Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nme.com/news/music/vinyl-set-outsell-cds-first-time-since-1986-2545781 <comment><USER2> Is anyone working on a reasonably priced turntable to play vinyl discs without degrading them? In the mid '80s, Finial Technology announced such a turntable, and had a working unit at CES in 1986.

It had a stylus that contained laser interferometers that could very accurately and precisely measure the distance from the stylus to the grove walls. It kept the stylus near, but _not_ touching, the groove, getting the audio signals from the variations in the distance to the groove.

In addition to not causing any wear, I remember reading an article back then in one of the audiophile magazines that said it also made records that had already been played many times on regular turntables and were degraded sound new, because the Finial could use a part of the groove farther down than had been used by the regular stylus, and so was not worn.

It was going to be pretty expensive, around $8000 at today's prices, so was probably only going to be affordable to radio stations, archivists, and high end audiophiles. Then they got hit with the double whammy of a major recession and the rapid replacement of a large chunk of the vinyl market by CDs.

Finial was liquidated in 1989, and their patents ended up at a Japanese company. Development continued in Japan, and eventually resulted in a product [1]. They seem to be around $15000.

The Library of Congress and a couple of other places have a system that can recover the sound for vinyl records and old wax cylinders what works by photographing the grove through a confocal microscope. The thousands of photographs are then analyzed to figure out the audio signal. This is still research level stuff, I believe, not aimed toward producing a commercial product, and so would be even farther out of reach for consumers than the laser interferometer turntables are.

[1] [http://www.elpj.com/](http://www.elpj.com/)

<comment><USER3> My very limited understanding after talking to someone who was interested in this stuff, is that people are concerned with quantizing of the signal, which will happen with that laser solution. I've heard this is why audiophiles also use magnetic tape. To be clear I heard this second hand and am not directly familiar.

<comment><USER4> A completely analog laser scanning solution is entirely practical. There's no reason to sample it digitally.

But honestly, this seems like insane overkill. Vinyl has a ridiculously limited dynamic range, and digital recording at 24/48 is practically transparent even with low-end prosumer equipment. At the high end you have to work quite hard to spend more than $4k on a spectacularly clean and neutral studio-grade ADC/DAC. (You can spend more on madly expensive super-fi, but it's not going to sound any cleaner than a good Burl, Lynx, or Metric box.)

So if you spend $4000 on the turntable/arm/pickup another $4000 on studio grade converters, you can capture recordings that will be absolutely indistinguishable from the vinyl source. And your precious plastic disks can stay in their wrappers.

<comment><USER5> As far as DACs are concerned, you'd be surprised: A few hundred dollars (e.g. Topping D50) can get you drastically better performance than many multi- thousand dollar "audiophile DACs":

[https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/m...](https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/master- sinad-distortion-comparison-graph-for-dacs.4814/)

Now as far as speakers are concerned, yes, you'll need to spend at least a few thousand for a stereo pair capable of doing justice to this level of precision and dynamic range.

<comment><USER6> Ah yes, ASR. The place where a DAC or amp having a -100db SINAD means it's a terrible piece of hardware despite it being well below the threshold of human listening and the noise floor of the best recording and tube amps, who have significantly higher distortion, are considered terrible because of it despite the vast majority of people who actually listen to them liking them far more than some of the most beloved hardware at ASR (I'm looking at you THX and Topping hardware).

I belived in their swansong and bought into it up until recently, then I tried "terrible" hardware and dear God it sounds so much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think there's some confusion in here that everyone buying vinyl is repeating the habits of our parents and grandparents. I think there's this misconception we're buying records of whatever the latest hit band is with only 3 good songs and mostly filler.

Vinyl today is very much about the collecting of good music and taking part in the physical ness of that collection. The b-side is just as good as the A-side, even if the sound quality isn't as perfect as the original studio recording. It doesn't need to be, and it has its own unique sound.

What I most love about the experience of owning vinyl is that it's annoying to pick one song. So you almost have to expect to put it on the first track and listen to the entire set. It's listening in the moment, since you can't skip and you have to be ready to flip the album over. I love it.

Also the experience of going to second hand stores to chat with fellow music lovers and discover new artists feels very human to me. Even if Spotify can recommend with precision, it mostly acts as background music since I don't have to pay attention.

Not saying this is everyone's cup of tea, but as a music nerd, I'm happy with my hobby.

<comment><USER8> > Also the experience of going to second hand stores to chat with fellow music > lovers and discover new artists feels very human to me.

It's really fun to buy .50 cent records because you like the cover. I've discovered some good music that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> By revenue, not by units sold.

Still interesting, and not really surprising based on my anecdotal experience of artists I follow. Streaming audio is good enough for most sound systems commonly in use.

Vinyl serves as a better collectible from a favorite artist for a few reasons.

      - more room for cover art

      - physical analog medium (superficial, but has value to some)

      - requires more care than CDs (proves the owner's dedication to maintaining the collection)

      - limited production runs make it more scarce than easily copied CDs

<comment><USER10> I think the "good enough" phrase you used really touches on the reason vinyl still exists.

Streaming is "good enough." But physical media is a different experience. It's more intimate. You can touch, feel, and examine the music and the packaging. Some bands (REM is one) even put Easter Eggs in their physical media that can't be reproduced by digital.

Streaming is fine for when you want to fill your space with sound. Physical media is for when you want to really enjoy the music. Read about what you're listening to, see the artwork and photographs, and experience an album of music on the order it was meant to be heard.

As one of many examples, a streaming service can play "Home by the Sea" by Genesis. But I've never encountered one smart enough to then follow that with "Second Home by the Sea," which is how the music was made to be heard. Some services will even play "Second Home" on its own, which is jarring.

Music is one of the increasing number of areas where people are figuring out that abdicating human curation for machine selection just isn't the same thing.

<comment><USER11> > Physical media is for when you want to really enjoy the music.

Wow this is some condescending, pretentious nonsense. Also, every streaming service I've ever used is perfectly capable of playing an album in order.

<comment><USER12> You're discounting the value of physically experiencing the media you're consuming. Pretentious or not, it really is a different feeling, something that streaming can't replicate.

<comment><USER4> I don't care about physically experiencing musical media. I grew out of that in the 80s when I moved around a lot and had to keep moving multiple boxes of vinyl up and down multiple flights of stairs.

If my FLAC collection was on vinyl I'd have to buy it a house of its own. Moving would require a military budget and a series of strategic planning meetings.

That would rather more physical experience than I care for.

<comment><USER12> I'm not saying one should listen to vinyl _exclusively_ , I agree that's ridiculous. But it is important to maintain and curate a physical collection of music -- wthether it's vinyl, CDs, FLAC, or MP3, and that is something that streaming makes impossible.

<comment><USER13> Important to you. Not me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Vinyl is one of those old-school technologies that seems like it's from the future. Somehow we turned sound into a disk. You can see and feel the sound and then a tiny needle will reproduce the original sound just by touching the disk. And in very high quality!

Blows me away every time I think about it. And we could have kept going: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc)

<comment><USER15> Could have kept going...

The CED offers one hour of VHS quality per side that rapidly degenerates. I own a sizeable collection of them, and while sorta neat, it's also sorta terrible.

The vinyl offers quality superior to most consumer tape equipment rivaled only by 11 ips reel to reel. CED had no quality advantages, decays rapidly and is non recordable. It was a non-starter.

The fact is that CED was in the works since the 50s when it may have had a short successful life, but RCA couldn't get off their ass. In fact CED was the last consumer product ever released by RCA. (The RCA of today is just a badge on various crap after being divested by Thomson Consumer Electronics)

Also even though CED uses a stylus, the similarities end there. You can literally run your nail in a phono groove and hear the sound. It is a literal imprint of the sound wave. Video cannot be encoded in such a straightforward manner, NTSC and PAL are not trivially. Also the CED is not vibrating the stylus. Rather the stylus sits on ridges and the signal is depth encoded (therefore varying the capacitance, hence the name). It is much closer to a crappy laser disc in operation (which also encodes in analog.. not digital)

<comment><USER16> An old boss of mine worked on that beast! From the sounds of it, it barely worked in the lab. He told a story of getting so frustrated one day that he literally shoved his 'scope off the back of the bench in frustration and walked out for the day. In his opintion, it is a good thing that it is dead and buried.

<comment><USER15> I have dismantled the players. Truly a marvel of electromechanical design. So many hand soldered and assembled parts. It is incredible they made it work mass produced. Too bad it was 20 years too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So I've been thinking a lot about this video recently: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ)

It talks about, demonstrates and measures the air quality around vinyl. Apparently the things are leaching dangerous compounds into the air constantly, especially when being played. It made his air quality measuring device give an alarm, instead of just reporting the number of particles or something.

