're typing it at a steady clip. Musicians get the same advice: Get in the habit of playing through your mistakes while staying with the beat, or you will develop a style that sounds choppy and hesitant and that calls attention to every mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll tell you what's distracting: the flashing ad banner on the left.

</comment><comment><USER10> I find that I have the exact opposite experience from Doctorow. The hardest thing for me is to get started. Once I'm going I can bang out a lot of text. I always get my best writing done after I'm warmed up and emotionally involved in the scene.

</comment><comment><USER11> I got bored reading this article but I generally like Cory Doctorow's sci-fi writing. His book Little Brother was great and every now and again I seek out a futuristic hacker* short story he wrote called "0nz0red".

*the other meaning of the word

<comment><USER12> 0wnz0red

[http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/...](http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that Suzy Orman has just decided to distribute her latest book free online in standard PDF form. See my post at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427164> for more info. I'd like to know what Cory thinks!</comment>


Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html?_r=1

<comment> brown9-2 In other news: most diaries abandoned after just a few entries too.

<comment><USER2> Most message-board comments abando

<comment><USER3> _sigh_ , slashdot humor, long time not see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Blogs suck! Stay with us, the Gray Lady. You're safe here. We know what matters.

</comment><comment><USER5> Another day, another negative blogging story in the NYT.

<comment><USER6> It's not negative, it's accurate. Most blogs (and startups) fail to generate a lot of traffic and get abandoned, that's just a fact.

<comment><USER4> _It's not negative, it's accurate._

You know, it could be both.

<comment><USER7> It could be but I don't think it is. If anything it disproves the most common anti-blog slur, namely that blogs are full of amateurs with no talent. In truth blogs are like any other form of media. Those who are good rise to the top, those who aren't fall to the bottom and give up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know where that article appeared in the _newsprint_ version of NYTimes. But the url (nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html) suggests the "Fashion" section. Hence: a lightweight piece that does not go deeply into either the Business or Media aspects of blogging.

Note also, since the discussion tends to slide to blog-vs-newspaper: _This reader_ is _not_ pleased that following the link to the NYT article takes me through a jeweler's ad page. "All the news that's fit..." ...and a lot of UNfit attempts to sustain profitability.</comment>


League of legends client wont stop transmitting data - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ayapqm/client_wont_stop_transmitting_data/ <comment><AUTHOR> Also in a magic way the post dissapeared from sorting by new on reddit, which seems pretty odd to me to be honest</comment>


Spotify's Fatal Flaw Exposed: My Closed-Door Meeting Ended in a Shouting Match - <AUTHOR> https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3AAaLrQwumVT8J%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fentry%2Fspotifys-fatal-flaw-exposed-how-my-closed-door-meeting_us_5a512262e4b0cd114bdb33cd+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk%E2%89%B7%3Dus <comment><USER2> Utter, utter garbage. Please do not waste your time reading this.

> Spotify's founder, Daniel Ek, made his initial fortune. At 23, he was the > CEO of uTorrent, a pirate platform that became BitTorrent (arguably the > largest rights-infringing platform in the world). He and their developers > then used identical rights-infringing software in order to build his new > golden goose: Spotify.

This is misleading, as BitTorrent Inc purchased uTorrent in 2006 to replace their own BitTorrent client. But uTorrent was just one client for this "pirate platform".

> Meanwhile, Spotify pockets 30% of all the revenue they collect––and they > don't make anything.

I suppose he has no issue with labels then?

> Spotify's in trouble because Spotify doesn't know what their product is.

> "No no…sorry," I said, shaking my head in disbelief. "Your product isn't > 'Spotify.'" He continued to stare at me. I said, "Sir, your product is > music."

What a muppet, going from "Spotify doesn't make anything!" to "Spotify's product is music".

This is especially dumb because it's like saying "supermarkets don't make any food, they just sell it!".

<comment><USER3> > Spotify doesn't make anything... television and film industries aren't up in > arms over Netflix the way music makers are up in arms about Spotify... > because Netflix makes stuff. Great stuff... Meanwhile, Spotify pockets 30% > of all the revenue they collect––and they don't make anything.

I forgot that Netflix was a charity from its inception in 1997 until its first original content launched in 2013.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article sounds almost childish.

Spotify (the app) is Spotify's (company) product.

Music is the musician's product.

