What We'll Do in Space by 2116 - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/heres-what-well-do-in-space-by-2116 <comment><USER2> Based on economic incentives, I would guess that the mining industry would conquer the new frontier way before any commercial space travel for humans-- one way or two way. Unfortunately the mining industry today is the scummiest on earth. I honestly hope that Elon Musk and SpaceX get into space mining before say Rio Tinto, just because he deserves the billions more and would probably reinvest it for more socially good projects as well.

My vision of how it could be in [N=no_fucking_clue] decades: Completely unmanned from the beginning (just like mining on earth nearly already is), with a large-scale base on the moon. It starts with mining on the moon that is processed on the moon and shipped to the earth and the infrastructure is set up so that [M] decades later it would be the hub for inerplanetary mining operations as well.

Get building Mr. Musk!

<comment><USER3> You might be interested in Planetary Resources [1]. They're planning to mine resources from asteroids though – no gravity well (like the moon) makes for easier transport from the source to the consumer.

It's very unlikely that SpaceX will be entering the space mining business. Musk doesn't seem to be a big fan of it, except in the context of mining resources on Mars for consumption on Mars.

[1] [http://planetaryresources.com/](http://planetaryresources.com/)

<comment><USER4> SpaceX will certainly be interested in putting someone else's mining equipment in space though. If there is an asteroid gold rush, they're selling the tickets.

<comment><USER5> This is probably a better point. Established mining companies would be better off investing in research on how to extract raw materials once they are at the location.

Let another company (e.g. SpaceX) deal with the transportation. The level of specialisation at every steps is huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _> In a mere 60 years, we of Earth have gone from launching our first spacecraft, to exploring every planet and major moon in our solar system, to establishing an international, long-lived fleet of robotic spacecraft at the Moon and Mars._

Put like that it's pretty impressive. A lot of people, including me, tend to focus on humans in space and on other planetary bodies so think look a bit grim from that perspective.

We're doing pretty well exploring our solar system. I wonder how the jump to other solar systems is going to be once we're 'done' here.

<comment><USER7> >We're doing pretty well exploring our solar system. I wonder how the jump to other solar systems is going to be once we're 'done' here.

We can reallydo a lot more in our current exploration. Ideally we would have a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars if budgets kept up. Also a good exploration of Europa, Titan and other moons.

As of now we do not have the ability to travel to another solar system in a human lifetime and the technology to do so doesn't even seem possible. No hints at near light speed travel, let alone faster than light.

<comment><USER8> It's absolutely possible to travel to another star system in a human lifetime. (BTW, there's no such thing as "another solar system": there is only _one_ Solar system, and that's our own. It's called that because our star is called "Sol", hence "Solar". Other systems are "star systems".)

The tech doesn't exist now, but it could with antimatter propulsion. Basically, you just need to create a large spacecraft which can accelerate continuously at 1 _g_. Then, you point the craft to Alpha Centauri and accelerate at 1 _g_ for half the distance, then spin around and decelerate at 1 _g_ for the second half. With 1 _g_ acceleration, you don't need artificial gravity. And the trip should take less 4 years from what I read here:

[https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=reb6mf...](https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=reb6mf99h3i7m8lvj9idsnvmu5&topic=34996.msg1217547#msg1217547)

The occupants of the trip will actually achieve apparent faster-than-light travel! (Alpha Centauri is almost 5ly distant.) Relativistic dilation at work. Of course, the problem is the huge amount of energy needed. But if they could achieve 0.1 _g_ acceleration, it's much less and the trip is still only 13 years; for 0.01 _g_ , it's 41 years, still within a human lifetime though a bit much. But that might even be possible with nuclear propulsion.

So, in summary, it's absolutely possible to travel to other star systems within a human lifetime, as far as physics is concerned. However, building antimatter drives and obtaining enough antimatter fuel for the trip seems pretty impractical, and also unlikely that anyone will want to expend the resources to do that. But if you accept much lower acceleration, and combine that with cryogenic technology ("suspended animation") so that people don't need to age during the trip, it might be doable. But it'd be a one-way trip most likely, since everyone the passengers knew on Earth would be dead when they got back, unless of course we eliminate aging.

<comment><USER7> >BTW, there's no such thing as "another solar system": there is only one Solar system, and that's our own. It's called that because our star is called "Sol", hence "Solar". Other systems are "star systems".)

[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/solar- system](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/solar-system)

>Basically, you just need to create a large spacecraft which can accelerate continuously at 1g. Then, you point the craft to Alpha Centauri and accelerate at 1g for half the distance, then spin around and decelerate at 1g for the second half. With 1g acceleration, you don't need artificial gravity. And the trip should take less 4 years from what I read here:

You would need a colossal amount of energy to maintain that acceleration. I would believe 8 years, but the system is already 4 light years away.

<comment><USER8> >[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/solar- system](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/solar-system)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System) From Wikipedia: "This article is about the Sun and its planetary system. For other similar systems, see Star system and Planetary system."

>You would need a colossal amount of energy to maintain that acceleration. I would believe 8 years, but the system is already 4 light years away.

And your belief is wrong. I already gave you a reference. The trip takes less than the distance in light-speed. A trip to the center of the galaxy at even 0.1g acceleration takes far, far less than the lightyear distance, in ship- time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _With lower budgets and less aversion to risk, private companies are also > more likely than public agencies to suffer disasters in space._

I disagree very much. Throwing bureaucracy and money at problems does not decrease risk. NASA has killed several astronauts: Challenger (bad internal processes and "go-fever"), Columbia (bad technical concept and design), and Apollo 1. Then there are those near-misses with Apollo 13 and Gemini 8 [1], which could have easily resulted in the loss of the crew. Money and bureaucracy also don't protect from stupid mistakes, as seen in the Mars Climate Orbiter case (output data in wrong units) [2].

Private companies also have a strong incentive to minimize risk to human life, due to all the bad PR and losses in revenue that brings.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_8#Emergency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_8#Emergency) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter)

<comment><USER9> Everything in your comment is belied by the evidence. Yes, NASA's attention to detail certainly does reduce the risk involved, and there have been numerous HN articles about its software processes, such as:

[https://gigaom.com/2012/08/20/nasa-scrubbed-mars-rover- code-...](https://gigaom.com/2012/08/20/nasa-scrubbed-mars-rover-code-clean- over-and-over/)

[http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/making_robust_software/](http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/making_robust_software/)

> Private companies also have a strong incentive to minimize risk to human > life

There's no evidence of that whatsoever. OSHA, for example, has vastly reduced workplace fatalities and injuries.

[https://www.osha.gov/dep/fatcat/dep_fatcat.html](https://www.osha.gov/dep/fatcat/dep_fatcat.html)

<comment><USER3> > _NASA 's attention to detail certainly does reduce the risk involved_

Bureaucracy and several layers of subcontractors is _not_ the same as "attention to detail". You can easily have the latter while avoiding the former; I'd even argue that bureaucracy is dangerous in this context, since it maximizes ass-covering and minimizes personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is still the best way to ensure attention to detail.

> _There 's no evidence of that whatsoever. OSHA, for example, has vastly > reduced workplace fatalities and injuries._

My statement was in the context of human space flight. When an astronaut dies during a mission, that will have a massive impact on the company's reputation, unlike some construction site accident. OSHA does not apply to space flight missions.

Compare commercial airplanes: Whenever a plane crashes, you'll be sure to hear about it and which airline it belonged to.

<comment><USER10> > Compare commercial airplanes: Whenever a plane crashes, you'll be sure to > hear about it and which airline it belonged to.

Plane crashes are rare events thanks to the massive bureaucracy known as the FAA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ISRO has few exciting space exploration projects lined up in the coming years:

a) Chandrayaan-2[1] in 2017. Second lunar mission; this time with a soft lander and rover.

b) Second Mars mission[2] in 2018. More science payloads than the first mission. May have a lander as well.

c) Venus orbiter mission[3] in 2018-2020.

d) Aditya L1[4] solar observatory mission in 2020.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2)

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalyaan_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalyaan_2)

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

[4][http://www.isro.gov.in/aditya-l1-first-indian-mission-to- stu...](http://www.isro.gov.in/aditya-l1-first-indian-mission-to-study-sun)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a complete newbie about space travel so when the article says it takes decades to reach planets like Mercury, I went searching for the fastest way we can/could travel today.

From the Wikipedia article about the Solar Probe+, it seems the spacecraft should achieve 200km/s as it passes by the Sun. At that speed, a trip to Mercury (57.91 million km) would take 80 hours?

Could someone with more knowledge about space travel weight in on the difficulties of achieving this and/or any glaring mistakes I have made in my assumptions and calculations?

To clarify, I'm interested in how fast we should ship super advanced robots to these planets. So things like human survival while it passes by the Sun aren't important in this case (I think? Is melting a huge problem for shipping robots that way?).

<comment><USER13> The speed as it is passing by the sun is the highest that it will reach in its route (the closest part of its elliptical orbit around the sun) You couldn't change that momentum to be going in the right direction (Towards mercury's gravitational influence, which is small compared to the sun) or slow it down enough to orbit mercury after it gets there without expending a crazy amount of fuel. So you could do it for a flyby, but trying to land something on the surface wouldn't work.