I'm not sure, maybe it's just one of those thousands of every day life things which are technically carcinogenic, or not. It made me pause personally though, having recently lost a friend, who worked at a record store, died at a young age to cancer, had otherwise always been a strong healthy man. I'm actually more comfortable talking about this here, semi-anonymously, I don't think it'd be wise to bring this up IRL with anyone, on account of it possibly not having to do with anything. I kind of half-wish I hadn't seen the video.

<comment><USER18> I lost my dad to cancer last year, and I think it can be maddening to try to unwind the causes. I think when you lose somebody, the natural impulse can be to reach out for a cause, at least so you can understand it, and there's a tendency to seize on any evidence or theory, no matter how weak, just to have somewhere to lay down the blame.

So you might be right that vinyl records are dangerous, or maybe that had no impact. In my opinion it's best for one's mental health to trust scientific inquiry to tell us what's dangerous or not, and to leave everything else as an open question.

<comment><USER19> I just watched the GP video, and science does seem to support that vinyl records are likely dangerous.

The video creator uses an air pollution meter[0] to find out that his records are causing very high PM 2.5, VOC, and formaldehyde. The vinyl records seem to only need to be taken out of their sleeves.

The results look shocking. There have to be some HN users who have the knowledge and equipment to attempt to replicate this experiment. Please do that and share!

[0] [https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ?t=553](https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ?t=553)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> CDs are dying, but they are mostly being killed by streaming services, not by vinyl. Digital music formats are still the king by far. The vast majority of people don't even care that their streamed music is lossy and they lose out on high frequencies that their ears can't hear and their headphones can't reproduce.

Vinyl appeals to hipsters and dumb audiophiles (there are smart audiophiles, but they aren't buying vinyl), both communities that are prone to buying into hype. Hipsters move on as soon as something becomes mainstream, and dumb audiophiles will move on as soon as there is a more expensive option with newer/cooler buzzwords attached to it. Cassette tapes could replace vinyl someday as the hip alternative to digital music- it's retro and analog, plus they are portable and don't skip/lose track during heavy movement (which a record player would do if you could go jogging with one).

<comment><USER21> Your conception of vinyl buyers is very negative. I think there's another category of people that buy vinyl. If you really love an album and want to support the artist you can purchase the vinyl version of the album. Apart from supporting the artist you often get additional treats like a nice booklet with the lyrics or additional art/imagery.

I really think there's extra value in buying vinyl apart from it being hip.

<comment><USER22> If you want to buy a physical medium then CDs are the obvious option because objectively they are superior to vinyls in every aspects and they can also come with nice booklets.

I think that the hip-value of vinyls is extremely important.

I write that as someone who had no choice but use vinyls and tapes until I got a CD player...

<comment><USER23> CDs are just... awful. Nice booklets? You mean small booklets with tiny pictures and even tinier text. And they come in what I consider one of the most horrible containers of all time: the ugly and easily-broken jewel case.

Like vinyl, CDs can be scratched, but they sure don't degrade gracefully: the nice pops of vinyl becomes jarring skips on a CD up to the point where the CD just becomes unplayable.

Nowadays I have all my music on my computer, as files on the drive or from a stream. But when it comes to wanting something physical, something I can hold and look at (from the cover and extra material that comes with an LP to the wonderful spinning of a record as the sound emerges), vinyl easily wins.

But maybe I'm weird, because even in the mid '90s as a teenager I thought vinyl looked cool and was fun and fascinating to interact with. I hated CDs and their cases so much I even converted all my CDs to minidisc! Happily I kept them around until I ripped them to FLAC files.

<comment><USER24> Unless you happen to have scratched your CD really deeply to actually damage the data layer (which requires grooves of 1mm in depth), it's fixable though, a scratch in a vinyl is not.

Also, the last few albums that I bought did not come as jewel cases but instead "fancy" cardboard cases.

<comment><USER25> When I worked as a DJ back in the 1990s I observed that if a 12" or LP skipped you could momentarily turn off the tone arm bias and the extra inward force would usually ride over the scratch as of it wasn't there. With CDs you were toast.

If a CD skipped then there was nothing you could do except stick another on ASAP.

CDs are a very fragile medium. Especially so if you scratch the top printed surface.

These days you'd do it all off a laptop with no moving parts and no skipping.

Protip number 2: always run your club system in mono. You can't hear stereo in a club and combining the L+R channels cancels out most feedback coming through the stylus. Happy days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Vinyl is one of the best ways to feel like you actually "own" music in today's streaming first world.

It's also a way to support underground artists who make art you appreciate - from the music itself to the cover art and the arrangement of the tracklist.

In hip-hop there's been a few small vinyl producers making super high quality vinyls for underground artists. They've gained a cult like following and can continuously sell out of 1500-2000 records at $60 per within an hour of release.

Those interested should check out...

Daupe [https://daupe.bandcamp.com/music](https://daupe.bandcamp.com/music)

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.factmag.com/2018/02/08/daup...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.factmag.com/2018/02/08/daupe- westside-gunn-mf-doom/amp/)

De Rap Winkel [https://derapwinkelrecords.bandcamp.com/music](https://derapwinkelrecords.bandcamp.com/music)

</comment><comment><USER27> Vinyl's growth is somewhat limited by the world's pressing capacity. Old pressing machines are being brought back online where possible: [https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/10/record- demand-...](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/10/record-demand-vinyl- sales-exceed-supply-lps) [2017].

<comment><USER28> When Jack White (of the White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and more) opened Third Man Pressing in 2017, he had the first vinyl pressing machines built in over 35 years. The machines were build by NEWBILT in Germany [1].

Third Man Pressing's about page also has a great video about the process: [https://thirdmanpressing.com/about](https://thirdmanpressing.com/about)

[1] [https://newbilt-machinery.com](https://newbilt-machinery.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As much as it pains me to say this, I think I'm a hipster.

I put a lot of attention and care into my audio and vinyl setup, but now that you can find albums at Walmart, the hip factor has been sucked out of it like a vacuum.

I've recently been downsizing, and this might be something that doesn't stay with me. I'll keep my signed albums, but maybe not the rest.

<comment><USER30> How long until future "hipsters" start seeing CDs as nostalgic? Although I kind of doubt we'll see a CD revival in 2035 or 2040.

<comment><USER31> I just got back into CDs :)

My daughter got a turntable and when I took her to the record store (Waterloo Records in Austin) to buy some records I felt like I had stepped out of a time machine. The experience was exactly as I remembered it when I was a kid. It's awesome.

I ended up buying some CDs then realizing I didn't have a CD player. So I bought one, hooked it up to the home theater receiver and was blown away by how good it sounded.

I ended up buying a desktop stereo system for my office and I listen to CDs as I work. The playing time is just about perfect as a reminder to get up, stretch, take a short walk, make a coffee or get some water, put on a new disc, and get back to work.

So now I'm buying CDs again and couldn't be happier. They are very inexpensive these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here I am listening to Daniel Barenboim's Beethoven Piano Sonatas spread over 24 sides of vinyl, purchased for under a tenner in a charity shop. A CD would be more practical, but the set of records is a real experience, even the getting up to skip the occasional scratch and turn over the records.

Edit: downvotes over 20 minutes. Do you doubt that I'm really listening to it (I am, before I read this news)? Or that vinyl is a real experience? Or that I'm some kind of "hipster" (I have thousands of records, and an equal number of CDs, collected over 30 years). Please reply, I'm interested what you have to say.

For the doubters, here's a photo: [http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg](http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/20190908_183833.jpg)

<comment><USER33> These are good years for listeners of classical music picking up the occasional vinyl in charity shops and flea markets. In my experience, classic big name rock records get cherry-picked from everywhere by the proprietors of upmarket vintage stores, but classical music is left alone.

Demographically speaking, lovingly collected vinyl collections are steadily entering the market due to the generation that bought them dying of old age. Lots of great recordings available for bargain prices.

<comment><USER32> Yes exactly! I've also been collecting prog rock on vinyl for many years, but that is usually so expensive that getting CDs or youtube rips is far more practical. However classical/operatic box sets are the sweet spot of well preserved (incredible sound quality) and cheaply available. For example I have a second hand box set of Verdi's Aida which has probably bought me more joy than virtually anything else I own, and I'm not even really a huge fan of opera.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A CD, and a FLAC-rip for me, please. I'd pick it over vinyl or any digital stream any day.