Spotify's (the company) product (the app) is a music delivery system.

People who have a Spotify (the app) account are Spotify's users.

People who listen to music are the artist's listeners.

Someone signed in to Spotify but who never played anything is a user but not a listener.

Someone listening to a song being played on Spotify but without a spotify user account is a listener but not a user.

Going to a meeting and being pedantic about such details shows nothing but your own lack of understanding. And to be honest, a complete lack of maturity as well.

<comment><USER5> How is that either childish or pedantic. It just took you 7 lines to describe your interpretation of the definition of product in this case.

I think it's a reasonable point to discuss. The author's example was good: when at Starbucks, people are ordering a coffee, not a starbucks.

To me, this was an interesting point, not pedantic, because it's not true for all businesses. Unlike Starbucks, when I was a kid, McDonalds wasn't just french fries and a milkshake, the playstructures and happy meal toys made it seem like more than a place for food.

That distinction seems quite relevant to a discussion about how much 'value' Spotify (company) is adding when they take media created by artists and put it on their computers for users/listeners to download/love.

<comment><USER6> >when at Starbucks, people are ordering a coffee, not a starbucks.

Except that is not true, they decieded to get their coffee at Starbucks. The Starbucks product isn't coffee its "coffee distribution", Just like Spotifys product is "music distribution". Both Starbucks and Spotify provide a distribution channel to attract users, now this doesn't mean reasonable quality coffee/music isn't important to them, but thats not the whole story.

So both are just like McDonalds IMHO, not different as you suggested, its just that their value adds are different.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm missing your point a little, however for me today Starbucks is not like McDonalds when I was a kid.

Starbucks is interchangeable with any of the many coffee chains. The service is fast, prices won't be insanely high, yet it won't be stale coffee sitting for days in a warmer.

So I'll choose Starbucks over a boutique artisan coffee house and over a gas station. But Starbucks vs Other_Coffee_Chain means nothing to me. EDIT: What I mean is I don't "decide to get my coffee at Starbucks". I decide I want to go for a walk and get coffee and I'll probably stop at the closest coffee chain.

Anyways, to bring this analogy back, what is the Spotify value add? The technical competence to host files on the internet? Putting a front end on CDN hosted media?

<comment><USER7> For me, it is my "adult" McDonalds. I have 5 artisan coffee shops in a two block radius yet I mostly go to starbucks 3 blocks away for a few reasons:

\- I can order online and have the order ready for pickup when I get there

\- I actually prefer their latte

\- They never mess it up

It was similar on my last Asia trip. While I try to avoid any sort of non- local food/restaurant while traveling, I enjoy the familiarity and quality I get at Starbucks and frequent it wherever I go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >"And by the way," I added, "Stop calling your subscribers 'users.' They're not 'users,' they're listeners––our listeners in fact. You're the 'user.' You're using our music to monetize our listeners for your profit." He looked at me as if I'd just shot Santa Claus in the face. "No, man! You're wrong!" He was sweating now, and the dozen or so musicians who'd gathered around us began heckling him. He shouted, "Spotify is our product! You don't get it at all!" He stormed off.

Then all of the very famous musicians in the room walked up to me and said "Wow, Blake! You sure did show that nasty Spotify executive!" They began to shower me with praise and small tokens of affection. Everyone was in awe of my wit.

Beyonce said "Blake - those words you've said were the most beautiful that I've ever heard. Will you write the lyrics for my next album?" And I said, "Beyonce - I'm honored. Ordinarily, I would say no, but because #IRespectMusic so much, I can't refuse this opportunity."

Next, Tegan and Sara came up to me. "Wow, Blake," said Tegan. "That was so amazing. I can't believe how brave you are." Sara chimed in "and handsome!", giggling. We made small talk for a few minutes, before they had to run to a recording session - but first, they surreptitiously slipped me their numbers.

By the time I was done talking with Tegan and Sara, most of the other famous musicians had already thanked me and left. I turned to finally leave the building, when I saw one last hooded straggler, standing in the corner. Suddenly, he looked up at me. "Tupac?!" I said. Indeed, it was Makaveli the Don himself. He looked deep into my soul and said: "Blake... God isn't finished with you yet." Then he smiled, a mysterious smile, and faded away, just like Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope.

And that was the day that I, Blake Morgan, saved music.