The other problem is since 200km/s is the fastest speed, you have to get to that point at the normal one.

<comment><USER14> Yes, the moment Earth and Mercury are the closest is when the Sun, Mercury and Earth are aligned, so going from Earth to Mercury at this moment is heading towards the Sun, but then gravity from the Sun will be too strong to be able to stop at Mercury.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's no mention of exploring Europa or Enceladus. I think sending probes there will have far more important consequences than sending orbiters to Uranus.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps Emily was thinking more about things in the distant future. There is already a Europa mission under development:

[http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-europa-mission- begi...](http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-europa-mission-begins-with- selection-of-science-instruments)

We should be there within the next 10 to 15 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> To be totally honest, it's hard to feel any enthusiasm for future space travel/exploration when it seems like a real question as to whether or not civilization will still be around in one hundred years. Climate change is such a huge problem that it dwarfs other scientific concerns. That being said, I suppose there's a chance that space exploration could drive technological innovations that could help on that front.

<comment><USER18> > _That being said, I suppose there 's a chance that space exploration could > drive technological innovations that could help on that front._

I'd say there is more than a chance, the amount of technology that was produced during the "space-race" is incredible - I personally think that an emphasis on space exploration would continue that advancement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If we're talking 100 years, my money's still on some kind of field propulsion. Here's why:

Take any 100-year period of time over the last few centuries. It's not just that folks in one period of time would not understand the activities of the next period, _they wouldn 't even understand the concepts involved_ So horseback folks really didn't grok riverboat steam power at all. Same goes for railroads. Or aviation.

That leads me to believe that what's up next is something we currently think impossible or silly. "Field propulsion" is a nice moniker for that, whatever in reality it turns out to be.

<comment><USER20> Im a bit of a contrarian in this area. I know Ray Kurtzweil thinks we advanced as much in tge last 14 years as the previous 100, but thats tosh. What amazing new technologies have we developed even since the 70s? Silicon chips? Genetic enginering? Rocketry? Solar power? Nuclear power? All those are baby boomer technologies. What advances from the last 30 years even come close to those? I think the truth is we discovered most of the exploitable physics in the mid 20th century and from now on it will be mainly iterative improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Which means it's likely that the first humans on Mars will not have been > sent there by NASA or ESA.

Yes I agree that's likely but for very different reasons from what is said in the article:

"Since the retirement of the US Space Shuttle in 2011, only Russia and China have maintained human spaceflight capability with the Soyuz program and Shenzhou program."[1]

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

</comment><comment><USER21> > Still, we could see humans on Mars in 20 years, give or take.

After a whole paragraph describing how difficult it is, this seems rather optimistic. Give or Take? Give another 100, I'd guess.

<comment><USER4> NASA says 20, SpaceX says 9, I'll call it 15.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's what I wish we'd do in space in the next 100 years:

\- Make industrial-scale self-reproducing robots, and send them to an asteroid. \- Build more robots out of that asteroid, send robots to next nearest asteroid. \- Build a ringworld out of asteroid and robot parts.

The great thing about space being so enormously big, is that .. once you get off Earth .. you've got so much of it to play with. Send some of these robots to the rings of Saturn, get as much water together as possible, take your fish-tank and get on with it ..

We have the technology to do this. We truly do.

We just don't have the will.

<comment><USER23> > We have the technology to do this

We're not even close to being able to make self-reproducing robots.

Even a simple robot requires a huge supply chain. Take, say, the photoresists used in chip manufacture -- that's an entire chemical industry that you need to box up. That little industry has a bunch of needs on its own. Okay, box those up, too. Repeat. Now let's do insulation for wires . . . or _batteries_.

It takes a lot more than a village to make a robot, it pretty much takes a country. Probably several, given how suitable raw materials are so inconveniently spread around (and often, hard to find, so I guess we need to add some kind of prospecting facility now).

Short of general-purpose nano-assemblers, which are likely to remain science fiction for quite some time, you'll not put a self-reproducing robot into a probe-sized package any time soon.

<comment><USER24> Ok, we're not close just now but at some point during the next 100 years perhaps?

<comment><USER23> It's hard to project 30 years out. Ask Charles Stross (he's written near- future SF, and -- I'm probably misrepresenting him -- has said he's abandoned story lines because technology caught up with his predictions). Predicting 100 years is pretty much impossible.

But absent "nanotech" or "micro-mechanical biotech" or some similar game- changing advance, self-replicating machines will need to incorporate self- replication of so much of their technology base that they will basically look like factories. Now, there's nothing wrong with a self-replicating factory, but it's not portable and cuddly, and you can't stick it on a rocket and launch it (not in one piece, anyway).

I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER25> Stross (who is active on HN) explores the subject of abandoning stories in some detail on his blog, e.g. regarding the Halting State series [1]. He also describes here how political uncertainty can kill a story; in this case uncertainty regarding the outcome of the 2014 Scottish Independence vote. Halting State books 1 and 2 are set in a near-future independent Scotland, but were written well before the vote happened. Regarding Halting State 3, he said (2013) "In just two years the map of the Scottish near future will have changed, unpredictably and drastically, from where it is now. I therefore conclude that there is simply no point in my starting to write..."

[EDIT: added quote, made it clear that it was the third book in a sequence that was canned]

[1] [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa- why-...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-there- wont-be-a-third-.html)

<comment><USER8> It sounds like he set his story too near in the future. Set your story 25-50 years into the future and then you can make reasonable predictions and avoid political things ruining them, for the most part (until a couple of decades have passed). Scottish independence could still happen, just not in the next couple of years. But in 30 years, it's possible. That far out, the state of the entire EU is in serious doubt.

Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey for example. In 1969, it looked like a fairly reasonable prediction of what things would be like in 2001 (42 years away), given the rate of change at the time in aerospace technology. By 1974, it still didn't look too bad. It didn't start looking overly optimistic until probably the late 80s, 20 years later.

Also, if Stross is one of those writers who makes multi-book story arcs spanning over a decade (like Herbert did with the Dune series), that's a sure recipe for total failure when doing near-term sci-fi. Stuff just changes too fast; Herbert's stuff worked sorta-Ok because Dune was set 8000 years in the future (IIRC), but even there one big premise was the idea of genetic memories, which were postulated when he started, but eventually disproven with greater knowledge of genetics, probably before he finished his last book.

This is stuff like Blade Runner worked well: it was a singular story, set about 35 years into the future. At the time, it looked like a somewhat reasonable depiction of 35 years in the future, though rather grim. Of course, now it's almost 2017 and things don't look anything like that, so it's interesting to watch from a historical perspective. It is a little disturbing that they now want to milk it with a sequel after all this time, when obviously things aren't going to look anything like that in 1 year, but I guess I can ignore it like I ignore the Matrix sequels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I hope that there will be a major breakthrough in propulsion in the next 100 years. With current technology there are pretty hard limits to what can be done in space.

<comment><USER27> The biggest breakthrough might not be in technology, but in policy.

Nuclear propulsion has offered high-Isp and high-thrust together in the same engine since the 60s[1], but for various reasons it hasn't flown. With the right safety precautions, public perception, legal changes, and luck, this could be the "breakthrough" you're looking for.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Using species known to survive outside Earth's atmosphere like the Tardigrades, especially given their size, for space based efforts might be worth considering.

<comment><USER29> Using them to do what exactly?

<comment><USER28> Off the cuff, using water bears as biobots and space-seeds might be of use, but just doing any research relate to using them in space to me is worth looking into; NASA has already done some research. Generally speaking, right now their our best bet to transfer life out of the solar system.

<comment><USER29> Can we implant them with Human DNA packets and randomly send millions of little "DNA Bombs" off into space?

<comment><USER30> And that is out humans got banned from the galactic alliance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _> it'd take 100 years to get there, give or take, unless there is some revolution in spacecraft propulsion._

What about ion thrusters? They are known and it's not a revolution but rather evolution of technology that's needed to make them more useful.

<comment><USER32> No it'd be a revolution. An ion thruster with comparable performance to chemical rockets would be revolutionary and is by no means a logical extension of any technology.

<comment><USER31> Ion thrusters aren't comparable to common chemical engines and they don't need to be. They can't offer same high acceleration (to enable escaping the planet gravitation for instance). What they can offer however is very long operation and constant acceleration (even if not high). What it means that when in outer space you can accelerate the spacecraft to huge speeds over long time, which you can't do with regular fuel, simply because you quickly run out of it. It's not a revolutionary idea by any means (at least not anymore) - it is pretty well known.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> how far is our current tech from cryo sleep?

Most science fiction assumes that humans will survive long duration space travel through chemical induced sleep, waking up only when they are about to reach the destination.

Is it just science fiction or do we have someone working aggressively on this.

<comment><USER34> 6 months seems to be the outer extremes of medically induced comas ([http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-a- medicall...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-a-medically- induced-coma/)) and that's nowhere near long enough to get anywhere useful.

Although I guess you could wake people up every 3 months for some muscle replenishment exercise and mission updates.

<comment> q-base But as far as I know you still age while in a coma. So while you may be in a unconscious sleep - it won't do you any good for long term space travel. Then you might as well be awake and look at the scenery along the way.

