Royalties from Writing a Hit Song with Justin Bieber - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/03/hit-song-justin-bieber-royalties/ <comment><USER2> If each radio spin at 347,820 spins hit 10,000 radio listeners average (a Denver hit station has about ~250,000 weekly listeners, a popular rush hour/drive time show with mixed talk/music format has ~80,000 listeners) , then the $53,000 was at a rate of 0.00001524 dollars per listener.

If Pandora paid that, his royalty would have been $582.55...

So it looks like the industry from a streaming point of view assumes about 20,000 radio listeners per play on the radio.

This might even average correctly across the US market.

<comment><USER3> Aren't royalties paid per play (i.e. spin)? The rate for the radio is about $0.14 per play (53/347), in that case. Stations have no way of knowing how many listeners actually heard the song. They can estimate with ratings services, but not get exact numbers like say Spotify.

<comment><USER4> Right. But the point is that it's sort of weird to directly compare album sales, radio plays, and online streaming view count. Those are fundamentally different both in terms of audience size and income potential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > How will I be able to support my gift?

In the end what we are seeing is that that golden era of creators making a living (and much much more) was an anomaly. Control of new types of distribution created scarcity and new forms of expression and shifting norms jacked up demand. But now distribution is free, instant and global. Demand has flatlined and production has exploded.

The hard question a creator needs to ask themselves now is not "how do I get paid for what my art is worth?", but instead "was my art ever worth much to begin with?"

<comment><USER6> If even people reaching a truly stupidly huge number of people don't get even close to making a living (I get more than that off a few hundred people on Patreon for the work that I do), in a situation where those operating the streaming services are renting out entire floors of office buildings in Manhattan, your question is disingenuous.

Just because some of us are eking out a sort of existence in the new era doesn't make it a functional system.

I would be perfectly happy to see it become 'this is the Star Trek future, your entire compensation is the satisfaction of a job well done and being personally liked for what you've created', if our world operated on some sort of UBI and we didn't have to have our performance linked to survival at all.

Under those circumstances, things naturally shift down the Maslow hierarchy of needs, and people take for granted that they'll live, and get desperate for validation and popularity, that being what they lack. I have NO problem with a world that completely unlinks money from performance, because I'm not a free- market capitalist type demanding that financial reward behave like a 'meritocracy'.

Self-evidently it doesn't anyway, so literally nothing of value is lost.

BUT, we have that completely decoupled world and yet demand that people pay for even the most frugal living with money they got somebody to give them, in a world where people simply can't and don't do that anymore.

Silicon Valley clever-boffins: come up with some disruptive alternative really fast. We don't have time to mess around, and what these songwriters face is the same fate waiting for all of us, in turn, including you. How about abolishing money and replacing it entirely with 'likes'?

<comment><USER7> The problem is the middlemen and the way the revenue is distributed through them.

Someone who produces and uploads their own video that reaches a stupidly huge number of people will make bank guaranteed, just like someone who is reaching their audience directly through Patreon.

On average you should be able to get $5-$10 per 1000 YouTube video views if it is on your own monetized channel. So that 35 million views probably generated around $245,000 dollars for someone.

Probably most of it ended up in the hands of the record label that owns the YouTube account, and by the time they finished taking their cut the final $200 made it back to the song writer.

My point is that new methods of distribution flattens the distribution and gives you the potential to make much more money if you spend the time to build your own thing rather than going with a record label.

<comment><USER8> _> On average you should be able to get $5-$10 per 1000 YouTube video views if it is on your own monetized channel. So that 35 million views probably generated around $245,000 dollars for someone._

Not disputing your numbers but just putting it out there that Hank Green estimated $2-per-1000.[1] That calculates 35m views to be ~$70k.

Google also recently changed its engagement algorithms and everybody's views and monetization went way down. I'm not sure what the latest 2017 cpm estimates would be. That Hank Green estimate was from 2015.

[1] [https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-1-000-cpm-f92717506a4b](https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-1-000-cpm-f92717506a4b)

<comment><USER7> From what I heard it is/was $5-$10 per 1000 if your video is eligible for the high value video pre-roll ads. If you only get text AdSense ads then it is about $1 per 1000.

Either way, my point is that a 35 million view YouTube video generates a lot more than $200 dollars for someone. Even if you take the minimum of $1 per 1000 you are still looking at $35,000 of ad revenue. That ad money must be going somewhere, even if creators don't get it. So YouTube isn't to blame, its the people who are skimming off so much money that only $200 is left for the writer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Get with the times! The way people consume music has radically changed. The music gold rush is over. The simple fact is people listen to music on YouTube and Spotify now. Music is also absurdly high in supply because everyone wants to be a musician. Guess what that does to the value? That's right, music is cheap because it isn't worth much.

Whenever I see people complain about this, I just feel sorry for them. The world changes, and there are winners and losers because of the change.

It's so strange to me how people think the world owes them something. The value of objectively looking at the market is so underrated.

<comment><USER10> On the other hand there is money in music, and it could and should increase. When you have 1 billion people paying $10 / month you have $12 billion per year to split between the artists, songwriters, record companies and distributors. That might still be lower than before but it is some money.

<comment><USER11> Fortunately for Hacker News, most of that economic windfall goes to middlemen.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately, it goes to the labels. The streaming services aren't rolling in the dough.

<comment><USER11> It also goes to the engineers working on the services. $200,000-$300,000/year to a senior, even if the service itself is losing money (And when it goes bust, you can always find another job.)

<comment><USER13> I feel like this irony is horribly lost on about half of the commenters here. Creator's job is seen as worthless, but the deliveryman's job value is indisputable.

And yet if Spotify were to pay its engineers scraps, I doubt the voices here would be as supportive.

The only reason the engineers are paid as much is because the companies can't get away with paying less. And just because they can get away with paying musicians less, doesn't mean the musicians should "get with the times". I am not saying every musician should be a millionaire, but there are plenty who collectively carry the multi-billion dollar industry on their backs, but get scraps in return.

On a more general note, when a vulnerable part of the population gets shafted, they shouldn't "get with the times" either. It's a sign of our failure as a society.

I guess it is not surprising that people in a capitalistic society think that the value of an activity lies in how much _profit_ it can generate _to the performer_ of that activity. I guess it's beyond reasonable to expect people to think of _externalities_ and understand them. I guess it's not at all surprising that a bunch of people who claim to be in STEM have a collective amnesia when it comes to understanding that M in STEM is an art akin to music, but with laughable ROI and a far more limited audience (and the number of corporations that hire mathematicians to do mathematics in the entire world is probably... 5? Go on ArXiV and see how many math papers there are by people outside academia, i.e. are the product of the "free" market system).

None of that is surprising. But that doesn't make victim-blaming any less tiring to see.

<comment><USER9> Actually, the musicians don't carry the industry. Even if Taylor Swift died tomorrow, and all of her music was erased from history, the music industry wouldn't be threatened even slightly. There is a virtually endless supply of musicians.

