How to Retire On $500 Per Month - <AUTHOR> http://jetsetcitizen.com/cheap-travel/can-you-retire-on-500-per-month/ <comment><USER2> A better title would be "How to leverage your income far more effectively".

How much money do most of us flush on rent, cars, overpriced houses, and other things. If you add it up over 10-15 years the opportunity cost of living in the US is over $1M for most people.

All that so that we can eat a horrible western diet, watch cable news, and work for prestigious firms in hopes of retiring at 70.

<comment><USER3> > If you add it up over 10-15 years the opportunity cost of living in the US > is over $1M for most people.

And you get the opportunity of living in the U.S. I certainly think this is worth >$1M over a lifetime.

I _like_ living in the U.S. I like having a car, and the associated freedom to take a day trip anywhere in the Bay Area. I like living in a suburban neighborhood where's there's trees and greenery, and yet stores, restaurants, and other conveniences are all nearby. I like being able to work on exactly the same stuff I do for fun and yet get paid for it. I like that I'm surrounded by some of the best & brightest immigrants from around the world in my job. I like my "horrible western diet", which basically consists of being able to eat whatever variety of food I feel like. I can have Mexican for lunch, fresh fish for dinner, Belgian waffles for breakfast the next day, Indian food for lunch, and Chinese for dinner. Is there any other country where you'll get similar variety?

Whenever I've visited other countries (notably China, but also Germany/Austria/New Zealand), I've always felt that they were nice places to travel, but I certainly would not want to _live_ there. Well, except New Zealand. I could imagine retiring there, but I'd hate to waste my 20s and 30s there.

Happiness is knowing what you want, going for it, and having the courage to say "Nope, I don't think so" when people tell you you ought to want something else.

<comment><USER4> You know, you can have a car in other countries as well. In Jakarta you can have a car and driver for less than the cost of a car in the US.

Personally, I think everyone should live in a different country for at least one (1) year. You'll gain a lot of perspective on your own country in the process. Just like learning another language teaches you more about your native tongue, so living in another country teach you about your own culture. Combine the two (new language, new country) for a serious eye opening.

For example, the Thai language has no words for "yes" or "no". There are no yes/no questions in Thai.

Only after being removed from pervasive US media do you recognize how much hollywood movie content is US centric and self-referential.

Honestly, if you love living in the US, go live somewhere else in the world for one year. You'll either love the US more, or you'll decide that you enjoy living somewhere else more than you anticipated. Either way, you'll have gained invaluable life experience.

<comment><USER5> <http://www.into-asia.com/thai_language/phrases/basics.php> lists Thai words for "yes" and "no", and describes other ways of saying yes or no to a question.

<http://www.thaifocus.com/phrases.htm> also lists Thai words for "yes" and "no", and inter alia mentions a couple of yes/no questions in Thai.

[http://www.peacecorp.gov/wws/multimedia/language/transcripts...](http://www.peacecorp.gov/wws/multimedia/language/transcripts/TH_Thai_Language_Lessons.pdf) seems to indicate that Thai even has a special word whose presence in a sentence indicates a yes/no question.

[http://thailanguagehut.com/blog/blog/thai-question-words- so-...](http://thailanguagehut.com/blog/blog/thai-question-words-so- confusing/) has many, many examples of yes/no questions in Thai, and shows how to answer them.

What is the basis for your claim that "there are no yes/no questions in Thai"?

(It does seem that binary questions aren't treated the same way in Thai as they are in English -- the conventions for how you say yes and no are different in different cases -- but it doesn't look at all as if there are "no yes/no questions". For that matter, even in English there are some binary questions to which "yes" and "no" would be peculiar answers. For instance, questions that implicitly make an offer ("Would you like one of these?") usually have to be answered more politely.)

<comment><USER4> Actually, I speak fluent Thai, there is no word for Yes or No. There is ไม่ which is a negation word, and ใช่ which basically means "correct"/"right", not "yes". The Thai question format is generally: Q: Hungry? หิวไหม A: Not hungry. ไม่หิว A: Hungry. หิว

There are other question indicator words, but the one you're referring to is for "correct or not" type questions, e.g.