<comment><USER34> I guess the bigger problem is that you'd almost certainly need a staff of medical personnel to monitor and manage the sleeping people (whether they're in a medical coma, held at a low temperature to slow everything, etc.) and you're back to the same problem of how they cope with the time and distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This needs more electrostatic solar sails and fission fragment rockets.

</comment><comment><USER36> Private companies have a long record of killing their employees and causing huge amounts of environmental damage, as long as they think it will be profitable and that they won't suffer awful repercussions.

[http://www.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/mnmstats.asp](http://www.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/mnmstats.asp)

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

"all the bad PR and losses in revenue that brings" is insufficient.

<comment><USER3> Your references only show that 100 years ago, safety and human lives were held in lower value than today – companies and government institutions alike were more inclined to accept fatalities back then.

Your first reference is pretty useless, since it doesn't show fatalities in relation to total man-hours worked. If anything, it would indicate that companies have become less inclined to accept human deaths!

<comment><USER29> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> All I got from this articles was an excessive desire to post childish Uranus jokes.

Predictions of the future are supposed to inspire and bewilder</comment>


Ask HN: I got into startup school, co-founder did not. Should he come? - <AUTHOR>

I just received my email and I am super excited. Except that my co-founder received his email and he did not get in. My question is, is there value in him coming along anyways? I think yes, strictly for the networking opportunity. Opinions? <comment><USER2> I would agree with you. First of all, proximity does matter. I'm working via Skype with my co-founder and technology makes this a pretty painless process, but there is nothing like good old-fashioned face-to-face interaction. Second, you're right - networking opportunities are important and your chance of finding the right ones increases greatly. Congrats

</comment><comment><USER3> I say yes only if you're staying for more than one day in SF, and you have other networking activities to do. That way, his time isn't wasted if he does come.</comment>


Peter Thiel launches Breakout Labs to fund bold early-stage research - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/10/25/peter-thiel-breakout-labs/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom <comment><USER2> Regardless of whether the amount is enough to fund scientific research endeavors (which range at > 250k/ year), Breakout Labs is a reflection of the current nature of scientific research.

The NIH or other foundations tend only to fund "safe" research proposals. Someone with a more radical idea with no funding resources is effectively shut down. 50k may not be enough to research something for a year, but it may be enough to prototype an idea. Win for creativity, win for science.

<comment><USER3> Are you speaking from experience, or from what you've heard?

I don't know much about NIH funding, but if you're looking for funding from (say) NSF, DOE or DARPA it doesn't have to be _that_ "safe" except in the sense that they really want you to produce _something_ publishable... not necessarily particularly useful. I figure that any worthwhile research project _ought_ to be able to be massaged into a form where you're producing something worth publishing regardless of what happens.

NIH might be different, due to the larger and more expensive scale of these sorts of projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> $50k to $300K grants seem awfully low for research projects. Heck you can barely build a good app with $50k.

<comment><USER5> I'm not too well-versed in research funding, but NSF CAREER awards seem to be around twice that (i.e. $100k to $600k) for a few years of funding. I suppose the recipient would probably be getting funding from other sources as well?

As for building a good app, I don't know if I'd expect a what gets produced by a conventional research group to be a nicely polished, ready-to-deploy app. Grad students are probably somewhat cheaper than developers too.

<comment><USER3> _Grad students are probably somewhat cheaper than developers too_

Actually, the cost of funding a grad student is surprisingly large. If you're a professor with an external grant, then the first thing that happens is that the university takes some off the top (around 40%) which is supposed to pay for all the office space, admin staff, and so forth that you and your group get. Then you've gotta pay the tuition for the grad student on top of what you're paying them... meaning (so I hear) that it's no more expensive to hire a postdoc making $50K than a grad student making $25K. And of course the cost of a $50K postdoc is isn't $50K, it's close to $100K once all the random other costs are taken into account. So in the end, you need at least $100K in research funding for each grad student-year.

<comment><USER6> That's not entirely true at the places I've been and people I've talked to. The reason is because a lot of that overhead gets waived if the professor teaches. Usually one class/year = 1 grad student. That's why many grad students (PhD candidates) TA at first too, because unless they are really, really good, they aren't going to be worth it to give them an RA position, especially if they are taking classes and they can't be productive enough for a professor. In a large group, usually a few professors will teach, and the rest will supplement grad students with NSF or some other sort of grants.

The last NSF grant I helped with, done by a professor I worked for, was essentially for the grad student's salary they get to live off of, as the rest of the costs were waived by the school (in this case, 25k/year for 3 years)

<comment><USER7> This doesn't match my experiences for most major research universities with active research programs. It's very standard to fund students as researchers through their time in grad school (especially in bio, but in CS too) and it's also very common to charge ICR and the tuition waiver. (Which is usually something the grant has to pay for.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope this style of funding takes off. I'll be the first to admit that I buy into the hype around social, mobile, realtime, and all those buzzwords for consumer apps but the future I dream about involves taking on the bigger challenges, basically the ones outlined in the Grand Challenges for Engineering: <http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/>

<comment><USER9> I hope so too! Thiel definitely seems like the most visionary of the billionaires in the world, he probably will end up having a greater positive impact than anyone else on the Forbes list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ideally, they would be a hub for innovative researchers on a shoestring-budget that could end up working together on even more ambitious projects. Or a good leader might be able to recruit from the applicant pool to break up a larger project into small groups that could focus on specific parts of the research.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know what % royalties they are asking for?

</comment><comment><USER12> Hm, and just a few weeks ago Thiel was predicting the "end of the future": [http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/278758/end-future- pet...](http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/278758/end-future-peter-thiel)

Bipolar much?

<comment><USER13> The articles fit exactly.

Most investments these days (even from the govt) are in short-term quick-to- realize projects. If this continues, we'll have endless electronic social playtoys, living as grown-up children in walled gardens, but the 'grand future' would be gone. No spaceflight, no radical new techniques, no new frontiers.

That's why people that are rich and interested in longer-term research, like him, could start a fund to fund more radical and long-term research proposals. Something that was originally the scope of university research, but times change.

<comment><USER12> I'm all for billionaires using their money to fund research, but that NRO article was so bad that I question his judgement.

1) I don't know what tech slowdown he's talking about. The cost of genome sequencing is falling at faster-than-Moore's law rates; that's probably the most significant growth area right now.

2) Thiel is a Singulatarian [3]; I thought the point of that was that exponential growth is inevitable. It's that coupled with this article that leads me to dub him bipolar. If you believe in the Singularity I presume you believe it will happen with or without any particular pool of money.

3) This paragraph. Maybe sounding like Grampa Simpson is required to get into NRO. And who in their right mind considers Robert Moses and Brasilia good models for anything?

> "towards the end Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the > 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong > to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters > today prefer Victorian houses. Science fiction has collapsed as a literary > genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks > later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the > hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress > was lost."

Damn hippies! And here I heard that they helped invent personal computing [1] and saved physics [2].

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture- Pers...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture- Personal/dp/0143036769) [2] <http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/> [3] <http://singularityu.org/?p=1749></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Stratusville – Game-Based Learning for Devops - <AUTHOR> http://stratusville.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

I recently put together a prototype of a game for teaching devops/backend server stuff. You navigate through servers and deploy new instances as needed. Currently it is a set of structured tutorials to get your familiar with the terminal and JavaScript coding. This prototype is a 4-level tutorial on navigating through a machine with terminal, sshing into another box, running JavaScript files ala Node.JS, and using trendy cloud-functions on demand. It was loads of fun to work on since I have a particular fascination for educational services that teach odd skills.

Future work includes fleshing out the game engine further, which includes implementations of SQL/NoSQL-style databases. And a game like this wouldn't be complete without a world view + branching paths so users can decide which path they wish to travel (DBA? DevOps? Build Manager?).

Question: Are you interested in seeing a real product out of this? What would you want it to cover?</comment>


The Dunmow Flitch Trials - <AUTHOR> https://www.dunmowflitchtrials.co.uk/history/ <comment><AUTHOR> Obviously there's a YouTube of it:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=zbCnAXe5lck](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zbCnAXe5lck)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was tempted to add (1104) to it, but the article is recent</comment>


Ask HN: When to pivot/optimize and when to abandon ship? - <AUTHOR>

I recently finished the beta version of my website (soundkey.com) and started attracting visitors using Google AdWords, just to see how "sticky" the website is and to get some data on users' behavior (using Google Analytics to track usage patterns).
The results, while prelimnary, have been quite dissapointing, and I wanted to know from the collective experience of HN readers, if this is something I should just learn from and soldier on, or take as a sign that I'm not offering a useful service and abandon or at least scale down this effort.
Stats: There were about 2,000 visitors over several days, with about 1 min avg time on the site and 2.3 pages/visit, which may or may not be decent, but only had a handful of submissions (less than 10).
It's likely that AdWords is not the best way to attract my initial user base, but even so, I expected at least some non-negligible user involvement.
Have any of you had experience with web apps that you put up, and initially got negligible traction from visitors, and then, after the right steps had that increase significantly?
I could hire a professional designer to improve the look, do customer development, find and target early adopters, pivot & adapt the product, do marketing, PR, SEO, etc, but I'm concerned that if out of a couple of thousand users only a handful found it useful enough to use (for free and without the need for registration) maybe I shouldn't be trying to "put lipstick on a pig".
What do you guys think? Am I being too pessimistic, or realistic?
How do you know when it's time to pivot & optimize versus abandon an effort? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how you'll monetize it (ads, I guess), but I think this is actually a pretty interesting idea. You may need to pivot a bit to find a better market fit, but FWIW I think you're giving up too easily. (And actually, 2.3 pages per visit seems pretty good as a first pass, but I don't have a lot of experience running adwords campaigns.)

