The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://econ.ucsb.edu/~doug/240a/Coin%20Flip.htm <comment><USER2> John von Neumann figured out a solution for getting fair results from a biased coin:

1\. Toss the coin twice. 2\. If the results match, start over, forgetting both results. 3\. If the results differ, use the first result, forgetting the second.

This has appeared on HN before, but no one's pointed it out so far in the discussion. More info: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_a_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_a_biased_coin)

<comment><USER3> Is there an extension to biased objects of more sides, say a die?

<comment><USER4> I think if you do 6 rolls and take the sum modulo 6 it works.

edit: no, got confused with something else (game I used to play was subject to widespread paranoia about the dice including the RNG source and whether other players had hacks. The dev ended up jumping thru all sorts of hoops to satisfy people -- taking random.org, letting each client add their own modifier and then using VN)

I think the straightforward way to extend VN is rolling 6 dice and reroll all if there are any duplicates, then use the first one (or whatever). Probably more efficient to turn the die into a coin and then use a few coins to approximate the die.

<comment><USER5> That would depend on get probability distribution I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "At any given point in time, either the coin will have spent equal time in the Heads and Tails states, or it will have spent more time in the Heads state. In the aggregate, it's slightly more likely that the coin shows Heads at a given point in time—including whatever time the coin is caught."

This doesn't make sense, because they started counting the number of heads from when the coin is launched. But the first state (actually the first few states) are irrelevant, because you always wait a second or two before catching the coin. If you follow this line of reasoning, then the state after the customary delay is the one that has the higher probability. But that state is fair (50/50) and, because the customary period varies, not determined by the initial state.

<comment><USER7> How do you reckon that the state after the waiting period ends is fair, if, as the article states, any point in time is more likely to have the initial side up? It would follow that at the end of the waiting period, the initial side is more likely to be up. And going forward from there, that new initial state (measured from the end of the waiting period) will continue affecting the rest of the flip. This bias will diminish over time, which backs up Premise 7 that more revolutions reduces the bias.

On a tangential note, this behavior reminds me of Benford's law, which is probably based on other statistical reasoning.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law)

<comment><USER8> I don't really follow the logic presented in the article.

For convenience, let's assume that the coin spins at 2 seconds per revolution. The coin begins in a Heads up position. After 0.5 a second, the coin is on its edge. The coin then takes another second to pass through Tails and again be on its edge. The coin then takes another 0.5 a second to reach its initial state of Heads up.

So it sounds to me like the coin spent 0.5 a second in "Heads", then 1 second in "Tails", then 0.5 a second in "Heads" before starting all over again.

If I borrow the numbering analogy from the article, it sounds like if we examine the coin in 0.5 second increments we get H T T H H T T H H T T H H, etc. which invalidates the article's claim.

Furthermore, the article claims a 51-49 split between sides. Even if we accept its reasoning (i.e. H T H T instead of H T T H H T T H) To get that specific result, (if my math is right) the coin would have to flip around 25 times on average (i.e H T H T H T H T H T H T H T H T H T H T H T H T 0.5*H), which is a specific number not mentioned in the linked article.

All of that to say that I have no intention of refuting the paper behind the article, nor do I think they are wrong, but just that the logic presented by the article (and not the paper which I didn't read!) sounds too simplistic to be correct to me.

<comment><USER9> More simply:

Imagine a counter ticking 1,2,3,4...

If you call stop at a random time, uniform over the whole tick time, there's a bias toward odds.

But if you choose to call stop at moment 20.5 (and stopping at a fractional time forces the system to round to the nearest whole number), plus random variation due to real-world physics, evens and odds are equally likely.

<comment><USER10> I think what the parent post meant is that this reasoning is flawed by assuming the coin spends the same time face-up in the very first iteration as in every other one, and that's a fallacy. To put it simply, assuming a 4 second rotation, the first second will be spent in state A, the next second will be spent equalising the time in both states, the next second will actually put state B second ahead in face-up totals, then reequalizing, ad vitam eternum - which invalidates the article's point about always having one with time at most equal, and one with time at least equal, since they alternate in total face-up time.

Edit : Basically, unless you start the coin in the vertical state, the odds- and-even comparison doesn't apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought this was going to go in another direction: if someone proposes to flip a coin, then they have probably decided that a 50/50 chance is more favourable for them than any other potential decision method (like, say, discussing what the fairest or most reasonable decision to make would be).

Hence if you agree to a coin flip that someone proposes, you have already lowered your chances of a favourable outcome for yourself.

<comment><USER12> No, because other decision methods have costs (eg time spent discussing), separate from the favorability of the outcome. Most coin flips are done in low-stakes contexts, where people would rather let the other person decide than waste five minutes.

<comment><USER13> I like the idea of the first kick in the world cup being decided by debate tho.

<comment><USER14> Are you a supporter of the Greek team by any chane?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _1% may not sound like a lot, but it 's more than the typical casino edge in a game of blackjack or slots._

That's an exceedingly optimistic view of casinos. Slot machines have a far higher edge than 1%, generally in the range of 3-15%.

<comment><USER16> Per pull? Really? I always thought casinos were dumb, but how could they be _that_ dumb?!

<comment><USER17> Note that Slots have the biggest swing for the house.

A slot machine is basically a money-making skinner box.

Blackjack with basic strategy (no card counting, just some 0 memory rules that would fit on a 3x5 card) is a narrow edge for the house, as is craps.

<comment><USER15> Casinos have plenty enough slot machines to average out any swings in profit/loss. I doubt the variance is that large overall.

Some time ago, I remember reading a talk given by a Las Vegas casino operator during a conference on risk. They analyzed their top ten largest losses for the previous year, and found _none_ of them were associated with their gambling results. The events that actually cost them were completely unrelated occurrences, like their resident entertainer getting savaged by a tiger, large fines from the gambling commission because of an incompetent employee, and so on. The gambling side of the business generated remarkably smooth results.

<comment><USER18> I think in this case "biggest swing for the house" should be interpreted as "biggest edge in favor of the house," not anything to do with variance. Everyone knows the house always wins in the long run (that's why "the house" is so much nicer looking [well, bigger, anyway] than your house).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If I'm understanding the article correctly, as long as the guesser can't see the coin, and chooses randomly, it is a fair 50/50\. I don't think you even need to flip the coin. The coin could just be sitting on a table in the next room. If the guesser is ignorant and chooses randomly I don't think you even need the coin. You could just write heads or tails on a piece of paper, cover it, and let them guess.

</comment><comment><USER20> Aside from the inherent probability in the coin, it is also possible for the coin flipper to exude bias if the coin is caught.

I can time a coin catch to get 75-25 heads.

Don't let someone catch the coin if they flip it.

<comment><USER21> How? Do you see it as it falls? or do you feel it when you catch and then choose to do the "Flip on to your arm" thing or not?

<comment><USER22> Not the OP but I can do it too. It's all timing for me. When you flip the coin it spins at a determined rate. If you practice, you can time catching it. It's surprisingly not so difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Something about the evens/odds heads/tails comparison the author makes doesn't sit right with me. If you're confident that the coin will make more than one flip, then how much cumulative time it has spent in 'heads' position doesn't matter (gambler's fallacy), since the 'catch' timing is effectively random after that first flip.

<comment><USER24> I think I figured out whats bothering me about it. We need to figure out at what point in the rotation of the coin it can be determined to have changed to the next face. Is it when the coin is perfectly vertical? Maybe even a few degrees before because the rotational velocity will likely carry it over to the next face after making contact with your hand?

It seems that in any case the coin does spend more time statistically on the face that it was initially flipped from, but it's not exactly (num_rotations/2)+1

<comment><USER7> The actual paper linked from the article does a great job explaining this. They mention that the side facing up at any moment is a reasonable approximation for how it would land. The time each side faces up is significantly affected by the angle at which you flip, as the coin precesses during the flip. Page 4 has an excellent pair of graphs illustrating this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When I flip a coin, I reach up and catch it in mid air, then slam it on to the back of my other hand. I feel fairly certain that those two actions would negate any bias discussed in this article, and quite possibly introduce their own. If you know enough about a particular way of flipping a coin, you could know whether the chances are off from 50/50, but if you know that much, you could either devise a way for the result to be in your favor most of the time or you could ask for the method to be changed to make sure the other person isn't cheating. In either case, coin tosses are often done in casual circumstances where close enough is good enough.

<comment><USER17> Never, ever, allow someone you don't trust to do this. In a day you can learn to get about a 70%+ swing in your favor by timing the throw and catch, and if they call it in the air, you can either flip it twice or just once when you slam on your hand.

All fair coin tosses should land on a flat surface. Felt or carpet is better than tile because it reduces the odds of the coin spinning when it lands, which is weight-biased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am not even kidding when I say Bill Belichick is probably reading this article and will now have his captains try and game coin tosses.

<comment><USER27> I generally don't pay too much attention to the coin toss, but Slater definitely called heads when the Super Bowl went into overtime.

Maybe he already knows.