Q: This road, right? สอยนี้ใช่ไหม A: Right. ใช่ A: Not right. ไม่ใช่

Alternatively, for a lot of statements you can just respond with the polite ending words, ครับ for men and ค่ะ for women.

The question, "would you like one of these?" in Thai would be, "เอาไหม่"... literally, "want?". The correct response is then either: ไม่เอาครับ or, เอาครับ ... that is the polite form for "do not want", or "want". There is no other way to respond to that question (except without the polite ending).

<comment><USER5> Those things you describe are all yes/no questions, so it is not true that there are no yes/no questions in Thai. And what you've described are ways to give (for particular classes of question) answers that mean just the same as "yes" or "no" would for the corresponding questions in English.

It's interesting that English has a category (call it "standard binary questions, answerable with yes or no") that doesn't correspond exactly to anything in Thai. But from what you've said it seems entirely wrong to describe that situation by saying that Thai has no yes/no questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am living in Bangkok right now at €500 (euro, ok) a month and before I clicked this I was wondering if it would mention Asia. You won't believe how many 'old western people' actually live here in Thailand (mostly the coast areas) or Indonesia for that matter.

<comment><USER7> What do you do for healthcare? Do you have insurance or pay out of pocket?

<comment><USER8> Health care is ridiculously cheap in Thailand compared to the US. A hospital visit a little outside of Bangkok cost me about 1500 baht ($40), including medication. It was a simple out-patient procedure, but I'm sure it would have been several hundred dollars if I had to pay out of pocket for the same procedure in the US.

Also, prescription medications are fairly cheap and you generally don't need a prescription. I got my allergy medication for $20, which is normally about $60 here if you don't have insurance.

<comment><USER9> The above shows how we are being suckered in the US. The requirement of good healthcare in our old age is held over us like a looming axe. The fact that it is so expensive is a subtle form of debt slavery. Personal wealth is basically required of us just to feel safe from dying in squalor.

I have also seen, firsthand, the spectre of death by infection being used as a kind of fortuitous (for healthcare companies) euthanasia (read: cost-cutting method) on infirm and elderly ethnic minorities. My girlfriend's father was pushed into hospice care, even though he was not ready to give up. (He'd been metastatic for 11 years.) The hospice nurses had sloppy anti-infection practices. (My girlfriend's an epidemiologist, so she knows what these are professionally.) There was a week's delay from the first symptoms of infection to getting a prescription for antibiotics filled, and by the time the script was filled, he was barely able to stay conscious to take one dose of the pills. Then there was a refusal to give him intravenous antibiotics, because it was against their procedures, so would need a doctor's permission. By that time, it was Friday evening, and the nurse told us we would've had to wait until Monday to get that permission. In the several days it takes us to figure all this out, the nurse is telling us, "He's actively dying," as if it was the cancer!

The whole thing feels like the time I found a cat with sepsis in its head, took it to the vet, then let them talk me into having them euthanize it. It knew something was up. Started yowling when we made the decision. The saccharine talk from the caregivers was the same -- purporting to be in the patient's best interest when it was really about money.

Then, there's the matter of my grandma, who was an Alzheimer's patient at the end of her life. She also died of an infection. As a youth, she was a waif, a socialite beauty of pre WWII Seoul, and even in her 70s, she was still waifish. She died fat, overfed by redneck nursing home nurses who didn't bother to prevent her bedsores. At first, my family tried to care for her in the home, but she needed to be supervised all the time. She kept on putting water on to boil, then wandering off. My dad's a doctor, a local healthcare insider, and for awhile she got better care because of his attention. He'd visit her every day and make corrections to her care constantly. But you can't keep that up. A week of inattention, and he gets a call that she's dying of an infection with the suggestion that, "it's just better to let her go." I only find out about this years later, when I am desperately calling my dad for advice about my girlfriend's dad and his infection.

I grew up in a small town, and my parents once mentioned there were people muttering about my grandmother getting benefits, because she was a foreigner, despite the fact that my dad was living locally and paying taxes in a high bracket for over 30 years.