Society hasn't failed either. Society is made up of individuals. If the individual wants to stream music instead of buying a CD, and if that means less money for the musician, then the only choice is to adapt as a musician or "get a job".

I say all of this as a musician myself. I realized all of this the hard way. Just about everything in the world that can be bought or sold is valued based on perception, which means anything can be worth millions tomorrow or squat. Nothing is permanent. We're all gamblers in a huge game of perceived value, and technology only makes it more crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Everyone knows that songwriters do not make their money off royalties. They make their money off charging pop stars hourly to write music with them.

The same way performing artists don't make money off their albums, they make money by touring and increasing their brand reach as an artist.

Music industry is not about creating IP, the same way the tech industry is not about creating IP. Making things and making money are two separate, yet intertwined tasks.

<comment><USER15> > is not about creating IP

I wish more people would come to terms with that. Protecting "IP" should not be the focus, but for many it is, so we have Copyright, DRM, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My grandfather had a single hit song over 50 years ago and he still lives comfortably off accumulated royalties and other proceeds in 2017. Those days are long gone. In this current system artists can still become millionaires via concert and show money. It's the writers and producers who are getting shafted since they depend mostly on royalities and points.

What I find intriguing are the genres where producers are arguably MORE important than the artist (think trap music). Some producers in that space are circumventing this problem by starting their own labels and signing artists under them. This is essentially what Mike Will Made It has done with Rae Sremmurd. As the music industry evolves, people participating in it have to continually think outside the box and innovate to maintain revenue streams.

<comment><USER17> "Santa's Super Sleigh"?

<comment><USER16> No but my user name is a big hint. Artist who grew up in South Philly 50-60 years ago and had a hit song so big he still lives off the royalties today.....

<comment><USER18> Chubby Checker?!

<comment><USER19> I don't know that Chubby Checker did so well. I saw him at a county fair 25 years ago. He was performing in a tent the size of a large restroom, with only two rows of benches, at about 2pm. There may have been only 3-4 people there altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yea... I think the system is rubbish, but I don't really feel very sorry for someone earning $149k from lyrics they wrote 3 years ago.

Edit: _helped_ write - per wgj there were 5 authors on that song - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15419567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15419567)

<comment><USER21> I believe that was a total? I didn't read it as just for this year.

<comment><USER20> That could be, but it seems like he's being well compensated for his effort either way.

<comment><USER22> Is he? Is he being compensated well when looked at relative to what others have made off of it? It would be interesting to see those numbers.

<comment><USER23> Just consider it flat out: Pick something you did three years ago. Let's say it took you a day, or a week, or a a good chunk of a month, off and on. With no followup work after that, what's a "reasonable" rate of return for that effort?

I make a good hourly rate, but at the end of each hour, my earning from that hour is done, and none of my hours have every billed at $149k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Everyone is very focused on the contrast between the Radio royalties and the Streaming royalties - but we all skipped right past that first item: $149,000 in royalties for writing a song (just the first 3 years).

That's a lot of money - more than most people make in 2-3 years - for what probably amounted to a few weeks of work. And we're supposed to feel sorry for him because he couldn't retire on it? Seems to me if he got 1 of these per year he'd be pretty set.

<comment><USER11> Writing a top hit song is a 'few weeks of work' as much as writing a program is 'hitting the 'submit' button in your source control system.'

You don't get paid for all the non-hit songs you wrote.

<comment><USER23> I get paid the same for all the code I write, but none of it ever has any chance at all of still paying me three years later. None of it. Ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wait for GANs and Style Transfer. Your "blessing" will evaporate as soon as the first Machine Learned Song hits Billboard 100.

<comment><USER26> RNNs are pretty close already:

[https://soundcloud.com/reivalk/basic-rnn-joplin-example- over...](https://soundcloud.com/reivalk/basic-rnn-joplin-example-overfitting)

<comment><USER27> The title point out that it's "overfitted". Basically the AI just reproduced almost the exact song that it was fitted with. It's basically a failed experiment where the machine didn't learn how to make music, but insted just repeated the note that it was taught. Not the best example to show case what RNN can do for music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can't say I've done a lot of research on this dispute, but so far I side with the streaming services since they aren't constantly conflating completely different numbers to try to trick readers. "Spin" is a radio term that isn't used in streaming, for good reason; it's just not the same thing at all.

</comment><comment><USER29> In the absence of significant income from album sales, artists can make a respectable living through touring and merchandising. This path isn't going to work for songwriters. They need to find a different funding model. Perhaps bill artists by the hour? Probably a flat-rate contract for x dollars per song would be more feasible.

<comment><USER30> Famous artists can yes. If you are a semi-known band with four people playing a twenty date tour playing 400 capacity venues with two local support acts you're probably not making so much.

That's 8,000 people who care enough to come out and see you. So let's say at least 100,000 people need to like you enough that they would at least consider buying the ticket.

$4000 dollars gross in ticket sales per night, 30% to the promoter. $2800 left. If you get 50% of that with 25% to each support act then after commissions to booking agent and manager you're left with maybe $950. You need to pay travel and accommodation costs out of that, and possibly a tour manager. For a four piece band plus tour manager you probably need $30 a head per diem for incidentals of living in the road. Add in food - another $30 per head and you've got $650 left. Hotel rooms aren't cheap. travel isn't cheap.

Sure you can sell 25 t-shirts a night at $20 each and make $15 a shirt. And throw in some CDs - maybe 30 at $10 a pop... you maybe net another $600 a night.

$1250 a day for your hotels and travel for 5 people - maybe you have $600 left after these costs. Oh and you have to pay your tour manager...

Each of the people in the band makes... what - $100 per show?

Can artists really make that respectable a living from touring and merch?

Sure, scale this up, play bigger venues - 2,000 capacity. But then your costs increase - people want a more impressive show, not just spit and sawdust. You need a set, lighting design, all the rest of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've got a relative in the music/movie business. He was pretty successful at both, most people in the US over 40 would probably recognize him. He and his family live well, but he still tours; usually small venues, travels by tour bus instead of fancy planes. Small crew, just a manager, sound guy and his wife. I figure he might pull $5K a stop, maybe 2x that depending on the size of the venue. Not bad, but not FU money. He still acts in movies, even some that have not held up well over time. I doubt he makes a ton with those roles either. But he still does them. My mom asked why he still does it, at his age; he replied, "I've got kids to put through school."

I saw him perform for the first time in 40 years, and realized how much he lied to my mom. On stage, he was (as the kids these days say) lit. He clearly loved the music (he still writes and performs new material), but the light in his eyes showed that what he really loved was performing and sharing his music with the audience.

Most musicians can't count on a career lasting 50+ years. The era of singles is gone, and performances are where the next generation will have to make their living.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a story about middlemen.

30 years ago, the supply chain for recorded music went something like this:

creator -> music label & radio -> retailers -> audience

Now it's something like this:

creator -> (label) -> digital platform -> audience

Huge power is concentrated in the platforms, which essentially combine curation, distribution, sales, and marketing. They control pricing. They control the playlists. They control the relationship with audiences and _understand_ them far more than record retailers or radio ever did.