EDIT: [https://www.patspulpit.com/2017/2/7/14522972/patriots- captai...](https://www.patspulpit.com/2017/2/7/14522972/patriots-captain- matthew-slater-has-called-the-same-side-for-every-coin-toss-for-6-years)

It sounds like it's been Slater making the all on his own but you never know....

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For an alternative view, check out Andrew Gelman's: "You Can Load a Die, But You Can't Bias a Coin"

[http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/dice...](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/diceRev2.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Gelman doesn't contradict. Gelman says that a properly flipped coin is always approximately 50% heads, regardless of coin design, but NOT exact, and NOT regardless of flipping style.

The OP is about empirically observed real-world tosses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting, but I'm not sure I buy the argument. Which seems to be that HTHTHTHTH... will always have either more Hs or equal H and T in it.

If the thing is tossed but stays in its initial state, is that a coin toss? What if you didn't hold it either H or T up? It's not impossible to hold it sideways and throw it up.

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems that for all biases except the weighting, all that is needed is for the caller and thrower to be opponents, and call it in the air. Then the thrower will want the result to be as unpredictable as possible since they cannot predict what the caller will call.

</comment><comment> GuB-42 Use rock-paper-scissors instead.

It can be considered a game of skill but any one player can turn it into a game of pure chance if he wants to, as such, is can be considered fairer.

The reason why RPS can become a came of chance is that there is no way to gain advantage over a player who plays randomly with equal probability : the outcome will be 50/50 no matter what. In game theory, it's called a Nash equilibrium.

Of course, if the opponent is playing sub-optimally (i.e. not randomly), you can try to take advantage of it.

<comment><USER30> I recall reading once about a RPS playing robot that would win most of the time against humans by taking advantage of its much faster reaction time and much quicker ability to process input. It delayed making its choice until it could see what the human was doing. The robot was fast enough that the delay was imperceptible to the human.

Humans vary in reaction time and processing speed. I wonder if there are any humans faster enough than average to be able to cheat that way?

Professional baseball players might be good candidates to try to train to cheat at RPS. They have to be among the fastest humans at processing input and reacting in order to hit major league fastballs.

<comment><USER31> Isn't hitting a baseball more about prediction and less about reflexes? I would think other sports would require quicker reflexes, like boxing, fencing, and table tennis.

<comment><USER17> They read the arm-slot, grip, and initial spin of ball from 90 feet away, and then react to it.

Table tennis is similar because you read the spin based off of the position of their paddle hitting the ball (table tennis balls are typically unmarked so reading the spin directly is a no-go).

OTOH, the table tennis stroke is more similar to a baseball bunt than a baseball swing as the paddle spends more time in a position overlapping the predicted path of the ball. This is somewhat negated by the much shorter distances in table tennis. It's hard to say which requires more quick reaction to complicated inputs.

<comment><USER31> Yes, they have some very small amount of time to predict the future path of the ball based on the motion and initial behavior of the ball, and begin a swing based on that. Apparently a fastball takes just under half a second from release to plate, and a swing takes 150ms to execute. That gives the batter about 300ms to decide whether to start a swing, which I'm guessing is around the same amount of time between hits in table tennis. Of course, I don't know how much a batter can adjust and aim the bat mid-swing. Also, some table tennis shots give you way less time than 0.3 seconds, but those are usually slams that would only be successfully returned if the player made a lucky guess.

<comment><USER32> For a surprisingly-fascinating look at issues related to the role of the fastball in baseball (touching on history, physics, biology, measurement error, etc.), I suggest watching the movie, Fastball...

[https://www.vudu.com/movies/#!content/743314/Fastball](https://www.vudu.com/movies/#!content/743314/Fastball)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As an aside, I practiced false flipping a whole ago and got quite good at it, assuming I remember the initial state I can always know the end state

<comment><USER34> Can you explain false flipping physically?

On a related note, it's much harder to fake randomness over time:

[https://faculty.math.illinois.edu/~hildebr/fakerandomness/](https://faculty.math.illinois.edu/~hildebr/fakerandomness/)

<comment><USER33> Make the coin wobble instead of rotate when you flip it, looks like rotation but it isn't. Shiny coins work best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> With normal people, any bias in the coin is cancelled out by lack of knowledge of which bias the coin has.

</comment><comment><USER36> What the original paper really needs is an extension to the world of the spooky and quantum. Right!?

</comment><comment><USER37> The easiest way to cheat is to just feel which side of the coin is which right after you catch it.

<comment><USER38> And then go back in time and call it in the air?

<comment><USER17> I said this in another comment, but if you catch it and flip it down onto the back of your other hand, you can often surreptitiously add an extra flip in without being noticed.

<comment><USER37> Exactly. I've done this multiple times (always letting people in on it afterward, of course). I have almost no skill in slight of hand, but it fools people every time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It seems a coin spin (on a table top) would avoid these issues.

<comment><USER40> The article addresses that: it's much worse.

<comment><USER39> Interesting... thanks for the correction. Apparently the head side being slightly heavier do to the extra decoration and whatnot severely biases the coin to falling tails up when spun on its edge, up to 80% of the time with some coins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Actually, my advice for a good strategy would be to train coin flipping until you are as reliable as the coin flipping device ;-)

> [...] an automated "coin-flipper" device capable of flipping a coin and > producing Heads 100% of the time.

</comment><comment><USER42> What type of coin are we talking about?

A coin with rounded edges won't land on its edge 1 out of 6000 tosses. A coin with a flat edge that is thicker than either of its faces (or just thick in general; doesn't have to be thicker than the faces) will land on its edge a great deal more often.

Also, a coin with a heavier "tails" side will more often land on heads in a spin.

I guess I should read the paper. Maybe it clarifies.

<comment><USER42> The 1/6000 figure comes from a paper "Probability of a tossed coin falling on its edge" from 1993. I looked for it in the hopes it clarified the type of coin used, but the paper, as far as I could find, is behind a paywall.

Nevermind, found a link that talked about the paper. They used a US 5¢ coin, a nickel which has a flat edge and I think the thickest edge out of all (common?) US coins. At least it has the thickest edge to face ratio in terms of width.

<comment><USER43> I have actually seen a £1 coin land on its edge, I imagine given that it's a fair bit thicker than any US coin, it's much more likely with a £1 coin.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter client made by 12 year old - <AUTHOR> http://twythm.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats right, a kid. its pretty cool too

<comment><USER2> Are you the kid? Pretty impressive!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

<comment><USER2> Are you seriously 12??? I was building static html pages with frames at your age! That is seriously impressive dude. Shoot me an email, my hn username at gmail.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! LOL try it out please! I need some beta testers! Can u tweet from it please?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Curated activitities for you to do in the local area - <AUTHOR> https://www.goactively.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We've got a discount for all Hacker News readers! Use the code "HACKER" (case sensitive) to receive a $10 discount.</comment>


Mainframe, Interrupted - <AUTHOR> https://logicmag.io/06-mainframe-interrupted/ <comment><USER2> "I'm kind of confused by everyone being called an engineer now. In my day, an engineer was somebody who had an engineering degree, like a civil or mechanical engineer. But programmers or systems analysts weren't that. Do software engineers have engineering degrees?"

\- Joan Greenbaum

<comment><USER3> > Do software engineers have engineering degrees?

We do, on countries where only universities acknowledged by the Engineering Order are allowed to give such degrees, and one cannot sign project contracts under that title if he/she hasn't become a member after graduation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Clark Squire is now known as Sundiata Acoli. He's still in prison, on a different charge.

That charge is for killing a state trooper for which he got a life sentence. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assata_Shakur#New_Jersey_Turnp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assata_Shakur#New_Jersey_Turnpike_shootout)

<comment><USER5> I don't get the article's subject's sympathy for him or the Panther 21 at all. It felt like a surprise turn in the article.

<comment><USER6> The Panther 21 were acquitted of the charges the CPP raised money to bail him out for in 1969 so if you believe in the justice system that means he was innocent. The shooting death that he is in jail for to took place in 1973 and so is unrelated to what CPP raised bail funds for. Just wanted to clarify because it wasn't clear when reading these comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting how back then programming was a woman's job and the racial divide between programmers and operators.

<comment><USER7> I was discouraged from pursuing any sort of programming/computing-related degree in the early 2000s when I went to college because my parents (who are quite old and do not use computers for any meaningful work) saw it as a secretarial position.</comment></comment>


Google Maps is no longer a flat map - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/03/google-maps-is-no-longer-flatearth/ <comment><USER2> Google Maps must be one of the modern wonders of the world, it's still nothing short of breathtaking to zoom out of streetview in crowded London and then land somewhere on a country crossroads in remote Vietnam.

<comment><USER3> Google Earth VR is mindblowing.

<comment><USER4> Holy Shit! I just youtube'd some videos about that and it looks amazing! This is the first thing that has really made me want to get VR.

Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCrkZOx5Q1M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCrkZOx5Q1M)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By the way, for anyone who prefers Google Maps to load fast and show actual satellite/aerial imagery (rather than trying to render each tree as a weird crumpled blob) there's a flag you can set to get the old, fast 2D mode:

[https://maps.google.com/?force=canvas](https://maps.google.com/?force=canvas)

<comment><USER6> Thank you!