My guess is adwords are probably the wrong way to reach _contributors_ to this site. No one is searching google thinking "I know how to pronounce this word, if only had a way to tell people". You may get some exploratory clicks but you're probably not addressing the problem they went to google to solve. I think you should be spreading awareness (virally?) among content creators, so that they keep you in mind when the problem your are solving occurs to them.

<comment><USER2> Also, I meant to add this:

> Have any of you had experience with web apps that you > put up, and > initially got negligible traction from > visitors, and then, after the right > steps had that > increase significantly?

Yes. Moreover, I'd guess this is the most common case. That's what this whole release early/iterate thing is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Copy imgur. Don't require a title, description, tags and all that. Don't even put it there, it just makes it seem too complicated. Copy imgur's flow exactly. Make it a simple front page. Give back a URL.

Don't bother with browse and all that, at least not until you've got a lot of recordings.

Change the URL. soundkey.com/key=so9m6u is lame, make it soundkey.com/so9m6u

No one needs an account. Don't even let people register yet.

Honestly though. I'd give up. People _really_ want to upload videos and they _really_ want to upload images. The number of people that want to record a sound is far far smaller.

This is not likely to ever be all that popular. I'd turn it into a much simpler site, then stop thinking about it. Chalk it up as good experience, and then work on something else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the frank feedback. Maybe in its current form it doesn't have much of a future. When this all started, my grand vision was the following:

Imagine that soundkeys are common-knowledge and familiar to everyone. Then, you could have soundkeys on wine bottles, menus, in magazine articles, books, business cards, basically anywhere.

Anyone can take their smart phone and take a picture of the soundkey (or enter it manually), and instantly know how to say the name of the wine, how to pronounce the items on the menu of some French restaurant, how a bird mentioned in the magazine sounds, how a car explosion in Iraq mentioned in the book sounds, how a potential client's name sounds, etc.

It would bring alive static pieces of paper (like menus, books, magazines, business cards, etc) : You see a soundkey anywhere and you know that you can hear a sound related to that thing.

So, to start things off, I started the website. Maybe instead of focusing on consumers, I could focus on talking to companies to start incorporating this into their products, books, etc. Of course, there needs to be a general awareness of soundkeys before companies use them, so there is a chicken-and- egg thing that needs to be addressed and which I thought that a consumer- facing website (i.e. soundkey.com) could address if it became popular.

<comment><USER3> What makes you think people want a soundkey on their business card, magazine, or restaurant menu? I'm guessing almost no one _really_ does, even if they also agree its a neat idea.

I understand how easy it is to convince yourself that a neat idea is a great business idea. That's what it seems like you're doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you don't mind my asking, is your name easy or difficult to pronounce?

[In my talking to people, I have found, statistically, that people with easy names (e.g. Bill Smith) think there is no demand for this service, and people who either have difficult names or work with lots of people with difficult/foreign names tend to think that this is useful and that there is demand for it.

Also, people who deal all the time with customers (e.g. sales people, realtors, etc) tend to think there is a lot of demand for it among their colleagues.

Of course they could be wrong. And even if they are right, this may not be a good business idea. But I have seen sufficiently high levels of interest in the idea, which is why I got started on this]

<comment><USER3> My name is definitely easy to pronounce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I can give much advice, but it might help for people to know what you think your target audience is and also what keywords you were using and what your ad text was.

To me it seems like you just aren't reaching the people who have a use for your site. I think you need to reach people who have a need that is met by your site and will instantly realize the value. For instance, just an idea, but maybe you can find hard to pronounce names and use those as a keyword and have the ad be something like 'tired of people mispronouncing your name?'

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think you're targeting the right markets. I don't think anyone would ever want to use something for the purpose of explaining how they would pronounce a word. Its educational in a way, but not really "fun".

You need to adjust your product so that anyone can use it. Maybe think along the lines of music/singing/mp3 upload sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I do try to explain on the site that it's not just for pronunciations, but for any sound whatsoever (funny sounds, etc)

It's like TwitPic but for sounds. You Record/Upload your sound and share on social media like Twitter, just like you upload pics to TwitPic and share on social media like Twitter.

Maybe I should de-emphasize the pronunciation angle and emphasize the "record any sound and share" angle?

<comment><USER2> "like TwitPic but for sounds"

I wouldn't use that verbatim, but that sounds like the right angle to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you guys think of a way to say that without using the word TwitPic, which I guess gets into trademark issues?

<comment><USER2> "SoundKey lets you share sounds on Twitter"?

I'd focus on the benefits of you service rather than the comparison. Most people probably won't know what TwitPic is anyway.

For that matter, personally I'd stay away from aligning too my branding closely with Twitter too, although that's certainly a use case I'd support.

Maybe:

"SoundKey is the easiest way to share [short?] audio [online|on your blog]."?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


COBOL ON COGS - <AUTHOR> http://www.coboloncogs.org/ <comment><USER2> Never before have I used a website as retro-feeling as this one.</comment>


Lisp.jl: A Clojure-like Lisp syntax for julia - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/swadey/Lisp.jl <comment><USER2> Why won't lisp syntax _just go away_?

<comment><USER3> Because a lot of people really like it. One of the really cool things about lisp syntax is that it exposes the programs abstract syntax tree, making manipulating the program itself easier. It really appeals to a certain way of thinking about programs, and sure it's not how everyone thinks about them out how people should all the time, but it's a great tool to have on your box.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Quiz Cafe - Download & Print Quiz Sheets in a matter of minutes. - <AUTHOR>

After running a successful quiz night for my brother's birthday party, I thought it would be cool to create some sort of web app that makes it really easy for people to download quiz sheets to print so they can host quiz nights easier.
I found a lot of sites that already provide this service to be way stuck in the 90s and were cluttered with way too much information - so my aim was to make it really simple and straight to the point.
I did the design of the site (character was created by Pasquale D'Silva), question resources, branding, front end development etc.
My friend @sesh handled all the magical back end stuff which was built using django.
I had originally built the site www.trivia-lab.com and used the Trivia Lab name, but realised that the word "trivia" was more associated with where I come from - Australia - and that Quiz is a more common name for the rest of the world. Therefore I now have two sites:
http://www.quizcafe.net
and http://www.trivialab.com.au
Thanks for checking it out! <comment><USER2> I'd replace your title tag:

(original) <title>Quiz Cafe - Download, print and play in a matter of minutes. | Free Quiz Questions - Free Quiz Packages - Free Printable Quiz Questions</title>

(proposed) <title>Free Quiz Questions and Answers - Download, print and play quizzes in a matter of minutes. | Quiz Cafe</title>

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Free Quiz Questions 27,100 gms (USA)

Free Printable Quiz Questions 320 gms (USA)

Free Quiz Packages 0 gms (USA)

Free Quiz Questions and Answers 14,800 gms (USA)

quiz questions and answers 135,000 gms (USA)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

gms - global monthly searches

If you haven't already I strongly suggest you run (not walk) and read everything patio11 has written about SEO and bingocardcreator.com.

I see there is a ton of longer tail traffic on 'xxxx quiz questions' where xxxx is a host of things e.g. science, bible, thanksgiving, christmas, sports, etc...

<comment><USER2> I see you implemented the changes. Hope it helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Thanks for your comments, much appreciated.

Yes, I did change the title tags like you suggested. I see what you did and realise why it should have a positive effect.

I read one of patio11's blog posts last night (I think it was SEO for startups). Quite a lot to take in, but it has definately left me with some ideas for moving forward.

Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> easy to click: <http://www.quizcafe.net> and <http://www.trivialab.com.au></comment>


NSA spied on Martin Luther King, documents reveal - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24279394

<comment><USER2> It was not just the NSA that was targeting American citizens at that time. The FBI's COINTELPRO operations were aimed at "surveying, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations".

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Now you know why OWS had no chance of succeeding.

This is how you kill justice, free speech and any other democratic movement. The thing is, this works up to a certain point, and then it blows up. If we're not going to correct the issue now, we (or maybe later generations, if we're "lucky") pay the price.</comment>


Enabling SMS subscriptions to your MailChimp list using Plivo - <AUTHOR> http://vincedasta.com/p/enabling-sms-subscriptions-pt1/

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Hope you find it helpful. I'll watch the discussion if anyone has any comments/questions</comment>


Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands - Starting With Mine - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2012/11/13/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored-posts-are-driving-away-brands

<comment><USER3> Good riddance! What he and others are complaining about is that Facebook has started to use pricing to stop them from spamming users. This is a good thing!

We're free-marketeers, right? Prices allow scarce resources (eyeballs, users are the product, remember?) to be rationed in an efficient manner. Would he prefer some nameless, faceless bureaucracy determine who gets to see his messages?