Labels now provide questionable value -- I would expect that some platforms may start to move into that area, in order to guarantee exclusivity, which is one of the few ways for labels to establish competitive differentiation. This is already happening in other media, such as books (ex: Amazon-owned book labels signing top authors or strong up-and-comers) as well as Amazon video and Netflix funding promising scripts and creative teams.

What can artists do? They have a few cards to play. One of them is exclusivity. Another is the ability to build their own connections with audiences (often using free or low-cost communications platforms). And dedicated audiences will do what is asked of them, within reason.

Some also perform, which is one of the few areas to make money these days. But platforms are also horning in on that pot. Ticketmaster is ruthless when it comes to manipulating pricing and forcing artists to play by its rules.

If I were an up-and-coming artist, I would concentrate not on becoming a "star" but rather making music that both you and your audiences can love, and building indestructible bonds with audiences that they will follow you no matter where you go, whether it's jumping platforms, going on tour, buying new march, or taking part in other activities that respect their love for the music while helping you make a living.

<comment><USER33> I'm worried about platforms moving into label territory too much because as soon as label start seeing them as competitors, they'll start rolling their own platforms and then we get that fragmentation which we know from video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I can't speak as to the other platforms, but spotify's revenue sharing model really sucks for small artists.

For example, if someone signs up for Spotify to listen to _exclusively_ songs by one artist, that artist is not getting that user's monthly fee... they're probably getting a couple pennies tops, if that.

<comment><USER35> But why should they get most of the monthly fee? Spotify offers the ability for that user to listen to that artist plus a million others and thus carries the overhead required to create a platform for that artist to publish in the first place. This seems a bit like saying that I as a taxpayer should only have to pay for the public services that I, at this point in time, take advantage of.

<comment><USER34> That's why Spotify takes its cut, no?

Comparing listening to different artists to funding multiple agencies with tax dollars isn't a valid comparison.

It's like saying that when I buy my favourite brand of ice cream at the store, that the other ice cream brands will get a cut simply for gracing the shelves.

<comment><USER35> No, it's like saying that when you buy your favorite brand of ice cream at the store the grocery store keeps most of the profit because without the store the ice cream manufacturer wouldn't have a place to sell to the masses.

If said artist is in such high demand, then he or she can go make their own streaming platform, charge $10/month, and keep 100%. Obviously that isn't the case, so they must get some utility out of using the Spotify platform.

<comment><USER34> No... you're missing the point entirely The store is Spotify. The brands are artists.

If I buy brand A, the store gets a cut, and brand A gets a cut. Brand B gets nothing.

With Spotify, if I listen to Repartee, Justin Bieber is still getting some of my money.

<comment><USER35> Saying Justin Bieber gets some of your money isn't really the whole story. Justin Bieber's songs are streamed billions of times a year, so his music accounts for a very significant percentage of total streams, and consequently use of the Spotify platform. Thus, he is bringing an outsized amount of value to Spotify, so he rightly is deserving of more money.

Again, Repartee is free to pull their songs and sell them directly to you if they think that will bring them more fans and more money. It's kind of funny for two consenting parties who both use a platform to complain that the platform is treating them unfairly.

<comment><USER36> Are you sure you are understanding the argument being made here?

I think the argument, which is fair, is that it is very weird that if I pay Spotify $10 a month and listen exclusively to a single artist, that artist may get a penny from me and Justin Bieber may get $3 from me, despite me never listening to a single track from him.

Nobody is arguing Spotify can take it's 20% or whatever, people are just arguing that the calculation Spotify uses to distribute the monthly royalties severely penalizes small artists. (because it looks in aggregate across all listeners instead of divvying per user)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There are some interesting points in the article's comment thread.

>>> Amir Epstein - Money for big hits is in streaming on DSP's. Spotify pays $7,000 per million streams. That may sound like nothing, but when artists like JB get 100,000,000 streams (that's a conservative number) that's $700,000. And then there's apple itunes, which pays around the same, and google play which pays a little more. And if you are lucky and getting decent numbers on Tidal, it pays $23,000USD per million. Not too shabby

>>> Anonymous (response) - That Spotify money you just referenced $7,000 per 1 million streams goes to whoever owns the MASTER. Typically the record company, NOT the songwriters. Do your homework

There is a pot of money out there, but you're unlikely to see it unless you're the one writing the record contracts.

</comment><comment><USER38> I pay GBP10 a month for Spotify. I've never listened to Justin Bieber on Spotify, but lots of other people (who don't pay) do.

As a percentage of my cash, how much goes to Justin Bieber vs how much to the bands I've actually listened to who have many less total plays?

Or - do neither of them get anything?

<comment><USER39> The other comment was correct that most of the pooled money will go to Bieber, however I feel there's a better way to frame it.

Economically speaking, you can imagine if Spotify had 100 users paying 10 GBP each; 99 listened exclusively to Justin Bieber, and 1 to 'Band.' All users listen to music in equal frequency. Though 99% of the pooled money — and if divvied up equally, 99% of 'Band' fan's money — goes to Justin Bieber, 'Band' fan's listening weight results in ~10 GBP of the total pool being pulled towards 'Band.' So, in effect, all of 'Band' fan's money could be classified as going towards 'Band.'

Also, as a couple side notes in Spotify's revenue structure:

1\. 70% goes to artists, 30% goes to Spotify.

2\. Over 70% of Spotify users become paying subscribers iirc, so there's not much of a problem with listening weight being pulled by free users.

<comment><USER40> >Economically speaking, you can imagine if Spotify had 100 users paying 10 GBP each; 99 listened exclusively to Justin Bieber, and 1 to 'Band.' _All users listen to music in equal frequency._ [emphasis mine]

Well obviously not all users listen to music at the same frequency (which i know you are likely well aware). What is the reason that they don't just take each users $10 then dole that out only according to the songs that person listened to. So if the user listened to one artist the entire month, then that one artist get's the full portion of the $10 that is given to artists.

That will help with the situation where: 1\. Someone else listens to bieber on repeat 24/7 (why should that affect where another's $10 goes) skewing the sample massively towards that artist.

2\. In terms of free users, segment them off and pool the ad revenue again boxed on a per user basis.

<comment><USER39> I completely agree with this solution being ideal, but I think it's a matter of engineering effort and memory. It's not worth the time investment to build a system more complex, and it's a lot easier memory-wise to just pool it all together for allocation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wow. The amount of hate in the comments is amazing. Eveyone knows best! I know many artists who complain about their low streaming royalties turn around and listen to music on Youtube, Pandora, Etc. HYPOCRITES. Do you really care about directly supporting your favorite artists and encouraging the work of upcoming acts? Then buy their music on BandCamp, go to shows and buy t-shirts/merch.