More anecdotes, but not infection related:

Another friend of mine, born in England, just over 60, a vigorous woman who volunteered with a local fire department and ran an arts organization full time -- she had to pony up over $10,000 to get attention for a treatable ailment that was going to leave her blind. Apparently it wasn't covered. She'd just gotten her US citizenship two years ago, a day we celebrated, but the whole experience with US healthcare upset her, and for awhile she was talking about leaving and moving back to England.

Yet another friend of mine, a young woman of 25, fell from an atrium balcony. She came from a poor family, but she was basically a saint minus 3 miracles. Her family kept her on a respirator for a week, then let the doctors talk them into pulling the plug. Her loss still haunts me. The whole church was _full_ of people from all walks of life she'd touched. The diversity of people she knew was amazing, and no one was there out of mere politeness. There were also 6 monks there who she sometimes worked with, also in tears. I thought the priest was going to deliver a dry, canned eulogy, but he even got choked up. I suspect if the US didn't have crappy healthcare, that wonderful woman would be in a wheelchair but still with us.

<comment><USER10> telcos and healthcare are two heavily regulated industries with artificially high barriers to entry in the US. thus the providers jack costs WAY up because they can. We're too dumb to put up a fuss. the average person's response? we need _more_ regulation. yeah, make it impossible for startups to compete in the industry, that'll drive prices down.

<comment><USER9> How do we encourage healthcare startups?

At one point in time, the HMO pioneer Group Health was a startup of a sort.

One _never_ hears about someone going bankrupt from paying for medical care in Japan. They have a _lot_ of regulations on what you can charge for health care.

<comment><USER10> by allowing people to make whatever contracts they want with their doctors instead of state mandated contracts.

<comment><USER11> Do you feel like either of these are true:

1\. You are currently barred by the state from doing this.

2\. Your negotiating power as an individual is greater than that of the private insurance companies who are already doing this?

You can complain all you like about the cost of healthcare, but I think it's economics not legislation that is preventing you from getting a better rate.

<comment><USER12> Concerning 1), many useful practices which would lower cost are barred by the state.

Some states (e.g. NY) ban catastrophic-only health insurance.

All states ban me from self-medicating (which is actually not very hard to do for simple illnesses). I'm also barred from buying lab tests without first paying a doctor for permission.

Women are required to pay a doctor for permission to buy birth control.

I'm banned from visiting someone with less training than a doctor to receive treatment for simple ailments.

Of course, I'll be the first to admit that Baumol's cost disease plays an important role too, as well as higher costs for newer treatments.

<comment><USER10> I forgot entirely about self medication for simple ailments. I had to get penicillin on the down low when I contracted scarlet fever.

<comment><USER12> The easy problems in medicine are vastly easier than programming. You don't need a doctor to solve them for you, all you need is his permission to implement the well known solution.

If you have an Iranian girlfriend, all you need is for her to smuggle you bootleg medicine when she visits her family. That's what I did.

(Yes, Iran has more medical freedom than the us.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would be more convinced by someone writing about how they'd done this than how they planned to.

<comment><USER14> I do it. My base expenses are less than $500 / month in the Philippines.

10,000 furnished apartment. ~5,000 food ~2,500 visa ~1,300 internet ~1,200 electricity

Total: 20,000 / 47.5 = $421

I'm probably forgetting some things. There are misc expenses which would bring me up to the $500.

That's not to say I actually live here for that though. Those are my actual expenses and I can get by with just those but I choose to have a little more fun. Beer is really cheap here but it adds up if you go out a lot. A 1/4 lb McD's meal is 135 pesos, so your expenses go up if you eat out a lot.

You can nearly cut that rent fee in half if you go for an unfurnished apartment but you have to pay more initially to put in your own furnishing.

You won't be traveling on a budget that low but you have to leave the country once every 16 months (I think) for a visa run if you are on a tourist visa.

Another big one is taxes. So if you are running your own business then you have to make $500 / month after taxes.