This is a commons problem on some level. Very similar to the issue with push notifications written about elsewhere. Too many companies used Facebook as a way to get around email spam filters, and now everyone (good actors included) is suffering.

Cry me a river.

<comment><USER4> If you are constantly getting spammed by a fan page that you explicitly _liked_ or _followed_ , then the appropriate answer is to unlike or unfollow it. There's no reason to curate information that you wanted to get to begin with.

What if Twitter implemented something like this where certain tweets from a person you are following do not appear? How would that feel?

This strikes me totally as a money play and not for the user.

<comment><USER5> > There's no reason to curate information that you wanted to get to begin > with.

But are you sure users actually _wanted_ that information? I strongly believe this assumption is false.

If I "like" something, I want to express that I _like_ it. I want my friends to know it. It's not a "subscribe" button, it's a "like" button, and contrary to what people in spam^H^H^H^Had business may believe, people actually attach meaning to what is written. It's not a #:G4202 button, it's a "like" button. If you call it "follow", you get a different meaning and different expectations.

> What if Twitter implemented something like this where certain tweets from a > person you are following do not appear? How would that feel?

Twitter is not Facebook. Twitter is about following people. Facebook is about showing people (my friends) what I like (and not necessarily caring what it has to say).

I, for one, welcome these new changes and want to repeat by GP: good riddance!

<comment><USER6> I think you've touched on the base problem of both sides of the argument -- it's a UX issue.

Facebook has given too much power to the 'like' button. There should be a different 'follow' or 'subscribe' button. If you subscribe to a page, you would expect to always get updates from it.

I only subscribed to facebook to be able to watch some dev videos. As I slowly became more used to it, I wanted to know how to get updates from the company page I work for. When I asked how to do this and was told to 'like' the company, that made no sense to me. What if I don't actually "like" something, but I still want to watch its activity?

<comment><USER4> Yes..this is exactly what I mean. If you don't want to be spammed from liking something, then don't allow the brands to reach out to users who liked their products. You can only do this with "follow."

By this definition, brands won't tell people to "like" their pages anymore, they will just say "follow" them. FB blurred the links and now no one knows what "like" or "follow" will do.

I can follow a brand and _still_ not get all the information from that brand. This is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems there are two different "Facebooks" - one for people, a real "scoial' network, the other for commercial entities and their customers. And this unacknowledged duality seems to be slowly coming apart.

There might be a huge opening here for a "companies only" facebook clone, where you can only get updates from your favorite brands and service providers, not socialize with friends.

<comment><USER8> "There might be a huge opening here for a "companies only" facebook clone, where you can only get updates from your favorite brands and service providers, not socialize with friends."

Isn't this just Twitter?

<comment><USER9> No it's called LinkedIn.

And while valuable in it's own right has no where near the engagement numbers of Facebook.

<comment><USER10> I don't think LinkedIn is good for this at all. I see things like earnings press releases on LinkedIn, or "XYZ, Inc. invents new 2nm transistor that won't be around for 300 years." on LinkedIn. LinkedIn presents itself as a social network for professionals, and I think they cover that quite well.

Twitter doesn't quite fit nsns's description as a 'Companies Only' social network, as much of it is social. I don't necessarily know that anyone would willingly sign up for a companies only social network, despite what companies may dream and pray for :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Without meaning to be unnecessarily negative; what I find most interesting about this post is that neither the article, nor any comments in this thread so far, even mention Google Plus. Cuban seems to write it off as a contender, even a revived MySpace seems more likely to him as an alternative. Why?

<comment><USER9> He's bluffing, and could have easily said Orkut or Pinterest.

<comment><USER12> Good point, last I remember pintrest is more popular than MySpace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it just me or does $3000 seem like a really cheap price for the Dallas Mavericks to reach 1M+ fans? Would it make any significant difference to their marketing budget if the price were cut to $1000 or doubled to $6000?

<comment><USER14> I had the same thought.

Think of when you go to an NBA game and they give out some sort of "freebie". I would imagine those game "freebies" cost much more than $3000, and regardless of that, with Facebook you are potentially reaching the 1M+ fans where as those game "freebies" might only be handed out to a measly 5K. It seems like a no-brainer to use Facebook to reach 1M+ fans at that price, vs what they traditionally pay for other forms of marketing.

Also, you could easily be selective on what sort of post validates for a $3K (post) promotion. Not all posts are worth promoting to every one of your fans, doing so would just weaken the brand image (in my eyes).

<comment><USER15> The problem is that you got that reach before _for free_. It's the change that's upset people. If Twitter started charging companies for tweeting there would be a similar backlash.

People feel betrayed by a company desperate for new revenue.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, very true. That makes much more sense why people are upset. However, I still think they should just take a step back and just look at the cost of more "traditional" alternatives that, what it seems like, are never even questioned for their price to value ratio. An extreme example would be how the Ford Explorer launch on Facebook generated more traffic than a Super Bowl ad [1].

[1] [http://www.socialsyntax.net/2012/02/facebook-trumped- super-b...](http://www.socialsyntax.net/2012/02/facebook-trumped-super-bowl- ads-but-marketing-integration-is-the-key/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get it. Facebook isn't working out so they are considering a change to MySpace or Tumblr? How about changing your focus to oh I dunno ... your website!? Moving from one free, closed-garden system to another isn't progress.

<comment><USER16> This - it's so dumb to cry about that. Build your brand on our website, your own social network, & your own smart phone apps. They can push/pull/interact with any other - but not building your own with that type of budget is assinine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Know what drives away consumers, Mr. Cuban? Awkwardly obvious product placement: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEBtJqze0rE&t=8s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEBtJqze0rE&t=8s)

<comment><USER16> My wife now watches Shark Tank with me and is becoming rather shrewd in evaluating businesses. We both hate the product placements.

Speaking of business model that drives away customers. Did you know you give up 5% of your business to appear on shark tank because of the exposure? With or without the deal. That is why they do the follow-ups on companies that did or did not accept a deal. It's good for the shows owners.

<comment><USER18> Did you know that YC takes 7% of your business, whether or not you get funded a demo day? Shark Tank may be a better deal. Or not. But it is ridiculous to argue that based on the fee for a prime time infomercial.

<comment><USER17> 7%, seriously? I had no idea.

Why are people clamoring to get accepted by YC? I'd be doing everything I could to make it a last resort, not a means to succeed.

<comment><USER19> Well, apart having personal advice on tap from a range of experts, the fact that on demo day your idea _will_ be in front of the best VC groups in SV, access to YC alumni for help and advice, I can't imagine why people would give up 7% of their nascent startup either!

(this is sarcasm btw.)

More seriously: you're giving up 6-7% of your company in return for a whole swathe of things that are very likely to increase your chances of succeeding significantly. Most people don't have ready access to the kind of personal networks that YC offers: the combination of that access, plus the social proof of having the YC imprinteur massively increases the likelihood of success for many, many startups.

And I'm saying this as someone who's very unlikely to ever apply to YC, but even I can see the benefits in applying, as do many others who choose to go to YC even if they don't in fact need the money: the fringe benefits are worth far, far more than the cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> His vision of Facebook makes no sense. There is no chance in hell Facebook will allow every "Liked" product, service and company to spam the users' newsfeed as much as they want, considering the primary purpose of it is to keep up to date with what friends and family are doing.

<comment><USER21> > There is no chance in hell Facebook will allow every "Liked" product, > service and company to spam the users' newsfeed as much as they want

Except that's exactly what they've done for years now. The real problem is that Facebook didn't limit this _from the beginning_ , because now companies are going to complain. I removed all my "likes" several years ago for that reason.

Facebook likes to push out extreme changes and then walk them back to what people actually want. This is the opposite of the right way to do it.

<comment><USER22> That's usually how it works with commons - everybody can use it until someone starts to screw it up.

Facebook originally allowed this because it enticed both user and content engagement. Now, Facebook needs to reel it back in to preserve whatever value is left of it's activity feed - _before_ it becomes the next useless myspace.

<comment> grey-area What FB should have done is let users control what is in their feed - <USER2> them options to define groups of people and let them view just certain groups in the feed, or split the concepts of liking and following. Instead it seems Facebook is happy to spam users for you if you'll pay for the privilege. Not really good for anyone involved, and not worth it for businesses long term to pay only to be perceived as unwanted spam amongst personal posts.

<comment><USER21> Facebook does have groups. But yes, what Facebook did was a bait-and-switch: there were likes, which were just biographical information, but then those turned into subscriptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> With regard to online advertising - companies follow people, people don't follow companies. Facebook gets this.

Let's play worst case scenario here - Cuban convinces all companies to leave Facebook. Then what? Do you honestly think there would be a mass diaspora of users because all the companies left? Hell no. Sure, Facebook's stock would plummet, but they'd still have options, because as long as Facebook has users, it has a future.

Now, let's reverse the scenario. All your friends leave Facebook. Then what? You leave too and so do all the companies, because after all, Pepsi doesn't hang out on Facebook to advertise to Coke. If the people leave, Facebook dies.

