Our Long Bets and Predictions about 02020 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.longnow.org/02020/02/26/12-long-bets-and-predictions-about-02020/ <comment><USER3> Not sure why they're so quick to write off Long Bet #9. It's highly likely we'll reach 1,000,000 worldwide casualties from Covid-19 during a 6-month period before the end of year (defined in the bet's terms as "hospitalizations").

And if the hypothesis turns out to be true that it was an accidental release from one of Wuhan's 2 laboratories doing bat virus research, that's definitely a "bioerror" under the terms of the bet.

There's significant circumstantial evidence it could have been a lab accident(early Chinese reporting about the index case, 1 lab location a few blocks away from seafood market, bat species, earlier lab accident, etc), but nothing more at this point. But we may know more by the end of the year.

Edit: This is _not_ the wild conspiracy theory about a bioengineered virus in a weapons lab. This is a hypothesis about accidental bat pee on a lab worker conducting routine research, or some similar accident (such accidental releases are confirmed to have happened _twice_ with SARS-Cov-1 virus in a Beijing lab). Laboratory-acquired infections do happen, sometimes with deadly consequences. In my mind, it's the most feasible scenario at this point, given no one has provided proof that bats were even sold at the seafood market that was blamed. And we know that many officials were eager to cover this all up.

<comment><USER4> the main thing about the accidental release theory to me is it neglects the intermediary animal aspect most scientists seem to agree on.

An accidental transmission from bats to humans in the lab: yes I could believe that. An accidental lab transmission from bats to pangolins to humans (currently thought likely) is much harder to believe. It doesn't follow the rule of simple explanations.

The lab-transmission theory is also dangerous because it's currently baseless in terms of hard evidence, yet is immensely satisfying for millions of people who are scared, bored, sick, pissed off, etc due to the virus. Like more traditional conspiracy theories, the lab transmission theory uses circumstantial evidence to provide a simple explanation in the face of chaos, the unknown, the void, the reality that the virus can really mess with us all this badly. "It's from a chinese lab accident" is not the pseudo explanation we all need right now, with so many different types of tension nearing breaking point.

Yes, it could be true, but I hope you'll join me in really hoping it isn't and in pushing back on it til we see proper hard evidence. Because I unironically think that if it turns out to be true it could cause a war.

<comment><USER5> Three points:

1\. It is always going to be a little suspicious, at the very least, that the first COVID-19 outbreak happened in the same city as a virology institute. (Conversely, if we had a bizarre viral outbreak in Atlanta, I would have very similar suspicions.)

2\. Nobody is going to start a war with China. On top of the centuries-old reasons that attacking China is stupid, they have nuclear weapons.

3\. If it was released from a lab, it was almost certainly the result of an honest accident. SARS was very serious and China would have wanted to invest in research intended to prevent the kind of problems we are having now. If that research led to an accidental exposure and release of this virus, that would be a very cruel cosmic joke on us all, but it wouldn't be a conspiracy for global domination or anything stupid like that.

<comment><USER6> 1\. It is always going to be a little suspicious, at the very least, that the first COVID-19 outbreak happened in the same city as a virology institute. (Conversely, if we had a bizarre viral outbreak in Atlanta, I would have very similar suspicions.)

I guess, but the last major hop from animal to human was the Hendra virus in Australia in 2017 -- going from fruit bat to horse to human [1]. This was in the Brisbane area which I'm sure has viral research labs nearby, but because they're Australia, nobody even began to speculate as much.

Sometimes shit happens, and it's deeply human to want to create the fantastical explanation. Not saying it couldn't happen it's just again, not the simplest explanation at all, and so it's really just not very likely.

2\. Someone sure would start a trade war though.

[1] [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170815095124.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170815095124.htm)

<comment><USER3> It's really strange to me that you call this a "fantastical explanation" when there have already been 2 accidental lab releases resulting in human illness and death that were _acknowledged by the Chinese government_ of a virus in the same family (SARS-CoV-1):

[https://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_04_23/en/](https://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_04_23/en/)

[https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/02/content...](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/02/content_344755.htm)

<comment><USER7> From the WHO link, 4 people died, and they were tracking 300 contacts.

So a million times less severe.

Conspiracy Theorists will rant about the WHO being a China shill though, you can never win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > By "bioerror", I mean something which has the same effect as a terror > attack, but rises from inadvertance rather than evil intent. [1]

It's not clear that covid-19 isn't bioerror. There is a lot of information[2] pointing in that direction, so I wouldn't dismiss the theory outright the way the OP authors did. In any case it hasn't killed a million people.

1\. [http://longbets.org/9/](http://longbets.org/9/)

2\. [https://project-evidence.github.io](https://project-evidence.github.io)

<comment><USER9> 'A lot of evidence' isn't one link. But let's look at that link.

"We are an anonymous group of researchers"

Well that's a good start innit (to be fair, it looks like it really is well intentioned and they are making an honest attempt but without attribution it's impossible to tell).

anyway, their summary, which you should have posted: "Editors' note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus."

It's not 'a lot of evidence' either way.

<comment><USER10> > We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified > theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There > is no evidence that this is true;

"Engineered virus" is a _much_ more drastic claim than "escaped from a lab". Practically all of the viruses studied in labs are natural. Engineering living (or quasi-living) things beyond adding this or that protein is still more science fiction than science.

<comment><USER11> > Engineering living (or quasi-living) things beyond adding this or that > protein is still more science fiction than science.

Its certainly much farther along than you might think: [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6329/1040.full](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6329/1040.full) (link to paper "Design of a synthetic yeast genome")

edit: more recent info on the project here [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05164-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05164-3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Impressive prescience over 27 years ago:

"""Precocious associate editor and columnist for the Daily Telegraph, 32-year- old [Boris] Johnson has been called the "rising star of the write, not right". After indulging his taste for politics and intrigue as president of the Oxford Union, Boris exercised his "belief in freedom" as a journalist, Eurobashing and penning paeans to British "ordinariness". Not shy in clashing with party lines, Boris would "renegotiate EU membership so Britain stands to Europe as Canada, not Texas, stands to the USA". Pericles, state-builder and negotiator of Athenian autonomy, is his hero."""[1] (February 1997)

[1] [https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the- cabinet...](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-cabinet-of- tomorrow-1277684.html)

<comment><USER13> I don't think it's prescience. I think the cause and effect goes the other way.

One of the mechanisms by which Johnson rose to power was by having his well- connected friends talk him up as a future leader from a young age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > 75% of all incremental new generation will come from renewable/sustainable > energy in the U.S.

> Predictor: Jigar Shah.

> Prediction Duration: 16 years (02004–02020).

> Did the Prediction Come True? Yes — 76%, in fact.

> In January, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said it > expected 76% of new electric generating capacity to come from wind and solar > in 02020.

What‽ You can't confirm a prediction has come true by citing another prediction!

</comment><comment><USER15> > The technology will exist that will allow for the "faxing" (teleportation- > sending/receiving) of actual inanimate objects, such as text books, > clothing, jewelry and the like.

This one has two possible outcomes. Faxing is cloning, not teleportation - <USER2> the parentheses are contradictory. We can definitely fax 3D inanimate objects (3D scanning, email and 3D printing).