I would say that $750 is a pretty decent figure for a single person not living high on the hog. As the article mentions, for $4,000 / month you can live like a king.

Anything I'm forgetting?

ETA: This is for Dumaguete in the Philippines. Cebu is more expensive and Manila is more expensive than Cebu.

ETA2: I didn't add local travel expenses because if you stay in Dumaguete for a decent amount of time you might as well buy a motorcycle for around PHP 40,000. Gas is cheap because you don't use much. Dumaguete has banned taxis so your only option is a trike which typically costs a total of PHP 60 to go downtown and back.

<comment><USER15> /You won't be traveling on a budget that low but you have to leave the country once every 16 months (I think) for a visa run if you are on a tourist visa./

I have a different experience: I am from Finland. Tourist visa when entering the Philippines is valid for only 3 weeks, after which it can be extended for 1 month, and after that for 2 months. The 2 month extension costs 4700 PHP.

Might be different for other nationalities but Finns usually get quite good deals on visas.

<comment><USER14> Same with U.S. residents. But the cost of the visa seems to be different every time I get one. I just budget around $40 - $50 / month for it. You can extend for 16 months I believe, but you can actually extend through Manila for up to 24 months. Again, not totally sure about that as I haven't been here long enough to worry about it (going on my 7th month) but that is what I have been told. Also, things change all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The funny thing to me about this article is I am already living in a country where you can live reasonably well with 500$/mo (I born and live in Venezuela). But you know what? This cheap third world country is a big piece of shit because of its political situation (Chavez).

So, from my point of view, I am just planning how to leave my country. But move to another third world country?? No way man... I would prefer to live in a expensive first world country and work as developer/codemonkey/entrepreneur/whatever.

So, if you choose to "retire" to a cheap third world country, check its political situation and background. Now, if you just don't care to be rescued by UN blue helmets when shit hits the fan, just be my guest...

</comment><comment><USER17> How exactly does one make six percent a month from safe investments?

<comment><USER18> _six percent a month_

Six percent annually.

That said, it is a fantasy, unless you intend on your retirement getting cut short by death prior to you exhausting your money. The standard recommendation for someone who is much older (i.e. can rely on death to moot insolvency with greater probability) is that the safe withdraw rate is 4%.

With a withdraw rate of 4% and a standard mix of stocks and bonds you can be fairly confident that, assuming the future looks something like the past, you will not run out of money within your lifetime. (Most people will in fact see their money "go infinite", i.e. their portfolio expands faster than their withdraw rate and when they eventually pass away their heirs and government get to toast their name quite a bit. However, the prudent investor doesn't plan on being "most people", they plan on being the unlucky sod who bought at the top and sold at the bottom.)

<comment><USER19> And let's not overlook that it's 4% before taxes. So in reality, closer to 3%

<comment><USER10> capital gains aren't taxed @ 25%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> wait... live comfortably on 2,000 a month, and live on 4,000 a month as a king?

Heck, I live on around 3,000 a month (after fairly aggressive savings by American standards) in a middle sized city and it's very comfortable. I could live comfortably on 2,000 a month if I wasn't working! (That's for one, mind you.)

<comment><USER4> Well, 4k USD per month is ~130k THB. The purchasing power of the Baht means that that is about equivalent to ~10k USD. (As an example, a can of Coke costs 12 THB in a 7/11).

130k will buy you a lot of luxury in Thailand. You can get a very good condo for 30k per month. You can each out for every meal of every day for about 1.5k per diem, so 45k for food. That still leaves 55k for spending on going out, buying clothes, utilities, gadgets, etc. etc. That is more than "comfortable".

Even 70k per month is more than enough for a very comfortable lifestyle. Local food costs < 100 THB per meal, so you could eat for less than 300 THB per day. A reasonable condo is only 20k if you're willing to live away from the tourist areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm curious about safety. I know this is probably an exaggeration based on too much media exposure, but my impression is that some of these places have high rates of kidnapping and the like. And it seems that if you were a westerner, especially if you were old, you'd stand out as a target.