<comment><USER9> And then the whole bus clapped!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems this sort of debate goes on continuously with ideologues.

Statements like

> Spotify doesn't _make_ anything

and

> Your product is _music_

are flat wrong. Spotify, the company, makes Spotify, the music distribution service. Music is their deliverable.

Of course it's true that Spotify would be nowhere if musicians weren't making music, just as it's true that musician's would be nowhere if instrument-makers didn't make instruments.

Spotify, the product, is a mechanism that allows for (perhaps too) user- friendly music consumption. Artists, through whatever means, enter into music arrangements that allows Spotify to be able to do so. The relationship may or may not be predatory. Salaries at Spotify may or may not be inflated. Regardless, those are valid critiques -- but assertions that Spotify doesn't make anything, or doesn't know what their product even is are wrong, and reveal an inability to understand that different parts of an ecosystem make up the whole thing.

<comment><USER11> It's interesting the different standards we have for ownership of entertainment media versus our own work product. There are zero programmers who feel Intel owns a stake in our work because without their computers, we wouldn't be able to make programs. But even though musicians in fact _can_ create music that people will pay to listen to without instruments, you just tried to take them down a peg from us by suggesting that they're just another rung on a ladder of value that I suppose starts with, what, logging to get the wood for the instruments?

<comment><USER10> A fair criticism. I did not intend to imply that musicians were in any way less valuable than instrument makers, recording studios, distributors, et al. My statement would better have been expressed as "guitarists wouldn't make guitar music if nobody made guitars."

The flip side of the coin, of course, is that you _can_ self-distribute music without a distributor. People have done it. As a web developer, I could build web pages that do things and distribute them via hard drives if ISPs did not exist, or I could start my own ISP. Musicians have it even easier, as they can just self-distribute on the internet -- but, whether by choice or by representative proxy, musicians have chosen to allow their product to be distributed by Spotify. They're of course free to haggle over the terms of that arrangement, and there are likely valid criticisms of Spotify, or the agents who negotiated their terms on behalf of the musicians... the only point I intended, despite whatever inartful phrasing I may have used, is that "Spotify doesn't make anything" is not a valid criticism of Spotify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > What I don't love is how little musicians get paid for all that streaming. > It's not fair––not even close. What's more, middle-class music makers are > the ones who are hit hardest, whose businesses are threatened, and whose > families are put at risk.

I question this. I know Taylor Swift and Jay-Z hate Spotify, but I know some of my favorite indie bands love it -- going so far as to release their new music on Spotify before anywhere else. For small, independent artists the ease of distribution and massive exposure well outweigh the lack of royalties. I think it's classic a long-tail distribution and the people exploiting the head are the ones complaining the loudest.

<comment><USER13> There's also just somewhat of a path-dependent reality. If you want to offer an all-you-can-eat music streaming service you pretty much have to offer the best/most menu you can under the constraint of a $10ish subscription fee.

It's what the widespread expectation is and any artist that wants a particularly special deal will just be dropped. Even big stars probably don't have much leverage individually given that their fans can and will either buy their music or acquire it from other sources anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it surprising that Spotify isn't pursuing its own label. Netflix proves that if your biggest risk factor is other's companies content, you have to move to host your own content before the competition wisens up.

<comment><USER15> A lot of record labels are part owners. That's how they are "getting away with it". Musicians are the only ones getting screwed by spotify.

[http://www.swedishwire.com/jobs/680-record-labels-part- owner...](http://www.swedishwire.com/jobs/680-record-labels-part-owner-of- spotify)

<comment><USER16> Interestingly, listing publicly as they're about to do, will release them from that binding over time. The ownership position will be majority non-label and non-insiders with a modest amount of time. Large investment funds will demand they make appropriate choices specifically to benefit the Spotify business, even if that includes building their own label to compete with the major labels. Assuming Spotify thrives over time, it would seem inevitable they'll pull a Netflix. It makes far too much business sense given their between very low and negative margins in the business as it is today (wherein the labels persistently squeeze them nearly to death).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "Wait," I said, "Listen, it's music. Your product is music. The reason I > know that is because if we went out into the street right now and asked a > thousand people what Starbucks' 'product' is, they'd all say coffee. Not a > single person would say 'Starbucks' product is Starbucks.' Right?"