<comment><USER16> The fact they listed text books as one of the objects would seemingly rule out that interpretation of the question since literally faxing a text book was possible decades before the prediction was made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 12020 is better than 02020 ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs), [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar))

</comment><comment><USER18> Here is the original 10,000 year clock proposal, Danny Hillis with Wired Magazine:

[https://www.wired.com/1995/12/the-millennium- clock/](https://www.wired.com/1995/12/the-millennium-clock/)

<comment><USER19> This reminded me of a proposal to add a leading 1 to our year[2020 -> 12020]:

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

Cesare Emiliani proposed that the Construction of the Göbekli Tepe 12,000 years ago could represent a "start of civilization", creating a "holocene calendar".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe)

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone explain to me the reason for including a leading zero? Is that just a stylist choice of the long now foundation?

<comment><USER21> From their about page:

> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve > the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.

<comment><USER22> Still only pushes the problem back for an additional 100k years. If they were really serious they'd use prefix codes. :P

<comment><USER23> I am more worried about what we will do when we run out of 64 bit seconds for unix time.

500 billion years is barely half way through the star forming age of the universe.

<comment><USER24> Well, timespec does have 34 bits it's not using...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Tangential: I wish we had open betting/prediction markets for everything. At the risk of being naive, I had this idea of matching speculators with insurance buyers on a platform. Example: If I'm hosting an outdoor event in 2 days and I want to hedge against it raining on that day, I can buy insurance (bet against sunny) and get paid if it rains. Speculators can make money by selling insurance. Sort of like options trading but for real world events. Does this exist? Is it even legal?

<comment><USER26> Just google "bet on anything". There are a number of websites all listed on the first page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > In 02004, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that food consumption would be on > the wane, as "billions of tiny nanobots in the digestive tract and > bloodstream could intelligently extract the precise nutrients we require."

Love the fact that Kurzweil is still somewhat taken seriously considering how poor his track record has been.

</comment><comment><USER28> They made a Mistake at Teleportation: "The technology will exist that will allow for the "faxing" (teleportation- sending/receiving) of actual inanimate objects, such as text books, clothing, jewelry and the like."

This is TRUE, and can be easily done with 3D printers. Note that "faxing" by definition is not "teleportation", but "copying at a different location", which is exactly what 3D printing is.

</comment><comment><USER29> Which year are they talking about? Is this an octal number?

<comment><USER30> It's to do with their "long" outlook. They're thinking of when we'll be in the five digits and looking back at the fours.

<comment><USER29> I get that. But obviously they never programmed in a language where string to int conversion routines interpret such a number as an octal number ... which is quite common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I guess 01997 is better than 1.99.7.</comment>


Show HN: Maildown – Super Simple Email API - <AUTHOR> https://www.maildown.app <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

A few weeks ago, I posted about my startup, Maildown. You can see the original post here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19590646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19590646)

I've now changed the app substantially based on feedback I received, and also simplified it massively. I now believe that Maildown is one of the simplest ways to integrate transactional emails into any project.

Maildown supports Markdown syntax, and lets you send emails to multiple email addresses very quickly with minimal code.

Maildown also supports markdown syntax, meaning that your emails are always cleanly formatted

Thanks for looking

Chris</comment>


Ask HN: Do you need a co-founder? (Co-Founders Wish List 2018 - GDoc) - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14ftdM5AvialCRr6O_Z9w6A3NI_XNSVJ2AZj3wLxSh0E/edit?usp=sharing <comment><AUTHOR> I got inspired by alexk comment [0] on the recent thread "What has HN given you?" [1]. All edits welcome.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410807) [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16409768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16409768)</comment>


Manu Prakash's Foldscope Revolution: A cheap, portable microscope - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/through-the-looking-glass-annals-of-science-carolyn-kormann <comment><USER2> I would like to buy a dozen foldscopes and give them to friends. Sadly, still not possible as per their FAQ[0] :(

[0] [http://www.foldscope.com/faqs/](http://www.foldscope.com/faqs/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Radioshack used to sell a $10 plastic microscope that people hacked webcams onto. What happened to that? Here's a link to an old tutorial.

[http://www.instructables.com/id/30-minute-USB- microscope/](http://www.instructables.com/id/30-minute-USB-microscope/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I am really tired of hearing about this revolution for all this time. When is it available for purchase? I'll pay $2!

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is his TED talk: [https://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_that_folds_like_origami)

</comment><comment><USER6> That site design has some serious issues. They're doing something in the header area that doesn't respond to swiping. In landscape you can't scroll the page.

</comment><comment><USER7> i see great value in getting these into the hands of those that require microscope for their work or research that otherwise may be unable to afford the cost of or require more portability andor durability than a conventional microscope

what i wonder is what sort of research or work can be enabled by getting 700nm resolution microscope into everyone's hands?

can anyone offer a list of developing research: on self, others or the environment; where a microscope is the barrier to entry

<comment><USER8> I think this project in particular is not hugely useful, the optics aren't really up to snuff to do anything other than look at small things with your eyes, it's pretty tricky to use it, and hard to take a picture with it. (Also in terms of taking a picture you are zooming the image in with the microscope lens, then zooming it back out with your cell phone lens)

That being said, this project is important philosophically I think and projects like it are going to be huge.

The real 'killer scopes' for me would be

1\. 10-15 dollar scope with battery and camera. This is possible as raw camera chips only require 10x magnification (as opposed to the 100-600x this is providing) so it's cheap/easy to get better optics. One could imagine a low cost camera chip attached to a lens like this scope's (but a bit better) and a rasberry pi zero+battery. A scope like that would let you:

(i) Set up machine learning diagnostics for malaria/other blood borne pathogens/squamous cells. Right now it takes experts to diagnose most of these diseases and those experts need good scopes. If you had thousands of these scopes in the wild and took millions of images+diagnoses, you could really fire some high powered machine learning at it to get rapid, easy diagnoses. Presumably, if you had good automated diagnostic systems (kind of pie in the sky) you could also use this for epidemiology.

(ii) Sample monitoring for any kind of growth system. One could imagine a floating version of this that takes images every few minutes and keeps a count of the number of cells growing in a medium (in it's FOV), the number/type of plankton/bacteria it could see, crystal formation etc. Basically any time a researcher wants to passively monitor a process, a cheap scope like this could be useful. You could even pair a pump or something to pull in and trap your sample as needed.

(iii) Water supply testing (for microbes). It's possible you could use a system like this to take a quick sample of any water supple to decide if it's potable. With a lot of people doing this you could monitor water supplies much more effectively.

2\. A 30-50 dollar fluorescent microscope with camera. This is being worked on by several neuroscience labs. It's around 100-1000 dollars depending on who you believe. This could be used for:

(i) Long term monitoring of cell firing in animal brains.

(ii) Monitoring chemi or bioflurescenct samples in vivo long term. Could be used for levels of compounds, disease progression, drug penetration and life time.

Basically this is stuff people are doing it would just make it much much cheaper and much more portable allowing longer term, higher throughput experiments.

Cheap scopes are everywhere, there are a number of decent ones you can buy and hook to your standard smartphone (though most are weak because as I said before, they basically have to 'fix' your smartphone's lens). You could even make a 10 dollar USB scope yourself by cracking open a webcam and flipping its optics. But mass produced, optically good scopes with cell level resolution in everyone's hands (especially if they can easily capture those images) have the potential to make huge, really powerful databases of microscopy data. Right now computer vision in microscopy is horribly task focused, it would be cool to see what people could do with billions of diverse microscopy images.</comment></comment>


Servers for Hackers - <AUTHOR> https://serversforhackers.com/

<comment><USER2> Excellent stuff! Exactly the kind of things I'm looking to learn as a developer. I'm posting this to Hackr.io as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> OK, but what the heck is it?