</comment><comment><USER42> In case anyone wants to glorify the "good old days": [http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17](http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17)

</comment><comment><USER43> On this theme, now is a good time to re-read the incredible letter Steve Albini wrote to Nirvana about potentially producing In Utero, which includes his perspective on royalties, etc. [https://consequenceofsound.net/2013/09/read-steve-albinis- pr...](https://consequenceofsound.net/2013/09/read-steve-albinis-proposal-to- produce-nirvanas-in-utero/)

</comment><comment><USER44> The guy wrote a song. It took him, what, a month? For that he earned $150,000? Annualized, that's almost $2 million. I don't see the problem here.

<comment><USER33> The problem is that writing a hit song is not something he can do every month. It's like finding a nugget of gold. It still has to fund the operation.

<comment><USER44> His pay probably lasts as long as that song was popular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As with any article about music finances, it misses one crucial detail: elaborating how the money is split between every single entity in the value chain. There's plenty of YouTubers who make orders of magnitude more money on the same amount of views. I feel it's probably largely due to the fact that youtubers usually only split the cash two ways between the star and the editor

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't understand, so Bieber made $596,000 (assuming he owned the other 80%) from this song? No way, it would seem like?

<comment><USER47> There are actually a completely different set of royalties payed to the performer vs. the songwriter.

<comment><USER48> Rodney Jerkins is only one of five writers on the song: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Long_as_You_Love_Me_(Justin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Long_as_You_Love_Me_\(Justin_Bieber_song\))

Bieber also has songwriting credit. If the royalty was divided evenly, Bieber would also get 20%. However, it isn't required to divide evenly, and songwriter royalties can be negotiated myriad different ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I have similar feelings. My gift generates millions for someone else. I take home above median income, but I'm not getting rich. I'm working toward a plan. I wonder what his plan is?

It's interesting watching this comment section fill with bickering over what commenters think he deserves.

<comment><USER50> Seconded. I think the software industry is an example where the "creators" just get a salary.If you are lucky or an early stage employee, you may get some equity. Software that we write creates billions for corporations but we never get a share. Question: Why do musicians & "creative" people get royalties for what they do and not others? If value creation is the argument, I would argue we are also creating value. I am not asking to be mean, but I am curious.

<comment><USER51> It's the risk tolerance intersecting with demand-supply. If you join a startup where you are willing to be underpaid in return for equity which could make you rich at a small probability, you're in a entertainment industry model.

However if you want a salary and comfortable living, you take a salary and don't get a shot at wealth. You could refuse to work on such terms but your company could persumably hire someone else who won't refuse since the supply of risk averse individuals significantly exceeds those who take risk..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> They are talking about songwriting royalties which are easily less then 5% of the royalties paid out by streaming companies. The vast majority of the royalty goes to the recording artist and their label in this case Justin Bieber.

<comment><USER53> Right, this is an important point which appears to be have been missed elsewhere in this thread (and was probably assumed knowledge in the original link).

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Obviously the streaming numbers are minuscule, but if people bought CDs, they can play it unlimited times for a fixed rate. Streaming does substitute with radio and purchased music, but more the latter.

Expecting radio rates for something that primarily substitutes for purchased CDs is ludicrous. It would have been more interesting (to me) if the article had compared the youtube/pandora payments with the equivalent CD purchases.

Also, this is what google and apple want to do to all of us. Make your complements cheap to enhance your value. Hence the plummeting value of software on their platforms. Apple is busying crying crocodile tears about the difficulty of making a living on the ios platform. They're not gonna care unless and until it damages their platform.

<comment><USER55> Your first point regarding how streaming cannibalizes CD I think is pretty spot on. Radio play for record companies and artists was a way to entice listeners to buy the record/cassette/CD/etc. and depending on where you sat in the payout chain, you really didn't expect money from radio... often times you paid to have your record played on radio ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola) ... and there were creative ways around the laws after they were created). But radio didn't play what you wanted when you wanted (that took buying records), radio played what they wanted when they wanted.

Streaming upends that. I don't buy records anymore, I pay a streaming subscription. I get pretty much anything I want whenever I want on demand. I have access to a much larger catalog than I would if I bought everything individually and I'm probably spending on-par with what I did in the old days. (I use to get a lot a free CDs and such because I worked for a record store chain in the 90's, but even so, I have access to a larger catalog today). The fact that I can get the vast majority of what I want means that those few hold out artists that I would like to listen to, but can't because they refuse to play the game (with good reason), simply don't get listened to... I have other choices.

I can't comment on the other issues you raise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Well, I thought this was going to be about JB screwing over a writer... so at least it wasn't that. Pretty low numbers though. I wonder what Spotify would have looked like if it were on the list...

<comment><USER56> To some degree that is what happened, though I'm sure he was screwed by a lawyer rather than the artist himself.

When they offered this songwriter some % of song royalties, they knew ahead of time that it wasn't going to be a whole lot of money.

Solution? Songwriters need a new metric to charge by.

One problem, though, is that perhaps songwriting isn't actually worth that much. When you look at a performer like Justin Beiber, how much of his income depends on specific songs that he's putting out? I'm not sure, but I don't necessarily think it's a large amount.

<comment><USER57> If writers are so opinionated about their works value, they just need to charge a fixed price. The allure of the possibility of writing a song once and having potentially massive perpetual income is why they like these royalty deals (and why said lawyer knew it was a good deal). But that's more of a lottery ticket in todays music industry. However, if you assign a price to your work you will quickly know what it's worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> You want to know how many spins a day some of my code does?

<comment><USER59> Actually yes please...

I would love to see that math worked out with someone who has written a popular program/website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Judging by YouTube alone he wasnt paid 20%, but rather 0.01-0.5% of real royalties.

</comment><comment><USER30> The revenues from live when you write or co-write for a globally recognised artist who tours will always be more lucrative for songwriters than the revenues from recordings. This is because (generally speaking) the revenues for live for songwriters come as a split of box office - and live performance is generally going to gross a lot more than recording for an artist of that stature.

For example, in the UK, PRS takes 3% of box office, and that is then paid out to songwriters based on duration of performance. So for example, if someone sells 1000 tickets at 10 each, there is £300 to be paid to PRS. If there are three acts playing and they each play 30 minutes, songwriters get £3.34 per minute. So if two songwriters co-write a song and agree a 60/40 split and that song is 4 minutes 30 seconds one songwriter would get £9.02 from this show and the other would get £6.01.

Bieber played six dates at the O2 in London - capacity 20,000 - and tickets seem to have been around the £45 mark. Let's assume he pretty much sold out - so those six dates grossed £5.4m

Assuming he did a 20 song set (so maybe 75 minutes duration for songs, with two support acts each playing 30 minutes - total duration 135 minutes) then the songwriters (for both Bieber and support acts) are getting £1200 per minute of performance across that segment of the tour. So actually, if you are the support act and you are a singer-songwriter playing 30 minutes support to Bieber, you're going to walk away with your live appearance fees plus £36k in songwriter royalties.