<comment><USER35> If you really just want a FLAC rip of a CD to play over a media center, then consider simply downloading the FLAC rip from a filesharing community, but then buying the vinyl release for the sake of owning the physical artifact. That way, you both get high-quality digital audio and you financially support the artist, but the vinyl release has larger artwork and is more satisfying as a collector item.

<comment><USER34> I buy the music, because I want to support the artists.

I buy the CD-format, because in theory, I can do that anonymously (cash at the store). I _don 't_ buy the vinyl, because I explicitly _want_ the digital format (see my reply to another comment on this thread as to why).

I rip the CD, because, well, my phone doesn't have a CD-drive (wow, that would be _weird_...).

At this point... I'd actually throw away the CD, because I hate having stuff. I don't care about showing off my collection to anyone, nor do I care about collectibles, but having stuff is just... cumbersome. But alas, I don't throw away the CD, somewhat because of sentimentality and also because if you have a physical copy of digital data, that's not a bad thing to keep, just in case, so ok, it stays.

Considering a vinyl is analog and also more cumbersome, I think it's pretty clear why I prefer the CD.

<comment><USER36> > _my phone doesn 't have a CD-drive (wow, that would be weird...)_

How about a floppy drive? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT1l8Dcjb1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT1l8Dcjb1Y)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm pretty biased in my thoughts on this. I used to DJ EDM back in my early 20s and still have thousands of dollars worth of equipment and vinyl records accumulating dust. Every once in a while I'll whip out a record and listen to it on my Technics. I never find myself playing CDs on my CD decks. There is something about vinyl that feels like a collectible that you want to take out of a sleeve and put a needle on. CDs just don't have that and feel like disposable junk. I'm surprised that vinyl is outselling CDs, but I am not surprised that it's still relevant.

</comment><comment><USER38> I bought a turntable from the 80s several months ago and I love it :-) I never had a turntable before so it's actually a "new" technology to me, but I find the physicality of the whole thing wonderful - choosing a record and setting up the turntable is like a ritual, you just enjoy the moment.

<comment><USER39> The novelty factor is a definitely a thing with vinyl. I'm nearly 40 and my first music (Disney etc.) was on record but we quickly moved on to tape and then CD. A lot of people not much younger than me will never have seen a record growing up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Note that this is talking about revenue, not unit sales:

 _The new report states that vinyl records earned $224.1 million (from 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019. This figure is impressively close to the CD numbers ($247.9 million, 18.6 million units)._

</comment><comment><USER41> The biggest relevation for me about vinyl was when I realized that it's CAV (constant angular velocity) and not CLV (constant linear velocity). It means that audio quality gets progressively worse as you move from outer tracks to inner tracks!

<comment><USER42> Not necessarily worse, though. There could be undesirable mechanical side- effects from the track moving too fast against the needle as well. (I am sure there is a huge body of engineering science about this.)

<comment><USER41> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Afikv6k1-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Afikv6k1-c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> CDs are a nearly-perfect format and it's sad to see them decline. Mainstream digital music stores don't even offer CD quality, and streaming services are antithetical to preservation and allow content to disappear overnight.

<comment><USER44> The thing that got me to stop buying CDs for the most part is how badly they are mastered.

In past it was some labels that put out badly mastered CDs, these days artists that once produced excellent albums now seems to accept a final result that tries to win the loudness war.

<comment><USER43> Yes, unfortunately mastering is an issue. It's the only reason that new "superior to CD" formats ever sound better (aside from perhaps extra surround channels), and entirely not the fault of the format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Would some one please enlighten me as to what on God's green earth is going on with vinyl? It's less dense, lower-quality, degrades with use, and is more expensive. It's probably less environmentally-friendly, too (though I'm not sure what it's target demographic is, so I don't know if that means much). Why is vinyl popular, all of a sudden? I had to rip all my grandmother's vinyl records, once, and it was a pain in the be-hind. I'm not sure why any one would willingly subject himself to that when better alternatives exist. I thought it was dead as of long ago.

<comment><USER46> You are looking at this as a CD vs Vinyl battle. Vinyl found a niche and never died entirely. Now CDs are dying because of downloads and streaming and you're saying "why the resurgence vinyl?"

There is no resurgence, perhaps a Renaissance in vinyl, but what you're really seeing is just the fall of CD down to vinyl's levels.

<comment><USER47> Go to [https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/](https://www.riaa.com/u-s- sales-database/) and select only LP/EP and vinyl single. Or just LP/EP.

Including both and just looking without inflation, it's above 1989 levels and could hit 1988 levels eventually. It's 5x higher than mid 90s through late 00s. Almost 4x since 2010.

Take out vinyl singles and the increase is absurd. It's 9x to 40x+ increase from any year between 1991 and 2007. 8x from 2008. Almost 2x from 2013.

And this is all for 2018 figures. 2019 will bump things up even more. Though the pace has slowed a lot.

Even if you add inflation, the resurgence is still there. IE for LP/EP, 2019 will beat out 1989. After a low of nearly 25x less in 93 and 05-06.

<comment><USER46> > Even if you add inflation, the resurgence is still there. IE for LP/EP, 2019 > will beat out 1989.

I'm having trouble viewing those graphs on mobile but it looks like in 1989 vinyl only had >4% market share and 34.6 million units, where as in 2018 it had >3% with 16.7 million units.

It's not nothing and it's not a large part of the overall market. It appears to be smaller than 30 years ago when it was considered a dead format.

<comment><USER47> I can be convinced otherwise as statistics isn't a strength of mine, but those two numbers are by units.

Unit share doesn't seem to make sense as a comparison point to me. A single or ringtone shouldn't be given equal respect to a full collection of songs. Downloaded singles are 75% of the unit market share but only 5% of the revenue market share in 2018. 2018 will be the last year downloaded singles have a greater revenue share than vinyl.

To me this looks like a resurgence because of how its revenue share has been. Its collapse of market and revenue share from ~83 to ~92 and being dead by 89 (with 3.3% revenue share, less than the past 5 years if including 2019). Having a revenue share of 0.1% from 93 to 07. Yeah, for 25 years it's revenue share was 0.1%. Then ~1.5% for the next 5-6 years and ~4.5% for the past couple of years.

It's not a crazy resurgence, but compared to 93 to ~2012, a 25 year span, it's many multiples higher and not looking to let up for now.

<comment><USER46> I agree that unit shares don't make sense, I was referencing the volume % which seems less absurd. The % of volume that LP had in 2018 was similar to the late % in the 80s. My point was that in the late 80s vinyl was "dead" and it's still "dead".

<comment><USER47> But it's not dead in the same way. The resurgence has it stabilized and growing a bit still. In 89 it was on a 5 year drastic downtrend.

Now it's on a tear compared to 93 to 07 and beyond.

There's active communities online and in real life of people who like vinyl and are buying it. Though there were always enthusiasts. The buying part wasn't happening from 93 to 07. If you can run a successful business off something that isn't trending down, without the biz being too crazy, then the thing isn't really dead. It's niche sure. But dead wouldn't make sense. Cassettes are dead. Paying for ringtones are dead. Those two aren't close to vinyl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I purchase vinyl to support the artist and the artwork on the vinyl is much larger and prettier.

Additionally, most vinyl releases these days come with a high-quality FLAC audio download, so I get the digital music as well.

</comment><comment><USER49> Vinyl is 90% nostalgia and 10% logical. Modern recording methods are far superior and have much better fidelity. I much prefer my flacs on amodern high end system

<comment><USER50> I'm not sure whether this still holds, but for quite a long time, vinyl was a surefire way to avoid the loudness war [1] — the physical medium simply wouldn't allow for such extreme transformation and still play well.

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

<comment><USER49> Yeah but it's got a bit better over the past decade as more people realized why that certain something was missing

<comment><USER51> Has it though? The wiki article (and my experience) implies that it's been getting worse, not better.

<comment><USER52> Last line of 2010s:

> Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and > subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum > album DR for albums since 2005.

It also hints how we may continue to move away from it:

> With music sales moving towards file-based playback and streaming and away > from CDs, there is a possibility that the loudness war will be blunted by > normalization technology such as ReplayGain and Apple's Sound Check. Most > cloud-based music services perform loudness normalization by default and may > reduce the market pressure to overcompress material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Recently re-experienced vinyl player with a music library in a hotel. The experience of vinyl is great you can touch and hold the music you like and love. The search depth of the music catalog is good its a stack of vinyls vs all music that was ever created. Carbon foot print from vinyl is lower than online streamed music due to the co2 foot print of all the servers serving online music. I think vinyl is a fun form to share and consume music.