<comment><USER4> video tutorials for linux sysadmin-type tasks?

<comment><USER3> Oh. So it's stuff for people who can't read, I believe. Because most of sysadmin-type tasks are perfectly suitable for a short written manual or howto.

<comment><USER5> Or for those people that learn better by seeing the output presented. I like some of their guides, both the tutorial style and the videos.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Google killing discovery to enhance search? - <AUTHOR>

Will Google's search super-personalization kill discovery/browsing by limiting results?
One author, http://searchbliss-webmaster.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-personalized-search-may-kill.html , suggests that over-personalized results may kill discovery (ie browsing). I think that is plausible, yet I think the bigger issue is that we don't yet have the best interface for browsing. Do you remember spending hours in the library stacks noticing things you hadn't thought of? I do, and I think the web is not yet as good at that as it could be.
In actual fact, I think the two relevant results from the change will be needing to scroll down farther for new results and more information for marketers, ie less privacy, as pointed out on another hackernews item, http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/adieu_google/  .
On another point, I wonder how the Google decision affects those without accounts. If one could disables his account, then maybe would regular search be restored?
I'd love to see a comparison of before and after results... and be offered a choice about this enhancement. I do prefer certain sites over others, and it would be nice to see them pop up. For example, if http://dotnetperls.com/ has a tutorial on the C# topic of interest, it is usually very helpful. <comment><USER2> Brin also mentioned the negatives to personalized search and news services in his book "Earth", published in 1990.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Dalke, I'll take a look at that.</comment>


How I use Evernote. Organizing GTD. - <AUTHOR> http://themindcaster.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-i-use-evernote.html

<comment><USER2> I have been using Evernote for about a year without much success, I just haven't found a good workflow. I like your approach and will try it out myself.</comment>


Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/16/confirmed-pandora-buys-key-rdio-assets-for-75m-in-cash-rdio-files-ch-11-to-shut-down/ <comment><USER2> I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years.

I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my career) and worked on the original implementation of the Heavy Rotation feature. I walked around the office asking people "Does this look right? How about this?" I'd upgrade Erlang code in production by hot-reloading the heavy rotation module, and walk around some more. It was fun!

In 2011, I realized that Rdio will never succeed due to lack of fanatical leadership—you can't have a company with absent founders, that's just not how it works—and left. I've been expecting this sort of an "exit" for a while.

Today I work at my own startup (sameroom.io) and every single day I'm grateful for the Rdio experience—mostly as a cautionary tale, unfortunately.

And now, we have to deal with this:

"Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old.

<comment><USER3> > _" Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating > on it?" —our 15-year-old._

Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!" "Let's fight!" I don't see any rational reason to "hate" on the success of a company or a brand...

<comment><USER4> You have to keep in mind that this is a kind of game. Almost no one truly, really _hates_ the other product. People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke.

So for instance I'm in the IRC camp of group communication, and I'll go to great length to use it over Slack, but if you really need me to use Slack and it makes sense, then I'll use Slack. But I will be doing cynical jokes so that you won't forget I'm in the other camp :P.

<comment><USER5> >People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke.

Unfortunately, this can get out of hand, see systemd death threats. Hope people will learn to be nicer on the internet now that the general population is on it.

<comment><USER6> That's not a product rivalry, that's a deeper upset with how systemd is handling things.

Nobody thinks vim is trying to take over the editor space.

<comment><USER7> But I would hope you'd still think that death threats over it are utterly ridiculous, and unacceptable?

<comment><USER6> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been told by people in the position to know that the 2010-era streaming services (Rdio, Spotify, Mog) were all effectively the same company: owned mostly by the music studios (in exchange for licenses) with a minority stake for each's particular founders/investors. As Dalton Caldwell cautioned in 2011, licensing costs make music startups are nigh impossible [1].

For people who are willing to pay for a music service, it seems pretty hard to beat Google Music's value proposition. Because it's a Google service, it can afford to compete as much as it needs to on price, and it also includes ad- free access to all of YouTube. I certainly wouldn't want to be a startup vying for that same $10 per month against one of the most popular content plays in the history of the Internet.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU)

<comment><USER9> I really like spotify because I can use it on my phone, PS3, laptop, etc. My phone can be the remote to my sound system in another room.

I also have a small data plan on my phone so I do not stream music. Spotify allows me to download their songs for playing offline.

Does Google Music provide these or similar?

<comment><USER10> Spotify also has a native(-ish) OSX client (can you use Google Music outside the browser?) and excellent playlist drag/drop and sharing support. Plus, I love their iOS user interface. No other service has come close in either area.

I just wish they had better local file support.

<comment><USER11> A couple of years ago Spotify rewrote their clients to use CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework), so since then their clients are in some sense native and in some sense not, and much more consistent across platforms.

Anyway, I agree with you that they have been pushing the envelope in terms of mobile functionality, especially iOS. Lately I'm not happy with how Android has crippled their lock screen experience by screwing up the lock screen widget API - but that's not Spotify's fault.

To any Spotify skeptics, I highly recommend trying the premium service. The social feed, cross-device sync, BPM matching for runners, collaborative playlists, Spotify Connect (ability to switch and control music playing on another device), Algoriddm Djay integration, all changed the way I experience music. Their radio/suggestions engine is not as good as Pandora's, but is slowly improving. The only thing that is sort of a letdown is the visualizations API, but I can see why it's not a priority.

<comment><USER12> > A couple of years ago Spotify rewrote their clients to use CEF

Eh. And not to sound like a cranky old man, but that shit sucks.

It's ridiculous that their "app" needs 20-30 seconds to boot on a modern computer. It's a damned music player. Plus, when the machine is under load, it skips like a 1993 disc player. And the damned thing crashes routinely.

Pre-CEF I was terribly impressed by their mac client. It's been a pretty ugly cliff they've fallen off though. They did a developer blog post some time ago detailing how teams are all using separate JS routines and libs... and I have to say, I wasn't surprised. It's rare that a popular app regresses in performance and usability quite as much as they have.

<comment><USER13> It takes roughly 2.5 seconds to load on my machine, not sure what's happening on yours that means it takes 20-30 seconds.

<comment><USER6> That's still 5-10x slower than it should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Rdio made a mistake by trying to compete directly with Spotify. And Pandora is making a huge mistake by shutting down the service and losing a valuable niche group of users.

Everyone I know who actually uses Rdio is DIE HARD (I see evidence of this in the comments too). The users I know are pro audio guys, musicians, programmers, artists, etc who use the app 6+ hours a day across desktop and mobile.

Rdio could easily carve out a dedicated customer base at the high-end who would pay MUCH MORE for a Pro version (I'd do $50 a month).

<comment><USER15> ever since I discovered rdio a year or so ago I am always telling friends etc.. I think their UI is superior and the experience is just better than e.g. pandora imo...

<comment><USER14> Exactly. I've recruited at least 4 friends to use the service. How many hours a day would you estimate you use it?