Facebook isn't a charity, nor a utopia, it's a company that is required by law to maximize value for shareholders. Facebook is already a master of providing value, they've built an empire by doing so. Now they have to learn how to extract value, and it's very smart of them to begin by extracting value from companies in a way that doesn't significantly impact user experience.

But this is just the beginning. Soon, Facebook will begin extracting value from people in more obvious ways. And I'd bet the #1 question on Zuckerberg's mind right now is, "How much shit will people take?" How many ads until everyone leaves?

I don't know the answer to that, but judging by how much shit is forced down the throat of an average American during a 30-minute episode of MTV cribs, I'd bet we'll take a lot more than we realize.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is kind of amusing, in a way. It always seemed weird to me that large corporations were willing to invest so much in promoting Facebook - From CNN promoting it on every commercial to big brands creating departments to manage 'Social Media' - e.g. Facebook and Twitter.

Did they all think this was free advertising, forever? FB is (at least now) a publicly traded, 'walled garden' after all, and Twitter isn't much different.

Looks like the social media revenue model is becoming clear: All your customer are belong to us, pay up.

<comment><USER25> Isn't the model always been clear: advertising?

You can run around in circles moaning about how it isn't "fair", but it isn't the Mark Cuban who built the infrastructure or attracted the users with a core product on Facebook. Secondly, Facebook never guaranteed 100% reach, I'm not sure why Mark Cuban expects it (and for free!).

<comment><USER26> To be fair, he asked in his post for cost certainty, not "free."

Now, honestly, what _I_ want as a user _and_ as an advertiser is the ability for the user to turn up and down the volume of another entity, be it a person or brand. I may want medium on George Takei, high on King's X and low on Hormel's Spam (yes, I like Spam.) Do you think it'd be valuable to send things to different demographics as a brand? I know I think so, especially if I can get some cost certainty.

The problem is that the amount of likes and the value of the brand are unrelated. Takei is not going to pay as much as Quizno's, even if he has three times the fans.

<comment><USER25> If I recall correctly, I think Facebook used to allow you to fine tune who you saw on your news feed. Not sure if it's still buried somewhere, gone, or what the uptake on this feature was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Mark Cuban is a primary investor in the patent troll Vringo. Why are we pretending he's some kind of tech trendsetter?

<comment><USER28> He's not pretending to be a tech trendsetter, he's being an investor, and hedging his bets, as all good investors do

 _This is a hedge against the unlimited patent exposure all the companies I have investments in face. Patent risk is impossible to quantify. It's unrealistic for most small to medium businesses to have any clue which patents they are at risk over. Vringo's IP from the merger is the flip side of that risk and offers an imperfect hedge. So, I made the investment._

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/04/17/cuban- says...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/04/17/cuban-says-vringo- stake-hedges-patent-risk-in-other-investments/2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > "The big negative for Facebook is that we will no longer push for likes or > subscribers because we can't reach them all. Why would we invest in > extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them? That's > crazy.

I think this mindset is the poisons venom in Facebook's revenue strategy. Facebook is seen as just a social network and not a legitimate communication or advertising platform like TV, radio, or mobile phones. Cuban has no problem paying for Ad's on Radio and TV, but is appalled when Facebook charges for a similar (And arguably more accurate) service. Facebook's response also makes little logical sense--On one hand they say the fees are to fight spam, but the screen clearly shows that the fees are to communicate with more people.

<comment><USER30> TV/Radio/Google Adwords/etc is drastically different from FB's advertising model.

The key point, as Cuban says in this article, is that companies spend real resources in trying to acquire "Likes" on FB. People build entire FB tabs. Curate what content gets posted. Build deep integrations on their websites. I've built a lot of this type of FB integration for clients...and I charge a lot, so I know this isn't cheap.

People do this with the expectation that they can reach the people who like their brand. When FB changes the game, it breaks this assumption and makes it doubly expensive to curate and communicate with your FB following. This is pretty much the gist what Cuban is arguing in the article.

On TV/Radio/Google Adwords/etc, there isn't a first step where a brand spends a lot of time and money sending users to said 3rd party advertising platform. You don't first spend development resources on integrating with the radio station's website, ultimately advertising their website for free and sending them tons of free traffic. You just give the radio or TV station your money, they play your ad, and that's it. That is the extent of your advertising investment. It's very concrete and simple to implement.

This is not the extent of the investments people have made in building up FB pages and followers. Brands have spent and continue to spend a ton of time and money on this and like Cuban, they are justified in being ticked off when FB changes the rules in an effort to squeeze revenue from them.

I have no doubt that money is the reason behind charging to communicate with your followers on FB. The altruistic motives like "fighting spam" would best be done with an algorithm. It surely wouldn't be something you could "opt out of" just by having a fat wallet. By FB allowing brands to pay them to spam people just means FB is fine with spam as long as they get paid. That doesn't seem like a stance that has the well being on their users foremost in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It makes sense for him to want to leave considering Facebook is really just providing a newsletter service, and it was the marketing that the companies have done to drive them to their Facebook pages. It should be a mutually beneficial relationship, not one where Facebook is trying to milk both companies and consumers. The problem is they aren't making 'enough' off of consumers, and therefore are trying to go after companies too. It's chicken and egg problem, and now that Facebook has 'everyone' on it they are trying to milk it. Yes, there is value of guaranteeing that X number of followers will see a post in their feed - which true fans would want to see anyway (and based on algorithms likely would or would be an active visitor to their Facebook page), however Facebook is trying to prove their $100 billion valuation by essentially trying to extort companies, whereas it should be a slightly above cost of reaching (as the minimum). Facebook is trying to charge Advertising prices for something that is at its foundation a service being provided; Facebook has no monopoly on containing fans. If Facebook doesn't change this quickly it has no chance of ever becoming a $100 billion company, because by that time Facebook won't be freely marketed by big companies linking to their 'Facebook pages.' Facebook's abusing the relationship, and like anyone in an abusive relationship - it won't end well for the abuser, they won't get what they want. - at least not once more people realize it's abuse and they don't need to be in that relationship.

<comment><USER32> Agreed. It sounds whiny coming from Cuban, but imagine you're a small business owner who relies on your Facebook page to communicate with your fans. You put a lot of time and money into gaining those fans organically, and now Facebook is essentially holding them hostage. What was that little blurb that Facebook used to have on their sign-on page? "It's free and it always will be." Hmmm. Don't promise a free service and then reneg. Perhaps businesses wouldn't have been so eager to get on Facebook if they knew that access to their fans would come at a steep price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> One could interpret this as Facebook being a "victim" of their own success - they have so much demand for advertising that they have to limit access to their userbase in order to ensure that the advertising retains its value. Perhaps, as Cuban says, uninformed business owners think they're paying for something other than what they're getting and demand will dry up once advertisers get wise. Or perhaps Facebook's conversion rate is just that good.

<comment><USER34> More like so little demand for advertising.

FB has a massive supply of impressions which has bottomed-out remnant/auction CPM rates industry wide.

I see this as a move to try and introduce a (somewhat) premium ad product. Users have already indicated interest in the brand -- now they will have to pay to reach these intenders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Here's another way to look at this.

When I subscribe to a page, I expect to get updates on new postings.

Because Facebook is using their EdgeRank to filter out those postings, I'm no longer get updates on all the postings. As such I've to go to the subscribed page manually.

No wonder I'm getting so few updates lately. Because Facebook is filtering out everything. How backwards is that?

<comment><USER5> Go to your profile, find the list of things you like.

<https://www.facebook.com/[user> ID or name]/favorites

Tell me, do you want to receive updates on all of 0.5k things you liked? Because if each of them writes even one post a week, you can forget about ever reading things from your family and friends. And the latter is what Facebook was designed for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why do brands keep pushing traffic to the Facebook/Twitter pages instead of their own pages? They should create dynamic interesting content on their main pages and use social media to push traffic towards it instead of using social media as a goal.

Ownership of your following is really important and at the end of the day the only way to do that is to have a proper standalone website.

<comment><USER37> Why do people rob banks? Because that's where the money is. Facebook and Twitter are where the people are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> He has a great point. It takes resources to build up an audience anywhere, and then the assumption is generally that once you have that audience you've gained the right to speak to it. Facebook expects you to pay to build your audience (via ads) and then again to speak to it (via "reach"). This makes it a pretty bad idea to spend resources on building an audience there.

Will Twitter do something like this? I don't think so. But it's also a crapshoot whether your tweet will actually be seen or too far down your tweet stream for someone to actually see it. I still believe that email marketing is The. Best. place to build an audience because you have permission to send a message to someone that is almost guaranteed to at least have its headline read.

Of course the rules of the road apply wherever you build an audience, meaning you can't spam or abuse the privilege to talk to them. But all things being equal, owning the channel has some HUGE advantages.

<comment><USER39> The power of owning the channel is a huge advantage, I wish more people understood. Email marketing used to be the best, but email read rates are usually less than 20% and it's over a few days. There is a better medium to build an audience that guarantees they get read...And definitely agree about not spamming or abusing the privilege.