Study of co2 emissions from streaming vs analogue music "The research shows GHGs of 140 million kilograms in 1977, 136 million kilograms in 1988, and 157 million in 2000. But by 2016 the generation of GHGs by storing and transmitting digital files for those listening to music online is estimated to be between 200 million kilograms and over 350 million kilograms in the US alone." source: [https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_643297_en.html](https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_643297_en.html)

<comment><USER54> >Carbon foot print from vinyl is lower than online streamed music due to the co2 foot print of all the servers serving online music.

The quote and article you linked doesn't say or support that. It is more likely that there are just far more people listening to music now than there were before. I don't think that switching from streaming to records would result in fewer GHGs. The article you linked doesn't specify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Makes sense - streaming has won, so the people buying physical media might as well go full hipster instead of half-assing it.

</comment><comment><USER56> Audio quality on CDs is better than Vinyl (especially over time), but it's not _great_. If you care about quality you're downloading music anyway.

But if you're going to get something physical, you want it to look cool, and Vinyl beats CDs by a mile.

<comment><USER57> Pah, tapes are cooler than vinyl. _My Dad_ has vinyl, plus only popular bands can justify a vinyl print run. You can release a tape album even if you can only count your fans on one hand, including the band members.

<comment><USER32> If you were a tiny band why would you release a cassette tape album instead of an MP3 or digital stream?

<comment><USER57> Because tapes are cool.

Or for a longer answer. Bands don't need to release vinyl. Fans appreciate the physicality, and will pay for it. But tiny bands probably don't have the resources for a vinyl pressing. I was also making reference to back in the day when your options were vinyl/cd or tape. If you wanted to release an album, tape was your only choice unless you were likely to sell at least X hundred units. And as I said, tapes are cool :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> We're looking for a tech co-founder for a project about vinyl records. The iOS MVP app has been launched, got over thousands of paid downloads, reached second on App Store top paid music app, gathered interest from major magazines about music (Resident Advisor, DJ Mag and many more) and a couple of accelerators. Now we're looking to add features and improve it to start monetizing. If you're passionate about vinyl records and have exceptional skills on iOS, Firebase Suite and React, we'd love to discuss.

</comment><comment><USER59> I was in the local record shop on Saturday, picking up the latest Bat For Lashes and Brand New Heavies albums. CDs are still selling more units, but vinyl is up to 3 times the price of a CD, so no wonder it can make up the shortfall. Vinyl packaging is just nicer. Back in the 1980s and 90s, vinyl and cassettes were the same price. I wish I'd bought fewer tapes during my Walkman years and instead recorded the vinyl onto tape. Those tapes are all shot now, but my record collection is still here...

</comment><comment><USER60> CDs were supposed to eventually be cheaper than tapes, but the industry kept raising prices. Even Blu-ray discs were grossly overpriced before people turned to digital sales.

</comment><comment><USER61> Makes perfect since, in the virtual age collectables will have more value than the thing anyone can access. Reminds me of an article I can't find about the lack of middle road anymore for many goods, you either care a lot or don't care at all about what you're getting. McDonalds vs Wagyu. Where's the bespoke Coke? (actually my wife enjoys elderflower syrup in her soda water)

</comment><comment><USER62> With CD being in decline, and vinyl on the rise, it's natural for vinyl to overcome CDs.

But I'd say it's mostly because CDs have all but disappeared from mass sales channels. E.g. this chart says a lot: [https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the- us/](https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/)

</comment><comment><USER63> Not really on topic here, but I've been trying this for a while and maybe someone can point me in the right direction. What are the preferred synthesisers / synth emulators that one can (or should) install on Linux? My quest is also one of audio fidelity; I am looking for specific sounds on proprietary DAWs that I can reverse engineer from first principles.

</comment><comment><USER64> We used to have a turntable stereo that was mono with one speaker built into a console that had a wooden lid on it on top so it could be closed and we used it as a computer monitor holder. My nephews stole my vinyl records inside of it. It was damaged in a flood and we never replaced it.

Turntables these days are expensive, but worth it for the vinyl experience.

</comment><comment><USER65> So interesting! I think that on a philosophical level it matches the trend that, while the world keeps on being more and more caught by fakeness and mediocrity, there's a counter culture and counter sentiment that yearns for something authentic again. There's still hope guys!

</comment><comment><USER66> _With vinyl revenue growing by 12% in the second half of 2018 and first half of this year, and CD rates barely changing at all, it could see vinyl revenue overtake that of CDs by the end of the year.

If it does happen, it'll be the first time that vinyl has generated more revenue than CDs since 1986._

</comment><comment><USER67> Can't wait for CEDs to outsell DVDs

</comment><comment><USER68> This is mostly about CD sales shrinking.

</comment><comment><USER69> Or the sales of CDs have declined so much that they are going to get outsold by a niche product.

</comment><comment><USER70> Is there a service where I can transform my (rare) CDs into vinyl, including the artwork?

</comment><comment><USER71> What really surprises me is that CDs were that big in the mid 80s.

If I had to guess, I would have said CD beats vinyl in early 90s. Or maybe I'm just not taking cassettes into account.

</comment><comment><USER72> On the toxicity and environmental impact of vinyl records [https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ](https://youtu.be/aZ2czFuIYmQ)

<comment><USER73> Seems like the author of this video has gone silent after being asked for the references he used to make his claims.

<comment><USER74> There was a documentary years ago about the hazards of working in a vinyl chloride chemical plant along the lines of nerve damage and dissolving bones in the fingers.

No idea where to find it again, but I'm sure processes have improved considerably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I am getting the feeling that this has less to do with vinyl sales surging and more to do with CD sales plunging.

</comment><comment><USER76> All these comments and no one has mentioned reel-to-reel tape decks. That will be the next hipster craze.

</comment><comment><USER77> Is likely a cycle when people are scrambling to collect things that are going out of style.

</comment><comment><USER78> I like Vinyl - CD's not so much.

</comment><comment><USER79> Vinyl is for hipsters. Objectively inferior capability to reproduce sounds.

<comment><USER80> > Objectively inferior capability to reproduce sounds.

Maybe when it comes to something like music, that's not the most important thing. In fact, most music listeners would say it's not really important at all.

Vinyls have great UX. The LP format encourages you to listen to an uninterrupted, un-shuffled 23 or 46 minutes of music. Album artwork and lyrics are presented at a scale where it doesn't hurt the eyes to look at them.

Your statement reminds me of whiskey drinkers who only drink out of one type of glass which is olfactorily optimal. It totally misses the fact that our senses are so easily tricked into enjoying things more if we enjoy the hints that surround the experience. Music is better on vinyl because you spent that much longer picking out the record and placing the needle. Whiskey is better in rocks glasses because it looks cinematic. It has next to nothing to do with being "objectively inferior" or superior.

<comment><USER79> > The LP format encourages you to listen to an uninterrupted, un-shuffled 23 > or 46 minutes of music

You can do this on a CD with superior audio quality.

> Album artwork and lyrics are presented at a scale where it doesn't hurt the > eyes to look at them.

There's nothing stopping someone from celling a CD in a vinyl-sized case.

> Maybe when it comes to something like music, that's not the most important > thing. In fact, most music listeners would say it's not really important at > all.

I'm pretty sure almost every single fan of vinyl will tell you it 'sounds better.' What they really mean is they like the typical mix of a vinyl recording, but CDs can be mixed to sound exactly like vinyl. If you want the same sound as live music, vinyl cannot compete.

<comment><USER80> I don't think you're understanding the gist of what I'm saying. Of course it's _possible_ to recreate the exact _audio_ experience of vinyl with a higher fidelity medium like a CD. But it's not about just the audio. It's the tactile, visual, and cultural experience around the audio. Just like food isn't just about the flavor.

And with your closing comment, I don't think you're describing as great a percentage of vinyl fans as you think you are. Sure, if you read audiophile forums you'll find such individuals. And if you encounter such an individual, they'll likely be extremely vocal about their opinions. But we're talking about vinyl outselling CDs here. That's a lot of people. If you asked most of them which format had higher fidelity, they'd certainly reply, "the one that doesn't pop and scratch."

<comment><USER79> > But it's not about just the audio. It's the tactile, visual, and cultural > experience around the audio. Just like food isn't just about the flavor.

