Sum-of-Three-Cubes Problem Solved for 'Stubborn' Number 33 - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/sum-of-three-cubes-problem-solved-for-stubborn-number-33-20190326/ <comment><USER2> Numberphile video on the topic with Andrew Booker: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASoz_NuIvP0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASoz_NuIvP0)

which is a followup from the 2015 episode [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wymmCdLdPvM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wymmCdLdPvM) when the 33 problem was unsolved.

The announcement elicited this Mathoverflow discussion about "mic drop" moments in mathematics: [https://mathoverflow.net/questions/325105/what-are- some-note...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/325105/what-are-some- noteworthy-mic-drop-moments-in-math)

<comment><USER3> Some additional links: Sander Huisman's 2016 paper about solving the three cubes problem for 74, using a supercomputer in Lyon [0]. The approach for 33 is quite similar, just augmenting the range searched (and some additional tricks to further reduce the search space).

Andrew Booker's paper about 33 [1].

It's quite funny how Numberphile inspired these searches.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07746](https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07746)

[1] [https://people.maths.bris.ac.uk/~maarb/papers/cubesv1.pdf](https://people.maths.bris.ac.uk/~maarb/papers/cubesv1.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that the second number is prime and the others have very large prime factors (only 5 and 4 distinct prime numbers for 1st and 3rd numbers respectively):

         (8,866,128,975,287,528)³ +
        (–8,778,405,442,862,239)³ +
        (–2,736,111,468,807,040)³ = 33

        696950821015779435648178972565490929714876221952 -
        676467453392982277424361019810585360331722557919 -
         20483367622797158223817952754905569383153664000 = 33

<comment><USER5> In a way it makes sense - if the numbers all had smaller prime factors, they probably would have been found sooner than now, and so wouldn't be as remarkable

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had to pause for a second to think about what's so hard about this? And then it hit me - negative numbers.

</comment><comment><USER7> The last unsolved integer under 100 is 42...

<comment><USER8> Spooky.

<comment><USER9> Haha Nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can someone ELI5 what the issue is with numbers that have a remainder of 4 or 5 after being divided by 9? I'm assuming it's something simple that I'm just not seeing, and having trouble googling for it.

<comment><USER11> The only possible values of a cube mod 9 are 0, 1 and 8. (If you expand (9n+r)^3 you'll see that all the terms divide by 9 except r^3. So the value of a cube mod 9 depends only on its own mod 9 value. So we only need to check that 0, 1 and 8 are the only values achieved by the first 9 cubes.) If you add three of these values the only possible answers are 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8 mod 9.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anybody have an idea of how much it would cost to have done this search on AWS?

<comment><USER13> At $0.0425/core/hour for Compute-Optimized instances (c5), 23 core-years costs $8562.9

<comment><USER14> That's...not bad

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know of a useful application for this fact? Serious question.

<comment><USER16> The mathematician Edmund Landau said (translation from German): Number theory is useful, since one can graduate with it.

(from his Foreword to Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie (Lectures on Number Theory) (1927).)

This from [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Landau](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Landau)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > other times, a solution is known not to exist, as with all whole numbers > that leave behind a remainder of 4 or 5 when divided by 9

Curious how we are able to prove that and with certainty say this is a rule?

<comment><USER16> Off the top of my head: the cubes of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 mod 9 are 0,1,-1,0,1,-1,1,-1.

The sums of three of these, mod 9, are 0, 1, 2, 3, -1, -2, -3 or 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, so the sum of 3 cubes can not be 4 or 5 mod 9.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would have liked to see a bit more comment on the algorithm itself in the article. But I suppose I can find that elsewhere

<comment><USER19> I've been able to find vague descriptions of the algorithm used but not any actual code. Might have to ask the author for it.

<comment><USER20> See it here: [https://youtu.be/ASoz_NuIvP0?t=393](https://youtu.be/ASoz_NuIvP0?t=393) rewind a bit if you want more explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So simple to check, yet so hard to find. I love these kind of mathematical problems.

In irb or python interpreter copy and paste

      8866128975287528**3+(-8778405442862239)**3+(-2736111468807040)**3

Though another question, are there an infinite number of possible solutions to this problem? Or just 1 solution with numbers in this length?

<comment><USER22> > are there an infinite number of possible solutions to this problem?

Unknown. From the article:

'A major result would be to prove the conjecture that k = x³ + y³ + z³ has infinitely many solutions for every whole number k, except those k that have a remainder of 4 or 5 after being divided by 9.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know if there is a conjectural characterization of those numbers which can be expressed as the sum of three cubes? The article mentions not being congruent to 4 or 5 mod 9 is a necessary condition. Is it (conjecturally) sufficient?

<comment><USER3> In the Numberphile video it is conjectured that there are infinitely many solutions for all those numbers, but that solutions are very sparse. The smallest solution for 42 might involve very high numbers.

<comment><USER23> Thanks! It seems they mentioned this in the article as well:

"A major result would be to prove the conjecture that k = x³ + y³ + z³ has infinitely many solutions for every whole number k, except those k that have a remainder of 4 or 5 after being divided by 9."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> (8866128975287528)^3 + (-8778405442862239)^3 + (-2736111468807040)^3

If I command-space on OSX and put this into the search bar (which accepts math), I get exactly 30,000,000,000,000.

<comment><USER25> echo '(8866128975287528)^3 + (-8778405442862239)^3 + (-2736111468807040)^3' | bc

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How many solutions are there?

<comment><USER19> The conjecture (that hasn't been proven) is that every integer that does not equal 4 or 5 mod 9 has infinitely many solutions (integers that = 4 or 5 mod 9 are proven to have no solutions). Parametric equations for 1 and 2 have been found that generate infinitely many solutions for those values but it is otherwise an open question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _With 33 out of the way, the only one left is 42._

I know this is just a coincidence, but it's a rather poetic one.

<comment><USER28> The solution for 42 is coming soon

<comment><USER29> Do you have a source for that? It took 7.5 million years for Deep Thought to discover the significance of 42, and it didn't even break it up into a sum of three cubes :) [https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Deep_Thought](https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Deep_Thought)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > That problem, stated as k = x³ + y³ + z³, is what number theorists call a > Diophantine equation — a kind of algebraic structure whose properties have > fascinated mathematicians for millennia. "They're rich enough to encode > [other mathematical] statements that have nothing to do with Diophantine > equations," said Browning. "They're rich enough to simulate computers."

You would certainly hope so, since every value a computer works with is integral.

<comment><USER31> It says they can simulate computers, not that computers can calculate them.

<comment><USER30> Yes, and I'm saying since they can represent every value a computer can represent, this doesn't come as a surprise.

<comment><USER32> A computer does more than store values: it also performs computation. And "they're rich enough to simulate computers" refers to the celebrated (and surely surprising!) theorem of Julia Robinson, Martin Davis, Hilary Putnam, and Yuri Matiyasevich, showing that (to state the result in a couple of ways):

* given a computer program that prints integers, there is a Diophantine equation whose integer solutions are precisely the set of integers printed by that program,

* given any computer program, one can represent it by a Diophantine problem: one can write down a polynomial equation such that it has integer solutions if and only if the program halts.

For example, because we can write down a computer program to print the prime numbers, there exists a certain (explicitly known) polynomial whose integer values are precisely the prime numbers. And as we can write down a program which halts only if (say) the Riemann hypothesis is true, we can write down a Diophantine equation which has integer solutions only if the Riemann hypothesis is true.

(What you're saying about being able to represent every value a computer can represent would be true for say linear or quadratic equations too, but those are not rich enough to simulate all of computation.)

Essentially, you can build a computer out of diophantine equations.

You can read more at [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hilbert%27s_tenth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hilbert%27s_tenth_problem&oldid=886276765) and good expositions by Poonen at [http://www- math.mit.edu/~poonen/papers/sample_beamer.pdf](http://www- math.mit.edu/~poonen/papers/sample_beamer.pdf) (talk slides) or [http://www.ams.org/notices/200803/tx080300344p.pdf](http://www.ams.org/notices/200803/tx080300344p.pdf) (article).

<comment><USER30> > What you're saying about being able to represent every value a computer can > represent would be true for say linear or quadratic equations too, but those > are not rich enough to simulate all of computation.

True, but this is a strange comparison to make. Calling an equation "linear" or "quadratic" is a statement about the kinds of computation involved in the equation. Calling an equation "Diophantine" is a statement about the kinds of solutions to that equation that _you_ , the author/reader, consider acceptable. These are not comparable concepts.

I understood the claim "Diophantine equations are sufficient to represent a computer" to contrast with e.g. "Real-valued equations are sufficient to represent a computer". It's true that real numbers have more power (vaguely defined) than integers do, so I can see why this comparison might be drawn in the first place. But since computers can't use real numbers, I still don't find it surprising that integers are sufficient.

> A computer does more than store values: it also performs computation.

Yes, but this is not a way in which computers differ from equations. And there are _no_ restrictions on the types of computation you can invoke in an equation, whereas computers are e.g. restricted to computing computable numbers.

> And "they're rich enough to simulate computers" refers to the celebrated > (and surely surprising!) theorem...

The proof of the incompleteness theorem involves showing that integers, _by themselves_ , are rich enough to represent any arbitrary mathematical statement. Why would it be surprising that adding structure on top of the integers lets you keep the expressive power you already had? "x = k", for some constant _k_ that encodes your chosen meaning, is a perfectly valid Diophantine equation, and we already know that we can represent arbitrary mathematical statements using only equations of that form. The additional forms allowed by extending ourselves to arbitrary equations won't take anything away from that.