I'm actually quite annoyed that Google took away the visible option to disabled the 3D aerial view. It's such a resource hog, and my work's internet is often quite slow, and 3D has far more data to retrieve.

<comment><USER7> The option is there. It's in the hamburger menu, labeled "Globe".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "On flat maps, it's impossible to represent land mass size on a relative scale."

Um, no it's not. TechCrunch needs better editors. You just need to use a non- Mercator projection.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection)

<comment><USER9> You can represent size _or_ shape correctly, not both.

Anyone who uses the Gall-Peters projection is a cop.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Obligatory XKCD

[https://www.xkcd.com/977/](https://www.xkcd.com/977/)

<comment><USER10> Google decided to go with "A Globe".

<comment><USER11> At low zoom levels.

Given the behavior of the poles (they're not viewable; the south is also a black hole…), I suspect that there's a very smoothly done transition to web mercator for the higher zoom levels.

<comment><USER12> Correct. At high zooms, the trig required in the spherical math becomes inaccurate, so we fade back to simple web mercator.

<comment><USER9> Cartography wouldn't be able to use all these cheap tricks if the poles were habitable territory.

Can you imagine the distortion on a map of a small town located at the pole if Mercator was used?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The visualization is really cool but for daily use seems more practical being able to plot long trip routes without them disappearing on the back of the globe than being able to assess the true size of landmasses: [https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Madrid/Sydney,+New+South+Wal...](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Madrid/Sydney,+New+South+Wales,+firstname.lastname@example.com,-5.1637745,3.36z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0xd422997800a3c81:0xc436dec1618c2269!2m2!1d-3.7037902!2d40.4167754!1m5!1m1!1s0x6b129838f39a743f:0x3017d681632a850!2m2!1d151.2092955!2d-33.8688197!3e4)

<comment><USER14> I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure if planning trips to the other side of the globe qualifies as "daily use" either :-)

I think it's neat to see that the route is along a great circle -- that wasn't clear at all before this change.

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, the line drawing doesn't make this as cool as it could be. The line representing the flight from BOS to PEK is drawn due west, as would look natural on a 2D map. The real flight (and shortest route) heads north and passes near the north pole.

Hope they can update this, which would make international flights seem even more impressive than they already do.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, ugh. [https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Boston,+MA/Beijing,+China/@6...](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Boston,+MA/Beijing,+email@example.com,-159.5021672,2.11z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x89e3652d0d3d311b:0x787cbf240162e8a0!2m2!1d-71.0588801!2d42.3600825!1m5!1m1!1s0x35f05296e7142cb9:0xb9625620af0fa98a!2m2!1d116.4073963!2d39.9041999!3e4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >On flat maps, it's impossible to represent land mass size on a relative scale.

This isn't right. It is impossible to represent both relative position and relative size accurately. Gall-Peters and other equal-area projections accurately represent relative sizes.

<comment><USER18> There are cartographically reasonable equal-area or nearly-equal-area projections. Why are we still talking about Gall-Peters?

Peters was a charlatan who knew very little geography (he didn't even want to give credit to the geographer who discovered his map), and the Gall-Peters projection is Mercator for old-school hippies who think they can promote equality by making Africa taller.

<comment><USER16> Expand?

<comment><USER19> Yes, but only vertically.

<comment><USER16> I was trying to ask the parent to expand on the many things he was claiming lol

<comment><USER18> Here's a couple views on Peters and his map projection.

An article from "The Map Room" [1] on the argument about Boston public schools having adopted that map, which really dominates Google results right now I guess, but even within the lens of that topic it hits the major points.

And here's a "New Internationalist" article about Arno Peters [2] -- it sounds like he was fine as a historian, and I even agree with his _motivation_ for not wanting to plot historical events on a Mercator map, but it sure would have been great if he had learned about the equal-area alternatives to Mercator that Gall and Mollweide and Eckert and other geographers had already made.

It's not that I'm against making a map projection to "question Western imperalism". I take more issue with Peters' questioning of basic geometry -- he claimed his map preserves angles, which is clearly false (imagine a NW-SE road meeting a NE-SW road in Ecuador and what that right angle would look like in Gall-Peters), and he claimed that it was the "only" equal-area projection.

And I don't think it actually advances the conversation about equality to make a map that looks right in Europe and stretches Africa and South America like taffy.

EDIT: left out the links

[1] [https://www.maproomblog.com/2017/03/the-peters-map-is- fighti...](https://www.maproomblog.com/2017/03/the-peters-map-is-fighting-the- last-war/)

[2] [https://newint.org/features/2003/01/05/arno/](https://newint.org/features/2003/01/05/arno/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what the long term geopolitical consequences will be when we all stop looking at projected maps. That small peninsula to the west of Asia just got a little smaller. A certain island kingdom is now more clearly the size of Uganda. Maybe Google can also flip the globe "upside-down" for all users "below" the equator.

<comment><USER21> Australian maps are shown with Oz in the middle, and the pacific / indian oceas each side, with South East Asia and Antarctia surrounding, exactly the same way US maps put the US in the center.

<comment><USER22> Do you mean whole-world maps have Australia in the center? (I assume so, since obviously a map of only Australia would have Australia as the center...)

That's fascinating! I grew up in the US and I'm not sure I've ever used a world map with the US in the center. Curious where you got this impression. I can find some examples if I specifically search online, but they look very weird to me.

Every world map I grew up with has the US on the far left, presumably due to the convenience of splitting the map on the Pacific Ocean. The first example that came to my mind: [https://i.imgur.com/FjBKD6k.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/FjBKD6k.jpg)

<comment><USER23> Maps in Japan have Japan and the Pacific ocean in the center and the Americas off to the right. Which make the phrases "the west" and "the east" kind of interesting choices.

Example of a map poster for kids: [http://happylilac.net/sekaitizu- mihon.gif](http://happylilac.net/sekaitizu-mihon.gif)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very cool. However it's not using great circle routes for airline directions, for example ask to go from Calgary to London. It should go well over Greenland, but instead just follows the same path you'd get from drawing a line on a Mercator map.

<comment><USER25> Eastbound flights often take non-great circle routes in order to make better use of the jetstream - depending on the forecast, a straight eastward line may be more accurate than a great circle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It even allows you to see satelite pictures of other planets! I'm not sure how old is that feature, but it's awesome.

You just have to unzoom far away from earth and it'll show you a menu where you can choose where you want to go.

[https://email@example.com,-157.4...](https://email@example.com,-157.4592368,22671583m/data=!3m1!1e3)

<comment><USER27> And interior of the ISS :). Thanks, that was a fantastic journey!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> While I was working on the PowerBI globe map visualization [https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual- awesomeness-...](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual-awesomeness- unlocked-the-globe-map/) (video in link)

I had to do some funky magic to stitch square tiles in a sphere from bing maps and do reverse mercerator projection. I had to also ensure GPS coordinates would exactly align to the right pixel otherwise the 3D chart would all look weird. So there was a lot of fun math involved over a bunch of evenings and weekends.

The hard part though, was to do an animation that would unravel a spherical earth into a flat earth and vice versa.

Naive me though it would be a simple linear interpolation that would take a couple of minutes but it ended up being many many nights of crazy mathematics to get it right.

Map projections are really interesting. Much respect to their inventors.

<comment><USER29> I'm interested in learning more! I imagined linear interpolation could work too. What went wrong?

<comment><USER28> This does a hemisphere but doesn't map lng and lat. Gives an example of the kind of maths involved. [https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1334241/interpolate...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1334241/interpolate- between-3d-plane-and-3d-hemisphere)

It's not a simple linear x0, y0, z0 -> x1, y1, z1 because you kind of want an animation like a square blanket is wrapping around a ball, stretching the right amount in different places such that it becomes a sphere.

I tried to find a single magical equation that would give a x0, y0, 0 -> x1, y1, z1 based on param t that goes from 0 - 1. I'm sure there exists one but I tried all sorts of fancy math I knew for a day or two and still had major trouble writing it down as a single equation function.

Then I thought about it in a different way after I ate a fruit and realized I need an orange analogy. What if we cut slices of orange. The ends are crescent shapes. Now it's a matter of animating the crescents into rectangular strips where the pointy ends stretches but the middle part remains the same.

Since in computer graphics, a sphere isn't really a true sphere, but an approximation with triangles the strip analogy works well. We just need to animate the ends of triangles.

The gotcha is the pointy end of sphere expands from 0 to length of mercerator projection (flat square) so they cut a tiny bit of the top and bottom otherwise you have infinite stretching at the end

So you have three little functions. For an x,y in a square you figure out what slice they go into and what side of the slice. The further to the poles, the more you squeeze towards the center, so you get something like this [https://blenderartists.org/t/producing-a-12-petal-gores- from...](https://blenderartists.org/t/producing-a-12-petal-gores-from-a-uv- projection-sphere/637809)

Then you have a blanket wrapping function I.e morphing a line into circle and that's a line -> arc -> circle animation. That's not too hard. The arc of a very large circle is almost flat. So you divide the line into two and animate the left and right segments into two hemicircle arcs that then form a proper circle. Kind of like curving the lines from the end to bend it into a circle.