<comment><USER38> Ok, now I'm curious... which medium/channel are you talking about?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> As with all new ad platforms you have to test the ROI. Apparently in his businesses he didn't see the benefit and did what all good marketers would do, pull your inventory. As Facebook tweaks it's EdgeRank Algo I am sure they will figure out how to get the most "bang for the buck". If not their stock price will continue it's slide.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't know the FB advertising system inside & out either but like Cuban, I'm miffed by this. The implication here is that companies essentially don't own their own "likes." What value do they have outside of being a vanity metric if you can't reach them aside from coughing up thousands of extra dollars?

<comment><USER3> They _don't_ own their "Likes"! Has that ever, even for one single moment, really been in doubt? Facebook owns the platform. You play in their sandbox, you follow their rules. They own _all_ the toys.

Look at Twitter locking down their API or Apple inconsistently enforcing arcane app store rules. When someone else owns the platform, they _effectively_ own anything you create with it.

<comment><USER42> You nailed it. Lots of great arguments for both sides, but FB owns the platform and all the toys. All big brands know the risks of making big bets to sell stuff in another guy's yard. In a free market FB can move the goalposts all they want,but the reach is still worth the risk until the cost of doing business with them makes the roi equal to or less than other big reach platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why not use all social networking avenues? I use Instragram, Tumblr, and Twitter alongside Facebook, but even without paying anything on Facebook, I get views and interaction from users that I wouldn't get if I said "fuck it" about Facebook.

<comment><USER44> My impression from the article is that's what he's doing. He's still going to use FB, just de-emphasize it as the main source for fans to follow the Mavs.

<comment><USER43> I feel like totally different people use Twitter compared to FB, with some intersection. I x-post everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> He makes fair points. Though the one thing that really grinds my gears about Facebook (and I will state it so that Facebookers can consider the issue) is that I cannot use their Open Graph API to build FB apps without being an active member of the network. Being an active FB member requires me to give them my mobile number, an spend a questionable amount of time using it. Time better spent _working_. I wish I could just pay them a developers fee ($50/year ? ), and have my own little dev account with no other feature other than being able to use the API.

<comment><USER5> But what kind of apps do you want to make on Facebook if you don't _use_ Facebook yourself? How do you plan to test it, or even make sure if it fits the ecosystem?

<comment><USER45> The developer account should allow me to test for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> If anything the situation is worse than he makes it out to be because apart from Edgerank factors there's also the ease with which fans can permanently hide the visibility of page posts. All it takes is disapproval of one post, followed by a single unsubscribe.

No easy way around this maybe, since fans have to be able to easily unsubscribe, but it's another big reason why collecting a ton of likes for your Facebook page may be largely wasted energy.

<comment><USER5> How about not posting shit as a way to prevent people from unliking? I see more and more companies posting things without any value just to make sure their logo pops up regularly on user's news feed.

<comment><USER46> I think that misses my point. I'm all for easy hiding of page posts for fans, but the honest thing for FB to do is call a spade a spade and remove the Like when that happens. As things stand the page still thinks they have a fan when they don't - it's not a good reflection of reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> _> "I haven't bought and I wouldn't buy here. I think they have to determine what their business is right now and how they will make money at it. I don't believe they are clear about either."_

Odd. I distinctly remember Cuban saying how he bought FB stock as a trade, and exited the position at a loss when he saw that the initial rally wasn't going to materialize.

<comment><USER48> He did, I think the key word in that thread is the "here".

A lot of analysts like Facebook at the $18-$20 price point, something reflected in the stocks relative stability since August.

He did buy into the IPO expecting a quick bump which didn't materialize. And he doesn't blame Facebook for it.

[http://blogmaverick.com/2012/09/04/facebook-handled-their- ip...](http://blogmaverick.com/2012/09/04/facebook-handled-their-ipo-exactly- right/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> He's not doing anything other businesses haven't considered. I'm sure he'll go back.

</comment><comment><USER50> FB is probably the last social network I'll ever use. If it goes, I'm back to email plus a whitelist and updating my webpage once every two years or so.

</comment><comment><USER51> How does Cuban make money these days?

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe when the "brands" are gone, Facebook will stop driving away users.

</comment><comment><USER52> Easy fix: change the text on the like button to 'spam me and my friends'.</comment>


Apple is close to acquiring Shazam, sources say - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/sources-apple-is-acquiring-music-recognition-app-shazam/ <comment><USER3> So last year I was in a big brand clothing shop and I heard a cool song. I Shazamed it. At home searched it on YouTube.

To my shock, it was launched a few months ago and it barely had 5k views. The shock for me was how the hell a giant clothing company (H&M if I recall correctly) has such an underground song on.

So I started googleing around to find out how music in stores gets selected, and long story short, this is a multi-million dollar business and there are companies which create playlists according to your brand. These companies also scour the world for underground artists, because you want your store to have the best music before it's popular, so that customers perceive you as a trendsetter.

What is the success metric for these playlist companies? One of the task of store employees is to report how many customers they notice using Shazam in the store.

<comment><USER4> This should have been an opportunity for Soundcloud actually, a lot of underground musical artists and an opportunity to connect via a large community platform to spread word.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but also a ton of unlicensed music (most of which came by way of remixes/DJ mixes), which they can't _license_ it to soundtrack cos. Spotify owns one (major investor, created by an employee) called Soundtrack Your Brand. Pandora offers one as well.

<comment><USER4> Thats true actually and I've seen SoundCloud plagued by theses issues but there's always plenty talent that get accepted such as Lil Yachty or XXXtentacion or even Chance the Rapper who all started on SoundCloud, I think SoundCloud has the capability to filter out the easy hits to market and partner with

<comment><USER6> If it was obvious what the "easy hits" were, I'm sure many labels would be competing for them.

<comment><USER4> Not really, Chance the rapper, Lil Yachty etc had huge amounts of listens etc on SoundCloud which is why they became famous, they werent being signed by labels despite their heavy recognition. Chance the rapper went independent, like the thing is that labels only sort of pay attention to SoundCloud, the major medium is still YouTube, but we even see musicians there with followings and millions of views not being signed.

Not trying to sound ass-hurt but if theres a big platform of dedicated listeners and theres a lot of people with millions of listens, wouldnt those be easy hits?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They're going to remove my "Open with Spotify" button aren't they

<comment><USER8> Ugh, this has become my favorite music feature of all time. I've made amazing playlists in Spotify by using Shazam around town in cafes and clubs. It was too good to be true.

<comment><USER9> I use sound hound, it has the same thing.

<comment><USER8> Awesome, thanks for the tip.

<comment><USER10> Soundhound also recognizes songs by humming. (Shazam can't)

<comment><USER11> Is it as good as Shazam at finding songs? I remember trying it early and not being impressed, but it was very brief so my sample size was too small.

<comment><USER12> I use both regularly. SoundHound is my go to by default but I use Shazam as a backup. Shazam is more successful normally but I like SoundHound more for whatever reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Relevant fact for context: the Pixel 2 shipped with a built-in music identification feature.

[https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/19/how-googles- pixel-2-now-p...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/19/how-googles-pixel-2-now- playing-song-identification-works/)

<comment><USER14> Siri has been able to identify music (I believe using Shazam?) for 3 - <USER2> years. I suspect they were shopping themselves around, and Apple wanted to own the technology enough to give them their asking price.

<comment><USER15> The technology Google is using here is very different. They also have active detection on Assitant, but this one is a passive 24/7 detection. There's a local database of the ~10k most popular songs, and it's only ~50mb [0]. It's all done locally, and when it works (Which is very often), you just have to look down at your phone and the song name is already there on the lockscreen without you touching anything.

[0] [https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-2-now-playing- so...](https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-2-now-playing-song-list/)

<comment><USER16> I don't know that sounds very cool, but it really just seems like a waste of power. I can't think of the last time I would want that.

<comment><USER15> As mentioned above, this is already running to do OK Google detection. It's also not scanning 100% of the audio, as far as I understand, it analyzes samples roughly each minute. I'm sure they would not make this a feature if it had a big impact. From my own experience, turning this feature on or off made no difference in battery life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why would Apple pay for Shazam? It'd be totally trivial to recreate their service if you are Apple. My guess is Shazam have patents and Apple will stop this feature on Android, one of the most compelling features of the new pixel is always on Shazam equivalent.

<comment><USER18> The usage-related data sets that Shazam has collected over its operational history are likely the biggest driver of value for this deal. Think about the insight you could gain by cross-referencing Shazam lookups with iTunes downloads. Probably lots of insight in how certain genre fan bases intersect, good predictive analytics on time-to-monetization of hot underground bands, etc

<comment><USER16> This is such a good point. Apple Music (and Spotify) are pouring money into people who stay on the beat. To this day this is still very analog (which in many ways is a good thing). But when your Apple or Google or whomever you must see the power of using basic statistics to do some part of this. (You could use ML too but that is super overkill most likely).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember this patent threat [http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/07/patent- infringement](http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement) and lost any respect I had for them.

<comment><USER20> I understand being angry at patent trolls, but you are aware that Shazam isn't one correct? They actually use the patented IP in question. Even patent attorneys in his own country effectively told him he's likely infringing.

<comment><USER21> IANAL but actually the "software" \- patent "system" in european has been under changes since around ~2000 which means that there would not have been any problem in releasing his code... ([https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal- texts/html/epc/2016/e...](https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal- texts/html/epc/2016/e/ar52.html)) (basically they are not de jure, but they would have a hard time to actually enforce this, if it is trivially).

actually the lawyer did make a strange assumption..

well there would still be a problem if he ever want to travel outside the eu where somebody could actually claim the infrigdement.