<comment><USER32> To clarify the comparison I made, consider the set of integer solutions to linear equations (or to be more precise, the Diophantine set of a linear polynomial). For example, for the equation x+y=k, the set of integer solutions k is merely the set of all integers. For the equation 10x+6y=k, you get the set of all even integers. For the equation 10x+6y+7z=k, again you get the set of all integers. So the sets of integers that you can obtain as the respective solutions to linear equations are all very simply structured. (If I'm not mistaken, they are always simply the multiples of the gcd of the coefficients of the variables, possibly translated by some constant offset e.g. if one is considering 6x+9y+15z+7=k, the set of obtainable k (by plugging in various values for (x, y, z)) is "all integers that are 1 mod 3" — so the set is always simply an arithmetic progression.)

Similarly for quadratic equations — you still get sets that are easily parametrized. Something like this is what motivated Hilbert to ask the question in the first place. Nothing so far would have suggested that if you go up to higher-degree polynomials, you should eventually be able to obtain _any_ computable (i.e. recursively enumerable) set as the set of integer solutions to some polynomial equation. Yet that's the case.

The contrast was never with real numbers, so mentioning real numbers is neither here nor there. (Though I understand how one can get that impression, if one thinks that what is being highlighted is "Diophantine solutions" in the sense of "integer solutions" as opposed to "real solutions" or whatever.) The surprising fact being highlighted by the number-theorist in the quote (and one of the highlights of 20th-century mathematics) is that the structure "the set of integer solutions to a polynomial equation" is rich enough to encode all possible computation — i.e. polynomials are not as "simple" as one may think. (Please take a look at those links if you haven't; it's really beautiful and super surprising that a program can be encoded as the set of integer roots of an integer polynomial.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> _> Booker found this odd trio of 16-digit integers by devising a new search algorithm to sift them out of quadrillions of possibilities. The algorithm ran on a university supercomputer for three weeks straight._

So...did he just brute force it?

EDIT: Should've read further down. Looks like, yes:

 _> But usually, solutions are "nontrivial." In these cases, the trio of cubed integers — like (114,844,365)³ + (110,902,301)³ + (–142,254,840)³, which equals 26 — looks more like a lottery ticket than anything with predictable structure. For now, the only way for number theorists to discover such solutions is to play the mathematical "lottery" over and over, using the brute force of computer-assisted search to try different combinations of cubed integers, and hope for a "win."_

<comment><USER3> The Numberphile video, mentioned elsewhere, explains how a search of O(n^3) is reduced to a linear search via some clever tricks. From there, the linear search is quite brute force. Several numbers are searched at the same time, indicating that no solution for 42 could be found under 10^16. Some supercomputer infrastructure seems to be necessary ("don't try this at home").

<comment><USER34> The paper ends with "The total computation used approximately 23 core-years over one month of real time.", so yes, I think running this on your 8-core desktop is not going to cut it.

<comment><USER35> But what about a $400 GPU with 4096 shaders?

I haven't looked at the algorithm, but a linear search probably can be GPGPU computed in parallel. A Vega64 is around $400 and runs 16384 threads on 4096 physical shaders at roughly 1.2GHz.

The main issue is if whatever data-structures used for this search will actually fit inside the microscopic amount of memory that is available to each shader.

<comment><USER36> You should probably assume that people using supercomputers have thought about "just using a GPU."

<comment><USER37> Don't assume anything.

They are not using GPUs and from the paper it looks like they haven't thought about it. I think a GPU cluster would be a speedup, but big number multiplication is relatively slow on GPUs, so maybe not as big speedup as with other algorithms.

<comment><USER36> A GPU _cluster_ , sure. But the discussion was about running the algorithm on a single GPU on your desktop.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Australia's Proposed Surveillance Laws Will Break the Trust Tech Depends On - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/trust-us-were-secretly-working-foreign-government-how-australias-proposed-crypto <comment><USER2> Apparently, this was overseen by the Department of Home Affairs. The recently appointed PM of Australia (Scott Morrison) used to be the Minister for Home Affairs. His new appointment to the role (Peter Dutton) was one of the primary instigators in the recent power exchange (he actually wanted the top job for himself, but lost the party vote).

Considering the history of both of these men, I predict a grim history for Australia's privacy related laws. They're both staunchly pro-surveillance, anti-immigration (to the point of racism) and, I suspect, _highly_ corrupt. I know that last statement is accusative, but Peter Dutton is currently embroiled in a situation where he released a French au pair and her partner from immigration detention because (allegedly) her prospective employer's second cousin lobbied the government to do so, and that family has donated large amounts of funds to the party. Meanwhile, others are held in sub-human conditions purely for trying to arrive in Australia as refugees, by boat. This situation is unfolding right now, but I doubt there will be any fallout.

Australia's current leadership was not voted in by the population of the country (as seems to be the trend for the last few years, no matter who you voted for), and seems to be set on an anti-privacy, liberty-destroying, nationalist agenda.

As an Australian, I'm incredibly embarrassed by all involved.

<comment><USER3> Small correction: Morrison was not Minister for Home Affairs, he was Minister for Immigration and Border Protection. Dutton was appointed Minister for Home Affairs upon establishment of DHA at the end of 2017. Before the establishment of DHA, which merged Immigration with other "national security" matters, responsibility for general law enforcement matters, including the telecommunications interception laws, the metadata retention scheme, and so on, lay with the Attorney-General's Department, not the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

DHA is a portfolio that's more or less specifically designed to deliver policy like this and frame everything in terms of "national security". Even the DHA staff I personally know aren't fans of how the structure of the national security bureaucracy has changed over the last year.

My bigger problem here is lack of pushback from the Opposition. The "bipartisan consensus" on national security matters need not mean uncritical acceptance of badly-designed laws and inhumane policies.

</comment></comment><comment> dane-pgp All the more reason to speed up the deployment and implementation of Binary Transparency:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Binary_Transparency](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Binary_Transparency)

Even if this is only used to detect after-the-fact that an attack has happened, that will still help us to assess the scale of the risks that software users face, and maybe allow citizens to hold governments accountable for how they use the dangerous powers they are seeking.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well that's dark. Unfortunately, I suspect Canada is not far from proposing a similar bill. Currently the federal liberals are working on an Anti-Foreign Interference bill that plans on clamping down on free speech in social media in a very serious way. Scary times, authoritarianism sneaks in.

<comment><USER5> Concerned Canadian here. You're referring to Bill C-76 (the "Anti-Foreign Interference" and/or "Election Modernization Act")?

Is there a good critical analysis (WRT free speech) of this bill you can recommend?

Text of bill is here: [http://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/bill/C-76/first- re...](http://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/bill/C-76/first-reading)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If only there was some theory of government that limited the government's power.

Something that specifically granted powers to the government, and no other powers, so we wouldn't have to worry about this kind of stuff in the future when an ill-informed majority wants to make decisions for the rest of us.

<comment><USER7> I'm not aware of one? Bureaucracies have their ways of squirming past any goal you set. (See: patriot act, NSLs, FISA court, Anwar Al-Awlaki)

<comment><USER6> Indeed. This requires a lot of buy-in and a lot of voter accountability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was planning on moving over to fast mail over Labor Day, not so sure now.

<comment><USER9> That's an excellent point. I may not renew with them, and it has nothing to do with FastMail themselves.

Australia seems like precisely the right-sized society to be affected by pushback against this sort of behavior without being large enough to overwhelm outside opposition.

<comment><USER10> So, what FastMail alternatives are there to be recommended?

<comment><USER11> Maybe ProtonMail?

<comment><USER10> It's a decent alternative, but the lack of FIDO 2FA is somewhat disappointing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1\. This feels like the beginnings of the inevitable and on-going battles for power between technology-based multinationals and governments as foretold in various dystopian sci-fi novels.

2\. Whilst all the issues in the article are cause for concern, what are the practical, technical and legal limitations to these requests? As I stated in a comment to a previous article, warrants are required for pursuing end-users (don't know about companies), so that means it's not a willy-nilly application of new powers.

It wouldn't be practical to pursue trivial crimes through forcing a company to release an intentionally insecure app update that targets one person.

Having said that, however, the Australian Government has authorised warrants to raid the homes of whistleblowers and their lawyers (see below), so I'm probably underestimating the pettiness of the powerful.

3\. Further articles illustrating Australia's recent and worrying lurch towards authoritarianism and nationalism:

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-28/witness-k-and- bernard-...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-28/witness-k-and-bernard- collaery-charged-intelligence-act-breach/9919268)

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-29/chelsea-manning- austra...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-29/chelsea-manning-australian- government-may-ban-entry/10180236)

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-23/huawei-banned-from- pro...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-23/huawei-banned-from- providing-5g-mobile-technology-australia/10155438)

First they helped to liberate East Timor and I said "good onya, mate", then they tried to screw billions of dollars from East Timor by illegally planting listening devices in the offices of the East Timorese government and I said "whoa, hang on a sec, that's Unaustralian! That's not why we helped them achieve independence in the first place is it? You sly c*nts!", then they came for my private messages...

</comment><comment><USER13> Always find it amazing how strong the urge to authoritarianism is in Australia. You'd think we'd all be larrikins and chilled out on the beach inviting newcomers to the barbie.

But no, we're apparently terrified of immigrants and love nothing more than the smack of firm leadership.

<comment><USER14> Just to support your point: The govt. also decided to seize everyone's firearms in 1996.

<comment><USER15> Most of Australia was fine with this.

<comment><USER3> As an Australian, who has many issues with these surveillance laws, I'm also 100% behind our gun control.

<comment><USER16> I'm an outsider that feels the same. I could never move to Australia due to its stances on privacy and censorship but the gun control is an attraction.