Now longitudes and latitudes both go through this line to circle animation. To get the z, we take the x arc position, the y arc position, the point on crescent strip and we do matrix rotate transforms to get final x,y,z

So rather than it being one single equation (which i'm guessing is possible using super crazy maths), we take a piecemeal approach and animate lots of little segments that add up as a plane to sphere animation using simpler maths and matrix transforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Very cool! It's always seemed a shame to me that we stick with highly- inaccurate projections when we have the tech to do much better, simply out of inertia. Double-cheers as well for ignoring the weird convention that you shouldn't care about accurate sizing when looking a political rather than satalite map.

</comment><comment><USER31> Looks like this isn't rolled out to everyone. I'm not seeing the 3D version (logged in & incognito).

<comment><USER12> For rollouts like this, a small holdback experiment is typical, to assess long term trends. Or maybe your browser doesn't have hardware acceleration enabled? Or you could be in canvas mode? Try ?force=webgl on the end of the maps url in case it's the latter. Try shadertoy.com to see if webgl is available.

<comment><USER32> Webgl works on my browser. Shaders work. Google maps is still flat. force=webgl does nothing. I'd say it's a partial roll out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If there's a job where I just get to explore the wonder of Google Maps all day, I want it.

<comment><USER34> Maybe the Google Maps QA team?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Finally we are rid of the biggest source of Mercator! Finally we can look at the south pole!

<comment><USER35> Actually no, McMurdo remains a white sport still :(

<comment><USER36> This is an unfinished demo from a while back, but I made vector and raster map tiles in a WGS84 projection, so McMurdo is included — though you have to find it yourself [1]

I'm unlikely to work on the globe, it's cool[2] but we don't really need it. Maybe when OpenLayers Cesium[3] gets support for vector tiles, so we don't have to see fuzzy, distorted raster tiles.

[1] [https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/temp- debug.html](https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/temp-debug.html) (click "Toggle" in the top right)

[2] [https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/](https://tile.gbif.org/ui/Globe/)

[3] [https://openlayers.org/ol-cesium/](https://openlayers.org/ol-cesium/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Openlayers Cesium provides a globe view for map tiles (or other data), it's it not to much work to transition to a flat projection at a high zoom.

[https://openlayers.org/ol- cesium/examples/sidebyside.html](https://openlayers.org/ol- cesium/examples/sidebyside.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> I find it curious that it loads the old 2D representation first -- made me think it wasn't working for a moment or two.

Also, is it just me or is zooming a bit broken at low zooms now? The globe drifts as I zoom.

</comment><comment><USER39> So it's no longer a map application, because it's producing weird non-standard projections, tiles that can't be stitched/georeferenced properly etc.

Will Google support and maintain an actual maps application? Or will they merge google earth and google maps together in an even less capable tool purely for consumers to wow at? Castrating Google Earth with the webgl version and locking it into Chrome was bad enough. I wish this stops here.

<comment><USER40> Google Earth desktop edition is still available. And it's still approximately ten thousand times better than the browser edition.

[https://www.google.com/earth/download/gep/agree.html](https://www.google.com/earth/download/gep/agree.html)

<comment><USER39> It's gradually phased out. Right now it's essentially abandonware. At some point in the future they'll just kill it out of the blue. Things that provide value to advanced users don't matter to most of these "data-based" companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> While this is a great improvement, this is most needed on mobile devices.

This was especially a problem with Ingress and Pokemon Go games where you need the map to be correct where it isn't. Even more difficult is using those apps in places like the Arctic or Antarctic, there's no way to accurately place GPS coordinates, deal with game portals or have directions other than the compass.

</comment><comment><USER42> You can see the difference between Africa, Congo and Greenland as mentioned in the article: [https://imgur.com/a/g7uIYGN](https://imgur.com/a/g7uIYGN)

Greenland is the size of Congo, around 2,2 million km2 while entire Africa is around 30 million km2. Europe being around 10 and North America 24 million km2.

</comment><comment><USER43> I believe this makes Google Maps the only mainstream SaaS map providing orthographic projection, and I wonder if that (partially) explains the recent increase in Google Maps pricing (previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570029)).

</comment><comment><USER44> That's the technology behind: s2geometry [https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/12/announcing-s2-libr...](https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/12/announcing-s2-library- geometry-on-sphere.html)

Annoying that techcrunch could not find that out.

</comment><comment><USER45> What's really interesting that in 2D maps, every country had their own variation of it.

If you were to take a 2D printed world map from America and compared it to a 2D printed world map, the sizes of continents wouldn't be the same, nor the centerpiece of the map itself. It would always center around that respective country first.

</comment><comment><USER46> It never was a flat map. That was just a kludge to make it work in the browser. The original application, from Keyhole, was 3D from 2003 or so. NVidia used to offer it as a promotion, before Google bought it.

Now it's a Chrome browser promotion. Google Earth requires Google's browser.

<comment><USER47> Google Maps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Just a note, they also changed how navigating works. It's almost as if the map curves differently at different zooms. The physics is very cool but it is a little nauseating. It is very realistic, almost like spinning a globe, but I'm not sure if its more preferable.

</comment><comment><USER49> There is a really good short youtube video about map projections and to understand the tradeoffs that are made to create them. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIID5FDi2JQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIID5FDi2JQ)

</comment><comment><USER50> A couple of suggestions for improvements: 1) Use quaternions instead of Euler angles for rotation 2) Show latitude and longitude grid so it's easier to identify equator and polar regions, etc...

<comment><USER28> Langitude longitude grid would definitely make it easy to map it to the flag mercaretor projection.

One can easily also correlate why things on the pole look so big when you have evenly spaced latitudes in a sphere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This was going to launch years ago with the vector rewrite, but it was only enabled for the globe mode (Earth/GL, complete with a simulation of the objects in the sky). Interesting timing.

</comment><comment> awinter-py > as east and west in all flat mappes -- and I am one -- are one, so death > touches the resurrection

\-- sermons of J Donne (as quoted by oppenheimer)

</comment><comment><USER52> As neat as this is, it's kinda a crummy experience in a few expectation- breaking ways :\ Most notably perhaps: if you put your cursor on a spot on the globe and scroll, you don't zoom there. You zoom somewhere in between.

Mostly things that can be fixed in the future (except perhaps "requires multiple click-drags to go to the opposite side", where before you could see most/all of the world at once). But it still seems a bit more shiny than useful.

</comment><comment><USER53> I am always amazed to see how ridiculously huge the african continent is. There are really huge countries over there.

</comment><comment><USER54> Did the compass disappear? I'd like to still be able to rotate the map.

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Apple Maps used to do this too. They took it away a few versions ago for reasons I don't quite understand. I really liked the "Pale Blue Dot"-like overview of the Earth when zoomed out all the way.

<comment><USER55> Apple Maps (desktop version) still does this, but only in Satellite mode. Which feels very intuitive, to be honest.

<comment><USER56> Of course, the definitive pale blue dot image was not taken by a satellite, but rather a spacecraft on a hyperbolic trajectory.... ;).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> But time is still a flat circle.

</comment><comment><USER58> Question is, will it destroy my battery like satellite view does?

<comment><USER12> No, surprisingly it's not much more expensive to render than Mercator.

<comment><USER58> Yeah pretty surprising. Did a test, switched over to sat view and my fans ramped right up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I am honestly surprised how Google has not released a GPS navigator to compete with TomTom or Garmin. It would absolutely demolish them in seconds.

<comment><USER60> They already have: the smart phone in everyone's pocket.</comment></comment>


The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google's most revolutionary phone - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/10/inside-project-ara-googles-revolutionary-modular-phone/ <comment><USER2> Google mgmt fake releases and then subsequently cancels unlaunched products all the time. They do it to assess market viability and also to stymie competitors. Ara is notable because of the breadth of the project, but it was really just about protecting the android cash cow's flank.

The strategy has worked pretty well. Android was released as open source almost 10 years ago, and you still can't run it on any semi open hardware, like you could with eg. Linux on a PC.

To this day, it still boggles my mind that Intel won't sell an open handset.

<comment><USER3> I worked at a startup producing an Android device funded by Intel and Intel wouldn't even give us source code to all the parts of the OS. We had to deal with binary blobs copied into the Android source tree for things like the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) and fastboot. They were things we really needed to customize too because their fastboot referenced buttons our device didn't have and things like that. It was pretty ridiculous.

Previous to that I worked on a TI OMAP solution and the source for that was much more open. We had a to extract a custom SGX package for the graphics processing, but otherwise it was much closer to the Android Open Source Project. At least we could customize their x-loader and u-boot as needed. Too bad TI OMAP died.

<comment><USER4> So the Intel system they gave you didn't have things like standard UEFI or a VESA/VGA subsystem? Could you install a standard x86/64 Linux distro or Windows?

<comment><USER5> Intel's mobile oriented Atom variants are incredibly stripped down vs their "desktop" line.