I see what you're saying, but I don't buy it. Nobody has a record player just laying around unless you're 'into' vinyl. It's like saying it's more fun to watch videos on VHS because the tapes look cooler. It's just nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> During EE undergrad I learned about DSP, math and other theory involved in digital audio reproduction and it's clear to me that it's technically superior. There's some truly marvelous engineering behind digital audio. And the best part is that it enhances life: now playing an album isn't "a ritual", I can do it anytime without needing physical, wasteful storage for a degrading format.

I'm absolutely baffled how people (the same trendy hipsters who in my experience are disgusted by capitalism and luxury consumerism) shell out for vinyl when they'd be better off spending more money on something that's usually much more important and will make a significant, audible difference: nice speakers.

<comment><USER82> I'm not a hipster but I have a vinyl record collection. So do my friends, we trade records and each have very different collections. I enjoy "the ritual", it allows me to recollect who gave me an album or the night I went to the show. None of my friends organize our records the same way. Some are chronological by release. Some simply alphabetical. Some chronological by acquisition date. Some combine an element of genre, whatever that means to them. It's a deeply personal thing but we can still share parts of it.

In life we get to have different tastes, having a record collection is one of the ways to celebrate that.

I don't appreciate being talked down to about my personal choices or how I derive enjoyment in my own time. I'm also not impressed by your straw man argument against these "hipsters", why are they so bad anyway? Is it because you perceive hypocrisy in how some hypothetical person lives their life?

<comment><USER81> It's cause I know how little time I have to do stuff in my life already, and the idea that I'd spend my already scant time cataloguing bulky records and having to worry about them whenever I move is pretty stressful.

<comment><USER82> That's your choice and nobody is criticizing you for that. Nobody is telling you to go buy records. Other people are allowed to spend their time and money how they see fit. That does not make them "hipsters" or wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> most of them should end up framed

</comment><comment><USER84> lol</comment>


LimeWire Co-Creator Launches LittleShoot: The New Model for P2P? - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2008/11/21/littleshoot/

<comment><USER2> I've often wondered if P2P or distributed computing could be done within the browser itself, without some kind of add-on as this appears to be... for instance, what about a javascript map/reduce framework? when i visit the site, the javascript GETs the lastest thing to map or reduce, and then POSTS the result back? anyway... ;P</comment>


The Browser Company - <AUTHOR> https://thebrowser.company <comment><USER2> So they're a group of people that say they want to build a browser, and that's it? What's the thesis behind what's broken in browser design and how they're going to reimagine that, and where's a version one MVP to play around with? A list of people with fancy qualifications looking to hire people does not seem to be the foundation required to build a competitive new browser. Why do they have business development people and a plan to have a team of 10 people and a hacker news posting before they have a browser? This is a bunch of marketing fluff. Very slick marketing fluff, but still just fluff.

</comment><comment><USER3> A few fundamental issues:

> the browser largely still does what it did twenty-five years ago

Maybe that's by design? The browser (at least major ones) can be easily extended the way the user wants; if they want something which helps them not get distracted, there's an extension for that (like the one which blocked the FB newsfeed). There are other extensions to remember URLs, and search is better than ever if you are opting to save your browser history.

Also, if you say you're fundamentally changing the browser, at least mention how? What are your core ideas of the redesign, apart from a few random and vague use cases? Without that, the site is just a pretty placeholder.

> The five of us learned a lot from working at a handful of startups, as well > as Snap, Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, and the Obama White House

and

> Beyond our team, we're lucky to be supported by our family and friends, as > well as investors who played a role in some of our favorite software > companies over the years (Airtable, DuckDuckGo, Github, Instagram, Slack, > Stripe)

The experience you mention is _definitely_ not the same I would trust in building a new brower, except perhaps DDG. The last thing I want is people from FB/Amazon/Snap telling my how my browser should behave.</comment>


Dremio – self-service data from the creators of Apache Arrow - <AUTHOR> https://www.dremio.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting combination of features, MPP query engine, but unlike the rest of the projects around Hadoop they can push down queries where data sits instead of requiring a bulk copy to HDFS first. This is a real pain point for modern analytical workloads, analysts want the experience they knew when organizations could run on a single relational database, but it just doesn't match how applications need to be made these days. Pretty impressive list of connectors for a first release, SQL databases, Hbase, Hive, Mongo, Elasticsearch. Definitely going to give it a spin today.

<comment><USER3> How does this compare to Platfora?</comment></comment>


Web 2.0rhea hack mistaken for end of universe - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/12/dziuba_twitter_hack/

<comment><USER2> _" I know of several pregnancies that were a direct result of this vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server. "_

</comment><comment><USER3> Dziuba misses more often than not, but when he's right, he's right.

This Twitter thing is much ado about nothing, imho.</comment>


Airbnb uses machine learning as a competitive advantage - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/airbnb-machine-learning.html <comment><USER2> How do they collab on the ML models?</comment>


Google's TPU Chip Helped It Avoid Building Dozens of New Data Centers - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/04/building-ai-chip-saved-google-building-dozen-new-data-centers <comment><USER2> I am on one hand impressed watching what an org like Google can do with its vast resources, but on the other hand deeply concerned. Computing is moving to a place where this deep specialization will be a requirement to set foot in the door in many areas.

The technical achievement is of course cool, but nothing unprecedented or unexpected for an org like Google. Almost natural: when ASIC implementation cost < new general purpose resources do the obvious thing.

This also happens for obvious reasons with commodity crypto accelerator chips, phone music codec chips, etc, etc. It just means at Google's scale the dollar savings are huge.

The cool thing is Intel and chip makers can level the playing field but they are so far behind.</comment>


GCHQ Catalog of Exploit Tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/gchq_catalog_of.html

<comment><USER2> Here's a few surprising ones:

> GLASSBACK: Technique of getting a targets IP address by pretending to be a > spammer and ringing them. Target does not need to answer.

What? Sounds like a bad TV show quote.

> MINIATURE HERO: Active skype capability. Provision of real time call records > (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also > contact lists.

One assumes this requires Microsoft's cooperation, right?

> SILVER SPECTOR: Allows batch Nmap scanning over Tor.

Interestingly enough, I'd expect this on the "other side's" arsenal. Would this be in order to scan hidden services, or to hide the origin?

On the other hand, a lot of this stuff looks to be entirely.. manual/low-tech?

> UNDERPASS: Change outcome of online polls (previously known as NUBILO).

> BOMB BAY: is the capacity to increase website hits/rankings.

> GATEWAY: Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website.

> GESTATOR: amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular > multimedia websites (Youtube).

These could mean a number of things, but to me it comes off as either a basic botnet, or a government-funded Mechanical Turk account. For instance, "change outcome of online polls" _could_ sound like they have access to every single online polling software around - or simply, they get bots/users to click on the option they want to win.

</comment><comment><USER3> What struck me most is that the names given to these tools aren't the typical governmental type names. These are hacker type tool names.

These hackers working for GCHQ are the worms that were turned.

</comment><comment><USER2> How is this _not_ interesting to the HN crowd?

HN, I am disappoint.

<comment><USER4> I think your definition of Hacker differs from the original and less notorious one.</comment></comment>


NORX: A Parallel and Scalable Authenticated Encryption Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://norx.io/ <comment><USER2> Neat! This is a sponge-based entry in the CAESAR competition [1].

[1] [http://competitions.cr.yp.to/caesar- call.html](http://competitions.cr.yp.to/caesar-call.html)</comment>


Startup Quote: Ben Huh, founder, Cheezburger Network - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/2798308233

<comment><AUTHOR> The worst thing in the world is to be bland.

\- Ben Huh (@benhuh)

<http://startupquote.com/post/2798308233></comment>


DnSimple.com is down and so is my website - <AUTHOR> https://dnsimple.com/

<comment><USER2> This is causing an outage for RubyGems.

[https://twitter.com/rubygems_status/status/53950089310885478...](https://twitter.com/rubygems_status/status/539500893108854785)

</comment><comment><USER3> They're experiencing a massive DDoS attack: [http://dnsimplestatus.com/](http://dnsimplestatus.com/)</comment>


Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/why-johnny-cant-stream-how-video-copyright-went-insane/ <comment><USER2> _Storing a permanent copy rather than a buffer just large enough for streaming is a pessimization, not an optimization._

And there's my word of the day. Can't wait to go pessimize me some software systems. Heh. Theses days, it's practically my job description.

<comment><USER3> <http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html>

> Mel called the maximum time-delay locations the "most pessimum".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So what if some company did something similar to Zediva, but with a model where customers "buy" the DVDs and then sell them back to the company when they are done streaming it? Basically use first sale to set up a streaming service where you don't need to deal with licensing issues.