<comment><USER16> I constantly use the service. I download songs to listen to offline while driving, streaming albums / playlists while coding, and if I'm at home and chilling, I normally have the Rdio Roku app playing music while I'm cooking or keep my laptop on and connected to Bluetooth while remote controlling it from my phone (phone notifications over Bluetooth audio get annoying). It's an amazing service and I'm really sad to see it go. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> that is really unfortunate, I much prefer Rdio's web interface to Spotify's and for all the years I've been a subscriber it's been rock solid, on the other hand I do think I am likely not the typical user (100% on desktop, mostly listens to full albums rather than random songs, a lot of classical music, etc.)

When Rdio shuts down I am really not sure where I will be able to go for a comparable experience, Spotify for some reason appears to have random holes in their classical catalog compared to Rdio, I am also not sure if Apple music is useable without an iDevice.

what other alternatives can others suggest for users in Canada?

<comment><USER18> Apple music is not usable with any device. Just to name a few issues I've personally experienced:

\- Not being able to listen to music because itunes said I wasn't signed in. (of course I was and the only way to fix it was to restart my computer.) This error happens a few times per month.

\- Songs not playing and getting an alert error with some random code that results in searching countless threads online. This happens multiple times per day.

\- There's no way to get to an artist from a song...think about that. You can't click on the artists name or select it from the dropdown menu while a song is playing...So you have to search the song and then select the artists name in the search results.

\- Absolutely no concept of syncing. Create a playlist on your computer and it might show up on your phone? Create one on your phone and edit it on your computer, but the changes don't reflect across devices. Everything just goes to shit.

\- Extremely slow clunky UI. Click a button or link and wait 1-2 seconds for some random UI thing to pop up so you can do whatever it is you set out to do.

\- Click any tab in the top navigation with the window set ot 50%0 of the screen and the UI will flutter quite a bit making you select a tab you didn't want to.

\- Click on a playlist that apple made and get an error saying something like "This playlist is currently not available". This happens at least once per week.

...I could go on and on. The ONLY thing Apple music gets right is recommendations. IMO It is by far the worst piece of software Apple has ever release.

<comment><USER19> I have nothing to say about your other issues (I haven't experienced most of them; I'm quite happy with the service), but the banner at the top of the More (…) menu takes you to the album of a song, which then easily leads to the Artist page. Do it all the time, takes me half a second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers.

My experience with Rdio was one of frustration. Their desktop player was buggy and frequently failed to play anything at all. When it did work, I found the consistency of the music catalog to be unreliable. One week they'd have the license to an album I wanted to listen-to, and then they'd lose it, and I couldn't listen to that anymore. I'm not sure what factors were at-play on their end to cause that to happen, but it was a horrible experience for he listener.

I wanted to like Rdio, but they failed at the basics in my experience.

<comment><USER21> "There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers."

I agree, and even feel more strongly about it. Even if you don't stumble, it's hard to compete with Google and Apple at this point, because they have their services tightly tied in with their other products. Buy an iPhone (hell, or even a laptop or tablet), and Apple Music is integrated out of the box. Same with Google Music.

Personally I think Spotify is doomed to fail (for various definitions of "fail") for the same reason. There are some people who want their music decoupled from their OS/hardware, but I think there are so many more than want it to "just work", and I think that Apple & Google have a better shot at that than anyone else, at this point.

<comment><USER22> I won't switch from Spotify though because it meets my needs and furthermore they keep innovating. One thing I can look forward to in getting back to the office on Monday is my new week's playlist that Spotify creates for me. I listen to a wide variety of music and they have helped me discover a lot o f artists and songs I'm really into.

<comment><USER23> Totally agree. Spotify's weekly discover playlists have made me look forward to Mondays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ahh, Pandora. They were ahead of their time at one time. Then suddenly and without warning, they kicked me out. "We don't want your filthy money, foreign scum. English speaking countries only!"

Yes, I know how proxies and VPNs work, but I'm not going to spend money and break the terms of service just to trick a company into accepting my money. If they don't want to do business with me, then so be it. Spotify's recommendation algorithm isn't as good (ooh, you liked a song in Russian? that must mean you only want to hear Russian bands from now on, right?), but they don't think I'm too foreign for them.

<comment><USER25> isn't this due to complex licensing issues?

i created my original rdio account while living in London, and then when i moved to Norway i decided to upgrade my subscription, at which point my playlists became unplayable as a large portion of songs were suddenly marked as "unavailable" in my region

<comment><USER24> Spotify seems to have found a solution for these complex licensing issues.

Netflix allows me to pay them money, but they have a different selection available depending on where I'm connecting from.

Initially, Pandora gave the impression that they were working on it, but how long has it been, 10 years? They can go sit on the roof with a bunch of onions as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER25> yeah, that's a fair point i guess

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As someone who switched to Rdio from Spotify because the former has not terrible music discovery, this is unfortunate. Looks like I'll be switching again...it would be nice to find a streaming service that was about music discovery rather than forcing the latest garbage down your throat.

Although who knows, maybe Spotify's radio now plays more than 10 songs...

<comment><USER27> Spotify now has a playlist called discover weekly or something that is songs they pick for you once a week, and in my experience it's actually pretty good. I've discovered several artists that way. And I also found Spotify radio to be awful.

<comment><USER28> I love Discover Weekly. It is the one thing that has really stood out to me. I have found a lot of songs/artists that I love using this service.

<comment><USER29> Did they develop this in-house or acquire a technology for this?

<comment><USER30> Sounds like it was in house: [http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify- discover-w...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover- weekly-online-music-curation-interview)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really liked Grooveshark because it had a proper HTML5 player before they shut down. I was looking for alternatives and recently found Rdio and was quite happy with it, actually it has a lot in common with Grooveshark (e.g. user stations).

Both Spotify and Deezer have web apps but they require Flash. Spotify has forwarded people asking for an HTML player to the forum and they have successfully ignored it for years. I sent Deezer a mail, they told me to "rest assured we are considering all options" and "if a transition is made it will take some time to implement".

Are there any alternatives that do not require a custom client or Flash (that also work in Europe)?

<comment><USER32> The Google Play Music library is excellent (I think it's still the biggest). You could try something like this:

[http://bluestackstutorial.com/2015/07/google-play-music- for-...](http://bluestackstutorial.com/2015/07/google-play-music-for-pc/)

<comment><USER31> Someone else just pointed out Google Play Music as well. Apparently it works in the Browser without Flash?

<comment><USER32> It does need Flash, according to Google anyway[1]. People might be missing the Flash requirement because Flash is bundled with Chrome.

1\. [https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1114577?hl=en](https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1114577?hl=en)

<comment><USER33> The default player needs the Flash plugin, but there's an experimental HTML5 player that works in Chrome/Chromium (even the BSD ports). I have used it almost exclusively for the past 9 months or so, and had no problems with it.

Here's how to enable it: [https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable- html5-playback-google-...](https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable- html5-playback-google-play-music/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Bummer. I really like(liked?) Rdio. I've been a subscriber for several years -- the UI I find to be pretty good, but their mobile apps are garbage.

So, who wants to write up an Rdio -> Spotify migration tool?

<comment><USER35> I was just looking at this one:

[https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify](https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify)

<comment><USER36> it worked!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> As someone who thinks Rdio is the best streaming service for diehard music fans, this really pains me.