<comment><USER17> Just so you know, if you want a gun here it's not rocket science. Go to a gun club, watch a fire guns being fired, go do a test and buy a safe.

Congrats, you can now buy rifles and shotguns.

There was a recent case of a father who was rejected from 3 gun clubs because he was too shifty and yet the 4th accepted him and the cops didn't see any reason to reject him. He bought a rifle and shot both his teenage kids at his x-wife's house.

Also you just have to pickup the weekly papers to see cops are afraid of the rising gang violence and the amount of illegal guns that they are finding and being used.

But airsoft guns are illegal so i feel so much safer than countries like NZ that let you buy AR-15s /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Typical government. Scream terrorists and paedophiles and try and erode people's freedom even more because no one can disagree /s

<comment><USER19> Why the sarcasm?

I suppose it's not that you can't disagree it's just that apathy means many won't and walk heard first into a Soviet/east german stasi society. This is even the stuff of fiction we have recent history to look upon. But it's all for the greater good, right? Born of compassion and a desire to protect surely?

<comment><USER20> > apathy means many won't and walk heard first into a Soviet/east german stasi > society.

It could be apathy, or it could be that they genuinely believe the government is doing the right thing. Don't discount the latter because the former is easier for your worldview

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In related news...

* 1,464 Western Australian government officials used 'Password123' as their password. Cool, cool. - The Washington Post || [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/22/western...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/22/western-australian-government-officials-used-password-their-password-cool-cool/)

<comment><USER22> The P is capitalised. What more security do you need?

These are the same people that want all Australians to move their health records online and made it manual opt-out. Amongst every other system uses old methods. The tax system doesn't use 2FA.

At least the credit cards use a chip and PIN... oh wait, now on contactless payment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I Also Like Capital Letters For Every Word</comment>


Wrike acquired at valuation of $800M - <AUTHOR> https://startinfinity.com/blog/wrike-acquired <comment><USER2> I have used wrike for 5 years and it is one of the worst project/team management tool I have ever used. It's overly complicated (The UI is a mess.), the search functionality is not that great (Example trying to find tickets by keyword), maintaining workflows is horrible (Again UI problem.).

The only benefit I can recall is that it can integrate with other tools and you are able to create and update tickets by adding the wrike ticket identifier in an email.

I would rather use Jira (For projects) and Slack for communication than just using Wrike.</comment>


Show HN: Trigger an email sequence with an API call (Seeking feedback) - <AUTHOR> Hello! I'm launching (aka "it's online") an early stage product that I'm building called ReplyBin. It's a functioning product, but pretty bare bones. I'm hoping to get some early feedback on it. You can see and sign up for it here to test it out: https://www.replybin.com/
ReplyBin is a web service that allows you to trigger pre-drafted email sequences with an API call. You use your own transactional email service (currently only SendGrid is supported, but I plan to add others in the future), and you can configure time delays to the emails to space out their delivery.
I welcome any constructive criticism you may have. Thanks in advance for any feedback! <comment><USER2> Looks cool. A lot of transactional emails have customer data. Not sure you could do that here. A gif tutorial of an example would be good.

Also register email link went to spam, probably a new account thing but double check your send grid account.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I'll have to look into that deliverability issue you mentioned. Much appreciated.</comment></comment>


Science needs to catch-up with what dog trainers know - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/why-science-needs-to-catch-up-with-what-dog-trainers-know <comment><USER2> > Flanery was careful not to give Kashi hints with her body language, so > Kashi's imitation abilities seemed credible.

I dont wish to question someone's expertise in their field, but as a reader this is a dramatic jump without explanation or demonstration. Trusting this assumption seems like a major need for the primary point of the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article goes on to describe the skepticism in the scientific community: "...by the academic definition of imitation, Kashi's response of circling Flanery after Flanery circled her would not be true imitation, because Kashi was already familiar with circling as part of her freestyle training. In other words, Kashi might have circled Flanery simply because, in the past, she had been rewarded so frequently for doing exactly that, rather than truly understanding the current task."

The main point of the essay urges a closer collaboration between trainers and scientists in the field.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A no-setup, no-maintenance FAQ-bot for (almost) any website - <AUTHOR> https://dialogbar.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We came up with the idea while working for a large online fashion retailer, where they were spending a lot of resources building a customer support bot, that basically replicated the contents of their help pages. So we thought, why not use the content that is already on the website, and make it accessible through a conversational interface? Kind of like when you ask a question to Google and get a direct answer in a featured snippet.

We added the "almost" qualifier for two reasons: 1\. Our scraper needs to be able to extract the contents of your FAQ page. If search engines can index your page, you're probably good to go, but in some cases it doesn't work yet (e.g. dynamically loaded content) 2\. Depending on the topic and the format of your FAQs, the quality of the answers can vary. That's why we allow the creation of demos, so you can try how the bot performs on your page.

<comment><USER3> Does an actual, real, problem exist for which the soluton may be to "translate contents of FAQs (actually FGAs [1]) into a conversation-like interface"?

This assumes that the FAQs/FGAs are actually already about what the customer wants to know, which is something that - at least in my experience - <USER2> happens.

Or, if you prefer, the assumption is that the content is there but that the customer cannot find it, while it seems to me that what - generically speaking - is missing is the actual content.

[1] [https://jdebp.eu/FGA/fga-not-faq.html](https://jdebp.eu/FGA/fga-not- faq.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, that's why we added analytics where we cluster the most common questions and show you the most common unanswered questions, so you can improve your help pages. There's also a (albeit rudimentary) human handover when the question can't be answered.</comment></comment></comment>


#startups Channel Chatter Visualized - <AUTHOR> http://zoom.it/hQvO

<comment><AUTHOR> The data was from the IRC logs over the last 18 months or so. Data was scraped from the log files looking for messages that were directed at other users which created this directed graph. The data was then fed to Gephi to get the svg output.

A SVG Version of the file: <http://stuff.janitha.com/startups_chatter.2.svg> feel free to do whatever with it.

edit: a much higher resolution render by 'count': <http://zoom.it/Lxrz></comment>


Telize.com, a JSON IP and GeoIP REST API, goes open-source - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fcambus/telize <comment><USER2> Looks good, but a lot of setup and configuration to get going. We ([https://commando.io](https://commando.io)) use [https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip](https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip) in production and it has been amazing.

Freegeoip is super easy to setup, go. It auto-fetches source data from MaxMind, supports https, and has rate limiting capability.

<comment> vive-la-liberte GeoIP is unreliable. Just as an example of this, freegeoip.net reports that my IP belongs in a city 50 miles (80 kilometers) away from where I actually am at the moment.

With data so inaccurate, why even bother?

<comment><USER3> MaxMind's free GeoIP data is bad, but their premium data is actually _very_ good.

[https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-demo](https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-demo)

Enough so that I've used it on GeoIP critical tasks in the past. Unfortunately it's an API, so you have a limited # of calls.

<comment><USER4> For a personal project I actually integrated four different geo ip lookup sources and returned the most common (city, region, country) tuple. If there aren't any in common then I have it go with maxmind geoip v2 (which is from their demo page that lets you perform a limited number of lookups per 24 hours). For the traffic my app gets that's enough.

But I do have to agree, maxmind's flagship database is the best there is.

<comment><USER5> Which sources?

<comment><USER4> Maxmind (geocity lite), Maxmind (geoip2 demo lookup page from their site), ip2location, eurekAPI, DB-IP, ipinfo.io.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's always been open-source, at least according to its author's blog post, which was previously discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10573561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10573561)

</comment><comment><USER7> That reminds me, I also have one of these simple rest wrappers around the MaxMind database that I should open source... mine runs on AppEngine so it is infinitely scalable and super easy to deploy... ;-)

<comment><USER8> Please do so :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We've been running this open source code in production for about a year. Works great, but not sure it's really news...

</comment><comment><USER10> Ended up writing my own (more-or-less API-compatible) GeoIP server after the free Telize service shut down: [https://github.com/kz26/balise](https://github.com/kz26/balise)

</comment><comment><USER11> I had some sites using telize and happened to go there on a fluke one day to lookup my info while on vpn. It said they were shutting down the free geoip site in 2 days! Got lucky.</comment>


8-Bit Funding - <AUTHOR> http://8bitfunding.com

<comment><USER2> It seems like none of the projects have much finding.

Crowd-funding sites like this are likely one of those domains, like auction sites, where only the biggest few sites can really succeed. They don't work well without a _huge_ base of funders.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really cool! Is this for 8-bit inspired projects only? Your "Learn More" sections says it's for any game, but it would be kinda strange to see super advanced 3d games on here.

</comment><comment><USER4> The biggest potential problem I see with this is that contributions are non- refundable. Unlike Kickstarter, which has an all-or-nothing "pledge" model, 8-Bit Funding sends contributions to the project creators immediately. That means small transactions have less value (thanks to PayPal fees), but also that creators get funding straight away for immediate needs, perhaps helping development get going sooner. It'll be interesting to see how this works out.</comment>


Learning the Language of Mathematics (2000) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://wac.colostate.edu/llad/v4n1/jamison.pdf <comment><USER2> This was written in May 2000, but the following bit sounds like it was written May 2017.

> In conclusion, I want to confess what my real goals are in teaching this > material. In a society in which information is passed in 60 second sound > bites and reasoning limited to monosyllabic simple sentences, careful, > analytic thinking is in danger of extinction. And this is a grave danger in > a democratic society beset by a host of very complex moral and social > problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> "This is unacceptable because mathematics is written as English is written in complete, grammatical sentences." Unfortunately natural languages have many flaws and will easily falls in contradiction like Russell's paradox. Even formal mathematical axiomatic systems encountered Gödel's incompleteness..