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems like there is a lot of BKK based people here. Anyone want to meet up for a beer?

jim.farang gmail.com

</comment><comment><USER22> > and you made 6% annually from safe investments

6% and "safe" these days does not sound doable.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why would you want to live in a place with a lesser standard of living than US?

<comment><USER24> Standard of living isn't everything. One of the best times of my life was in China, lifting weights, hiking up mountains, spending nights in temples, drinking tea, and meeting local people some of whom had never seen a white person before.

If you've never spent 3+ weeks in a country that's very different economically/socially than your own, I'd recommend it. You might like it, might not. I've had mixed experiences with different countries. I quite enjoyed China and Malaysia, Eastern Europe not so much.

But we all have different tastes - there's a meme in the USA that it's the "greatest country in the world" - I reject the notion that there _is_ a greatest country in the world. Just different places for different people at different times in their lives.

<comment><USER25> _there's a meme in the USA that it's the "greatest country in the world"_

There's the same meme in India, and perhaps in other countries too. It is a bit silly to think like that, especially when most people haven't really travelled to many countries. I used to think the same but once I started travelling my views changed. Definitely worth a try.</comment></comment></comment>


Is Agility Making You Less Innovative? - <AUTHOR> http://www.enthiosys.com/blog/2010/3/21/is-agility-making-you-less-innovative.html

<comment><USER2> Agile focuses very hard on the short term. Hopes and dreams are not short term. Agile is a way to implement innovation but it will not create it. My experience is that the shorter the stories are then the less innovative the code becomes. The really cool stuff gets done at nights and weekends.

But was it not ever so?

<comment><USER3> I think this is inevitable. Slicing and dicing the problem into a bunch of tiny sub-problems that can be implemented in short sprints is based on the assumption that:

      1. None (or few) of the problems are very big.

      2. All of the problems can be solved without much brain strain.

      3. A fairly straightforward well-known architecture can be used.

Those assumptions are clearly optimized for projects like business applications, Web front-ends, enterprise services, etc. Situations where nothing depends on somebody getting their brain really deep inside a problem and then marinating on and being frustrated by it until eventually a bolt of inspiration knocks them over while they're washing their hair, causing them to hit their head on the washcloth rack on the way down, so that the idea tragically disappears down the drain along with the mingling blood and. . .

ANYWAY. For skunk works projects, we've already got a different strategy called a skunk works team. Nothing wrong with using those. Right tool for the job and whatnot, eh?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What would Steve Jobs have thought of 1 week sprints or continuous delivery?

</comment><comment><USER4> So, Agility is an implementation strategy, not a method to run a company by.

</comment><comment><USER5> not ...

see: Eric Ries "The Lean Startup: Innovation Through Experimentation. ..."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i65PaoTlVKg></comment>


Apple adding DisplayPort to iOS devices? - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/17/apple-adding-displayport-to-ios-devices/ <comment><USER2> From the Full Article:

The move suggests that the standard could be coming in the future, but since the position is still listed, it seems unlikely that we'll see DisplayPort included with the next iPhone / iPad at this point.

So apple may be adding displayport to iOS devices... some day

<comment><USER3> I think the general rule about headlines phrased as questions, is that they can _usually_ be answered with a "no".</comment></comment>


Altair GraphQL Client - <AUTHOR> https://altair-gql.herokuapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone!

Presenting altair graphQL client, a beautifully designed tool for making queries and mutations to any graphQL server easily. It comes packed with a couple of useful features including support for setting headers and variables, ability to use fragments in your query, a doc viewer that shows the available queries and mutations that can be made to a server (as long as the server allows it).

It comes bundled in a website, a chrome extension, and a mac desktop app (windows and linux apps coming very soon).</comment>


DigitalOcean One-Click WordPress Install - <AUTHOR> http://www.longren.org/digitalocean-one-click-wordpress-install/

<comment><AUTHOR> I, for one, think this is awesome. They even have one-click installs for Ghost.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice.</comment>


Why Apple is obsessed with gold: It's all about Asia - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2015/04/25/why-apple-loves-gold/?r=te <comment><USER3> Take it with a grain of salt, but Jony Ive was quite adamant about why they created a gold watch - They (presumably he, marc newsom, and the rest of the design team) - love the material. We know they are among the world's greatest experts in building personal electronics out of aluminium, (check), stainless steel is a classic watch material (check) - so why aren't they allowed to build a gold watch just because building things out of gold is awesome?