Streaming revenue splits between labels and songwriters (or sound recording copyright royalties, and publishing mechanical royalties) are based on old record label models, where the label invested a large amount of money to record, manufacture and market product; because of this, they took the lion's share of revenues from record music sales. It's easy to argue that things have changed, but equally, generally speaking a songwriter needs an artist to perform and record the song - and the artist probably needs a label (or someone with some money) to market that song and help it generate the maximum revenues. Songwriters still benefit, because they get MORE revenues than they would have done otherwise. A great song is nothing unless someone records it and performs it.

So the problem is not necessarily with Pandora, Spotify, YouTube and all of these other companies - they are following models which by-and-large have been dictated to them by labels - you can't operate a music streaming platform without songs to play, and you can't play songs without obtaining permission to use the recording, and the recording copyright - and thus that permission - is controlled by record labels rather than songwriters.

The scale of the market is completely different. Bieber's 2016 world tour apparently grossed $250m in ticket sales - if we stick (for ease) with the UK model for compensating songwriters for live performance, this tour generated $7.5m in revenues for songwriters. Let's say that across the whole tour - including Bieber songs, numerous co-writes, and support acts - there were 250 songwriters involved. Assuming everyone's song was performed for roughly the same duration then each songwriter should have walked away with about $37,500. Not bad.

The problem is not streaming - it's people crafting flawed narrative that is based around "my song got streamed a billion times and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" but at the same time ignoring the completely different scales of revenue for live performance vs recording. Bieber has 32 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Assuming that they each listen to an average of 8 tracks a month (for a total of roughly 250m streams) then his label is generating maybe around $1.25m in recording revenues. The songwriters will be getting a fraction of that - and each individual songwriter will get a proportion of that fraction, based on how much their song is listened to. If his most popular song gets 50% of streaming activity, second most popular 25%, third most popular 10%... and his tenth most popular gets 1% then that track is only generating the label $12,500 a month - and maybe $2,500 for the song writer - but it's still getting 2.5m streams a month. If the writer has a 20% share of the song, then they are getting $500 - over a year (all things remaining equal) then maybe they get $6,000 for 30m streams.

If that song was played on every date of a Bieber tour as part of a 20 song, 75 minute set, on a tour where headliner is performing 60% of the total duration, then based on the UK model for songwriter performance royalties the writer of that song would be getting $225,000.

If someone has a 20% share of that song they are getting $45,000.

</comment><comment><USER61> At least we know why Google earns so much. They don't pay any royalties, rather keep everything to themselves. Interesting business concept.

<comment><USER62> I don't think they're keeping everything for themselves. I think they're actually not taking in that much money from Youtube ads / youtube red.</comment></comment>


Welcome Eric, Gustaf, and Jocelyn - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/welcome-eric-gustaf-and-jocelyn/ <comment><USER2> So happy to have all three of you on the team!

<comment><USER3> Congrats on the new hires. At this point, it would be useful to have a web page with all the partners and their bio. (maybe there is and I am missing it?)

<comment><USER4> ycombinator.com/people

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gustaf is awesome and has been a great help at my startup YesGraph. YC is lucky to have him!

</comment><comment><USER6> Eric was really no surprise :) such a great addition to the YC partner team.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895967)

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats Jocelyn!

</comment><comment><USER8> Gustaf is great! Incredibly sharp, ego-less and genuinely warm and friendly.

</comment><comment><USER9> I recently had office hours with Gustaf, it would be an understatement to say that he is an amazing partner. Every consumer facing startup in the batch should do OH with him asap.

</comment><comment><USER10> Congrats, Gustaf and others! Very well deserved.

</comment><comment><USER11> I met Gustaf very briefly while unsuccessfully interviewing at YC, he seemed great, congratulations to him!

</comment><comment><USER12> Great additions! Gustaf is very insightful.

</comment><comment><USER13> Huge congrats to Gustaf and the YC team! :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Congrats on the new team members!</comment>


Robin. The smarter smartphone - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nextbit/robin-the-smarter-smartphone

<comment><USER2> With everything synced to the cloud, apparently automatically and without user intervention (I agree that's overdue), how is privacy handled?

<comment><USER3> Usually it's handled by putting some "nice words", like "encryption", in the copy text. Here they don't mention it at all, at least that feels a bit honest. Instead they chose to tell us that the phone is:

> supercharged with the cloud</comment></comment>


Show HN: Wishminer – Mining social media for app ideas, my weekend project - <AUTHOR> https://wishminer.com <comment><AUTHOR> Dear HN,

Currently, I am stuck in a long-term project and really had the desire to build and finish a small app - I guess some of you can relate.

So this weekend, I built Wishminer, a little tool which searches social media for app ideas that people wish for. I hope it can be helpful to some of you. It's fairly basic and nowhere close to perfect, but I would appreciate your advice on how to improve it.

<comment><USER2> Two ideas:

1) clustering similar ideas, for example when I looked at it there were multiple about finding friends. Related, you could build an reddit-style ranking instead of a purely temporal one

2) if you want to turn it into a product, maybe a way to share "hey, this is exactly my app"... saw some similar comments here. Probably you'll have to work on anti-spam too :)

Good luck, great project so far!

<comment><USER3> 1) could probably be achieved reasonably by filtering out keywords from the sources and simplify them ("app find friend" or "app sell item") and generate tags based on that.

<comment><USER4> 1) you could also try to use word embeddings for distance. Afaik they work better than bag of words when few words are present in one observation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Super cool weekend project! This is a great example of an MVP. The design and functionality are all attractive, intuitive and consistent, but you kept the scope very narrow and didn't get distracted by different filter methods, search, etc.

Nicely done!

</comment><comment><USER6> I see a lot of 'a laptop for school' wishes from teenagers. I'm curious whether the current generation of cheap laptops just aren't cheap enough, or is it a status thing where they actually mean they want an expensive Macbook?

<comment><USER7> Having been poor, for a lot of people, you don't just "go out and buy a laptop." You have to save up for it. You might be working two jobs while going to school just to cover the bare costs of tuition, housing, food and possibly transportation.

I saw one instance where it sounded like they had a computer, but not a laptop. (Or they were stuck in the computer lab.) Another said they wish they had a computer to help them jump-start a career for their family.

And like my sibling post points out, sometimes the laptops that are available for $150-200 really are pretty terrible. When you have a limited budget, it isn't appealing to save up for something, and then you buy it, and it's buggy or painfully slow, or unable to run the software you'd need it to for your classes.

And finally, when you don't have a lot of money, and you don't already have a good computer yourself, and you maybe haven't learned all the tricks, you don't know how to find a "good" laptop on the internet. (Not that it's wildly hard - Amazon has some decent ones, depending on price point... but you won't be coming from a place of confidence in your buying skills.)

The next step up seems to be - how many compromises can I avoid at my price point? (This is super common on SlickDeals: you see $600-1000 laptops, and people pick apart the CPU, the GPU, the weight, the screen technology, the HDD vs SSD, the amount of RAM, the build quality. None of them get all of those right because if they did, they would be $1200+ laptops, not deals!)

<comment> 52-6F-62 Having been in the same place, I can second all of this. Even I'm my (40% below market) current job I still take my time weeding through comparisOne to consider the most weight for my money. The city is expensive.