Maybe something like constructive category theory would give us a better way to formally put ideas in ...

</comment><comment><USER4> The article says: 'A definition MUST be an "if and only if" statement.'

It is an established convention in mathematics to write definitions in the form "X is Y if P(X)". For example: "A metric space M is complete if every Caychy sequence in M converges in M".

One may question whether this is a good convention, but it is a convention that most mathematicians tend to follow.

<comment><USER5> That's because the other direction is implicit.

"X is a rectangle if it's a quadrilateral with all right angles."

Okay, so you can use this statement to look at an object and then check if it's a quadrilateral with all right angles, and then conclude that, by definition, it's a rectangle.

But for the other direction, if I tell you it's a rectangle, it's implicit that you can conclude all right angles. Contrapositively, it's also implicit that if I say it doesn't have all right angles, you can conclude that it's not a rectangle, i.e. that this condition has to be satisfied for anything worthy of the "rectangle" name.

[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/566565/are-if- and-i...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/566565/are-if-and-iff- interchangeable-in-definitions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish we had such a paper for programming.

<comment><USER7> What's the difference? Discrete mathematical concepts are applicable to programming as is without modification.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Send Text Message via HTTP Request - <AUTHOR> http://freetxtapi.com <comment><USER2> I especially like how the homepage carefully explains the security and privacy implications of this service /s

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input. Will definitely add these in the next iteration.</comment></comment>


Linus Torvalds: Apple's HFS+ is probably the worst file system ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/article/2868393/linus-torvalds-apples-hfs-is-probably-the-worst-file-system-ever.html

<comment><USER2> What the article actually tell?</comment>


Software hovers around the line between barely works and almost works - <AUTHOR> http://clabs.org/blogki/blogki.cgi?page=/ComputersAndTechnology/AlmostBarelyWorking

<comment><USER2> This rings true. Sadly.</comment>


Atreus Keyboard Build - <AUTHOR> https://michaelpnash.github.io/atreus-keyboard/ <comment><USER2> Is there a model M clone that is readily available in Europe? I have heard so much about these mechanical keyboards but have never had the chance to try one.

I easily have wrist and pinky issues when using regular modern flat keyboards like laptop keyboards or the Apple ones. The keyboard that solved my issues was the original Microsoft Sculpt of which I have already had keyboards that broke on me. The latency on this wireless keyboard is annoying me lately so I am looking for a new wired option with good latency that also does not kill my wrists and pinky

<comment><USER3> Can you describe your wrist and pinky issues?

I have found the most ergonomic setup for myself is actually a little counter- intuitive. Wrist rests actually make carpal tunnel syndrome worse for me, because despite being soft, a wrist _rest_ ultimately leads me to focus the weight of my arms on the wrist rest (i.e., _resting_ ) , which only leads to compression of my carpal tunnel. What works better is a chair with high arm rests and a desk that's low enough to where my arms can float above the keyboard. The meaty part of my forarms is enough of cushion for my arms & nerves to avoid both carpal tunnel & numb pinky syndrome. The keyboard sits at the edge of the desk, no wrist rest required. Try it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A 42-key Atreus (Atreus42) was my daily driver for 2 years. The TMK firmware supporting 2 different modes of dvorak, I found that it was much more comfortable to use than a normal keyboard. Function, Shift, Control, and Alt keys, all in the center for thumb control, made A LOT of sense, and now I feel like the classic "wide" space bar is a waste of space on contemporary keyboards. Enter and Escape as bottom-most pinky keys was also easy to get used to since there was no outer column to get confused about, as with the 4x12 Planck / Atreus62.

The one thing I thought it needed was an easier way to access the Delete, Home, and End keys. Changing the default keymap entailed compromises that I didn't seem like they would be worth it, so now I am looking at the OLKB 48-key Planck keyboard. While I don't think pure "grid" ortholinear is as comfortable as the column-staggered Atreus42, the typing experience is tolerable with sculpted Cherry/OEM/DCS-profile keycaps.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the unique keyboard and DIY aspect. But 150 for something I might mess up in the process of building just can't be justified... for now.

<comment><USER5> Atreus creator here. It doesn't happen often, but occasionally I have customers run into trouble putting their kit together, and I'm committed to always stepping them thru the process of troubleshooting and walking thru the fix. The last thing I want is for you to buy a keyboard and never get it working properly.

Here's an instance where someone damaged their kit's microcontroller and was walked thru the repair process: [https://old.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/5clvio...](https://old.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/5clvio/best_customer_service_i_have_ever_received_atreus/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I still don't think anything beats Matt Adereth's dactyl[0]. Tweak some hand size / reach parameters and let the clojure generate the curvature and the scads. Pure bliss in terms of human->machine interface.

[0] [https://github.com/adereth/dactyl- keyboard](https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard)

<comment><USER5> The Dactyl is definitely neat. It's designed for a different use case tho; you wouldn't take a Dactyl with you when you're out and about, while the Atreus is specifically designed for travel.

I'm working on a similar programmatic definition of the Atreus here: [https://icosahedron.website/@technomancy/101809590723531930](https://icosahedron.website/@technomancy/101809590723531930)

It's still a work-in-progress, but being able to tweak the input parameters and recompile to get the board regenerated is really handy! The circuit board already uses programmatic alignment for placing the switches and diodes: [https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/blob/master/atreus.rkt](https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/blob/master/atreus.rkt)

<comment><USER3> >I'm working on a similar programmatic definition of the Atreus here: [https://icosahedron.website/@technomancy/101809590723531930](https://icosahedron.website/@technomancy/101809590723531930)

>The circuit board already uses programmatic alignment for placing the switches and diodes: [https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/blob/master/atreus.rkt](https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/blob/master/atreus.rkt)

Advances like these, especially the last one, are where I hoped state-of-the- art keyboard design would be headed. Amazing work!

In the same vein, I have found an interesting python library that's capable of generating KiCAD circuits: [https://xesscorp.github.io/skidl/docs/_site/](https://xesscorp.github.io/skidl/docs/_site/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Got my Atreus kit in the mail today. Can't wait to put it together! Phil, thanks for a wonderful product!</comment>


Myvim: Script to create a portable bundle of Vim environment - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/junegunn/myvim

<comment><AUTHOR> Just came across this from One Thing Well[0]. Basically you run a single command and you get a vim.YOUR_USERNAME script that you can copy over to any machine and execute to have your complete vim environment with plugins and all. While I already use git to manage vim config[1], making this work elsewhere means doing a git clone and some symlinks. Having it be one step for occasions when I quickly want a familiar environment is cool.

[0] [http://onethingwell.org/](http://onethingwell.org/)

[1] [https://github.com/michaelmior/vimrc](https://github.com/michaelmior/vimrc)</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever used time-blocking? Why? How'd it work? - <AUTHOR> Time-blocking is when you reserve specific chunks of time (usually on a calendar) for specific tasks. Granularity may vary, but think of it as reserving time to complete each of your to-dos. I'm developing a product that will help people do this.
So I'm curious:
If you've used the technique, what were the circumstances (Work, school, parenting, etc)? Did it improve your productivity or balance? If you've since stopped, why did you decide to stop using the technique?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Yes, but more adhoc like "starting now I will dedicate 60 minutes to X". Any solution that requires me to schedule ahead or needs me to add my todos in yet another system is too much work. Especially when todos are written with pen&paper.

Your solution ([https://www.cloqworq.com/](https://www.cloqworq.com/)) which accesses Google Calender and moves todos into slots looks cool.

I somewhat look forward to a hardware solution that includes blocking access to internet or other distractions like [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/saent-be-less- distracted](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/saent-be-less-distracted). I've tried kitchen clocks (countdown) but they just added stress and pressure and didn't do anything to keep me focused.

<comment><AUTHOR> Saent seems cool - I definitely lose a lot of time to web distractions.

I think I'm learning that people tend to plan further out (a few days to a week) in the face of external deadlines (i.e. exam season at school, sometimes end-of-quarter in business, etc). Adhoc time blocking occurs more when the motivation to be productive is self-imposed. Does that jive with your experience?

<comment><USER2> I think so. I don't use any calendaring application, not even for birthdays or dentist appointments and never use reminders so my work/todo flow might be unusual.

If your software could disable distractions, and that's mainly access to certain websites (like HN) or email, it's a huge plus.

With the kickstarter campaign I just like the hardware gadget and the initial prices are low enough to try. I can imagine the social sharing added to the software I saw in the screenshots will be awful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some days I used to really struggle to focus on a single task. I discovered Pomodoro through a friend and have been using it ever since.

I do not use a task list, but rather for 25 minutes I work on my story focusing on just that. Then I take a 5 minute break. After 2 hours I take a longer break, (first one is lunch, second one is 30 minutes, third one is 15 and then after another hour I go home)

It works very well for me. I am happy with my output. Some days, I have to abandon Pomodoro to instead have a meeting during that time slot, or other times I am just less productive Than I would like. It is a good baseline to help keep me focused.

<comment><USER2> Do you use any hardware or software with the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique) ? Or just your watch?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have not only used timeblocks with great success in my consulting business where I forced every employee to split every day into two blocks, one before lunch and one after lunch. The employees also has to map out EVERY project and task into timeblocks.

This and a few other rules worked so extremely well that our revenue increased 33% and all our customers are very happy.

Timeblocking was such a huge success for us that we started building a SaaS app on top of our method called ... ... ... (wait for it)

[http://timeblock.com](http://timeblock.com)

:)

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, I notice a sharp rise in productivity and progress on all important projects. I don't schedule individual todos but set out todos on a project in that time.