I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $1-$5 depending on popularity, and the company buys them back for some small amount.

The company would probably need to have some system in place for dealing with people that actually want the DVD that they 'bought'. Maybe something as simple as letting people know that they own the DVD, but the company is not responsible for shipping it to them. If the customer wants to come pick it up at the office, he can feel free to swing by and have someone pull it from the data center for him.

<comment><USER5> I doubt this particular solution would end up being looked kindly on. This is one of those places where the edge cases get weird. Netflix, for instance, is well entrenched as legal. And Zediva was basically Netflix with the latency removed. But because of the streaming nature, the one-copy-to-many-eventual- viewers thing was able to be labeled a "public performance." When really the difference in a "spirit-of-the-law" way is that the lack of latency would require the service to need far fewer DVDs than Netflix, which would result in less payments to the content creators for the same amount of people watching their stuff. Which gets back to the mess that copyright law has evolved into -- in terms of compensation for content, is there any reason that a Netflix service should be worth more to a content creator than a Zediva service? It creates a really perverse incentive in terms of creating more useful services.

So going back to why I think this would most likely be struck down: I think the most likely way it would be shut down would be by calling the "purchase" system (while a clever hack) not legally meaningful. Especially since the only person this hack enriches is the service provider: now if someone wants to watch more movies, they have to "buy" and then "sell back" more "discs", losing some small amount of money on each of those transactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So if I do this:

wget <http://example.com/file.flv>; sleep 5; mplayer -cache 8092 file.flv

am I "streaming"?

In answering that question, does it matter what I do, or only what the guys at example.com are doing?

What if my system is diskless and file.flv is downloaded to a RAM disk? What if I turn off the system after watching? What if I don't? What if I save file.flv to a USB stick and watch it later? What if I loan the stick to a friend?

What if I do this:

ffmpeg -i file.flv file.mp3; mplayer -vo null file.mp3

Can the guys at example.com prohibit me from doing that? Based on intellectual property law? What if some user owns the IP rights to file.flv and uploaded it to example.com and the guys at example.com do not have any IP rights in file.mp3? What if the user did not give them any of her IP rights?

What if I never put file.mp3 into "iTunes"? What if I never put it into "Dropbox"? What if I never send it to "the cloud"? What if I just leave it on a USB stick? What if I play it back from the stick? What if I move it from the stick to my RAM disk and then play it back?

OK, enough.

Enjoy your media.

To get the most from the experience, it may be necessary to stear clear of people who willingly conceal the truth or, in the worst case, lie to you in order to suit their business model.

</comment><comment><USER7> I hope Aereo continues to win. Another company doing the same thing is: <http://www.skittertv.com/> \- unfortunately neither of them support my local area. Due to my house's construction/location, I can't pick up DTV signals easily and would gladly pay $10-$15/mo to get those channels instead of the minimum $30/mo that my cable company charges for basic package.

<comment><USER8> You should call the cable company back and ask for the "lifeline" package, by that specific name. It only includes the local channels, but it exists in basically every franchise area and is generally $10 or less.

<comment><USER7> I did. I called three different times and not one of the sales people for Bright House Networks here in Florida knew about it. I said it is the lowest package with just the bare minimum channels like ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS and they said "No, the lowest plan we offer is $25+tax. There is nothing called lifeline."

<comment><USER9> If the house has been previously hooked up for cable (or still is for internet) you can try hooking up anyway. A lot of them will usually have those channels come through anyway because it costs them less in filters and things to do so. However some of them still encrypt them so it's a bit of a crap- shoot as to what you'll find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a great in depth look at the dysfunctional way copyright has evolved. One of the more interesting things will be when we all have 'Google fiber' which is to say the majority of the Internet has really high speed connectivity and we can stream back from our houses to our devices. Today that is highly constrained by 'uplink' bandwidth but that will change. And when it does we'll get a full court press to make things like the SLingbox illegal.

</comment><comment><USER11> Meanwhile millions just illegally download the movies and tv shows of various sites, completely ignoring copyright law.

And there isn't anything these people can do about it.

But hey, lets do a lot more suits against companies and at least force them to do crazy things.

<comment><USER12> Technically, the letter of the law only highlights transmission (uploading) as illegal in most copyright issues. Downloading most any material seems completely legal.

That'd be neat to see: a bittorrent case which the user turned the upload to 0.0 . Are they infringing?

<comment><USER13> Most downloading is illegal. But there is a difference between crimes that the police will arrest people over, and crimes for which someone 'wronged' can sue. For downloading the 'wronged' party can sue for damages, which would be loss of earnings for that one sale. Plus, I guess, costs.

Uploading is easier to sue, because there the damages (the number of files made available) is much larger and it makes things more cost effective. It also (possibly?) acts as a deterrent to other uploaders.

Criminal charges tend to come in when money is being made from copyright infringement. Selling burnt DVDs, for example.

I'm being a bit vague because of the international audience. (I'm in the UK.)

<comment><USER14> "Crimes for which someone wronged can sue" are actually not crimes but torts.

Copyright infringement is always a tort, but the conditions under which it becomes a criminal offense vary by jurisdiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's really the exact same copyright-induced inefficiency in traditional video rental places. It always struck me as bizarre that a video rental place could "run out" of copies of a particular film, when at trivial expense they could manufacture (on site) additional copies on demand.

Intuitively it seems like this would result in more money for the rightsholders as well, although maybe the need for video rental shops to vastly overprovision copies of some films made them more money than the alternative.

<comment><USER16> Isn't video rental (in the US) done under first sale doctrine[1]? That means copyright holders only receive money from selling each physical copy.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine>

<comment><USER15> That's right, but they wouldn't necessarily have to (strictly speaking) _sell_ copies. They could instead license the right to make copies for a fee.

My suspicion is that that fee would be set to extract as much money as possible from the rental stores (cf. Netflix) and that they are/were better off with the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the problems with all of this is that location gets very tricksy. They say you need to be in NYC for Aereo to work.

The problem is, there's no good way to verify that.. Aero seems to be using HTML5 location, which can be bypassed by setting geo.wifi.uri in Firefox pretty trivially. (I know they ask for Safari, but you can also change user- agent)

Even if they used IP (which is a huge mess!), you could bounce through a proxy.

The problem is the internet does NOT have a reliably way to determine where someone is.

This goes all the way back to the Yahoo/France Nazi memorabilia issues back in 2000.

We have hints, and suggestions at where people are, but not hard and fast proof. For technical and social reasons, this is unlikely to change- So having laws based around restricting things to certain geographic areas is never going to be a long-term solution.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if any of the companies that require unique uploads to the cloud service play fast and loose with compression. There is a large spectrum between running a hash over a file to see if it already exists on the server, and doing the same thing over pieces of a file. Full file deduplication might be clearly against the rules, but what about running a totally generic upload cache that only looked at parts of a file to see if it already had been uploaded as a chunk of data and then copying from the server side cache instead of retransmitting from the user. Seems like there is a lot of grey area between deduplication and simple optimized compression.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe Johnny doesn't want to "stream". Maybe Johnny just wants video that play backs immediately/without delay, and smoothly. And Johnny thinks that's what "streaming" means. Maybe Johnny thinks that "downloading" means he has to wait.

Does Johnny know that when he watches YouTube he's downloading? Or does he think he's "streaming"? As long as Johnny does not have to wait for playback, and playback is smooth, does Johnny really care about whether he's "streaming" or "downloading?

All else being equal (i.e. speed to fill a buffer or a disk block is the same and in neither case does Johnny have to wait for playback longer than in the other), I'd bet Johnny would prefer "downloading" over "streaming", since then he can watch the video again later. Just like a VHS or DVD rental.

Assuming you have the storage space, all else being equal, "streaming" video when you can "download" it seems "insane" to use the Professor's term.

Unless of course your business model is traditional "broadcasting" of the pre- digital, pre-internet variety.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Ars article misses out the third opportunity - a subscription based service with easy to use existing networks and protocols and software; where some of the sub fee goes to content creators.

That's never happened. Even though the content creator would be getting paid for their content there would have been many court cases shutting anyone providing that service down.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think this is an innovative solution and I wish aereo all the best. However, unless they can somehow include some more (premium) channels, it may be a little hard to sign up too many people. Currently available channels: <https://aereo.com/channels></comment>


Running a Modern Startup on PHP - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chartboost.com/post/4591949888/php-agile-development <comment><USER2> Their setup doesn't seem extra-ordinary in any great way, and reads more like a justification against a strawman argument. The author sets up with "PHP is regarded as a clumsy and amateurish technology, best left to development newbies". I am not sure who it is that regards PHP in such a way. Sure, it's not as sexy as Clojure, Scala, Ruby or Erlang these days, but I don't think anyone needs to be convinced that PHP is a worthy technology to build a platform on - some of the biggest sites out there are running on PHP just fine.