That said I know of programs in this city where disadvantaged people can apply to purchase refurbished laptops for between 30 and 100 CAD. They won't get you far in the work world but they might get you through a boot camp or part time management of an EBay account or job search and some online courses, etc. (Toronto)

There could be more of that, yeah? I haven't had to go to that route. But I can attest to the ability to get to that next rung being strengthened by having the correct tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just from the first page I found this one, "A restaurant that does food for when you feel too sick to eat real food" which is interesting because normally restaurants are not eager to cater to sick people, but if you combine it with home delivery there might actually be a market.

<comment><USER9> Once I was out to dinner with my boss and his wife was sick at home. He asked the waiter for a to-go order of "something very mild and bland"—I think the result was steamed vegetables and rice.

I found this really interesting at the time because most restaurants wouldn't like to describe any of their food as "bland"! But sometimes that's exactly what you want—if you're sick, hung over, a picky eater, or very sensitive to textures/flavours (e.g. with ASD)—and you may not have the energy or time to prepare something for yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My favorite is "An app that reminds me to turn my phone on".

<comment><USER11> I really miss alarms from the old time phones, the ones that didn't require your phone to be open already

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wishminer is a lot of fun, partly because some of the suggestions are so crazy. I enjoy scrolling through them.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good work! This could prove to be useful for both the wishers and wish- granters. It looks great, but I had a couple of issues on my first impression:

1\. Not much info at the top of the page, could use a description, especially mentioning the goal of trying to help people fulfill these wishes. (I initially thought this was more of a selfish goal of mining/stealing ideas)

2\. All the wishes seem to be from Twitter, apart from one Reddit item. Maybe a filter to categorize the different sources, or a total from each source at the top of the page.

Very cool though, thanks for sharing and I hope you continue to work on it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time. The missing description is a good point. I will probably add an about section, to avoid the misunderstanding.

Twitter is the dominant source at the moment. Yeah, maybe filtering by source could be useful, just wondering if reddit in this case would be too sparse. I'll try to add more sources, but couldn't find any other good ones so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _An app for planning holidays with 1 click_

What's the closest to this? Is there an app where you can specify a destination/price/date and have a 1 click checkout with your bookings and tickets?

<comment><USER15> I vaguely remember a service posted here where you'd sign up and they'd find a random trip for you and you wouldn't know where you were going until the day of.

Google flights is probably the closest to one click though. Super fast to view destinations and prices without much effort.

<comment><USER16> Maybe you are talking about Srprs.me[0]? They are only available in a few countries within Europe, and they only let you travel to to other countries in Europe but it is exactly what you are talking about.

[0] [https://srprs.me](https://srprs.me)

Edit: changed link to the correct one.

<comment><USER17> There's always going to be limitations because you can't get visa or vaccinations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heh. An app-interlock: "An app that only allows you to call taxis, your parents or 999 when drunk and not any other numbers"

This is genius (the site, not the above idea).

</comment><comment><USER18> Weird but saw at least 3 tweets validating my existing app, likely to be frequency illusion.

Was definitely addicted in moving down to see more.

Im sharing this with my friend right now.

</comment><comment><USER19> Brilliant mvp, impressive cares for details bravo!