I whole-heartedly disagree with this. Sure, people might say coffee, but Starbucks' product is really the whole package. The store design, atmosphere, music, employees, drink names, drink combos.. these were all essential in Starbucks' rise. You aren't just buying coffee at Starbucks, you are buying the experience of Starbucks, therefore, that is the product.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Meanwhile, Spotify pockets 30% of all the revenue they collect––and they > don't make anything

I think this demonstrates that the author has a very narrow understanding of what it takes to build a music app with 140M+ active users.

Sure, they could pay artists more and it's legitimate to have that talk, but taking it to such extremes makes no sense.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why bring up that uTorrent technology was part of Spotify? Clearly guilt by association and a bit of ad hominem on Daniel Ek. Had really hard to take the article seriously after that.

Spotify and power dynamics in the music industry is fascinating, but there has to be better treatments in the topic. Any tips?

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this meant to be satire cause I can't understand the OP's logic at all?

While it might 380,000 streams to make 1 year at Minimum Wage, per the OP's logic, one can say they get paid for 3 minutes worth of work (or the average length per song).

<comment><USER21> I'm pretty sure it takes more than three minutes of work to compose, record, mix, and master a song.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > This was the year people started to connect the dots about how Spotify's > founder, Daniel Ek, made his initial fortune. At 23, he was the CEO of > uTorrent, a pirate platform that became BitTorrent (arguably the largest > rights-infringing platform in the world). He and their developers then used > identical rights-infringing software in order to build his new golden goose: > Spotify.

Holy hell that's a lot of bad history. Bittorrent existed far before uTorrent was a thing. What are the dots that people connected? A quick glance at his Wikipedia article?

</comment><comment><USER23> This bloke is fatally and arrogantly wrong! Spotify's product is not the music, it is the product of the musicians! As a musician he should know this fundamental fact very well like alphabet - especially when thinking about his copyright. When I buy a Sony Walkman from Amazon that is not the product of Amazon - if we want to stick to the stupid analogy stream started by the author at Starbucks. The Spotify's product is the delivery system and that's it! Which is very important! I listen to music for many decades now, I love music and to date Spotify is the best form to carry it out and unleash the experience. Much less bound by physical medium and the unavoidable maintenance cost and effort. It is allowing us to use existing generic infrastructure (computer or other gadgets, internet) and access virtually infinite amount of products. The same is not true for vinyl, CD, not even right managed files which all need to be bought, stored and delivered to the right special gadgets. From a fragmented set of stores in various ways. Need to go and buy manually again, and again - I bought so many music repeatedly just because the media got outdated or lost that it is unfair towards me, the listener. The Spotify form of delivery is something important for listeners, the end clients of the musicians, musicians should be much more respectful what is good for their audience. Without proper delivery methods their music was lost in the space!

If he is dissatisfied I urge the author to do better! For all of us!

</comment><comment><USER24> I feel for musicians, but to say that Spotify does not make anything is BS.

I started listening to _more_ music on Spotify. This by itself does not necessarily pays more to the musicians that I used to listen to, compared to buying their CDs and tracks piecemeal. But I started to listen to two orders of magnitude more artists than before. I may not spend more on music, but my money are now spread over a longer tail.

What Spotify makes is a distribution and discovery product that - by itself - creates a huge value for me.

</comment><comment><USER25> As far as whether or not Spotify is good to musicians, or takes too big of a cut, or distributes revenue fairly, I don't know. It's certainly possible that there's a better payment structure that would be better for musicians that results in no difference to the consumer.

But as a long-time paying user of Spotify I disagree with the premise of the article: Spotify is the product, the music is not.

For a fixed amount of money each month I can just play almost any song, whenever I want, regardless of whether I even know I want to, with zero friction. I don't have to decide whether or not a song is worth the money, I don't have to decide exactly which songs I will play, I can have shared playlists with friends where we can listen to music from our various overlapping tastes.

The extensive collection of music is a key aspect of the platform, but short of a massive dropoff in what's available, if an album isn't on Spotify the most likely outcome isn't that I'll go somewhere else to listen to the album, it's that I'll just listen to something else on Spotify.

</comment><comment><USER26> The product, besides co-opting the artists' music, is playing a centralized kingmaker, from whom artists or their labels can purchase influence. Now it's starting to go beyond music though.