With that being said, I definitely saw it coming.

No meaningful technical upgrades to the platform have been made in the past year, while keeping the technical deficiencies. the mobile apps are a disaster, and overall I had the feeling they were busy searching for a way to stay afloat.

Sad day indeed.

</comment><comment><USER38> I subscribe to Spotify. If they would just let me view "My Albums" (which is basically all I'm ever interested in) as an alphabetical list instead of a canvas of _enormous_ pictures (4x2 fit on my screen), that would make me so happy.

Every time they continuously deploy one of those "please upgrade" popups, which is nearly every day (pretty annoying BTW, can't you just upgrade silently? I've never even noticed anything change after one of these upgrades, I don't care, especially not in the exact moment when I'm about to relax and put on an album), I hope they'll have fixed this.

I really loathe how the streaming services don't allow me to customize my UX in any way. Especially when it's harder to find albums in their clients than in a shelf of CDs.

From what I can tell from random Google Music screenshots, it's also oriented around the "grid of enormous pictures" paradigm. :(

<comment><USER39> In Spotify, instead of "saving album to My Music" I choose to create a playlist of the album. It's just drag and drop to create the playlist on desktop.

I choose to sort those into folders based on genre/artist/album, which works well for me.

<comment><USER38> Oh yeah, I have some of those old playlists cluttering up my sidebar... Wow, I didn't know there were folders! Thanks, that might work for me too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've used Rdio for a few years now, and this sucks. Spotify's UI doesn't compete.

<comment><USER41> I tried out both a couple years ago, found them to be pretty comparable in terms of music catalog, and chose Rdio because I prefer their interface.

Recently, I've been noticing that some of the "people" I follow have stopped publishing playlists to Rdio in favor of Spotify, so I've been considering the switch. But it's a shame to have to leave Rdio's great HTML5 web interface for either Spotify's native app or flash.

<comment><USER42> Spotify has a web player as well

<comment><USER31> well, actually they have a web site with a Flash player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here is Rdio's announcement of the shutdown:

[http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from- rdio.htm...](http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from-rdio.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> Any detail about what's going to happen to existing user accounts? As an Rdio subscriber, I want to make sure my existing collections and playlists don't just get deleted.

<comment><USER45> I'm 110% sure subscriber accounts are part of the 'Key Assets' Pandora bought from Rdio.

<comment><USER46> "...in the call today McAndrews made clear that those numbers [of users] are irrelevant since that service is shutting down, not transferring."

<comment><USER45> How does that indicate Pandora doesn't get the contact information and payment information of Rdio subscribers?

<comment><USER46> "not transferring"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is a real shame. I just discovered Rdio about a month ago and it was a breath of fresh air coming from Pandora (repetitive music discovery, and you can't play a specific song/album) and Spotify (awful UI, cluttered and full of bugs, and not web based).

I also had this handy bookmarklet to mute most of the ads: [https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f](https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f)

I have no interest in a mobile app or downloading content. Streaming whatever I want whenever I want on my laptop is important, and having a good discovery mechanism is important too. Pandora and Spotify aren't up to scratch.

I don't think there are any decent alternatives to Rdio, though I just googled and discovered Google Play Music is now available in NZ, so maybe I'll give that a go.

<comment><USER48> This

> This is a real shame.

And this

> I also had this handy bookmarklet to mute most of the ads: > [https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f](https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f)

Might be related.

<comment><USER47> mute, not block. Rdio still gets paid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Pandora: Rags to riches poster child of SV:

CEO cant make payroll; begs employees to stay and they do....

Pays $75,000,000 for assets of a competitor a few years later.

<comment><USER50> What did the employees get out of it?

<comment><USER49> Jobs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Another Janus Friis company to add to the list.

</comment><comment><USER52> Does anyone know a good way of exporting my rdio "history" data? I have years of data in there.

<comment><USER52> Ah here's a solution: make a cURL request for all your history data.

Simple way to get a well formatted request:

* Go to the history tab ([http://www.rdio.com/people/username/history/](http://www.rdio.com/people/username/history/)) and pull up the inspector

* Scroll down once or twice and go to the network tab

* Find the `getHistoryForUser` request and right-click it, select "copy as cURL"

* Paste into your editor and change the "start" param to 0 and the "count" param to 99999

* Make the cURL request. Boom, no rate limiting. I got 3.5mb of history (though it seems to only go back 1 year.

<comment><USER53> Thanks!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Thinking of going back to buying CD's (or getting Flac files). Streaming services are to unreliable :/ They are only good for discovery.

<comment><USER55> It takes a lot of trust to lose a lot of trust.

First there were records, then cassettes, then compact discs, and they all wore out. A plausible lifetime for something you bought was maybe 15-20 years: not really a problem but indeed a nuisance. You knew the day would come when the cassette would snap or the CD would just jump way too much.

Moving to digital music was the big revolution. I could encode songs into files on my computer and I could replicate those literally forever. I would never, ever lose my music again, or be forced to buy it back in the de facto format of the next decade.

Then came the streaming services. That meant convenience but it did trade in even worse life expectancy and uncertainty. Anyone could bet money that a digital streaming service in the 2000's would not be around 20 years later. But they did become popular, especially when mobile 3G/4G data appeared everywhere.

Ironically, while it did become possible to stream anything anywhere, you could also fit all your audio files onto a memory card. Several times. At a negligible cost. Surely you would only have your own collection with you, but that collection was actually hundreds or thousands of compact discs all compressed into a manageable amount of data.

For reference, I still have my music in ogg/mp3 format and digitally bought albums as flac. I didn't have plans to move away from that and I still don't.

If I want my music in a new phone or in my car, I'll just replicate my collection to a new device or memory card. And I then have the exactly same collection on my phone that I have on my desktop. And my work computer. I still have my 80's-90's CDs in the closet but I've ripped the most important albums no later than the turn of the millennium, at the latest. The setup is so manageable and dirt cheap that I can't but wonder what would it take to replace it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Ctrl+F Soundcloud.. _crickets_

I once made a chrome extension to add global keyboard shortcuts to Soundcloud and now that is literally all I listen to all day (I know, artists aren't getting a penny from me and that is bad, especially for small indies, I would buy much more music off bandcamp if the ux wasn't so atrocious).

My point is, surely I'm not the only one here using SC exclusively? Just curious.

<comment><USER57> Just yesterday, I tried to find an album that Scott Melker had uploaded to SoundCloud. It's gone, and he posted this announcement [https://soundcloud.com/scottmelker/please-listen-a- message-o...](https://soundcloud.com/scottmelker/please-listen-a-message-on- my-soundcloud-takedowns-and-account)

So, SoundCloud can't present me with the discography of Black Sabbath, and a smaller artist I enjoy can't even keep his music on the service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm interested to see if/how Pandora changes their service after this. It's been a while since they added a new feature.

</comment><comment><USER59> I've been a paying subscriber of Rdio for at least 3+ years. I loved that Rdio let me explore other people's playlists, often leading to discover new favorite songs. Also never liked Spotify's UI. I'm bummed to switch.

</comment><comment><USER60> This has been an interesting 5 years for this space.

I had Grooveshark, but they didn't have an iOS app, so when i switched from Android I went to Rdio.