I use iCal at work but I'd love something similar for home, where I use Ubuntu. I dislike Google Calendar, it didn't work so well. A desktop app seems to work best for me.

I'd be interested in hearing more about your project!

</comment><comment><USER6> If I have a weekly task I know I have to do like a status report, I always block out time in my diary for it.</comment>


NYC Demo Day  - <AUTHOR> http://nycdemoday.com/

<comment><USER2> Before I read it, I thought this would be an interesting idea, along with NYC Entrepreneur Week (<http://nyew.org>) - except that this is 8 startups that already have enough exposure (given that they got into these seed programs) presenting to ... er, I have no idea who? Looks like you need an invite to get in, so I'm assuming it is only open to VCs (which would explain why it's called Demo Day).

What would really rock (and I feel like NYC has very few of these entrepreneur friendly events - other than the tech meetup and the web2newyork meetup) is something like the NYTM showcase that was done at Internet Week, which allowed every willing company to put up a booth to interact with everyone at the event, with the funds coming from sponsorships. Except that these companies should be allowed to present for a 10 minutes each.

When are we going to have exciting things like that happen in New York? :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the NY Tech Meetup - you can to present in front of a crowd of 400 tech enthusiasts; VCs, press and alike are in the crowd. Some even have received funding, as well some fairly big sites launched there (Delicious, Muxtape, Hype Machine & some others).

<comment><USER2> I've been to NYTM and while Nate is doing a great job, I think it's still too big and represents more of the 'business entrepreneur' community than the 'engineer' community.

The Hackers & Founders meetup that Dave (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daveambrose>) runs is a lot more interesting but smaller and does not have demo's.

Maybe I'm just out of it but the NY tech community feels a lot more fragmented than the one out on the west coast.

<comment><USER3> Thanks bringing this up. Demos are something I plan on including for next month (largely for timing/prep concerns) as we're getting close to our meetup this coming Thursday. I'll be sending out an open invite tomorrow.

For those of you that'd like to present or share ideas as to the format for our first Demo H&F in October, please email me: daveambrose at gmail.com.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Mobile Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/mobileanalytics/?sc_channel=TA&sc_campaign=mobile_analytics&sc_publisher=Techmeme&sc_medium=Sponsor_posts&sc_category=web_mobile_social&sc_content=TA_Sponsor_post_A&sc_detail=TA_Techmeme.com_mobile_analytics_Sponsor_post_A <comment><USER2> Wow! Considering that Mixpanel charges $2000 for 20MM data points, this is awesome. Love how the cost of starting up just keeps getting lower and lower. :)

Also, I understand that Amazon includes 'System Events' in their free tier. Even with this included, at an average of 15 custom events + 5 system events, you can have 5MM sessions a month for FREE. This is more than enough for bootstrapped companies/projects to start and grow with.

I'm not sure who the customers for these analytics companies are (small projects that grow with them vs big projects that join them) but if it is the latter, well Amazon is def. the better choice. Although they do not offer any complex funnels/segmentation, I am sure this and other features will be added in the future.

Thinking about Peter Thiel's monopoly vs competition eating profits (Zero to One, awesome book!), I wonder if and how players in this space will be able to differentiate themselves enough to really have a competitive advantage over one another.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Mixpanel_

This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is expensive!

Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if I am wrong):

\- Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of this free tier and the paid tiers. Start and End events are going to put reasonably sized apps into the billions.

\- If you manage to get rid of said system events, big parts of the dashboard are likely to be rendered useless like DAU, MAU, retention, etc.

\- You cannot deeply segment any of this information so you will have a lot of questions remaining even just the next day

\- It will be difficult to offer funnel analysis (which doesn't exist) that is retroactive at that scale. That means you will get the same kind of funnel that people hate with Google Analytics' goals.

\- Generally speaking: complexity of analysis will mean higher prices

While Mixpanel pricing may seem expensive by comparison, the products are not comparable. You get what you pay for in the level of sophisticated analysis.

Given that, over time it is our plan to lower prices relative to the rate that hardware and infrastructure becomes less expensive. We think that's fair. And if we can improve our technology to become more efficient we most certainly want to make our software and products more accessible.

We are very open to your thoughts so please be harsh and candid (as I know HN can be). We deeply care about our startup customers who made and pushed us into who we are today.

<comment><USER4> As a second-time founder, I found Mixpanel to be the most expensive piece of SaaS we were using in our stack: at barely 30k users, it was already far more expensive than our whole hosting bill combined!

Then I switched solutions for a while, looking for a good combination that'd give me Facebook attribution data plus user behavior. So far, I haven't found my ideas combination and in a way, Amazon doesn't change that.

I find that solutions like segment.io are great in the way that you can install their SDK just once, and have that proxy the events to all other SDKs. For now that's what I chose to do, to avoid week-long delays for approval publishing our apps in the app store.

<comment><USER5> We effectively went through the same thing - moved off of mixpanel when it got too expensive.

We instead started throwing all of our events into Google big query. You can steam events directly into a table or proxy then through your server to add more metadata. You can even use mixpanels great open source client libraries and point them at your servers.

Initially I was worried that we would miss mixpanels built in analysis and tools but we honestly preferred querying a database with SQL better. The tricky queries are the funnels but once you wrote the query once you can just save the template. The only thing we had to build was a chrome extension that could graph the results of an arbitrary query.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing! I'm not a developer, but an analyst. I know SQL fairly well and some javascript, but no coding experience apart from writing code for google analytics. How easy/cheap would it be to build a custom analytics solution like that? It's probably beyond my personal skills, but do you think it's possible for someone with my skillset to find a developer and supervise them? Can you point me to some resources or stories of it being done?

<comment><USER7> We recently launched mobile SDKs for iOS and Android at Snowplow ([https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow)), so that's probably the easier route to go than a full-blown custom build :-)

<comment><USER6> Yeah seems good and I will check it in depth. It seems not provided out of the box, but I assume I can use MS SQL/HDInsight as a backend, instead of Redshift? Maybe you should consider including Azure as an infrastructure partner. I'm a consultant in the non-valley space (rest of the world). Lots of folks like me are looking for what you've developed. Most are pretty big MS fanboys. Just saying :)

<comment><USER7> Great! Yep we're not based in the Valley either. Our first focus is on AWS and Redshift, but yes Azure is interesting too :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> (Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Heap. We build mobile analytics, so I'm far from impartial.)

Amazon's main purpose in building an analytics tool is to drive spend to the Amazon App Store. If you can't measure the ROI of their app store, you can't devote more resources to it.

This applies to just about all the big tech companies and their respective distribution platforms: Google with AdWords, Facebook with mobile ads, and Apple with the iOS app store. _Lots of dollars flow through these platforms_ , and Amazon/Facebook/Apple don't want their developers measuring those dollars with a hostile competitor's analytics offering. (Often, the hostile competitor they have in mind is Google.)

You'll notice this in the screenshots for Amazon's mobile analytics. On the Overview page, note the breakdown of "Lifetime Value Per User". There are separate figures for iOS users, Android users, and...Fire OS users. A line item for "Fire iOS users" would never be so prominent in Google or Apple's analytics (or even present).

Thus, Amazon et al. focus on making their own analytics tools good at measuring acquisition (prioritizing their own channels) and some high-level metrics. Digging into the data is much less of a priority. Even basic questions - "what's the conversion rate for my signup flow?", "what are the email addresses of my active users?", "what percent of my revenue comes from repeat visits?" \- require you to use a different tool.

Bigger companies are aware of this feature gap and happy to pay the price premium. But startups are (appropriately) more price-sensitive, even though a solid investment in growth/analytics is arguably _more_ important for startups.

I'd love to hear HN's feedback on how Heap (and other analytics companies) can structure their pricing to better accommodate small companies.

</comment><comment><USER9> "1st party" analytics on Android is a bit weird at the moment. Since Google Analytics for Mobile requires Google Play Services - you can't use it in for installations on Amazon Fire devices. Of course there are third party services (Crashlytics, Mixpanel, etc), but it's just interesting to see Amazon and Google essentially forced to build their own versions of each other's services to compete on Android.

<comment><USER10> Are Android devices without GPS a large enough market for you to worry about? I didn't think that anyone was actually distributing a significant amount of apps through the Amazon market.

<comment><USER11> Many of the devs I know aren't, but then they haven't put much effort into Amazon. Amazon App Store is basically Amazon Fire tablet users only. The Amazon Phone has barely sold so can be discounted for right now. Other than that, the folks who install the Amazon store... which requires manually enabling 3rd party apps on your Android phone and then installing it... are folks looking to get the free apps Amazon gives away to get people to use their store. So, not only is it a much smaller audience, it isn't necessarily the best quality audience. That's what I've heard anecdotally at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mobile analytics is relatively new Amazon offering. Seems follow their typical approach, start with low prices with small number of features and build new ones.

Amazon unlikely will be the best solution (e.g. I bet Mixpanel will be significantly better for at least next few years), but they may cover a lot of typical use cases. That will commoditize the user event analytics and put pressure on the other companies.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very basic dashboard and reporting made me think it must be all about APIs and reusing data in other AWS products.

You know, Analytics + SNS + SES would make up a nice a little marketing automation solution and I wouldn't mind building my own reports in R or whatever.

However, there's no way to retrieve and reuse any data through the API. Seems like a major opportunity loss with AWS users as target audience.

</comment><comment><USER14> Disclosure: I work for Localytics.

Overall I agree with Suhail's points regarding GA being the closest proxy for this service. You do get what you pay for when it comes to advanced analytics. If anything Amazon's move shows that simple data collection around analytics is becoming commoditized. We tend to price based on MAU's rather than events to help customers with predictability, but given that event data points are the basis of our (and pretty much all analytics company's) cost model, that can present challenges.