(Edit: in germany where I live there were patent processes about that matter in ~2000 and the federal court ruled in favor of the patent, however after/at the end of 2000 they basically always rejected them.)

<comment><USER22> The patentability of software has been significantly broadened since then in Germany, just look for example at the cases Dynamische Dokumentengenerierung and Routenplanung.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Shazam is a feature not a product: index the Fourier Transform of all songs.

<comment><USER24> If you can point to any blog post that shows how one would implement Shazam, I'd love to read it.

I read somewhere that the Pixel 2's on-device index of 10,000 popular songs was only ~60MB. That blew my mind.

<comment><USER25> the original paper is quite readable: [https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf](https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf)

shazam's value is obviously in how it scaled this method to millions of users and songs but implementing it for yourself on a limited catalog of songs is a couple days of work once you have the theory. in fact this was a lab project for the intro signal processing class at berkeley that i ta'd.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the link. I thought these things involved a lot of markov models and gaussian functions but this is mostly just some pretty slick engineering. The 1000x search speed seems very good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was looking for a way to see the lyrics of a song on Spotify. The official Spotify help page recommended using SoundHound instead for lyrics. SoundHound can listen to the music and show you the lyrics in real time line by line. That was pretty cool. I wonder how Shazam and SoundHound differ and how they make money.

<comment><USER28> Plug here: I used to work for SoundHound. They just have more sophisticated deep learning going on (the cofounders wrote the original papers on deep learning back at standford). SoundHound and Shazaam are similar on the surface, but its all the tech underneath that's different.

Checkout Hound/Houndify: www.houndify.com

SoundHound truly is the most innovative company I have worked at so far, and their tech is the very best I've seen, and I've worked at quite a few tech shops by now. Their partnership with Nvidia is awesome, and I can't wait to see their work come to fruition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> what is the bigger picture here with Apple's media intentions? Bought Pop Up Archive (podcast tech), Shazam, hires a top TV exec, and that's only just this week. Is Netflix on the radar?

<comment><USER30> Apple's core competency: sell flat computers.

Anything that brings you deeper into that ecosystem, feeding the likelihood of buying another flat computer, is fair & likely game for Apple to buy or compete with. Shazam: you hear a song, use phone to recognize it[1], download album from Apple Music, ... you're a little more likely to stay within the iOS ecosystem and buy another iPhone.

[1] - Recently I stopped at a traffic light; cheap chopped car pulls up with music blaring hard edgy electronica. Something sounded interesting about it. Yank out iPhone, run Shazam, identify song before car drives off. Download album which is about...software engineering?!

<comment><USER31> Well, don't leave us hanging, what was the album? :)

<comment><USER30> "Brute Force" by The Algorithm: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/brute- force/1083396755](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/brute-force/1083396755) reply

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The integration via Siri is fantastic. Instead of opening the Shazam app, you just ask Siri. In fact, there is little reason to have the app around if Apple buys them. Just make the integration native.

\- Hey Siri, find this song.

* It's "Just Jammin" from "Grammatik"

\- Please save it

* Done!

<comment><USER10> It appears that what you wish for is already a feature on iOS, Android, and Windows:

[http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/identify-song-cortana- windows-1...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/identify-song-cortana-windows-10/)

Side note: WinPhones had music recognition integrated since 2014 at least, but nobody seemed to notice or care.

<comment><USER33> Sony Ericsson feature phones apparently had the feature since 2006(!) [http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20060523005400/en/Grac...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20060523005400/en/Gracenote- Sony-Ericsson-Partner-Provide-Mobile-Music)

<comment><USER34> And it worked surprisingly well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> >>>Notably, though, both of the numbers we've heard are lower than the $1.02 billion (according to PitchBook) post-money valuation the company had in its last funding round, in 2015.

What happens here in terms of payouts? Who gets screwed and who comes out ahead, assuming this turns out to be true?

<comment><USER36> Well first off, the employees for sure. Then it just comes down to which investor got better terms as to who gets screwed the least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I switched from Shazam to SoundHound a long time ago like many others pointed out, SoundHound is just a better product. But geeze, money talks. With Apple's backing, how does SoundHound compete? Perhaps Google/Amazon should snatch up SoundHound to keep that competition going.

<comment><USER28> SoundHound has a number of beefy corporate partnerships already. They have a very intelligently designed API around their deep learning models that 3rd parties are using in their own in-house voice/music products (www.houndify.com).

I am curious what their end-goal is though. I think they can likely stand on their own if they play their cards right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I heard the Soundhound search tech under the hood was much better... but I guess Shazam has the mindshare.

<comment><USER39> in my experience a/b testing shazam just has a way, way bigger database. It would easily identify really obscure stuff like 1970s Arabic psych rock or disco even if it wasn't even available in US online stores, and wasn't ever sold here. Same goes for gracenote, and the other systems that tried the same shtick

the database is the golden goose here, not the algorithm. it's similar to what made grooveshark more fun than spotify

<comment><USER40> But then Apple already Has the Data, Apple Music and iTunes Store.

This is the Tech vs Data question, it seems people value Data a lot more.

<comment><USER41> You underestimate the world of music that isn't available via iTunes, Apple Music or Spotify. It's huge. While Shazam is far from perfect for obscure music, it surprised me at times and iTunes or streaming services aren't even close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I always thought Spotify should buy Shazam. This article explains why they haven't: "... the $1.02 billion post-money valuation [Shazam] had in its last funding round, in 2015."

<comment><USER43> Spotify bought The Echo Nest.

<comment><USER34> And killed the public API :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Seemed likely since around iOS 6 or 7 they debuted Siri's music recognition feature which was powered by Shazam.

<comment><USER45> When I saw the headline, my first thought was "didn't they do that years ago?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Siri can already recognize a song, and apparently this uses licensed Shazam technology. But I never want to use that, and instead use Shazam, because I don't want to talk to my phone in public.

I'm afraid Apple will kill the app and just want me to use Siri.

<comment><USER47> You can turn on write to Siri in the options

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> As an example, say you own a single share in Shazam, are there any ways to figure what that one single share could be worth? - Assuming Shazam is bought for $100 Million.

<comment><USER49> If you own the share (exercised the option to buy it, were granted a share, what-have-you), you'll get a letter once the deal is finalized. If they were bought for $100m, you'll likely get a letter saying that your share is worth $0.

<comment><USER48> Ok thank you for explaining! Curious about the $0 bit though

<comment><USER50> Depends on the deal, and how many shares of Shazam has been issued. If its a straight up 100 mill deal, and there are 1 mill shares, and you have 1 stock, well you get 100 usd. But the deal might be structured way more advanced, or Shazam might have a lot of debt etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I like Shazam. I hope Apple doesn't break it.

<comment><USER52> I wonder if they'll drop Android support.

<comment><USER53> There's an Apple Music for Android...

<comment><USER54> Did you ever try it? This app works so terribly on Android (really, one of the worst apps I've ever used) that I just assume Apple makes it bad on purpose to somehow make naive people believe Android is somehow worse.

<comment><USER42> Glad to hear the product manager for iTunes for Windows is still employed by Apple...

<comment><USER55> I just thought about quite an ironic situation. A new-hire at Apple starts their first day in a software dev position for desktop applications. They're very excited to be creating consumer Apple products. The new-hire is introduced to their team.

New-hire: What are we working on?

Supervisor: iTunes for Windows.

<comment><USER56> Implying iTunes for Windows is still being worked on. That's a good one.

<comment><USER57> It's a sad thing when the product being dead would be the upgrade you hope for. I'm referring to the Mac version though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Does anyone else have better success with SoundHound? I feel like their product is much better.

</comment><comment><USER59> BBC quotes $400 million amount.

</comment><comment><USER60> Truth in headlines:

 _Apple is close to to acquishuttering Shazam, say friends of Shazam founders to shake the bushes for a bidding war._

</comment><comment><USER61> The built-in song recognition in the Pixel 2, has played wonders for Shazam's money tunes.

</comment><comment><USER62> Does it feel like the second gilded age to anyone else?

<comment><USER23> what do you mean?

<comment><USER62> Massive consolidation of major companies and rampant inequality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Basically, whaaaa...?

</comment><comment><USER64> Too bad, that movie with Shaq was awful.

</comment><comment><USER65> I thought most companies were moving towards NN for this. Doesn't Shazam rely on a ton of audio processing and not NNs? Seems like a backward move.

<comment><USER8> Their processing works perfectly - why would you need an NN?

<comment><USER66> NN would be more useful maybe for "recognize this song by me humming it, da- na-na'ing its main riffs, or badly singing a few words".

<comment><USER8> Yeah that's true. I would hope they would make that a different function though. Google uses NNs for the android keyboard autocorrect now and it will incorrectly change _correctly_ spelled words that I wrote 3 words back because it decided I wanted to write a more "likely" sentence. It replaced "worry about that" with "sorry about that". The shotgun approach of NNs in certain scenarios is infuriatingly frustrating. Sometimes an exact match is preferable to a probabilistic method.</comment></comment></comment></comment>