Back in the day Intel created a linux distro called Moblin to promote these CPUs, because Microsoft balked at supplying a Windows variant for a X86 platform that didn't even have PCI device enumeration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't get it. This is a IBM PC moment right here. Imagine you could standardize the smartphone. Really divide it into block, standardize the communication bus. Make it a PC. It would be huge, eat up the smartphone world, just like the PC ate up the homecomputers.

I even think this is how Google would have beaten the iPhone. Android as the OS for an ever-evolving phone, where if a user needs more ram he would just add more, if he needs a new processor he would just replace the current, if he needs a higher resolution display the old just would get replaced. Of course that is not easy, of course in the beginning a tailor-made smartphone would be slicker, faster. But then you support it some time and you get loyal users upgrading their device instead of even considering something else.

I know there are limits to upgradeability, just as a PC reaches the moment where all that remains from its old incarnation is the case. But still, enabling upgrades and thus removing consumers from the market would be a huge hit to all other smartphone vendors, probably spawning a more targeted parts industry.

And no: The current module system from LG or what Ara was presenting in the end is not it. Adding a new photo lense interests no one. You need to be able to switch out the core components to make an impact. The Fairphone 2 comes close, but I don't think you can drive real core upgrades without controlling the OS, and thus it ends up with a core module. We'll see. If they manage to add things like replacing the display with a better display, the core module with a more powerful one, that might already be good enough.

<comment><USER7> Did the upgradeable PC ever really work, or did the vast majority of PCs sold go to the dump with exactly the same configuration as sold? After a few years, it becomes a cascade of dependencies: Can't upgrade memory because the old motherboard won't support state of the art DIMMs, the bus used by current cards (ISA, PCI, AGP, PCIx) doesn't match the motherboard, power supply connector has different number of pins, and if you replace the motherboard to allow a newer component to be plugged in then all of the other old stuff needs to be replaced due to the new motherboard. The most success with longevity seems to be USB peripherals, with old/new stuff working together, and it's worth noting that USB is external to the PC. (I'd contend that that USB's success is largely due to the mechanical simplicity of USB, which is beginning to disappear.)

With increased integration, there's also an aspect of the cost of a module being almost independent of its contents, meaning that the cost of making a device is roughly proportional to the number modules it contains. Under those circumstances, it makes sense to minimise the number of modules, the lowest overall device cost being a single integrated unit.

In my mind, the key to long life is freedom to modify the software. It's amazing how far a well designed hardware platform can be pushed with software optimisation over time. I do embedded systems in my day job and our current product does things that weren't even thought of when it's hardware was designed, by virtue of the original design keeping the hardware simple whilst doing as much as possible in software, and current creative use the existing hardware resources.

I think a fixed hardware platform can work well, provided an original design goal is to do as much as possible in software and there is complete freedom to rework the software going forward.

<comment><USER8> > Did the upgradeable PC ever really work,

It did in the early days (the first 10 years). These days, the mobo, CPU, ram, power supply, graphics card all seem to need to be a matched set.

<comment><USER9> For the mobo, CPU, and RAM, I would agree, but power supplies and graphics cards have been forwards and backwards compatible for roughly a decade.

<comment><USER8> Not in my experience. The disk drive power connectors have changed, the fan connections multiply, and the mobo/graphics cards sprout extra needed connections.

<comment><USER9> The SATA power connector is ~14 years old, and graphics cards often come with adapters for the PCI-E power connectors. Some GPUs (like the GTX 1050 Ti) are entirely powered by the PCI-E slot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even at Google most people knew this project was stillborn. It's a combination of two factors: no one but a few geeks actually has any need for this, and the overwhelming majority of profits in the industry is taken by a company that builds the opposite of Ara, further underscoring the former point. It terms of flushing money down the drain it ranks way up there with Google Glass and Project Loon.

<comment><USER11> I am still baffled that countless intelligent people deluded themselves into thinking this could have worked well on a big scale for the longest time.

<comment><USER10> As Alexander Pushkin(a famous Russian poet) wrote in one of his poems: "Oh it is not hard to fool me, for I am eager to be fooled."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ara was one of the most exciting things about Motorola, and I really wish Google had at least done us the favor of letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it might've had a chance.

> _"To us, it just felt like we had just kinda hit molasses. And I think, to > Google, it felt like they were being uncomfortably sped up," the source > said.

Google constantly gets a lot of credit for "innovation", but this is a story I am seeing over and over. Skybox, also bought by Google, said much the same in an article yesterday: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/alphabet-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/alphabet- said-in-talks-to-sell-skybox-satellite-business)

> Skybox's momentum seemed to slow following Google's acquisition, while > Planet Labs has continued to raise money and send many satellites into > space.

And from Boston Dynamics: [https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/17/google-could-be- selling-bo...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/17/google-could-be-selling- boston-dynamics-because-even-google-thinks-these-robots-are-terrifying/)

> In December 2013, Google acquired Boston Dynamics and a few other robotics > startups. The idea was to build a robotics engineering team inside Google > and make them work with Boston Dynamics on robotics projects. Since then, > not much happened.

As another point, NEST was regularly making large strides and releasing new products, but that effectively ended with their Google acquisition. They rebranded Dropcam after buying them, and that was it, there's been nothing new.

Even for acquisitions Google claims to want to develop, it seems to be a graveyard for tech's hopes and dreams.

<comment><USER13> > letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it > might've had a chance.

Who says Lenovo wanted ATAP, or would have given it a chance? And Google bought Motorola almost 5 years ago. If you don't call that a chance, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER14> I think the point is that if you believe both (a) it had zero chance at google (b) it might have had non-zero chance at Lenovo - then it would've been preferable for it to go to Lenovo, since a possibility of >0 is still better than a flat 0.

Personally, I'm reasonably sure the chances of Ara succeeding were infinitesimal anywhere, but I think your "who says" isn't a counterargument to ocdtrekkie's point.

<comment><USER13> The point is clear; I'm questioning the assumption. "Who says (b)", is what I'm asking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Given that swappable storage already exists in a standardized form factor at a tiny size, what are the truly functional components of a phone that should be swappable?

All I can see are screen, memory, CPU, baseband mobile communications, wifi, bluetooth, camera, local sensors, battery.

Observations: trying to put memory and CPU across disparate modules on the same generic block-linking bus used by the other components smells like a recipe for pain. Sensors and wireless connectivity are stupid-cheap and therefore largely not module-worthy, they would probably be on the same unit as the mobile comm's baseband.

Conclusion: Maybe retry with [cpu/memory]+[camera]+[comms]+[screen]+[battery]

Gotchas: Hardware profits lower, so where's the commercial carrot? I suppose a cabal of governments (EU?) or a single big one (China) could regulate heavily against throwaway devices entering their markets, which could provide enough push, though it would be hard for China to regulate. Software experience polish would suffer. Overall bulk would likely suffer, though we've already reached too-tiny-to-hold-is-the-problem so that's less of an issue.

</comment><comment><USER16> I would've liked to see Project Ara continue. I never thought the phone idea was good because the economics didn't seem to make sense. There's no way that a low volume product using expensive parts can compete with the handset makers and carriers on price and finished quality.

The real strength was in the maker space where you can put together components to custom build your own product. Just like a higher level arduino system, you can easily get a lot of functionality without the pain of low level development. There is a lot of potential, especially from the healthcare field, which had a lot of interest in this project. I know of a few people who were working on projects around project Ara before they pulled the plug on it.

</comment><comment><USER17> From a layman's perspective, it sounds like they shot themselves in the foot somewhat by taking modularity to a logical extreme — building a highly generalizable bus system that would support connections of any kind of component on any part of the device. I wonder what gains would come from relaxing that requirement, so a certain sector is always reserved for a camera, another for a battery, etc, one for each component that everyone is obviously going to want on their phone but might be upgradable over time. The idea of being able to attach a Geiger counter to your phone is intriguing but that was always going to be a niche within a niche.

<comment><USER18> That's what these guys are trying to do: [https://shop.fairphone.com/en/](https://shop.fairphone.com/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> HEY GOOGLERS! Please make a Google Pixel phone with a replaceable battery and I'll go buy one! I'm stuck on a 4 year old Samsung Nexus until you do (or until I can no longer get replacement batteries for it.)

I'd really prefer to get a phone with VR specs like the Pixel but not being able to replace the battery makes it not worth the spend for me.

Thanks in advance!

</comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting that the original Project Ara Moduino prototype became the Moto Z. Confirms that the Moto Z was developed under Google, because Lenovo sure as fuck wasn't throwing money at Motorola's R&D.

The split might've actually been good, for modular phones at least. The Z might've been scrapped alongside Ara, but alternatively there might be a Google Moto PiXel right now with Google Mods.

All the things that could have been...

</comment><comment><USER21> Way back when the dinosaurs roamed, and we had "PDAs", Palm tried to do this with their Visor "Springboards." These module would slide in the back and give you all sorts of awesomeness like "more memory, temperature loggers, cameras, printers, etc."

However, this expansion module came at a cost. The product itself had to be twice as thick as the competition, and the marketplace was moving so fast that it became outdated in just a few years.