The problem being highlighted in this thread is that the value derived from advanced analytics doesn't justify the cost in the minds of a lot of startups. There are a variety of reasons for this: not enough users, deeper insights are "interesting" but not game-changing, complex to set up, hard to understand, requires lots of event tagging, etc.

Here's one way to think about the value of more advanced analytics: they are primarily valuable for startups when they power the ability to take action on them (i.e. In the form of marketing campaigns). For example, if creating intricate and specific funnels and flows seems like overkill for your startup e-commerce app, would the value increase if you could send a push or in-app message to users who have dropped at a specific point in a funnel but have purchased before? I suspect that it would, but clearly the value fluctuates depending on the stage and context of your app.

</comment><comment><USER15> This seems awesome but it could really use more real time metrics and more sophisticated reports/funneling/cohorting.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is great especially considering the REST API meaning this can be adapted to other environments other than mobile...

</comment><comment><USER17> You may also want try an open source (self-hosted) solution like Countly ([https://count.ly](https://count.ly)). It may well meet expectations if free- to-use Community Edition ([https://count.ly/products/editions/community](https://count.ly/products/editions/community)) is what you'd need. If not, you can go with Enteprise Edition ([https://count.ly/products/editions/enterprise](https://count.ly/products/editions/enterprise)) which is also open source, self hosted, but with a lot more features like drill-down events, funnels and retention (cohorts).

</comment><comment><USER18> That free tier is quite generous – worth about $140/mo if you were to exceed it by the amount of free allowance. Need to be careful if you rely on it being free, and then grow.

</comment><comment><USER19> lot of saas companies offer metadata & other common metrics, as an addon to their main offering. such as crittercism, testflight, bugsense, crashlytics and helpshift.

i've headed analytics/targeting at a yc company in the past before mixpanel, flurry were in the market, and saw first-hand how portability/dumps of the data made a big difference as you grow - something that not all analytics saas companies provide.

disclosure: i work @helpshift and we have several customers who may have 100M+ data points/week but we dont price based on data points. we give the basic active, engagement and session metrics like amazon, and search/faq metrics within our sdk. slice-n-dice reports based on custom events are coming soon.

but our pricing is aligned around in-app customer support & active users. we dont track/charge for metadata, breadcrumbs and you can tie as much data to an issue/user (much like Parse out-of-box). most of our users have several sdk's and we're fine with that too.

that said, i see a lot of value in heap/keen/segment that make it less important where/how the data is and let you focus on what insight to surface

</comment><comment><USER20> +1 for [http://keen.io](http://keen.io)

</comment><comment><USER21> i try mixpanel, it has best solution for startup, also have highest price.</comment>


Seattle Underbelly Exposed as Homeless Camp Violence Flares - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/us/seattle-homeless-jungle-camp.html <comment><USER2> NYTimes, reposter extraordinaire.

See several recent local news articles about the Jungle: [https://www.google.com/?#q=seattle+jungle](https://www.google.com/?#q=seattle+jungle)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but those of us in the east don't necessarily follow Seattle news. I have relatives and friends there, was out there for a few days last spring, and had no idea about it.

(There is the larger point that many people suppose that if it isn't mentioned in the NY Times it didn't happen. That is a discussion for another day.)

<comment><USER4> >had no idea about it

Did you look out your window as you came in from the airport? its shanty towns and shacks until you are surrounded by buildings.

<comment><USER5> I've flown into Sea-tac literally dozens of times, most recently last summer, and this has never been a description of my experiences heading out of the airport into the city.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most important tech trend? - <AUTHOR>

I launched my first startup 6 years ago and arguably the most important trend was the adoption of mobile.  I focused my company on this and quickly grew and sold my company.
Now I am trying to figure out what the most important tech related trend will be during the next 5 years.
Virtual Reality? Drones? 3d printing? Bitcoin? <comment><USER2> If the FAA gets it's act together then drones (aka flying personal butlers) could certainly be it. The disruption they could bring to delivery, courier, security, tourism, gaming, etc could be huge.

Also, self-driving cars (if they reached a reasonable price-point in the next few years) could have pretty profound effects on ridesharing, delivery, parking, congestion, etc. Could be a major quality-of-life changer for people in big cities.

But overall I think the most-important technology will be batteries. Long- lasting, fast-charging, small, powerful, cheap, recyclable batteries will be crucial to so many hardware-based industries. They are truly the stepping stone to many futuristic tech-trends.

<comment><USER3> _If the FAA gets it 's act together then drones (aka flying personal butlers) could certainly be it. The disruption they could bring to delivery, courier, security, tourism, gaming, etc could be huge._

All noble uses for the technology, but I suspect the most popular use will be to take better selfies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Internationalisation. In the next few years there are going to be a billion or so new internet users who'll want content and eCommerce, but they'll mostly be on low-powered, low-bandwidth smartphones. That particular market is very poorly catered at the moment. There are some players out there, but there's going to be room for _a lot_ more. Essentially the size of the internet user base is going to double.

<comment><AUTHOR> Providing services to the next billion internet users sounds like a big opportunity. I wonder if the solutions will be similar to what worked in the developing world or entirely new.

<comment><USER3> _I wonder if the solutions will be similar to what worked in the developing world or entirely new._

You don't even have to go to the developing world to find opportunity. There are services that exist in the US that simply don't exist elsewhere. One example is an MLS for real estate, which powers Zillow, redfin, etc. There are many developed countries that don't have one yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everyone is saying that Javascript is the world's most popular language, or at least soon will be.

That saddens me as I do not care for it at all. It's not like I can't learn how to code in JS, but to do so I find quite unrewarding.

I don't see 3D printing being commercially interesting for at least another few years. For anything you really seriously want a custom-made part for, you'd want a metal part made by an experienced machinist with a CNC mill. I expect 3D printers will get there someday but not soon.

Drones, quite likely there are many uses for them other than snapping pictures of white house lawn.

Bitcoin, maybe. In the long run, definitely. There is a specific limit to how many bitcoins can ever be mined. At the same time, more merchants are accepting them. Without a doubt, the dollar price of a coin will increase. I do not know yet - I haven't really checked - whether i'd expect bitcoin to do better than what I could do by investing in stocks, bonds or commodities, but in the long run I expect they would do better.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately Javascript will be the world's most popular language for a long time, until the web moves away from browsers. Which could actually happen within our lifetime, given the rise of mobile.

<comment><USER5> I should be clear that I am not by any means a language zealot. There's lots of people who like Javascript, and that's just fine with me.

For reasons I'll go into later, I just became a vegan. I've done it before, I know how to be a vegan and be happy with my diet. Tempeh is popular among vegans, but I regard is as foul, I'd rather drink sewage, but I'm completely cool with someone else eating all the tempeh.

What I like is to stress over cache misses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Distributed...PC's, "broadband", and mobile are early iterations of a ubiquitous computing mesh. This is not so much the internet of things but human controlled computing...that's where the margins are, not in industrial commodities. The next big thing will provide people with more computational power and more reach.

<comment><USER8> What hardware/software platforms and network protocols do you envision for the UC mesh? Distributed gossip protocols or centralized named-data and content- centric networking?

<comment><USER7> Keyboards.

<comment><USER8> A UC mesh of ... prose?

<comment><USER7> The infrastructure and protocols aren't the relevant place for innovation. TCP/IP wasn't the greenfield of money making opportunities when everyone started connecting to the internet. 3G wasn't the greenfield when everyone went mobile.

Look at tablets...they're getting keyboards as an upsell. They're becoming full computing devices. The cell phone companies' walled gardens aren't the future. Maintaining a walled garden requires constantly delivering features people really want. That's not a telephone company's core competency. They're future is in providing infrastructure for general computing. All they really want is mailbox checks.

General computing is better with keyboards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From a mainstream consumer software startup's standpoint I'm pretty sure adoption of mobile is still the biggest trend. The last 10 years was about everyone starting to have "smartphones" and mobile internet access. Now it's about society adjusting to "mobile" and doing more with their phones. Just look at Snapchat, Periscope or how people use Messenger. We definitely have at least 5 more years of major innovation in mobile usage. I think we're only about to hit the "early-majority" stage.

</comment><comment><USER10> A lot smart folks are trying to figure out the AI space > [http://www.wsj.com/article_email/artificial-intelligence- exp...](http://www.wsj.com/article_email/artificial-intelligence-experts-are- in-high-demand-1430472782-lMyQjAxMTA1MzA2MTMwNTEyWj)

</comment><comment><USER11> The growth of messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, which reflects a preference for communicating with smaller groups of contacts more frequently, in contrast with the one-to-many mode of communication popularized by social networks like Facebook and Twitter

</comment><comment><USER12> Sensor networks. Interconnected intelligent self-adjusting self-responding devices. A marketplace of data generators and data consumers. Summarizing mountain of data, text, articles, detecting trends and responding.

</comment><comment><USER13> Group housing may become popular when we get AI surveillance that can watch over the common areas and identify abusers. But that's probably more than 5 years out.

</comment><comment><USER13> The car as a platform. Self-driving cars means cars will provide entertainment, news, and a work environment.

</comment><comment><USER14> Robots</comment>


"Whistleblower welcome in China" - <AUTHOR> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013-06/14/c_132455893.htm <comment><USER2> This is disgusting. A news agency that is known for defending its own governments' dirty stuff, twisting truth, and manipulating public opinions, is now appreciating a freedom fighter and a human rights activist.