When Spotify launched in Canada, I tried it, and quickly switched over simply because the app was not complete junk. The Rdio song offering was fine, just as good as Spotify as far as I could tell. The Rdio app, was terrible. 50% of the time it would "play" but no sound would come out, the other 50% it would sometimes work / sometimes just crash or lock up.

You cannot have a product that is half assed, when you are still trying to win the market, and even if you have won you still cant for very long.

</comment><comment><USER61> Too bad the now-defunct Rdio button on my Roku remote can't be remapped.

</comment><comment><USER62> Interesting way to exit. Is that common?

<comment><USER63> That's the part that intrigued me. Chapter 11 means the original investors get the short end right? why would they agree to this acquisition? or do they get money back, and tax-payers cover the losses?

<comment><USER64> Shareholders get will nothing, but debt holders will still get paid in proportion of how much they're owed.

<comment><USER65> Incorrect.

The law varies state-by-state but the actual process is closer to the following:

(1) Company agrees to file for bankruptcy, usually because they feel it's in the owners' (shareholders) best interest to do so, in terms of recovering as much as possible from the "bad" company, vs. trying to keep the company running.

(2) Company's management comes up with a plan to distribute company's assets (cash, servers, IP, whatever) more or less "fairly" among the creditors. A big part of this is preventing management from giving a sweetheart deal on something worth a lot, to their friend/relative/whoever (e.g. selling the customer list for $1 to their friend's company), vs. making sure everyone who has a claim on said assets can get the most back as possible. A lot of arguments happen here, this is the main point of the rdio situation, whether the sale to Pandora is the best possible outcome for everyone.

(3) The company's assets get distributed as follows:

Employees -- most states give employees' unpaid wages preferential treatment in bankruptcy, under the same legal doctrine of why employees can't be held civilly liable (sued) doing something under control of their employer -- employers have a general duty to care for/protect their employees. (Note that neither the high priority bankruptcy payment, nor the liability protection, applies to contractors. Keep this in mind next time you think contractors are "overpaid" earning 2x as much as a W2, on top of the fact that they get no benefits and have to pay both sides of FICA)

Secured creditors -- any creditor whose claim is "secured" or "backed up" by some kind of asset, e.g. mortgage lenders.

Unsecured creditors -- 1099 contractors, lessors, all vendors, debenture (bond) holders, basically anyone who claims they're "owed" by the company.

And finally, lastly, equity holders (stockholders). They don't necessary have to get zero, but often do, because they're so far down the list of who gets paid (what investment bankers call "capital structure seniority" \-- they're very junior).

So yes, it might be more or less ratable within each class, but there's no guarantee that "shareholders will get nothing", nor is it strictly proportional.

This is the garbage collection of capitalism and I find it fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is what will happen to every single streaming service eventually. It's hard to believe that 10 years down the line Apple Music, or Spotify, or Google whatever-it's-called-now will still be a thing.

If you really like listening to music, make sure you either have it as physical media, or stored on your hard drive (yes, I still buy and rip CDs myself).

</comment><comment><USER67> I've put together my own simple rdio -> Google play music migration: [https://gist.github.com/mdkent/9d48a4142362a2815b09](https://gist.github.com/mdkent/9d48a4142362a2815b09)

</comment><comment><USER68> Sad to hear this- I've been a paying Rdio customer for a few years now and have been thrilled with the service overall.

Given the alternatives, I'll likely attempt purchasing albums from Amazon, or another DRM-free alternative.

</comment><comment><USER69> This is really disappointing, Rdio was one of the few music streaming services legally available in South Africa.

It's pretty much just Deezer and Apple Music left now. Google Play Music, Pandora and Spotify are all region-locked.

</comment><comment><USER70> Super bummed. I've been a subscriber from the very beginning. Loved their interfaces and service far more than any of the alternatives.

(Though these days 90% of my Rdio listening is through Sonos, but still it worked great.)

You'll be missed.

</comment><comment><USER71> Looks like we are going to switch over the kids to Apple Music for Android when it is stable enough. Rdio was at least available in South Africa unlike Google Play Music and Spotify.

</comment><comment><USER72> And I just switched from Spotify to rdio. What timing!

</comment><comment><USER30> Honestly, if Spotify had a redesign I don't think there'd be another choice.

</comment><comment><USER73> What assets do they have worth $75M?

<comment><USER74> 75,000 Aeron chairs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I just checked out Youtube Music today and its pretty awesome and you are able to leverage all the great catalog of music uploaded to Youtube. I'm surprised more people are not using it/talking about it. I really do see this as a spotify killer if its gets some steam and some of the discovery features you get with spotify.

<comment><USER76> If Youtube Music Key is not drawing directly from curated uploads from artists, it's going to be an opaque mess of poor quality lossy uploads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Music is a dying industry because there's too much good free music floating around. Look at labels like [http://www.ektoplazm.com/](http://www.ektoplazm.com/) . The music is 100% free. There's not even a buy button anywhere. Long distance phone calls and music are a glimpse of our future where things are too cheap to meter. The dying industries are trying to find ways to create artificial scarcity to go back to the old way of doing things.

<comment><USER78> It makes sense that there'd be free options for a genre like trance or other electronica that can be made by one person on a computer.

However, if you enjoy music that features live instruments I just don't see how it could be free. There's too many people involved who need to eat.

<comment><USER79> Whether you want it to be free or not, it's effectively impossible to enforce scarcity over resources that can be trivially digitized. People don't pay for music anymore because it's very easy and low-risk to get it without paying for it, and the internet guarantees it's going to stay that way. Even if you can get everyone to pay for Google Music, that's $10/mo from someone who used to spend $20/CD and potentially bought several of those each month.

The fact is that it's now much harder to collect money for musical recordings. I don't think anything is going to change about that.

<comment><USER80> But so many $10/month people are people like I am who rarely buy new stuff and just listen to older stuff and the radio. I listen to music a lot, but most of the bands I prefer have ceased to exist for a while. That being said, I don't subscribe to any services because I'm cheap and I hate the way I can't get everything I want in once place so I run off of my own storage.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trust in LIME: Yes, No, Maybe So? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dominodatalab.com/trust-in-lime-local-interpretable-model-agnostic-explanations/ <comment><USER2> Trust is not just about understanding the model's behaviour - although that is clearly helpful.

1) The model may be applied to millions or billions of instances, humans can't check them all, or even a small percentage. Explanations appear extensive and general (it's using the right features) but it's very hard to prove or convincingly demonstrate that this is so - it could be using the right features or good features in a good way in this case - and then not in other cases.

2) Experts / owners are generally doing the checking; users are not victims, they should not have to simply accept what they are told. They need a means of protection and representation in the process to have real trust. If this doesn't happen adoption will be impeded, and I believe that once lost trust can be very hard to regain especially in systems with stabilisation mechanisms (memory)

3) Some users are less privileged than others, they don't have the freedom to make decisions about trust. Models are imposed on them, there needs to be a mechanism of wider accountability that prevents them from being abused.

I think that in addition to explanation three things are required :

\- mechanisms for managing model development accountably and transparently; why were the decisions to use or discard data or techniques taken? What were the tests that were applied and when?

\- mechanisms to manage models in production - what models are being used, where? Are they demonstrated to be being used appropriately? Can any harm that they do be discovered and repaired?

\- Market, legislative and social structures that impose these requirements and penalise actors who fail to use them.