Cool idea though - we actually made our own springboard module for our senior design project as a EE.

[https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/511D5DYQQAL...](https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/511D5DYQQAL.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER5> Every time they made a public presentation of it, further away from the IBM PC for your pocket it moved.

First it was that that Google was to be the only producer of endoskeletons, and that it would house custom chips. OK, that's on par with the IBM BIOS.

Then they started talking about how modules would only be available via their Play store, and tied to your Google account. They were not even sure if they would allow the resale of used modules.

Then they started talking about moving the mobile radio into the endo.

Then, right before official cancellation, they talked about a complete rethink where just a few small parts could be replaced.

</comment><comment><USER22> :-(</comment>


Blend.io: A Peek Into The Future Of Music Project Collaboration? - <AUTHOR> http://www.djtechtools.com/2013/08/15/blend-io-a-peek-into-the-future-of-music-project-collaboration/

<comment><USER2> What I would love would be a no latency audio chat for jamming, which also would record each channel.

I'm not sure how to solve the no latency issue. One solution maybe to force people to use looping, and then delay the other participants by a cycle. (This wouldn't really work for most song structures, but would for the target market of Blend.io).

<comment><USER3> Yeah, problem with that is that you would only hear what the other people are playing 1 loop in the future- the whole point about jamming (for me) is to adapt real time to what others are doing, so you couldn't do that

I started thinking about these problems and the best solution I could come up with is what we are building now: [http://getbandhub.com](http://getbandhub.com) which is not live - but async

We have an alpha now (video/demo in the link) an will be releasing a beta in a few weeks

Would love to hear some feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I sort of like the idea of Blend, especially since I'm a Live and Maschine user primarily, but I'm not sure how I feel about Yet Another Social Network tacked on to the rest of the product. I get that it helps with discovery of potential collaborators, but if you already know people you want to work with and simply need a solution to keep everyone's files up to date, the whole "cred" thing seems it would just be a distraction.

Bitwig ([http://www.bitwig.com](http://www.bitwig.com)) was founded by a team of former Ableton developers who aim to offer network collaboration (both local and remote) natively in their DAW, though that product is still in private beta at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER5> Useless comment, but I had this exact same idea a while back (was basically GitHub + SoundCloud, used "resample" instead of "re-pull." I eventually lost motivation and never got an MVP going, but I'm glad someone has and hope it takes off, finding people to collab with isn't easy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Blend.io looks like a really promising piece of software. There have been many attempts at a live collaborative jam software service but this one has come a long way.

Check out the article to find a free beta code as well and give Blend.io a test drive

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm working on a similar website called [http://www.thrusong.com](http://www.thrusong.com) that's going to be opening up for beta in about three weeks.</comment>


No More Definition Links in Google Search? - <AUTHOR> http://friendfeed.com/e/811bbc07-d772-0cf2-fa8e-815c0aaf8fb7/No-More-Definition-Links-in-Google/ <comment><USER2> will define: <term> still work? That was the main way I got definitions, as opposed to just typing the word in.

</comment><comment><USER3> still works for me.</comment>


Why the iPhone sometimes feels stuck in the past - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/15/11394950/iphone-ringtones-ios-stuck-past <comment><USER2> I'm sure the author of the article has a really valid reason why not being able to put a ringtone on their phone symbolises the downfall of the glorious apple empire, but my experience with iPhone users is that most of them have them on silent 24/7.

<comment><USER3> This got me thinking about other ways in which this stuff is a problem. Yesterday I found a podcast that I could only download as an mp3. I loaded it up in safari but there is no way to "save" the file because iOS doesn't give access to the file system. Consequently I couldn't listen to it on my subway ride this morning because i didn't have bandwidth. This is supposed to be a device that I own and that makes my life better, but then why is it standing in my way when I want to do a very simple thing? It's quite frustrating.

<comment><AUTHOR> GoodReader has a good internal file manager and it can download and play MP3s from a URL.</comment></comment></comment>


Live forever... or die trying - <AUTHOR> http://theimmortalists.com/

<comment><USER2> I for one am convinced that aging and death is an evolutionary error (from the point of view of the host, not of the genes!), which can be solved with technology. Like all technological problems, it is just a matter of dedicating enough brain-power to solve it. And the only reason why we are not throwing enough brain power to it currently is because we, as a society, are illogically convinced that either it is an insolvable problem, or it is a problem not worth tackling (because of the huge ethical issues associated with immortality).

But both views can be overcomed with technology again: as soon as it starts to become clear that we can solve the problem, more and more brainpower will be dedicated to it (capitalism is very much suited for tackling this). And technology can also diminish most of the ethical problems (resource pressures caused by overpopulation, ...) ultimately by allowing for out-of-earth colonies.

The only open question is if access to immortality will be open to everyone or will be controlled by a small elite for centuries to come (ultimately it will be a commodity, like all technology). Capitalism in its current form (specially as practiced in the US) is not very inspiring in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER3> While true immortality is the ultimate goal of researchers like de Grey, from a practical standpoint, current research is actually focusing on immorbidity (or indefinite lifespan).

Basically, remaining reasonably youthful and healthy does not necessarily keep you from being run over by a truck. For that we'll need some sort of backup- and-restore system.</comment>


Didi Kuaidi, Uber's Rival in China, Has Raised $2B in Fresh Funding - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/07/two-billionnnnnnnnn/ <comment><USER2> I'm in China and my Chinese wife uses several of these apps but they are battling pretty hard and she changes her app preference fairly regularly. Currently she's alternating between "Yihao zhuan che" ([http://www.vvipone.com/](http://www.vvipone.com/)) and "Didi da che" ([http://www.xiaojukeji.com/](http://www.xiaojukeji.com/)). Yihao has several different upgrades like "fast car" and "dedicated car" which can pay more for quality. While Didi is more taxi grade and does car pooling with lower cost options and delivery driver services. Didi is also doing a lot of promotions like "free Mondays" which free is fairly bloodbath pricing.

<comment><USER3> Yihao Zhuan Che is actually owned by Didi And Kuaidi, but all three are standalone apps. It's interesting how much internal cannibilization there is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didi is absolutely dominant in Kunming. Overnight (and I've been there 15 years) it became impossible to hail a cab, because all the cabs were servicing Didi customers. Way to market your service ... if you aint on it, you aint getting to where you need to be! I would say market penetration on a per-ride basis was pushing 80%, and that was a year ago. Uber has no hope.

<comment><USER5> uber would have no hope in the first place being a foreign, non-chinese company that relies on internet access to hosts not wholly controlled and hosted in china

<comment><USER6> Using Uber here in Suzhou, I'm pretty sure their China servers are completely within China. There is no "bump" from transversing the GFW and starting such a service in China without having the servers inside would be crazy. There is no reason they couldn't just completely partition their service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Has China blocked Uber and started fining, arresting or disappearing their drivers yet?

Because that's what's going to happen, unless Uber has some well-positioned backers from China

<comment><USER8> Well...

China likes to make things easy on their own startups. Everyone should know that by now. If Uber has not made arrangements and structured the administration and ownership of their China business in a fashion consistent with that reality... I have to question the suitability of the leadership team at Uber.

This is all basic stuff at this point. China is not a mystery anymore. You shouldn't be getting the basic stuff wrong.

<comment><USER9> Even if Uber had greased the right palms before, they're still a foreign owned country and at an inherent disadvantage in China. I expect them to be pushed out the same way they were pushed out of Paris in the near future.

<comment><USER10> That's a bogus analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can think of very few business ideas that need $2 billion+ worth of runway before they are self-financing. It certainly seems it should be possible to build a ride brokering service with a fraction of that.

But I assume they got it because they could and not because they needed it.

<comment><USER12> According to the article they wanted $1.5b, but decided to leave it open for another few hundred million because they could. As you do :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not that this is constructive in any way, but I like the URL for this page :)</comment>


Business plan competitions: What's the value, to participants and judges? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/06/19/startups-look-business-plan-competitions

<comment><USER2> So let's see, students submitting papers and receiving scores. Sounds familiar?

It should strike everybody as an idiotic way to evaluate potential business success. If anything good's gonna come out of it it's that we may come to questions that same process that's used to evaluate academic prowess.</comment>


Decades - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/1849/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me getting old, or has fashion not changed much since 2000? I was watching Road Trip the other day and thought "these clothes are basically what kids wear today". Watching a movie from 1980 in 2000, the clothes would have looked foreign. This may not sound like a Hacker News topic, but does this signal some type of cultural equilibrium? Could it be that in a connected world there's less reason to stand out in your dress?

<comment><USER3> It's not just you getting old: [http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of- style-2...](http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201)

<comment><USER4> "Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn't already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn't tell me with certainty they weren't from the 2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier."

The other day I was in the car with my 17 year old and a song came on the radio from the late 90s and she thought it was a new song. I didn't laugh because I've noticed the sameness to pop music myself and if I hadn't lived through it I probably couldn't tell either.

<comment><USER5> I've considered that this is true as well, but since I am extremely unfamiliar with pop music since the early 90s, I assumed that could also be the case as well.