It's apparently not because what Snowden did matches their core values, or they want the same thing happen in China. Oh yes, they certainly like Snowden. It's because Snowden exposed some bad things done by US authorities, and they can use this as political tool; furthermore they can finally take this and say to Chinese people, hey, US does this too. You like the freedom in US? That's all bullshit.

If you are interested in what their reactions were when this kind of thing happened in China, back in 2010, this [1] (google translate: [2]) was xinhuanet's opinion on Chinese human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Liu Xiaobo [3]. They described Liu Xiaobo as an evil man used by western countries to attack Chinese government, while the truth is Liu Xiaobo spent years striving for Chinese people's freedom, human rights, and constitution enforcement in China.

Xinhuanet basically writes what the government tells them to write, and say what the government tells them to say.

[1] [http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2010-10/15/c_12664760.htm](http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2010-10/15/c_12664760.htm)

[2] [http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh- CN&u=http:...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh- CN&u=http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2010-10/15/c_12664760.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%25E6%2596%25B0%25E5%258D%258E%25E7%25BD%2591%2B%25E5%2588%2598%25E6%2599%2593%25E6%25B3%25A2%2Bsite:xinhuanet.com%26biw%3D1304%26bih%3D776)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo#Nobel_Peace_Prize](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo#Nobel_Peace_Prize)

EDIT: typos

<comment><USER3> I'd say what Snowden is doing fits fits their core values and goals perfectly. He's spreading gross misinformation and propaganda that's damaging to the US government and major US based technology companies. The fact that he may be doing it out of well-intentioned ignorance rather than willfully doesn't strike me as a big sticking point from their perspective.

[edit: I'm not surprised this is getting downmodded without any actual counterarguments. My comment is a bit too flippant, and the Snowden story really plays to the prevailing biases of the tech crowd. Still this whole episode does have me a little saddened by how otherwise intelligent people can behave so irrationally when something fits what they want to believe.]

<comment><USER4> "He's spreading gross misinformation and propaganda that's damaging to the US government and major US based technology companies."

It is not propaganda if it is true, like the members of congress have admitted.

American companies and country own the world, they have power to abuse and they do. Is that hard to understand?

Like any other Empire, they fall down over its own weight.

<comment><USER3> We already know the majority of his claims are not true, or are grossly misrepresented. The latest bit of noise is a congressman with no background on intelligence who misunderstood a briefing he received and just made an ass of himself in public. Just like all the other articles on this, we'll get corrections and clarifications over the next several days that basically amount to a retraction, but I expect that's not what you'll remember.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _a program which marks the bleakest moment yet in the history of the Internet_

Writes someone from the other side of the Great Firewall.

<comment><USER6> While I agree it was a bit odd to read this coming from someone in _China_ (given the state of their own internet), I'm as surprised as you are to have read this.

However, you have to read between the lines:

> _How do we make sense of the fact that the market and the state colluded in > the abuse of private information via what represents the backbone of many > modern day infrastructures? [...] How do we understand the one-sided cyber > attack accusations the U.S. has poured upon China in the past few months?_

After I read those two questions, I realized, there was a difference. People in China know about the firewall. Sure, they have no choice, but the government isn't going behind their backs or allowing them unrestricted internet access and penalizing those who access "disallowed" content.

And I do, for one, agree with that last question; I hardly could believe that the US was just taking cyberattacks from China for _years_ without at least attempting to get some revenge (and indeed, I know the US has the resources to fight back).

That being said, I admit I did laugh a bit to myself at this part:

> _this force is acting in an unconstitutional manner and entirely contrary to > the Universal Declaration of Human Rights_

And that's when I started reading in-between the lines, because half of it's the truth, and half of it's probably state-ordered propaganda. The only difference this time is that this propaganda has some truth to it.

<comment><USER5> _I realized, there was a difference. People in China know about the firewall._

That's the part they know about. Political dissenters in China are actively censored, suppressed, imprisoned, spied upon - systematic efforts to access overseas email accounts of dissidents and the personal computers of journalists outside of China have also been reported. So the government is most certainly 'going behind their backs' and doing a great deal more.

But my point wasn't really to discuss the ways in which China isn't actually an open democratic society - everyone knows that. I usually hesitate to use the word 'propaganda' since it tends to be broadly over-applied to things like 'US Congressperson says a stupid thing' which are just 'someone saying a stupid thing' rather than propaganda. But this particular item is clearly a piece of hypocritically indignant state-sponsored propaganda. There's a great deal to talk about regarding the NSA surveillance programs - I just have a really hard time imagining how this sort of piece is a useful or interesting starting point for any such discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did anyone catch the dig against Chinese Internet freedom?

"For this reason China, despite the fact that it does not have a good reputation as far as Internet governance is concerned, should move boldly and grant Snowden asylum."

If this is official government propaganda, why are they saying China doesn't have a good reputation?

The article also calls for Google to withdraw from the United States on the same grounds it withdrew from China - hacking of Gmail and state surveillance.

<comment><USER8> Communist agitprop. They know that unless they address the bad reputation their article will lack credibility. They aren't stupid.

I think the article is hilarious and I'm glad China is sticking it to the US. Not because I support China, but because I hope this makes Americans uncomfortable with the prosecution of American whistleblowers to the point that something will actually change.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Having researched China for 27 years, 北京大学等等 -

I thought the official Xinhua editorial would be interesting to an HN audience.

Actually, this New Yorker article is better.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5885327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5885327)

Evan Osnos, a top journalist in Beijing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Mark my words: by 2041 china will be a freer country than the United States. It is already economically freer in the free economic zones such as Shenzhen.

<comment><USER10> Mark my words: You're a delusional idiot. Today, not in 2041.

Seriously, have you _been_ to China? Have you dealt with their government? TEHRE ARE NO FREE ELECTIONS IN CHINA. You fucking, fucking idiot.

<comment><USER9> Iran has free elections too: just today they chose a new president out of six candidates. The ad-hominem speech that you exhibit has always been characteristic of communists: Lenin was a master of it for one. And that's where US is slowly going...

<comment><USER11> I voted you up, but keep in mind it was 6 candidates acceptable to the existing power structure.

<comment><USER12> Keep in mind that US elections are generally between 2 candidates acceptable to the existing power structure, with a sideshow of more novel/progressive/interesting candidates who can't win because it's set up to be almost structurally impossible for them to.

<comment><USER11> I would be the first person to agree with you.

<comment><USER12> How do we fix it :-/ I think a proportional voting system would open it up, but that conversation is so far from the one we have on the national stage that it seems ludicrous.

<comment><USER11> I don't know, it's so completely complicated. I would think we'd have to move to a parliamentary system to really break the duopoly. The media demonizes and marginalizes any other political parties in America, and Americans want to be "winners" so some even vote for a party based only on the perception that they will be the triumphant side.

The problem is that it seems like for most people, choosing between a few options is preferable than to have to carefully examine and choose from a wider array.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Slightly off topic: China must be very happy about this revelation. We (US) have been criticizing their "great firewall" for so long, but now it's revealed that we have our own program with similar motivations, only a different execution. Rather than burying and censoring information, this surveils your usage of certain information and calls you a terror threat when you step outside the lines.

<comment><USER14> It takes an enormous amount of rationalizing to compare a system of overt and pervasive government censorship of the Internet --- a system run by the government that _blocks access_ to things the government doesn't want its citizens to read --- to even the most egregiously editorialized assumptions Glenn Greenwald has come up with.

<comment><USER13> I'm certainly playing the devil's advocate to some degree and being hyperbolic, but fact is we, or should I speak for my self and say I, have been on high moral ground for quite some time, demonizing the "great firewall," applauding Google's circumventions, etc. Yet now we find out we're far closer than we would like to be, and have been for some time.

<comment><USER14> This is a slippery claim; anything the NSA does that you don't approve of would enable you to claim we're "far closer than we'd like to be" to China. It's a phrasing designed to end discussion, not encourage it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I cannot be the only one who found this line to be amusing:

"Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn."

<comment><USER16> #leastuntruthful

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Misleading title: this appears to be an opinion article about why the Chinese government should grant him asylum.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an official (propaganda) editorial, from the highest level.

Many of the top foreign journalists in Beijing tweeted this official post.

<comment><USER18> Looks like Snow isn't being extradited. Xinhua is the official press agency of the state. Editorial or no, this didn't get posted without the state's nod.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whistleblowers that serve China's needs.

Oh, you're a whistleblower _against_ any Chinese policy? Say goodbye to your freedom and count yourself lucky if you don't end up in a stadium with a bullet in your head.

<comment><USER19> Lets try this experiment;

Title: "Whistleblower welcome in US"

The Comment:

Whistleblowers that serve US needs. Oh, you're a whistleblower against any US policy? Say goodbye to your freedom and count yourself lucky if you don't end up in Guantanamo with a waterbucket around your head.

Interesting how beliveable this actually sounds...

Lesson learned: Don't throw with stones if you live in a glass house.

<comment><USER20> please don't try it. The population of US may double in a very short time.

<comment><USER21> What do you mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think I would want to be an ex-NSA agent with "asylum" in Russia or China right now or at any time in the near-future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - very dangerous for Snowden to be in China, considering that torture is routinely used in interrogation.

<comment><USER23> And the US do not waterboard people it interrogated right?

<comment><USER24> Waterboarding was banned in 2009 by presidential order.

<comment><USER25> On the same day he signed an order to close the detention facility in Guantanamo, if memory serves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Xinhua is the official news outlet of China; they're China's Pravda. They aren't doing Snowden any favors in the US by writing this, but, of course, that's not the point.

<comment><USER26> I agree that they are not doing Snowden any favors by writing this piece. It makes him look more suspicious. They should just shut up and watch the show.