If not then expect AI to go the way of nuclear fission, airships and GMO.</comment>


Your Database Management System Is Underutilized - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2016/08/31/relational-database-management-system/#.V8bdQ4Y6d5Q.hackernews <comment><USER2> I applaud anyone willing to look back and reason about what we've lost.

In this case, I prefer leaving the past in the past. Startups used to need to hire dedicated DBAs, and these days they largely don't. Scaling business logic that lives on horizontally-scaleable hosts is markedly easier than scaling business logic that lives inside a database. Debugging, zero-downtime deploys, and logging are all complicated by putting logic in the DB.

Unless latency is far-and-away your highest concern, I don't recommend using these features.</comment>


Sweden's central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cenbank-digital-sweden/sweden-starts-testing-worlds-first-central-bank-digital-currency-idUSKBN20E26G <comment><USER2> > The pilot will run until February 2021 and will use block-chain technology, > the Riksbank said.

Will it really?

Riksbanken can have a central server to resolve any double spends, which is only really a problem in a decentralized network. Once you have a singular authority you can just let them decide, and you'll have no need for an inefficient cryptocurrency.

> which is being developed by consulting firm Accenture

Accenture is quite famous for developing bullshit solutions for made-up problems, so I guess this is a good fit for them.

> The sharp decline in the use of cash and competition from alternative > currencies, such as Facebook's Libra, has also prompted central banks around > the world to consider issuing their own electronic currencies.

This is poor reporting, as e-krona predates Facebook's Libra, which is still far from being launched. They probably mean the perceived competition from Bitcoin.

<comment><USER3> Problem with a central server for money is that it makes the whole state vulnerable. If everybody use central bank e-currency you can just attack their sever to destroy the flow of all money.

But if it is distributed like real crypto currency, you have to be able to attack and take down hundreds or thousands of severs geographically spread.

<comment><USER4> I don't know why your comment is being downvoted. That was my understanding as well. A distributed ledger is much harder to tamper with, which is why "blockchain technology" is actually a reasonable solution to this problem, IMO. I am open to being proven wrong, though

<comment><USER2> I did not downvote him, but a cryptocurrency is only tamper proof because the entities that decide the rules are distributed (in Bitcoin it's the miners who extend the blockchain). So to being down the Bitcoin network you need to bring down all the miners, which is basically impossible.

But here there's only a single entity that decides the rules. So if you shut down riksbanken's servers, the servers that are deciding which transactions are valid, you essentially shut down the network.

Sure you can have thousands of servers around the globe sharing the last seen state or new but not yet verified transactions, but that's not a very useful network. They would instantly be discarded once riksbanken's servers come online to sort out the mess.

You can have this problem in Bitcoin too, if you isolate a majority of the miners from the rest of the network, essentially splitting it in too. But that's much harder to do.

Edit: Here I refer to deciding double spends, which the critical problem any digital currency needs to solve. Without it anyone can print money out of thin air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My company's suggested implementation made it to the second round of proposals. Unfortunately we are not involved any more.

There are some serious challenges that needs to be ironed out. Two that comes to mind is how to solve offline payments, the other one is how to live up to the requirement from the government that the currency needs to be liquid also during a crisis (what if electricity or telecom doesn't work?)

The Riskbank have had a hard time steering towards the inflation goals. Cutting the commercial banks from that chain, and giving interest, for example, directly on the currency, would make The Rikabanks job a lot easier.

<comment><USER6> > My company's suggested implementation made it to the second round of > proposals.

If you don't mind me asking what company do you work for? I am actually studying computer science (security and privacy emphasis) at KTH in Sweden and I have been interested in CBDC for some time now. If your company offers master's theses I would love to connect on LinkedIn or via email.

> the other one is how to live up to the requirement from the government that > the currency needs to be liquid also during a crisis (what if electricity or > telecom doesn't work?)

This is the first thing I thought of when reading the article. Since you seem to have some knowledge about the field, what are some proposed solutions to this problem?

The article mentioned something that I find particularly interesting:

> Sweden is the least cash-dependent country in the world, making it a litmus > test for how central banks can react to people using less of the money they > print.

To be honest I had my suspicions that this was the case. Anecdotally, I have lived in Sweden since August of 2018 and I cannot recall a single time where I have carried cash in my wallet or used cash for a transaction in Sweden. If I am not paying with a credit/debit card I usually just use Swish (similar to Venmo or Cash app for US readers, except it's operated by several Swedish banks and I believe the Swedish central bank).

<comment><USER7> How do those without bank accounts like tourists or the indigent operate in this "cashless" system?

<comment><USER8> Tourists tend to have cards and use them.

The poor people have bank accounts, because if you're poor and getting some gov't assistance, that gets transferred to a bank account (I mean, how else? No non-financial institution or gov't agency is going to employ tellers handing over cash directly, they all use banks for that, and checks aren't used); it's general EU policy that basic financial services (bank accounts, bank transfers, electronic bill paying, card payments) should be available to everyone including the very poorest. Even a homeless, unemployed drug addict would be expected to have access to these services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kudos to the swedes for working methodically to try to find a way for the central bank to issue digital money. They have been working for a number of years on this and seem to be thinking effectively about all of the issues involved.

One of the reasons that most interest me in this type of digital money comes from its use by the government itself within its various branches. Moving the financial accounts of the government from internal systems to a public blockchain potentially opens up the government accounts to public scrutiny in a way that has not yet been possible. This offers a potential for transparency which matters less, perhaps, in Sweden, than in other governments around the world.

<comment><USER10> > Kudos to the swedes for working methodically to try to find a way for the > central bank to issue digital money.

Can you elaborate what you mean by digital money? My understanding is that vast majority of money issued by central banks is already digital.

<comment><USER11> Sweden is moving unusually rapidly to a cashless (or near cashless) society. A lot of countries are seeing big increases in the use of digital payments but generally not big decreases in the value of cash payments although that may well come eventually. In Sweden it's already happening.

Like most central banks, the Riksbank runs 2 credit risk free payment systems: one that supports commercial banks and another, cash, that supports both companies and the general public.

The central bank's relationship with commercial banks isn't really affected by this initiative. However, the thinking is that a credit risk free payment system for the general public is still valuable for the reality/perception of a stable financial system.

If cash (effectively) goes away then so does the second payment system. What the Riksbank are doing is looking at alternatives that have the payment system properties of cash but in a digital form.

As I understand it, they're looking at a couple of models. A digital cash equivalent i.e. mostly anonymous peer to peer. And an account balance based i.e. central banking accounts for joe public.

It's interesting work and, in my opinion, likely to be followed closely by other central banks as I'm sure they are predicting similar dynamics in the next 20-30 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This headline is goofy. Central banks have been using digital _electronic_ currencies for decades. The difference is that now they want to include all Swedes in the electronic currency system, not just Swedish banks, as they have been for decades. (And the claim that this uses "blockchain technology" is just a lie; it's a centralized database. It's no more a blockchain than Git is.)

I think this is a terrible idea given both the current appallingly bad state of _unintended_ vulnerabilities in computer security and the appalling _intended_ security vulnerabilities inherent in centralized architectures like the one they're proposing.

<comment><USER3> Most of your money is already on a centralized architecture of you are using a bank. But I agree that a decentralized system would be preferable.

However I can see a benefit in electronic money becoming a public utility rather than being controlled by private companies trying to extract rent.