PHP has a bit of a reputation for attracting unskilled programmers, but that's because it is so easy to get started with, which leads to a lot of newbies writing it. All that means is that you may have to filter your candidates more carefully when you hire, and nothing to do with the language itself.

In short, the post seems subjective and opinionated, without showing any concrete problems that they overcame with alternative languages or frameworks. "Codeigniter is bloated" vs "Paraglide is awesome" are both so vague as to be useless. "Ruby's syntax sucks" is even worse.

Much better to have had a list of specific things that dissuaded them from using one framework or language, and some killer features that convinced them to use the other - if all I see is a personal opinion without any reasoning behind it, I cannot make any useful decisions in my own situation.

<comment><USER3> _"PHP is regarded as a clumsy and amateurish technology, best left to development newbies". I am not sure who it is that regards PHP in such a way._

No one likes it but it gets the job done in a clumsy and amateurish way. It's the BASIC of web programming. Those other so-called sexy languages have actually been _designed_ rather than having features bolted on later, those features are designed to fit into the language from the start.

 _some of the biggest sites out there are running on PHP just fine._

Popularity != proof of goodness.

<comment><USER4> I think he was trying to show capability more than quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Simply put - if you are a good developer and the language isn't completely out of whack for what you are attempting to do -- for instance, web apps and fortran probably aren't optimal -- the language shouldn't matter in terms of getting things done.

I know of a couple of startups doing well that are built using PHP. One doesn't even advertise the fact that they use PHP because they want strong developers regardless of language. Fact is, PHP is pretty darn simple to pick up, not much harder to do things correctly, and has a _lot_ of third party/opensource support. Is it cool? No, but when it comes to language wars, this pretty much sums up my feelings:

<http://programming-motherfucker.com/>

Personally, there was a startup about 6 years ago where I wanted to use Python. The IT guy and I got into a discussion about PHP vs. Python. He was more comfortable in securing PHP apps. I was enamored with Python, since I was writing a bunch of stuff with it. After exploring mod-python vs. mod-php, mod- python had bugs and wasn't nearly as mature, so we went with PHP. The language didn't matter, it was about getting things done.

There are lots of "cool" languages out there, a good dev will run circles around a mediocre dev who focuses on things that are "cool".

<comment><USER6> Isn't `mod_python` dead?

<comment><USER7> Yes, replaced by mod_wsgi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As the author of Paraglide and Paragon, I thought I'd post here. I knew SeoxyS was writing a blog post that may have included Paraglide, but I didn't know when he would publish it. I'm glad that he did, but had I known when, I may have whipped up a simple homepage, did a little bit more polishing, and created some basic documentation. I wasn't quite ready yet to release this to the wild for mass consumption. It's in the cards, but I just didn't expect to push it publicly for a little while longer.

Thanks to everyone who followed the github project, and whoever had nice comments to say. For anybody that has criticism of the projects, I'm happy to address them in a separate thread when I officially release the project publicly. I'll make a post here when I'm ready and have proper documentation. Please expect more updates in the very near future, and thanks for the interest.

<comment><USER9> I'd really just like to know why your framework reinvents the wheel for nearly every aspect of the application stack? Looking at the code even thus far, I don't see how Paraglide or Paragon improves on any aspect already offered by the largest frameworks Zend Framework, Symfony and Lithium, which already have documentation, encourage new contributions and follow best practices within their respective paradigms.

Why not contribute to an existing framework? Your efforts will be better received and more widely appreciated.

The absolute last thing the PHP community needs is another framework.

<comment><USER8> If this were a brand new framework, then maybe it would be a waste of my time, unless I had more compelling reasons. However, I started building my framework a few years ago and have just been making incremental updates here and there. Friends and coworkers have started to use it over time, and people like it. I've been told to publicize it over the last 3-6 months, but haven't gotten around to it.

My framework is minimalist and gets the job done. I'm a big fan of minimalism and I don't like that some modern frameworks are bloated and have something like hundreds of thousands of lines of code, as opposed to just a few thousand, and that includes components outside the core, like helpers.

Paragon has more work in it than Paraglide. Paragon can support multiple different backends with the same code, just different drivers. I know this exists in other PHP ORM frameworks now, but not a few years ago (not saying mine was the first, it just wasn't as widespread). Also, Paragon integrates cleanly with Memcache so the developer doesn't have to deal with cache and uncache logic.

Hope this clears things up!

<comment><USER10> Exactly what I was going for when I released klein.php (<https://github.com/chriso/klein.php>)

Sure, you could do the same thing with other frameworks, but most of the other frameworks are full of bloat and not particularly fast. I think it's better to have a few components that do one thing really well rather than a monolithic framework that tries to handle every aspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Paraglide and Paragon looks pretty terrible. Honestly, I don't see it as a great PHP5.3 framework. In fact, it looks pretty terrible.

Lithium would be a better choice, if you think that you can't do OOP in PHP5 without 5.3, or you think that all other frameworks suck for this/that reason:

<http://lithify.me/>

Personally I use CakePHP for side-projects, and it suits me just fine. But honestly, PHP development isn't that bad, even with a 3 year old version of certain frameworks...

<comment><USER12> Paraglide and Paragon look decent to me.

PHP makes the need for a framework minimal. Cake is neat but overkill in a lot of ways unless you happen to be one of the developers of Cake and know it inside and out. Same goes with Kohana, CodeIgniter, etc.

If you know PHP well, it's almost as efficient--possibly moreso--to program your own minimal MVC framework. PHP has so much of what you need done for you that only an efficient ORM is a bit tricky.

You're not going to have the widespread adoption of your framework that Rails enjoys. This is because Rails increases the utility of Ruby for webapps by a factor of 10x while your PHP framework improves PHP for web apps about 2x.

BUT, if you are using PHP you might as well write your own internal framework because it's a fun programming exercise and will take you only a little longer than mastering someone else's.

I went down the same path(created my own minimal php framework called uno a while back), though if I'm doing MVC apps nowadays it's almost always using Rails. Rails has the advantage of loads of great devs that know it. Also, once I learnt Rails well I grew to depend on certain features that I just didn't want to emulate in Uno.

<comment><USER11> I am actually one of those people that knows CakePHP inside and out (see <http://github.com/josegonzalez>).

Regardless, a framework is a way to jump-start someone in developing for a given language. Honestly, I've taught at least 5 developers PHP in about half the time it would normally take using a framework than without. The same applies to any other language.

It's easy to write your own framework, but I can almost guarantee you that it will have more bugs than any of the larger, open source frameworks out there. They may have their chinks, but those get largely fixed and tend to benefit the most people. Using a well-known, and well-tested, framework means you have access to a greater pool of developers, and they don't have to learn the idiosyncracies of something you've written because you could.

And while I am in the process of writing my own framework (see <https://github.com/josegonzalez/git-php>), I still prefer using someone else's framework. It's nice to be shown other ways of doing things.

"If you know LANGUAGE well, it's almost as efficient--possibly moreso--to program your own minimal ARCHITECTURE framework. LANGUAGE has so much of what you need done for you that only an efficient IMPORTANT_DETAIL is a bit tricky."

<comment><USER12> > but I can almost guarantee you that it will have more bugs than any of the > larger, open source frameworks out there.

I think you can _definitely_ guarantee it :). Before stopping dev work on Uno I ran into plenty of bugs that I didn't anticipate that would have been quickly weeded out by a bigger community. Many times I realized, "oh, this is why all the frameworks do it that way", only after doing things a way I thought was "simpler".

> "If you know LANGUAGE well, it's almost as efficient--possibly moreso--to > program your own minimal ARCHITECTURE framework. LANGUAGE has so much of > what you need done for you that only an efficient IMPORTANT_DETAIL is a bit > tricky."

Good point. I do think PHP is a bit unique though in the respect that many people argue that _PHP itself is_ a framework/architecure for web apps. But I largely agree with everything you've said.

<comment><USER11> PHP is a complicated templating language ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Despite the author's denigration of Ruby for its "mess of symbols, implied parenthesis (sic), and lack of statement endings," they sure do depend on a lot of Ruby tools and Ruby-based services: Capistrano, Github, Lighthouse, Tender, and Campfire.