On the other hand, if you were to play me an unfamiliar song from about 1965 to about 1980, I can, with pretty good accuracy, narrow down its release to within a year or two just by its sound. It's a game I like to play with the SiriusXM radio channel.

There's no doubt that pop music has become a lot more homogenized in the past couple decades, and the technological advances that drastically alter the sound of music are becoming fewer and fewer. Has there really been anything other than (the scourge of) Autotune that's really affected the sound of music in the past 20 years? The only other thing I can think of is digital sampling, which hit like a tidal wave around 1983-4.

However, I must vehemently disagree that you wouldn't immediately recognize something from the 80s. The sounds and styles of music in the 80s were much more distinct. Even my kids, who were born in the 90s, can immediately recognize song from the 80s by their sound.

<comment><USER6> The loudness war.

Digital equipment also increased the amount of material with very high production values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> During the 90s, did people refer to present day trends as "[90s ___]"?

People have started using "2000s" to describe the 2000-2010 decade. For example: "music of the 2000s" [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=music%20...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=music%20of%20the%202000s,music%20of%20the%2090s)

But that only became necessary in the past few years, before that you could just call it "pop music"

I think decades blur together enough that it takes a few years before people are comfortable generalizing them into a single term.

<comment><USER8> I have two theories. On the one hand, it seems like people tend to be hopelessly bored with the "last decade" (people only started giving a shit about the 90s like 5 years ago). On the other, I find decades to have become more and more boring since the 60s.

The 60s invented _so much_ (I'd argue youth/pop culture and the very "decade" category itself). The 70s had bellbottom pants and disco music (it's more of a pity-category that we even bother to name it). The 80s at least had MTV. The 90s... it's "my" decade, in a way, but I already struggle to even come up with stuff. It's like an off-brand 80s. The 2000s? Heck, did anything even happen in the 2000s? 9/11? MySpace? ...? It's hard to objectively judge stuff you're currently in but the 2010s look boring as _fuck_ right now. Like, I couldn't come up with a single thing, culturally, the 2010s should be remembered for. Hipsters? They're just stealing everything cool from previous decades!

I feel like one of the other posters here is right: Pop culture is becoming less and less homogeneous, it's just picking what you like from any source you like. It's remixes of remixes and weird niche stuff celebrated for 3 months before people move on to the next shit. 10 years might simply be way too long to stay consistent, nowadays, while the smaller changes are too subtle to matter as a "category".

<comment><USER9> In the 90s, Techno/Rave music became big, forever changing the music landscape. And of course the Internet started to go mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My little daughter watches MacGuyver, Hannah Montana, the A Team and Jessie all back to back without a second thought.

She loves The Beatles and LFO.

The internet smeared culture all over the surface of life like wet paint.

The "generation gap" is dead and buried.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think people don't realize that the extreme variation in culture over the decades of the 20th century was due, in part, to the fact that older media simply wasn't available. Think of the 70s. Want to watch a TV show from the 60s? You're SOL. Maybe you can find records from bands of that era, but want to see fashion trends from a decade earlier? What do you do? Dig up old magazines in the library? Want to watch an old movie? Better hope it turns up on TV or as a rerelease in theaters. Culture really did exist in this relatively narrow window of just a few years.

That's completely gone, now, and I just don't think we're going to see these dramatic decade-tagged cultural shifts any more.

<comment><USER5> I have to wonder if you actually lived in the 70s because what you are describing is simply untrue. TV reruns were a huge thing, especially during the day. As a kid in the 1970s, I was deeply familiar with a lot of TV from the 50s and 60s. When we got cable in the mid-70s this became even more true. Syndicated shows and reruns ruled the airwaves. There was no lack of exposure to earlier decades through television.

Now in terms of movies, what you're saying is a little more true, but a lot of movies were aired on network TV, so eventually you would see a lot of the big ones. HBO was around in the 1970s as well, so there was an opportunity to see lots of movies that way as well.

xkcd's thesis seems to be premised on the idea that there are no catchy, and widely accepted, names for this decade and the previous one.

I've considered the same question and decided that music, fashion and other cultural touchstones are becoming less distinct from decade to decade than they were going back to the last century.

However, I've also considered that it may be the case that I'm simply less aware of the details of pop culture than I was 20+ years ago. I can hear a piece of music from 1965 to about 1980 that I'm not familiar with and pin it down to within a year or two just by its sound. Maybe it's possible to do that with music from the last 20 years, but I certainly can't do it.

<comment><USER11> I was born in the 70s, but was not old enough to remember them directly -- so I'll defer to your direct experience. Of course there wasn't zero access to media from other decades -- but I remember in the 80s and even 90s cultural access was very, very different. I could access an album from the 70s, but I'd have to go buy it. Or borrow it from a friend and give it back. I could see reruns on TV, but only certain TV shows and definitely not on-demand. (Or I'd have to go rent, which, again, limited access.)

> I can hear a piece of music from 1965 to about 1980 that I'm not familiar > with and pin it down to within a year or two just by its sound. Maybe it's > possible to do that with music from the last 20 years, but I certainly can't > do it.

I also think some of what you're describing re musical trends is related to the above: Artists have a million outlets and tens of millions of tracks at their disposal to be influenced by, so the idea that there's a "sound of the year" as promoted by major labels and radio stations is just... gone. It's not like Justin Bieber songs are playing everywhere. He's a huge celebrity musician and I still would have to go out of my way to hear one of his songs. They just don't permeate my media sphere. Again, compared to the 90s when a hit song would be unavoidable.

Anyway: I don't think it's the sole cause. I think labelling decades was also simply a branding and marketing trend that has fallen out of vogue, maybe due in part to the simple problem of what to call the "aughties."

It's an interesting topic! I love the media environment today. God. When I was first tinkering with music in the 90s I would've killed for access to things like Spotify and SoundCloud. So amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Munroe's linguistic hypothesis is interesting and may prove valid, but I think what we're seeing is likely due to deeper cultural shifts. William Gibson's circa-2010 observation that "the present is really of no width whatever" hints at a more atomized popular concept of time and the dissolution of the concept of the regular, periodic structure of decades in the 20th century.

I wouldn't be surprised if by the mid-2020s we've more or less abandoned the concept of decades in favor of an ad-hoc system of domain-based periods loosely defined within cultural groups - I'd say to some degree, we're doing that already.

<comment><USER5> I think you're right as well. A lot of the distinctiveness of sounds in popular music were driven by improvements in technology in the 60s through the 80s or 90s, but that's no longer the case. The same can be said about movies up to the last several years.

With the exception of (the scourge of) Autotune, has any technology really changed how music sounds since the tidal wave of digital sampling in the early to mid 80s?

Similarly, the massive advances in computer graphics have radically altered movie making in the 80s through 2010 or so, but those advances are becoming much less noticeable from year to year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think there's a larger cultural phenomenon at play here.

Perhaps it's just me or or maybe my generation (those born in the late 70s) has a somewhat unique perspective on this but I think there were 3 pivotal developments around the end of the 80s / the beginning of the 90s:

\- the fall of the Iron Curtain

\- the advent of the World Wide Web and widespread use of personal computers and the internet

\- globalisation becoming a considerable and perceptible factor in everyday life (mainly due to developments #1 and #2)

These developments to some extent caused cultural perceptions and distinctions - both spatial and temporal - to blur.

In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago.

<comment><USER13> > _In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago_

I think it's got less to do with any world events and more to do with the fact that you reached adulthood around then. The mid-80s were about 10 years before you graduated. The 90s started 10 years before I graduated, so that's my "10 years ago" point. Meanwhile the people born right after I graduated are about to reach adulthood, which feels like an impossible reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think its actually a more substantial shift. With media being so accessible it almost feels that the generational cultural gap is blurring and narrowing. I have access within moments the entire popular culture catalog of music, films, and TV shows going back decades. There seems to be a great convergence and preservation of culture. I'm as likely to listen to 60s & 70s David Bowie as I am to listen to the new Arcade Fire album coming out later this year.

The past two decades almost seem to blur into each other culturally. People basically dress exactly as they did 20 years ago as far as I can tell. Maybe that's because these two decades and the coming decade are my prime years and so I lack perceptive as a late 20 something who is still neither quite young nor yet middle aged.

<comment><USER15> Something lost on second-half-of-millenial-generation and up will be just how _inaccessible_ media was, even well into the 90s. Movies took years to be released on video. What you could buy was mostly whatever the local stores chose to stock. You'd probably not even know about all kinds of media because it never showed up anywhere you could see it, unless you read lots of industry/medium specific magazines or something. Music? Hope your record/CD store has it or will order it. TV show? Didn't record it when it aired? Gone. You can watch TV Guide and try to catch a rerun. In a few years maybe it'll be one of a handful of episodes released on VHS (full seasons? LOL no, or _incredibly_ expensive in the unlikely event that they are released). Want to see some family photos from someone across the country? Call them, oh they're out, leave a message on their answering machine that you'd like them to go get prints made and mail them to you. You may see them in a month. You'll have no idea what you're getting until they show up, unless you've seen them in person before.