I've begun to notice politics creeping in to their "overview" page as well and do not like this one bit. Music (like sports, before ESPN) was/is a form of escapism and putting a 'support DACA' themed playlist on the front page damages the brand, unless they dynamically start to offer playlists targeted to your personal political beliefs, a terrible idea and one that is incompatible with Spotify's publically progressive culture.

</comment><comment><USER27> I love Spotify. For me its a music discovery service. I dont care if you call me a user or a listener, all I know is that last year I listened to 1800+ artiste/bands. A few years ago I was stuck listening to the same 20-30 bands that I knew about or someone recommended. I now know about artists (possibly OP is one of them) that I would have never come across otherwise. I think that is their product and they do a pretty great job of it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Horse shit. Fatally flawed article. But I see the comments pretty much have that covered.

I wonder where the other 70% is..

I wonder where the collective of artist streaming sites are..

I wonder who's making stuff..

I. Just. Wonder.

</comment><comment><USER29> What did I just read?

This feels like a "that happened" post:

> He looked at me as if I'd just shot Santa Claus in the face.

> "No, man! You're wrong!" He was sweating now, and the dozen or so musicians > who'd gathered around us began heckling him. He shouted, "Spotify is our > product! You don't get it at all!" He stormed off.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why was this article taken down by HuffPo?

<comment><USER4> Because it is a childish rant about someone being uselessly pedantic for the sake of being pedantic and confrontational.

I guess that's too low even for HuffPost!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> >music is your product

And podcasts are what..?</comment>


The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-mysterious-downfall&print=true <comment><USER2> Batle of neandertals vs modern humans shows how at the times of great upheavals even small advantages can spell difference between survival and success.</comment>


Why I am excited about RocksDB - <AUTHOR> https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/171586413118/why-i-am-excited-about-rocksdb <comment><USER2> Not very insightful. Looks more like an ad than anything else.</comment>


The A* algorithm in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://clj-me.cgrand.net/2010/09/04/a-in-clojure/ <comment><USER2> As this snippet doesn't really help a lot to know what A* search actually is, here is the explanation from Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (from Russel and Norvig):

 _The most widely-known form of best-first search is called A-start search (pronounced "A-star search"). It evaluates nodes by combining g(n) - the cost to reach the node, and h(n) - the cost to get from the node to the goal:_

      f(n) = g(n) + h(n)

_Since g(n) gives the path cost from the start node to node n, and h(n) is the estimated cost of the cheapest path from n to the goal, we have_

      f(n) = estimated cost of the cheapest solution through n*

_Thus, if we are trying to find the cheapest solution, a reasonable thing to try first is the node with the lowest value of g(n) + h(n). It turns out that this strategy is more than just reasonable: provided that the heuristic function h(n) satisfies certain conditions, K search is both complete and optimal._

 __

So, for the following graph (tree actually):

      +---A---+
      |       |
      B h:1   E h:4
      |
      C h:2
      |
      D h:3

Where the function g(x) is the depth of the node in the tree, and the heuristic function h(x) is presented next to the node (random values), A-star will search for a solution first in the nodes with smaller values of f(n). So a traversal starting at node A will visit nodes in the following order: {A, B, C, E, D}

      f(B) = h(B) + g(B) = 1 + 1 = 2
      f(C) = 2 + 2 = 4
      f(E) = 4 + 1 = 5
      f(D) = 3 + 3 = 6

If there's anything wrong with my explanation please correct me.

P.S.: I know my heuristic function is probably not admissible.

<comment><USER3> And for those wondering when you'd use this algorithm (as even academics don't seem to know!) - it is the go-to algorithm for implementing pathfinding in video games, and robotics.

<comment><USER4> Yup. The algorithm was first used in planning paths for Shakey The Robot back in the late 1960s, which seems like ancient history in computer terms. (I only know of it because my dad "invented" A-star. :-) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 10 second explanation of A star: you have a graph + matrix of node-node distances. You want to find shortest path from origin to destination. Standard Dijsktra only allows lookahead of one node at a time. A star allows you to incorporate a long range heuristic, like Euclidean distance from current node to destination. This gives a lower bound on current candidate path length and allows you to discard bad paths more rapidly.

Note that in all cases you need some basis for this heuristic (eg lat/lng of each node). Also, while 2D maps/nodes as cities is a great way to build your intuition for the algorithm, you can generalize it to arbitrary node types as long as heuristic function gives a good lower bound.</comment>