I'm guessing the fact that gold is popular in China (Apple's soon to be largest market), and probably will yield a high gross margin, probably made it straightforward to get Tim to sign off on it - but I really do believe that the initial driver was the desire to work with the material.

But, put it in a different perspective - pretend that _you_ are in charge of the Apple Design team for their next generation product, which is meant to be _worn_ , and you want it to be attractive to _everyone_ in the world - <USER2> materials would _you_ chose to make a watch out of?

I don't know about you, but gold is pretty high up on my list.

<comment><USER4> I think jewelry shows some signs of snobbery ("look at me, I'm wearing precious materials on my body! - Aren't I awesome?").

Looking at my mother's generation, they are still putting a high emphasis on wearing gold and such. But the kids my generations are a lot more interested in "technology". What I mean by that is they'd much rather get an expensive phone than a gold necklace, and brag about _that_ instead.

So why isn't an "expensive" $600 phone snobbery? Because it's actually worth the cost in terms of _functionality_. A $6,000, or $60,000 "gold smartphone" would insinuate just as much snobbery to me, just like a $17,000 Apple Watch does, which is 100% identical in terms of functionality with a $350 one.

This is going to become even more laughable when we start mining billions of tons of precious materials from asteroids in a couple of decades and bring them to Earth.

I also find it _extremely disappointing_ that Apple wants to turn from a "premium brand" into a "fashion brand". The two worlds couldn't be anymore different. Premium brands implies high quality for a certain premium price. Fashion just means paying $7000 more for a different watch band. I really hate to see Apple going down this trend, because it only means it will eventually start focusing less on the "technical quality" side of its products, and more on the "fashion side" of its products (kind of how Beats uses poor quality headphones and wraps them up in expensive "fashion" packages - which by the way, Apple acquired).

<comment><USER5> > But the kids my generations are a lot more interested in "technology". What > I mean by that is they'd much rather get an expensive phone than a gold > necklace, and brag about that instead.

You are assuming everyone worldwide from your generation thinks this way. This is a giant unfounded assumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I've ever been entirely comfortable with this 'theory' (as true as it might be), it's worth noting that Apple Watch doesn't necessarily fall into this one.

IMO, the gold Apple Watch was created to position Apple Watch as a luxury good, and make the cheaper models more appealing and fashionable. Just the existence of the uber expensive Edition gave the Sport and 'regular' Watch more 'fashion cred' for those that would care about such a thing.

<comment><USER7> Why not both? Making an absurdly expensive gold flavor elevates the whole Watch brand, positions it as a luxury good, _and_ makes it more appealing in China. Win-win.

<comment><USER8> I don't know. I've never thought of Apple as "luxury". I thought of them as "premium". Premium. As in pay premium for the best.

Positioning Apple as a luxury product isn't what I want or need as con/pro- sumer. I'm not sure where Apple are heading with this. Profit I guess.

<comment><USER6> So this is a part of Apple's 'pivot' into a luxury goods maker, of which they've been making a whole bunch of hires of the past 12+ months for.

> Positioning Apple as a luxury product isn't what I want or need as con/pro- > sumer.

Compare Apple Watch to it's 'competition' \- the Moto 360 and the Samsung Galaxy Gear. One type of con/pro-sumer will be happy buying a gizmo and would buy either a Moto 360 or Apple Watch purely on it's utility. But Apple Watch is going to sell to a whole lot more people because it is a fashionable luxury good as well.

Even if no one buys it, Apple Watch Edition helps increase the luxury and fashionability of all the Apple Watch models.

<comment><USER9> > Even if no one buys it, Apple Watch Edition helps increase the luxury and > fashionability of all the Apple Watch models.