And shortly before that, it was even worse. Home releases of movies? Haha, what's that? _Maybe_ a super-expensive 16mm print will be available at some point for home projectors.

A short while ago mass media was far more ephemeral and inaccessible than it is now. Before that it didn't really exist, outside print. Want to hear music? Know anyone who can play it? No? You're out of luck. Better learn an instrument. Film? What's that? Maybe you can catch a stage show at the local harvest festival. Maybe your kids will stage something in the living room. That'd be nice.

We're not _that_ far removed from those times. This has been a huge shift in people's relations to one another (to paraphrase Vonnegut, people's small artistic talents used to be very valuable to their friends, family, and community, but they're now in competition with the best in the world, rendering any expression of those talents low-value and eccentric) and to media itself. We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost. Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in media, and I'm not sure the trade- off of being able to watch Hogan's Heroes or whatever at a moment's notice rather than waiting for a rerun is entirely worth centering our lives on screens and speakers so completely.

<comment><USER16> I think this is right on. I listen to quite a bit of music and I have said several times to friends something like "I could spend the rest of my life listening to music released before 2000". Hyperbole, perhaps to some, but that is pretty accurate. I am now able to go and "discover" bands from the 70s.

Film is another form of media that behaves in a similar manner. Why would I need to watch the new remake of movie X when the original is so readily available, and likely better.

I think the internet has worked to make media and culture diffuse much faster. Something new and interesting is suddenly everywhere and certain kinds of surprises, or hype or suspense similar to say, the Beatles landing in the US in the 60s, would be extraordinarily hard to replicate.

I would though, take a less dour attitude in regards to the future than you seem to have hinted at. I think society is adjusting to the this bombardment of entertainment, a more more people live fulfilling lives mostly detached from social media, you just won't find them on facebook :-).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't this also partly due to the post modern nature of fashion and culture over the last 15 years. Everything seems to be a reference in some form or another to the preceding 4 decades.

</comment><comment><USER18> I hate it, but I have fallen into calling the 2000-2009 the 'noughtys' \- which I first heard on a radio show in 1999 and thought sounded stupid, but soon stuck for me.

As for the teens... well we are still in them, so yes they are just 'music, art, etc.' in the same way that I don't say: "So I was talking _English_ to a friend today..."

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe artificially grouping trends by an arbitrary ten year period is what's weird?

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what impact Boomers have on this too. Last year the Boomers finally lost their status as the biggest generation, so I would expect to see the importance of the 60's, 70's and 80's begin to decline. At the same time, we see nostalgia for the 90's starting: Bill Nye, Full House, Surge...

</comment><comment><USER21> I have a feeling it will come back with the 20's, which will piss off centenarians. And everyone is going to use the term super early, like I wonder what the 20's are going to be like. We're going to have self driving cars in the 20s. They're going to overuse the term, you'll see.

</comment><comment><USER22> I still see the term 'millennial fashion' and 'the noughties' been thrown around, but these are meaningless terms. Here's an interesting talk by Adam Conover debunking the term millennial: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ)

<comment><USER23> doesn't 'the noughties' just mean 2000-2009 (plus or minus one on either end)?

<comment><USER22> Yeah it does, but it's a corruption of the previous attempts at labeling decades and doesn't really solve the problem of labeling decades. A decade is actually meaningless in terms of what it represents culturally, and since the explosion of The Internet, culture is now smeared and has no basis in a decade anymore. We've reached a post-post-post-post modern era. Rushkoff goes into this more in his 'present shock' theory [https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with- now...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with-now-douglas- rushkoff-and-the-threat-of-present-shock)

<comment><USER23> Sometimes you just want to refer to a granular period of time -- e.g. "I was living in Alaska in the noughties" or "It wasn't until the noughties that I decided what I really wanted to do in my career" \-- and as far as that goes such a term can be useful.

<comment><USER22> Fair point. I get funny looks when I say something like this though: "I was living in Alaska in the holocene era". See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps this is the result of increased computing power, search engine use, and the internet in the 2000s. Since computers can now let you automatically organize, tag, and find any kind of music you want, there's less need to manually break down music into larger categories for organization. Combine this with YouTube and social media dictating what's popular or has gone viral, and you end up with a generation of consumers that sees movies, fashion, movies, and culture more as a constantly moving trend than something that stays static for a long period of time.

</comment><comment><USER25> Were cultural memes grouped by decade before radio? Seems like these standard groupings were a product of a broadcast media that doesn't exist to normalise patterns anymore.

<comment><USER26> > Were cultural memes grouped by decade before radio?

The earliest popular decade association I am aware of is the "gay 90s" image of the 1890s, which apparently was popularized in print media in the 1920s, roughly concurrent with (but independent of) the emergence of commercial radio. So, perhaps not _before_ radio, but also not originally _driven by_ radio, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's pretty amazing, I can watch a movie from 1997 and feel transformed to a different time. Also people went into rooms to use phones attached to the wall, and computers took up entire desks.

Though funny enough, I think fashion from then is coming back in style. It was very clearly the last year before everyone got all caught up in 60s revival fashion with Austin Powers.

I don't get that same feeling if I look at movies and photos from 2007. Everything looks the same as today.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can remember during the later half of the 90s people started asking how we would refer to the first two decades of the new millennium since we were so used to talking about the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Here we are 20+ years later and there still isn't an answer! The people 2097 are going to be writing articles about how much we suck for not figuring this out for them ;-)

<comment><USER28> I always thought it was the Noughties and the Teenies?

<comment><USER4> I've never heard of those terms, but I like Noughties. "Do you remember getting naughty in the Noughties?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Go watch any music video from 2000 to 2005, there definitely is a style of the time, that is distinguishable from the style of today.

<comment><USER30> Back in that twilight era when there were music videos for most hit songs, and MTV was actually still showing them. People are going to be amazed at what a big deal TRL and Carson Daly were.

Some of those videos from that era were really elaborate, almost short films. Now we seem to have largely gone back to a more 80s-style, where the bands just perform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My theory is based on the Internet.

First, people are now exposed to vastly more information that in 80s or 90s. This forges the diversity in taste and segregation of pop culture.

Second, trends come and go at faster cycle than before. If something on Youtube goes viral, this could be in pop culture for weeks and then vanished in the shadow of another fad.

</comment><comment><USER32> Here on Belgian radio, we call the music from 2000-2010 the "Nillies". As in "Back to the 90s & Nillies" [0]. As for 2010-2020, I'm sure we'll just call them the Dixies in a few years.

[0] [http://www.the90s.be/](http://www.the90s.be/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I think in ye olden days there was a deliberate attempt by someone -- the shadowy world of cultural illuminati, maybe - to segment by decade, even though I never remember any directives saying, "It's now 1980 -- please burn all of your stuff that dates from 1979 or earlier."

</comment><comment><USER34> I think this coincides with the rise of the Internet. With information, discussions, and media of the past 20 years being instantly accessible, the disconnect from looking at the past is really tenuous or it doesn't exist anymore, and everything just sort of melds together.

</comment><comment><USER35> what if there isn't a well known term to describe this period?

For instance, I have never heard of "noughties"

[https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there- are-70s...](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there- are-70s-80s-and-90s-how-do-you-describe-the-years-from-2000-00s)

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't know about the teens, but the first decade of this century definitely needs to be the 'naughties'.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder if in the 1900s they had the same issues...

<comment><USER38> I think they did. We talk of the 20's, 30s, right up to 90s, but not of the decades 1900-1909 and 1910-19.

Having said that, up til around then, times were grouped by the reigning monarch, at least in Britain: Georgian, Victorian, then Edwardian to cover 1901-WWI.

<comment><USER15> "Turn of the century" isn't only used for 1900-1909, but is sometimes used in that rôle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The bottom line says "and and"

</comment><comment><USER40> Where's the joke. Give me my funnies, internet laughman

<comment><USER40> I am doing much out loud, but no laughing? What kind of a comic is this?!</comment></comment>


Backblaze introduces Cloud to Cloud Migration - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/cloud-to-cloud.html <comment><USER2> > For customers that want to migrate 50TB or more to Backblaze and store it > with us for at least 12 months, we'll pay the data transfer fees from Amazon > S3. In the last 90 days of this program's private beta, we've migrated more > than 2PB of customer data out of the cloud oligarchy and into Backblaze.

This is so cool. Great work on Blackblaze's part to provide a competitive storage system alternative.

<comment><USER3> Yev from Backblaze here -> thanks! We're pretty excited about this, there's never really a better time for AWS users to diversify their cloud storage vendors and keep a working copy somewhere else. :D</comment></comment>


Show HN: "Declarative" Sourdough Calculator - <AUTHOR> https://www.breadfriend.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

There's a bunch of sourdough calculators out there --- but one of the things I missed was the ability to just write that I wanted a loaf of total 800g weight, x% hydration, and have the final loaf consist of 20% spelt, 10% whole wheat and rest wheat for example. So, I decided to create a calculator like this for myself, and I thought I'd share it with you. Hope you find it useful!

</comment><comment><USER2> That's so 2020!

</comment><comment><USER3> Haha love this!</comment>