Note that you're rewriting html entities to their readable counterpart, eg:

``` Loved & Found ```

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks you, good catch. Will fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> someone wishing for myspace app made me laugh

</comment><comment><USER21> I just saw one which said "a show that's all about you", This sounds like a very creepy idea which should be turned into a black mirror episode.

</comment><comment><USER22> And as always with this idea, people have no idea how IT and app development works. I also want an app that does my dishes but that's not how it works..

<comment><USER15> Bad example...

[http://www.geappliances.com/ge/connected- appliances/dishwash...](http://www.geappliances.com/ge/connected- appliances/dishwashers.htm)

Not too far off. If you get in the habit of putting dirty dishes in the washer there's no reason it can't detect a full load and start a cycle. Could even integrate a soap reservoir so you don't have to even do that every day.

<comment><USER23> > Not too far off

There's a big difference between an app that does my dishes and an app that controls an _expensive and space-consuming_ machine that does my dishes.

Yes, you can't have a $1 digital phone app that does the dishes on its own, but I think that was OP's point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Decent idea, but super hard to filter spam it seems.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER8> First three or so pages, four different versions of Tinder-but-for-finding- friends.

</comment><comment><USER25> Seems very good for a weekend -- for an year, even.

How do you do it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I'm using Firebase as a database and for hosting, which makes development really fast.

For getting the data, I'm using a worker written in Python, which queries the Twitter and Reddit APIs and does some regex filtering before writing it to the database. In the future, it could be interesting to experiment with more advanced NLP techniques for filtering/grouping/classifying.

<comment><USER26> Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Im impressed by what you've done with just regex for the filtering. Which makes it possible to curate a dataset of wishes to do some unsupervised clustering and fitering.

Filtering could benefit from knowing what other syntax ( phrases ) would map to wishes, broadening the coverage.

Would love to work on this --let me know if you're open to that.

Either way, this is a useful project

<comment><USER27> Re: finding other syntax, have you seen [https://answerthepublic.com](https://answerthepublic.com) ?

That site lets you type in some key words and then it finds what questions people are searching for on Google based on those keywords (with prefixes like "who", "what", "where", and search suggestions).

Then it makes a nice big graph of the questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an amazing resource, thanks for sharing. Using autosuggestions might actually be really useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> neat. thanks. will probably waste a lot of time on this :)</comment>


Facebook knew about Snap's struggles months before the public - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/13/facebook-knew-about-snap-struggles-through-app-tracking/ <comment><USER2> Is onavo that popular ?? I had never heard of it before, and noone around me uses it..

</comment><comment><USER3> What is Onavo, and why do people install it?</comment>


The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon - <AUTHOR> http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon <comment><USER2> Is there a name for the feeling experienced when you hear an expression with very strong and definite negative connotations used to mean something completely different, almost frivolous?

Because that's what anyone from Germany experiences when the read this article, the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group having been highly present in the public conscience for over 3 decades now. As an American, imagine using "Charles Manson phenomenon" for something like this...</comment>


I made a talking emoji using regular emojis and JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/how-i-made-a-talking-emoji-using-regular-emojis-and-javascript-fe20e62ba10 <comment><USER2> I'm Deaf and read lips.

Thanks for this extremely intriguing idea to use emoji to depict a talking person visually.

You know, some animated films get it right. Sometimes I clearly see utterances like «Thank you!», «Okay», but more often not. Especially older animations don't care and just let the character move the mouth in very simplistic ways: «Babbabbabaa Baababba ba baaa.»

Similarly for that emoji. It is moving the mouth in quite arbitrary ways. It looks like: «Sobbabbabee be <grin> seebee <grin> <frown> babbaa».

To solve this problem we need about twelve emoji for utterances: «ah», «ay», «ee», «oh», «oo», «b», «d», «f», «l», «n», «r» and «s». The «r» emoji must be animated (so we see the trilling tongue). The other sounds are either invisible like «k» or cover several different sounds like «b» also covering «m» and «p».

«Okay» would be rendered by: «oh», «oo», «oo» (standing for «k» wich is invisible) «ay» and «ee».

Edit: Add «th». This is an extremely simple sound to lipread. I remember my delight when I learnt English in my youth and in an movie suddenly realised that an actor said «Thank you».

<comment><USER3> Halfway through the article, he shows a picture with mouths for a-z, sh and th: [https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*gwbWfYm- iQIPEXXP%...](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*gwbWfYm-iQIPEXXP%2E) There are others if you search images for "lip sync animation". It would be interesting to see if the result is understandable if you simply replace the emojis with those images.

<comment><USER4> That image does not map to letters, it maps to the phonetic alphabet. English has different phonetics for words when compared to their written counterparts. For example "money" needs to be converted to "mahnee" before being converted to emoji counterpart. Otherwise it is gibberish.

<comment><USER5> 'mah-' is US English, not English :P It's 'mah' in one country.

p.s. Seems every day on here I'm reminding people from the US that their country is not the world, their version of English is spoken and spelt in just one country, etc etc etc. Maybe I should give up doing that.

The most classic maybe was a linguist (yes, amazing) who on her blog was gloating that her variety of US English was particularly rich, in having almost every vowel sound in English. I looked at her list.. it didn't include the 'o' sound in 'pot'..

<comment><USER6> Either you don't understand that he means the pheonetic alphabet, or you say money in a way that is foreign to almost any person in the UK as well as the US. Do you say mooney or mohney? If not I think your phoneme almost certainly must be mah.

<comment><USER7> British English has at least two pronunciations of money that I know of, /mʌni/ and /mʊni/

<comment><USER6> The former is the most common way for Americans to pronounce it, and matches the mouth shape of ah, and the latter, while not common in the US, also matches the ah mouth shape. I really don't know how yesenadam is pronouncing it such that his mouth doesn't take the ah shape.

<comment><USER5> Ohhh. I'm sorry everyone. Yes, you're right of course. It didn't occur to me until I tried it that the _bu-_ in _bun_ is _bahhh_. __Goes back to drawing board __

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One improvement might be to use a pronunciation dictionary and map the emojis to actual sounds rather than characters. Having recently needed such a thing, I found that there are two widely available datasets: CMUdict and Moby Pronunciator:

[http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?n...](http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=3205)

[https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict](https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict)

The problem is that they'd be pretty hefty payloads to load on the client, so you'd want to do the text -> phone mapping elsewhere. Then use your character mapping as backup for words that aren't in the dictionaries.

</comment><comment><USER9> > an emoji, in reality, looks like this: "\xF0\x9F\x98\x81"

… well, that's one encoding of the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode code point.

> This is because setInterval(_=>{ },99) executes the function every 99ms

This is categorically wrong. You can't trust setInterval to heed your request precisely at all: it's a request that browsers take as a minimum only. Most browsers will call your function after the number of milliseconds you requested plus up to 16ms more, but some might wait even more than that (I think Safari in power saving mode doubles its tick time, to operate at 30fps; and background tabs typically won't fire more than once a second these days).

Try running this snippet in your dev tools; it logs the number of milliseconds between calls:

      t=Date.now();setInterval(()=>console.log(-t+(t=Date.now())), 99)

On Firefox I'm getting mostly 108–111, with the odd one a little higher, and a couple of 99s after running it for a few minutes.

(Some trivia on similar techniques for this measurement: `+new Date` is rather slow, `Date.now()` is about 7× faster in at least Firefox and Chrome, and `performance.now()` gets you microsecond precision (it returns a floating- point number in milliseconds, tied to an unspecified epoch instead of real- world time), and is a little slower than Date.now().)

<comment><USER10> Besides that 99 % 6 = 3, so if the browser fired the setInterval function precisely every 99 ms, only two emojis would be displayed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for noticing, I will update the article

99 % 6 === 3 ((99 % 6) + 99) % 6 === 0 ((((99 % 6) + 99) % 6) + 99) % 6 === 3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Makes me think of Microsoft Comic Chat[0] this is kind of cool looking though, and definitely different.

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

</comment><comment><USER12> Good God, copy-pasting emoji in production code is now a thing. Damn you, millennials, damn you to code maintenance Hell!

<comment><USER13> Your editor can't type emoji?

<comment><USER12> ycombinator can't:

There should be emoji after the colon, I can type them fine in Chrome. Truth be told, they would make up great return values, making yourself indispensable to your employer.

<comment><USER13> The HN platform deliberately discards characters beyond IIRC 0xFF - it's been a while since I looked at the source, I'm probably wrong about where it cuts off. An odd design choice, but a design choice all the same - it doesn't bear on anything else in any way I can see.

<comment><USER14> There was a time when people discovered a lot of text renderers break down with lots of stacked combining characters, and people were posting strings to HN that IIRC either drew a stack of accents all the way up and down the page, or crashed the browser.