<comment><USER27> Why would they want to do Snowden any favors? Their best move is to be very vocal, and milk the scandal for all its worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't intend on being too harsh on this article, but I must say that it seems about as skewed as a Fox "News" broadcast.

It is not too difficult to find less biased coverage - my favorite technique is to take a story I am interested in and then read two or three articles about it from different countries.

</comment><comment><USER29> If Xinhua is taking a stand, it means the Chinese government decided they quite like the situation as it is. Looks like Snowden's bet paid off: he'll likely not face extradition from Hong Kong after all, and SEALs teams will be kept at bay.

The boy is hella smart.

</comment><comment><USER30> Considering its origin, anyone have a firm-handle on the Miss Liberty political cartoon? Who's the rat?

</comment><comment><USER26> So what's wrong with this article?

<comment><USER31> 1\. _Hypocrisy of those who preach about Internet_ . The USA might be spying but they don't aggressively remove anti-American content. Much unlike China where criticism of the lives of its political elite will get your foreign website blocked.

2\. China has no tolerance for those that _embody the courage to fight against the system_. It has a military interest in learning what Snowden knows. We may even see Snowden go from wistleblower to traitor.

China's Internet policy is increasingly leading to cultural isolation, xenophobia and bellicose nationalism. I don't trust _Fang Yang_ and other social engineers to control the feelings they cultivate.</comment></comment>


How eBay Could Rescue Bitcoin From the Feds - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/09/ebay_bitcoins/ <comment><USER2> A licenced money transmitter can handle Bitcoins only if they handle them in a rather non-bitcoin-ish way - i.e., if the participants are not anonymous, and fraudulent transactions can be reversed.

This can be done - bitcoin itself doesn't provide these features technically, but it can be done by paypal; the question is why would they - it probably is less profitable than their current transactions.

<comment><USER3> > ...and fraudulent transactions can be reversed.

Is this strictly true? What do foreign currency exchanges and Western Union do?

<comment><USER4> Wire transfers aren't reversible.

<comment><USER5> Wire transfers are harder to reverse than paypal or CC, but they are still based on mere agreement between banks. Bitcoin-central.net exchange had some fraud instances when wires were actually reversed after withdrawing BTC.

Only two things are irreversible for real:

1\. When you take a tangible thing in your own hands and go away. This can only be "reversed" by another party running after you.

2\. Bitcoin transaction.

See also: [http://www.quora.com/Wire-Transfers/Can-wire-transfers-be- re...](http://www.quora.com/Wire-Transfers/Can-wire-transfers-be-reversed)

<comment><USER6> The bitcoin network can conspire to reverse a transaction. The accidental block chain fork demonstrated that the plurality of participants will do so when it is convenient for them.

<comment><USER5> The accidental fork in March demonstrated that all transactions were included in _both_ chains. One guy attempted a double-spend attack against OKPay (but then returned money). Only people who could have been hurt are those accepting transaction during the fork. Everyone else's money was just fine. Everyone should simply listen for alerts and simply stop trusting new transactions until the fork is resolved.

To reverse some old transaction would require enormous amount of computing power and some serious motive. It's not even close to two banks disputing a wire transfer between each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is just speculation. I don't see any concrete signs of EBay integrating bitcoins support in PayPal in the near term.

<comment><USER8> This blog post: [http://deals.ebay.com/blog/whats-the-deal-with-bitcoins- anyw...](http://deals.ebay.com/blog/whats-the-deal-with-bitcoins-anyway/) is a concrete sign that ebay has at last some interest in bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > develop[ing] a way to facilitate transfers without risk of widespread > fraud...may be a tall order for eBay

No it isn't. The bitcoin seller transfers the bitcoins to a bitcoin address controlled by Paypal. Paypal sends USD from the buyer's Paypal balance to the seller's Paypal balance, and BTC from the Paypal-controlled bitcoin address to the buyer's bitcoin address.

Paypal knows the dollars and the bitcoins both exist, and can deliver them to the right party itself, so the parties don't have to trust each other to complete the transaction; they just have to trust Paypal.

There is a problem, I guess, if the USD comes from a source like a credit card that may eventually be reversed, or if the buyer claims a hacked account. But you could get around that with some waiting period, requiring a Paypal balance/bank transfer for Bitcoin transactions (credit cards can't fund Bitcoin purchases), and/or requiring 2-factor auth for large transactions / Bitcoin transactions.

Processing an eBay transaction is actually harder to prevent fraud, because it's hard for Paypal to tell that physical goods were as described, and delivered to the right party. (AFAIK eBay basically has humans reading what both parties wrote and using their judgment to deal with disputes about product delivery.)

</comment><comment><USER5> All the difficulty of buying/selling Bitcoins for cash online only highlights how inflexible it is to move money with legacy technologies. Everyone who touches fiat currency must comply with tons of costly regulations, allow reversal of transfers and verify identities of people involved. This not only increases costs for everyone, but also reduces competition. The only stuff that can be irreversibly transferred is either physical commodity (including paper cash and precious metals) or Bitcoin.

But, luckily, once you buy yourself some bitcoins, you may do whatever you want with them. Buy stuff, gamble, donate, pay freelancers, or anonymize as much as you want.

There are only two ways eBay can possibly "embrace" Bitcoin:

1\. By promising non-reversible transfers of USD when exchanged for Bitcoin. This may be problematic if there are some "customer protection" regulations that demand possibility to return funds.

2\. By separating USD payments from BTC payments completely. E.g. you can sell/buy stuff on eBay for BTC without converting it to USD on eBay, but elsewhere. This is much more doable without triggering FinCEN regulations or chargebacks.

<comment><USER10> Many people (myself included) don't think irreversible transactions are a good idea.

People like the protections afforded them by credit cards, and by financial regulation. Many financial regulations exist to stop the public being screwed over by the unscrupulous. If they increase costs a little, well that's the insurance cover for when we inevitably run into people who want to take us for a ride.

<comment><USER5> I see what you mean, but you miss an important point.

Reversible transactions must be reversed by a human intermediary. An insurance company, a financial institution, someone who you must trust this way or another. In addition to obvious value (that you described), this also creates all sorts of issues we all know about: fraud, regulatory hassle, spying, freezing of accounts etc.

Bitcoin as a protocol (or any alternative money-moving protocol for that matter) itself cannot reverse anything. It's just a protocol. Anyone can set up their own BitcoinPayPal and mediate Bitcoin transactions and reverse them as they like.

The value of Bitcoin is that you can _opt in_ insured reversible transactions based on trust if you want to. But that's not necessary. USD is limited precisely because you have no other way to move it across the internet without trusting intermediaries that might reverse the transaction. Bitcoin simply gives you all possibilities, USD gives you less.

There's nothing impossible in having eBay to act as an escrow for BTC transactions just like with USD. But the power of BTC is that you can ultimately _own_ it, while USD must be always stored in someone else's hands.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure it's correct to say BTC gives you all possibilities yet, though those services could be built. It may be a while before they are built because the bitcoin community in general seem to be violently against reversible transactions as a concept.

As for 'owning' BTC, the concept is entertaining. BTC is an entry in a public ledger, you own the private key to access it, but it's very hard to say where exactly a BTC is at any given time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the concept of (anonymous, decentralized) Bitcoin transactions and PayPal is self defeating.

<comment><USER5> It is not. Bitcoin gives you an option of transacting irreversibly which you can use as-is, or with a mediator (e.g. PayPal). Traditional banking does not give you such option. All transactions are mediated and always reversible (even wire transfers, see my reply in a parallel thread).

As a side effect of irreversibility, anyone may build their own "PayPal" or "eBay" on Bitcoin in any jurisdiction and compete freely. Customers will have much more options than with traditional highly controlled and restricted banking system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would think the free aspect of Bitcoin would be appealing to eBay/Paypal, assuming the bulk of the ~3% fee goes to a bank/Visa/MC. The users are accustomed to paying the fee, so eBay has an opportunity to keep it all to themselves

</comment><comment><USER13> I've used Bitcoin intentionally to get away from PayPal. So for me, the more PayPal stays away from Bitcoin, the happier I'll be.

I'd much rather deal with a new company, like coinbase, who can jump through the necessary hoops.

</comment><comment><USER14> The only solution to bitcoin transactions is either trust-based (no strangers involved) or irreversible cash-based payments for bitcoins, possibly supported by trusted escrow service in the middle.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ok so at the moment its only a potential problem in the US, not the rest of the world.

<comment><USER16> And the EU [http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/mlr/your-role/EU-payments- reg.htm](http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/mlr/your-role/EU-payments-reg.htm)

And almost everyplace else in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Bitcoin must be scrapped and engineered from scratch to fix its inherent flaws (if it's even possible).

<comment><USER5> Why not taking the source code, improving it and releasing your own genesis block to prove your point? Or pointing out an existing altcoin with higher (or faster growing) market cap for that matter?

<comment><USER17> Your failure of logic is remarkable. My point was not that it's possible to make a better bitcoin (indeed, I even pointed out that it might be impossible). The point was that the flaws of bitcoin make its usage impossible for any serious purpose.

<comment><USER5> Could you elaborate on that? I myself write a lot on how Bitcoin can be used for not only "serious" purposes, but also for purposes impossible without Bitcoin (blog.oleganza.com).

Since Bitcoin is at very least is just an asset, any money business that exists today can use Bitcoin and enjoy lower costs of handling it. Then, there are special properties that make possible entirely new business models. Of course, Bitcoin itself is not without risks of crypto failure or miners' attack, but so is any other asset: gold can be stolen, govt money can be inflated or confiscated, milk can be spoiled etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>