<comment><USER14> I don't like metalworking, but I depend on my car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Older technologies don't get much love, and PHP especially has a bad reputation_

Actually, Python is older than PHP.

<comment><USER16> Correct. Python 1991 (20 years ago) & PHP 1995 (16 years ago).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> CodeIgniter is bloated? It doesn't even include an ORM! There are some many things missing from it that other frameworks include that I can't even fathom what the author is talking about.

Having switched from PHP to Ruby a year ago, I now find Ruby's syntax beautiful and incredibly powerful. If you don't like the implied parentheses, it turns out, you can go ahead and add them!

Edit: because I didn't proofread the first time...

<comment><USER12> > Having switched from PHP to Ruby a year ago, I now find Ruby's syntax > beautify and incredibly powerful. If you don't like the implied parentheses, > it turns out, you can go ahead and type them add them!

I like Ruby's syntax as well and do most web app work in Rails nowadays.

However, one thing I love about the PHP syntax is that it's so easy to switch between PHP and C or C++ and vice versa. So if you're doing a lot of C work and only a bit of web work, it's nice to know PHP.

Otherwise if you're doing web work full time, Ruby's quite fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lumping CodeIgniter and Symphony together as parallel examples of bloated and get-in-your-way frameworks seems like a stretch.

CodeIgniter is modular, so you can just use the MVC capability it provides and leave the rest alone. Symphony seems to require a substantial amount of prep and up-front learning in order to use it. I couldn't see the set up time between the two frameworks being much further apart.

I'm curious what aspects of CodeIgniter the author found to be bloated and crippling.

<comment><USER19> When I started using CodIgniter the easiness of installing the framework really amazed me. You don't even need the mod_rewrite enabled!

Just extract the CodIgniter code into a webserver directory and create the controller code to show some output or load a view and you are done!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The framework is one thing, how you use it is more important and I believe once you know any framework ( and in any language) inside out, it's kinda pointless to compare. Anything will do, unless you are writing a new super duper cool Google, Twitter of Fb

Also strange, after reading 51 comments, i have not seen anyone mention Zend Framework. It's got a steep learning curve, but it's just awesome. I've been writing a social web app framework based on ZF, Redis, Gearman and lots of other stack and it's awesome.

<comment><USER21> I also love Zend but you're right about the learning curve. It's a bit steep but is well designed IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why would one use a language where the best you can say is "it gets the job done". There are so many better options in absolutely every single way that the only reason I can fathom for one to start something new using it out of choice is laziness to learn something better.

<comment><USER23> If the technical founders are most comfortable with PHP then getting to market with code you know you can trust can be far more important than picking the "right" language (and by right I mean a language that startup communities see as being a proper language to work with).

More props to them for clearly knowing it has its limitations and downsides... I'd pick a developer who used a language they knew inside and out and were informed and aware of the downsides of the language over a zealot who thinks their language of choice works best in every situation (my most common experience of these types are in the ruby community, by a quirk of coincidence).

PHP was the language I used to teach myself how to develop for the server-side when I'd been purely a front end dev many years ago and I still like it (though granted I like Scala more) because it's always felt like a language you can sit down and get shit done with quickly and without fuss, and sometimes that is as important as any other attribute you can attach to any other language choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As far as PHP frameworks go, I've been using Yii when I do a PHP project and have found it simple and clean and Yii's documentation is pretty superb.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yeah I agree with most of the comments here. PHP is a clumsy mess, but it gets the job done and I am a firm believer in importance of being first to market.

Cite my sources: When I came out of university I had what I thought was a very good grasp of what software should be, and that "elegant" well written software would dominate the market. Totally not true. The best example is the accounting system "Attache" in Australia ... it was the WORST software I have ever used. They only recently (in the last couple of years) got the ability to open more than one window at a time _in an mdi windows application_ !! .. Attache is without a doubt the most successful accounting software in Australia, despite the fact that it's a dog. Why?? Because they were first to market. They were there on Day 1 with a product that met the minimum requirements (e.g. it RAN)

I often see people who underestimate the importance of being first to market ... I truly think it's very important

</comment><comment><USER26> Paraglide looks interesting, although looking at the main class doesn't inspire me with a lot of confidence:

[https://github.com/bgoldman/Paraglide/blob/master/paraglide....](https://github.com/bgoldman/Paraglide/blob/master/paraglide.php)

The lack of tests somewhat seals the deal.

<comment><USER27> If you want something that's nothing like that, you may enjoy this:

<https://github.com/codeguy/Slim>

<comment><USER10> or mine: <https://github.com/chriso/klein.php>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> We use s similar setup to what they are using. We use in house built MVC framework though. Our Model is a lacking but still works. We do still use Memcached and I don't see how they can skip that. I don't know what their user numbers are like for even 1-2k concurrents that many Mongo queries could be deadly.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're still at a very early stage and the traffic is definitely not what it's gonna be in the future yet. So far, Mongo has held up beautifully in real-life situations and benchmarking, and we can deploy new boxes infinitely to beef up our replica set with Amazon EC2 when we reach our limits—but Memcached is not out of the picture entirely. So far there's been no need for it (which would not be the case with MySQL) but if future traffic starts to call for it, we'll definitely add that to our setup.

<comment><USER29> Note that you can only get up to 7 usable members in a RS (then you need to shard), see <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Replica+Sets+Limits>

I'm curious if you happen to use any monitoring to notice when load on your mongo servers gets too high (eg is about to start swapping to disk instead of using RAM etc)?

Cheers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Somewhat related... Derek Sivers attempted to port CD Baby to Ruby on Rails, but ended up abandoning the port effort after 2 years and switched back to PHP. See his post on why he came back to PHP and what he learned from Rails (from 2007): [http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_swit...](http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html)

<comment><USER31> Holy lord is that a lot of risk to accumulate doing a full rewrite and deploying it all at once. I think the hardest part about rewriting an app is knowing about all the edge cases, kludges, etc. that accumulate over the years. It makes sense that the person who knows the most about the product and its dirty secrets would be much more capable of rewriting the app quickly than a newly hired employee.

As a counterpoint, last year I joined a startup as the first technical member. I migrated a PHP application written by an inept contractor (terrible DB layout, SQL queries in the views, most features buggy and incomplete, etc.) to Rails piece-meal. I had very little experience with Rails or PHP prior to this, but was able to rewrite the app in the course of a few months, while adding new features and continuing product development. I simply placed nginx in front of both the PHP and Rails app servers and rewrote the auth system for both apps so that cookies/credentials could be shared. Then it was a matter of migrating sections of the app over one-by-one. There was some hairiness in how the Rails side linked to non-Rails pages, but that code was gradually replaced as the rewrite progressed.

Even despite the abominable DB schema from the original PHP app (which, in fairness, had nothing to do with PHP), Rails was flexible enough to allow me to override its conventions and map tables to models with joins, etc. Overall, it was much simpler than I thought it would be and after the rewrite was complete, it was pretty simple to write migrations to start organizing the DB schema into something coherent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> somewhat related: anyone know if cakephp is still being actively developed (as a framework)?

<comment><USER33> I believe it is, I haven't met anyone who's used in a long time though. I think CodeIgniter is the current hot framework for PHP.

<comment><USER34> CodeIgniter is still PHP4-friendly. It's not "hot" by any means. CakePHP is still actively developed, but it's pretty miserable. (It's slow, too - so much so that framework devs usually benchmark against it because it's so reliably slower-than-everyone-else.)

If you're going to use PHP, I can't really think of a good reason to use anything other than Symfony2.

<comment><USER11> They're removing PHP4 compatibility in 2.0, which is being more than actively developed. And it at least gets as much traffic as Symfony does: <http://www.google.com/trends?q=symfony%2Ccakephp>

As far as not using Symfony 2, I wouldn't use anything not marked as stable in production. That goes for CakePHP as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _Unfortunately, PHP offers very little in terms of modern and agile MVC frameworks._ There are many good MVC frameworks for PHP. Look at Zend Framework (most popular in our region), Kohana, Yii.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've been using Paraglide as well, and it is indeed very cool.

<comment><USER37> Any documentation out there for Paraglide? Did some searching and only pulled up the GitHub repo.

<comment><USER8> Documentation is forthcoming. I didn't expect people to find out about this yet :) If you follow the project on Github, I'll release updates in the near future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Brilliant post. These guys are running in a very similar way to us. Some things in there for us to take hints from though. Will be checking Paraglide out!</comment>