Maybe that has something to do with the character range limits. Not all non- ASCII is forbidden, though: Français should work AFAIK, and I've seen Chinese and Japanese.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Instead iterating through every byte like ""[n]

Pedantic note: JS iterates through UTF-16 2-byte code units. It's that way for compatibility reasons (used to be UCS-2), but it's the worst of both worlds: not as good as UTF-8 for ASCII, can't do operations in O(1) time like UTF-32.

<comment><USER9> Calling it UTF-16 code units as distinct from UCS-2 is dubious. The water is _very_ muddy there, because bad surrogates are allowed, thus the strings are arguably better considered UCS-2 rather than UTF-16.

See [https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript- encoding](https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding) for a discussion of the topic.

I'm perpetually sad that a couple of big players decided to go all in on UCS-2/UTF-16 when it _should_ already have been apparent that UTF-8 was roughly uniformly superior and that UCS-2/UTF-16 would have major issues. (I speak as one who was a child at the time, but has read a fair bit about the state of things back then. So don't trust my yearning optimism.)

The worst part about UTF-16 is how it poisoned Unicode with surrogate pairs. UTF-32 and UTF-8 are both good because they didn't need any special consideration from Unicode to make them work. But UTF-16, extending UCS-2 as it does… ugh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This idea originated in the jsgolf community and dwitter (a site where you post 140 character js snippets that generate interesting visuals). See [https://www.dwitter.net/u/aemkei](https://www.dwitter.net/u/aemkei)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is an interesting take on making javascript do animations.

</comment><comment><USER18> Such a nice idea paired with a descriptive and non-click-baity title.</comment>


Peter Thiel won't be involved in YC's work with the ACLU - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/peter-thiel-y-combinator-aclu/ <comment><USER2> I don't think this is really saying anything at all, other than to drum up a negative association (or positive, depending on how you look at it). Thiel is not involved with YC-backed ACLU, just as he is not involved with the YC- backed company I work at.

Business is as business does. Sam Altman has stated he is not going to cut ties with Thiel over political issues [1]. At their level of influence, doing so burns bridges unnecessarily, and sends a clear message that polarization and bubble-creating is OK, and its not. YC wants to set a good example for the tech community by influencing the world in a positive way (e.g. ACLU) and not in a negative, spiteful way (dropping Thiel).

[http://www.recode.net/2016/10/16/13302120/y-combinator- sam-a...](http://www.recode.net/2016/10/16/13302120/y-combinator-sam-altman- peter-thiel-donald-trump)

<comment><USER3> "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is something I was never able to do. It is clear that to really make it in life, idealist have to dial down their inner voice - a lot.

I do not think that, given the chance, I would ever be able to work for/with people like Peter Thiel. But I have great respect for educated, smart, strong and generous people, who are able to work with those who doubt evolution, who doubt climate change, or who put their archaic beliefs above those of others and decide how they should live their life. But the world it seems is increasingly fractured, and a lot of doors open up for those able to work efficiently with the other team, or outside of any team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So he's never been a partner and doesn't work "very closely with the companies." Yet he's still affiliated with YC?

Actions speak louder than words: drop him or acknowledge that YC at some level acknowledges his views (this isn't bad, or good, just something that should be done in my view).

Even something as simple as "we acknowledge that people have differing political views, yadda yadda... would be sufficient).

Why say anything about him? Well, clearly he's the elephant in the room. They should acknowledge this and move on.

<comment><USER5> > Even something as simple as "we acknowledge that people have differing > political views, yadda yadda... would be sufficient).

Why do they need to publicly admit the obvious? What is the angle here?

<comment><USER4> It's obvious that Thiel supports an individual that contradicts many of YC's own goals and interests?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "He is not a partner," Manalac said. "He never has been. We have 19 full- > time partners who work very closely with the companies." She went on to say > that she "can understand why people would be very scared and nervous about > that but he will definitely have no interaction with the ACLU.

So why not cut ties already? If Thiel isn't involved anymore, and he's working with the Trump administration, why doesn't he resign his partnership and move on?

<comment><USER7> > > "He is not a partner," Manalac said. "He never has been. [...]"

> why doesn't he resign his partnership and move on?

Because to resign his partnership, he'd first have to _be_ a partner.

<comment><USER6> What are you talking about? Yes he is: [http://blog.ycombinator.com/welcome- peter/](http://blog.ycombinator.com/welcome-peter/)

<comment><USER7> > What are you talking about?

I'm quoting the statement from YC Partner Kat Manalac in TFA, which was also quoted in the post I was responding to.

If you want to ask why YC is denying that he has ever been a partner now after welcoming him as a "part-time partner" previously, well, you'd have to ask someone else.

But it doesn't make sense to quote a statement about how he never has been a partner and respond to it with a question about why he doesn't resign his partnership.

<comment><USER6> It does make sense. Y Combinator has a relationship with Thiel. He's been declared as a partner many times in the past; now they're saying he's not. That's why I'm asking the rhetorical question. I'm afraid you're taking the passage quoted here and removing all other context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sorry if negative, but I like my tech companies pushing their political agendas on me, as much as I like Hollywood stars doing it.

I'm sure they're all good guys, but now that the Prez has proven you can get elected as a billionaire non-politician it took about 45 seconds to start hearing about candidate Zuck.

Would argue, the Hacker way is to be skeptical of all of it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think people vastly overestimate how much ideology matters once you get past a certain net worth. At that point, they're all in it for the same reasons

 _cue the picture of the Clintons laughing at Trump 's wedding_

<comment><USER5> Yeah...But don't tell the party loyalists on either side about it.

Dem pundit: "It's the uneducated white cis male patriarchy that wants the south to rise again..."

GOP pundit: "Those minority transgender liberals want to take your guns and religion..."

Oligarchy: smiles

<comment><USER10> This is why Sanders wasn't so enamored about fighting the GOP. He was in it to fight their funders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I imagine Peter Thiel is on a small list of people that could leave YC and start an incubator on par. Probably best to keep him around.

p.s. We also never know how many individuals at YC personally hold views closer aligned with thiel or with sama or somewhere else completely who don't make a statement because they're not as bold / don't want to stick their name out.

<comment><USER12> Doubtful. He has the funds to be sure but incubators are many and good ones are few. He'd be hella late to the game.

<comment><USER13> He has the ear of the President of the United States. I don't know how to put a price on that, but I'm positive it's worth a lot.

<comment><USER14> _" Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword."_ \-- Buckminster Fuller

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does Peter Thiel still consider himself a libertarian? I just can't imagine how Trump's positions on immigration can be justified on libertarian grounds.

<comment><USER13> It's pretty easy actually. It's pretty much the same argument one uses to justify building a fence around any other piece of property.

<comment><USER16> The United States of America is not "any other piece of property".

<comment><USER13> I didn't say it is, just that an analogous argument can be applied. First you postulate citizenship as membership in a private club. The club's bylaws determine who gets to be a member and how the club's property is to be managed and protected. The rest is trivial and I'm not actually a libertarian so I'm not going to bother working through it.

<comment><USER15> In other words, you can arrive to an incorrect conclusion by postulating incorrectly. Free immigration (free movement of people) is regarded as one of the core concepts of libertarian theory and philosophy. It's not "easy" to argue for restrictive policies on immigration from a libertarian standpoint.

<comment><USER17> That can happen only in a society where there are no public services and all property is privately owned. Then crossing the "border" of the country is considered trespassing on someone's private property and it's up to them to allow or disallow it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a worrying trend that tech and Silicon Valley are increasingly politicizing. Excepting direct regulations, I'd like to keep business and politics separate.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is reaching the point of parody.

Imagine saying about your partner that you "can understand why people would be very scared and nervous about [him] ... and then keeping him.

</comment><comment><USER20> Close your eyes and imagine how alienating it must feel to be a conservative/libertarian/non-leftist working in tech right now.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sad that Katrina Manalac was wrong twitter about Peter Thiel.

He IS a YC partner, although part time. She tweeted: Thiel isn't a YC partner.

</comment><comment><USER21> tl; dr. Thiel won't be involved in ACLU because he's is not a active member of the YC.

</comment><comment><USER16> @sama

care to comment on this one?

</comment><comment><USER22> Whatever sincere doubts and supposed nuances may have lead YC to continue to tolerate Thiel's presence before Trump took power, there can be no more doubts today.

An organization that associates itself with both the ACLU and a fascist regime lacks any kind of credibility. This reeks of PR driven opportunism.

<comment><USER23> And this reeks of an unaccepting worldview to have of others.

<comment><USER24> Some world views should not be (and are not) accepted. Railroading damaging world views has always been part of politics, and for good reason -- there are plenty of world views whose existence damages everyone.

<comment><USER13> Too bad nobody agrees on what those are. So you can tolerate each other, segregate yourself, or fight.

<comment><USER24> There are plenty of examples of agreement on this. Cannibalism - to name one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>