Visa and MasterCard engage in massive rent extraction.

Would have been nicer with some form of robust international system for money transfer and exchange where middle men could not nickel and dime you the whole way.

<comment><USER12> > _a decentralized system would be preferable. ... a public utility rather > than being controlled by private companies ... Would have been nicer with > some form of robust international system for money transfer and exchange > where middle men could not nickel and dime you_

Well, in fact, the system you are describing has existed for 11 years and inspired the Swedish system being discussed here; presumably the attributes you are wishing for are precisely the ones that they want to eliminate by creating their own private system instead of just using Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This effort betrays a supreme misunderstanding about what makes Bitcoin important.

"Blockchain technology" is not what makes Bitcoin revolutionary.

Bitcoin is censorship-resistant electronic cash. It's teleportable currency - without a deplatforming option.

That's the innovation.

What Sweden is engaging in is a cargo cult. Build the blockchain runway, hoping the planes will land. They won't because they have no reason to.

Censorship-resistant money is a direction no government will pursue voluntarily. The reason is simple: censorship of transactions will be demanded by a ruling class indent on "doing something" about drugs, terrorism, and rogue states. Some governments may be forced to follow the censorship- resistant direction by market forces, but that's probably far off from today.

<comment><USER14> Why is this getting downvoted?

<comment><USER15> Some people really don't like cryptocurrencies

<comment><USER14> Is it just pure hatred ? There don't seem to be much arguing going on...

<comment><USER16> My theory is that the nerds on here who spend too much time in the financial fun house become imbibed with the ethos of it. It's really a sad end to a lot of idealistic young hackers who give up on changing the world in order to defend their fancy new stock portfolios. The joke is ultimately on them however, as everyone who trusts wall street eventually gets taken to the cleaners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> All these banks and financial institutions launching digital currencies miss the whole point: FRICTIONLESS transactions. Right now you have layers upon layers of network companies nickle and diming you. This is literally someone taking a penny from everyone's account except it is a lot more than that. There's absolutely no reason for Mastercard and Visa to even exist in 2020. They're sitting on top of some obsolete imaginary network collecting rent.

<comment><USER18> The issuing banks provide credit and insurance, and quite a lot of effort in the system goes to anti-fraud. Especially for online payments.

<comment><USER17> It used to be that way but with all the data available to us now, managing fraud isn't as difficult as it used to be. Definitely not to the tune of 3-4% both ways combined in many cases.

<comment><USER18> EU fees are capped at 0.2 per cent of the transaction value for debit cards and at 0.3 per cent for credit cards. Americans presumably are getting ripped off for the usual "free market" reasons.

(Not counting Amex cards, which take 3% off the merchant and hand most of it back to the customer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The blockchain technology that will be used in this pilot is apparently R3 Corda : [https://www.corda.net/](https://www.corda.net/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Sorry if this is naive, but how is this different to electronic currency? The whole difference between cryptocurrencies and electronic currency, is that cryptos are decentralised and have a public ledger.

A CBDC (central bank digital currency) does not have a public ledger, and is not distributed. If they are using a blockchain internally (an entirely pointless concept done only for the addition of a buzzword to their webpage), that doesn't make it a crypto in the currently known sense.

So I ask again: how is this different to digital/electronic currency that already exists? I can open my bank app, check the funds, send them to another person instantly. None of that involved paper, and all of it was backed and controlled by the central bank. What makes this any different?

</comment><comment><USER21> Since currency is de-facto already digitized, and everyone does everything electronically, how the h is an e-currency different from what's already there?

<comment><USER22> I guess one advantage is that now every marketing company/institution can analyze the entire flow of money within the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The blockchain was not meant to solve the problem they are trying to solve.

We already have digital currency and it works quite well.

I really have no idea what they are doing.

<comment><USER24> [https://xkcd.com/2267/](https://xkcd.com/2267/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Big Data and banking - I think it's the best combination! And thta's also what the author of this article thinks: [https://devsdata.com/big-data-financial- services/](https://devsdata.com/big-data-financial-services/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Why not something like GNU Taler[1]? It's a centralized digital currency with privacy for the payer at its core, but payees are always identified (very useful for taxation purposes). That sounds like exactly the use case for a government entity that wants a digital cash replacement.

\- [1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler)</comment>


The Most Influential Women in Technology 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/women-in-tech/2010 <comment><USER2> These women did some cool things, but I haven't heard of any of them. After reading a few interviews, I'm left wondering who, exactly, they're influencing. I'm not saying this to be sexist. I married a hacker chick. I just don't know where they come off being the most influential of the year, and didn't see much to back up the headline claim.</comment>


Enjoyment of one's tools  - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/07/31/enjoyment-of-ones-tools/ <comment><USER2> I have worked productively with quite a number of different toolchains. Among them were full-blown IDEs that worked great (VS+VisualAssistX and Eclipse for C++, XCode for Obj-C), there were IDEs that worked less than great (VisualDSP, Matlab) and several combinations of dynamic languages and Emacs or Vim.

I feel that some languages/environments benefit more from IDE support than others. But in the end, whatever works well for you is a good tool. Bad tools however drain the life out of me and leave a hollow shell of a coding monkey. I hate working with inadequate software.

In general though, the text editing capabilities of Emacs and Vim blow anything else out of the water and make a huge difference to my productivity and enjoyment. IDEs often lack that (but there are usually plugins like ViEmu or VsVim that can make up for it). Another great thing to have is good autocompletion, which Vim in particular is not that good at (again, plugins can help). Lastly, refactoring tools are a nice time-saver, even though a comparatively rarely used one. This is where IDEs usually have an edge.

Taken as a whole though, my enjoyment usually peaks when I feel powerful. With Emacs or Vim, you sometimes feel like a code surgeon, slicing and dicing code as if by magic. THAT, is cool. It is an experience that IDEs have a hard time to make up for. Also, the customizability of Emacs an Vim allows you to discover new stuff whenever you want, which is a great thing that avoid becoming bored of your tools. So in the end I guess I concur with the author in that I prefer simple tools to those slick IDEs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I spend some of my free time customizing my environment, which for me means basically zsh and emacs. I find this process somewhat enjoyable, and I find that using said environment to get actual work done makes the work much more enjoyable.

</comment><comment><USER4> I personally look at it this way: I want to get things done. And I don't want to worry about my tools. That's why I spend so much time making sure I'm using the right ones. Because bad tools make for an unproductive programmer.</comment>


Vogue Spain caught stealing from Instagram User/Street Photographer - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/04/22/how-not-to-run-an-instagram-account-vogue-spain-caught-stealing-from-well-known-street-photographer/

<comment><USER2> For some reason, I've seen more and more examples of blatant intellectual property violations coming from the traditional media. Pretty much every news paper's web site publishes articles with embedded Youtube videos of copyrighted material, which may or may not be legal in your country. That's just the norm these days, but it gets worse.

Recently, there's been a surge of cases like this where publishers simply grab images or other content from the internet, publish it without checking the license or giving any credit to the original author. And then they sell this material and claim it's their content.

When you cite a sentence from a magazine in your blog post, you'll get a cease and desist letter. Fair use should go both ways.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now public apology on the feed, cited as a "mistake." <http://instagr.am/p/Ju8A7as02f/> Walking out the door with someone's stuff is not a "mistake," it's theft. Same deal.</comment>