No it doesn't. The Apple Watch Edition by appearing on the wrists of celebrities and fashion designers helps makes _all_ smartwatches less geeky and more mainstream but _only_ the Edition is seen as luxurious. The aluminium Sport is now the cheap low class Watch in comparison to the fashionable Edition. Moto 360 (made with metal and leather straps) has no such connotation.

I'm still not convinced Apple had to go this route to appeal to celebrities and chinese, after all they use aluminium iPhones instead of gold Vertu phones. Many celebrities wear plastic Beats headphones and fitbits. I'm confused why Apple wants to turn into a luxury brand (besides the extremely high margins of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Short version: China !== Asia.

Long version: I understand that China is a big market for Apple, but as the headline indicates, it's not just China where people are more inclined to buy (and show off) gold products - it's a phenomenon in many Asian countries.

<comment><USER11> Asia pretty much equals China + India + a bunch of other much smaller countries. So if they said "asia", do they mean Japan where this might not go over as well, or India where gold is reserved almost exclusively for jewelry? Focusing on china instead is much more precise, even if the gold watch might be attractive in Malaysia and Vietnam also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For the Apple watch edition, I doubt that Apple expects it to be a large revenue driver. It's an obvious marketing move to position the watch as a high end luxury item, to 'frame' the pricing discussion, and to generate buzz. This is a technique that companies (especially aspiration luxury brands) have used forever. Set the price of your A-level item unusually high and suddenly the price of your B-level item seems like a bargain. Where other e-watch makers are struggling at the $200-300 price point, Apple is selling its C-level watch at $350 and its (probable) volume seller B-level watch starting at $549 without any problem. I think they understand the human psychology of luxury purchase decisions pretty well. It's smart (and slightly evil), but I don't know how this will fit in long term with the rest of their products which are 'premium' but until now haven't pushed so far into 'luxury.' An iphone is slightly more expensive than an S6, but is perceived to be 'premium' in some way. Apple doesn't make diamond encrusted $10K phones even though their are luxury phone brands that do. This is new territory for Apple, not sure that I like it.

</comment><comment><USER13> It seems absurd for consumers to store value with items that are very perishable. What do you do with your 10k watch in 5 years when Apple has stopped releasing security updates ? You're then left with an expensive shell and a rotten core.

<comment><USER11> If you are in the market for a $10k gold watch, you probably just hand it down or even throw it away...it is not the kind of money you think about (most high end watches are much much more than that...think 30k CHF for a simple one).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So much speculation going on here. Amy Hoy actually researched it ([https://unicornfree.com/2015/nobody-will-pay-10000-for-an- ap...](https://unicornfree.com/2015/nobody-will-pay-10000-for-an-apple-watch- other-reasons-you-cant-sell-shit)) and 10k isn't much for the kind of high-end fashion market that will buy this. In fact it is kinda low, as Amy points out the 10k will only get you the "basic bitch" version of the Berkin bag.

Basically a) you are not the market and b) for those who are the market here 10k is not much.

Side note I love Amy Hoys writing and suggest you all go read her site.

</comment><comment><USER15> I found the evidence in the article to be less than persuasive. The cited study found black to be the most luxurious color in those markets but obviously there is no black phone or black edition variant. I'll also note that Apple has quite often historically used black without being accused of pandering to Asian tastes. No equivalent study for the west is offered as a contrast, probably because gold and silver would also be high on the list. The western designer cited as not liking Apple's turn to gold wears ... a gold (colored) watch.

<comment><USER16> I think it is implied that black is a favourite color in the west as well. So black devices is just pandering to everyone, which is why the white iPod was kinda revolutionary colorwise. Everybody else was doing black or dark devices and here comes Apple with signature white earphones and device.

<comment><USER15> It's not a coherent argument to say 'Apple is moving away from black/white because Asians associate luxury with gold' when your own citation says that 'Asians actually associate luxury with black to a higher degree'.

I also found strange the whole bit about 'white and funerals in Asia' which he promises more on later than later spends _fewer actual words on the topic then he did on the promise to give more details_ lol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It should be "all about Apple".

I admire the Apple design ethos, especially recently. It felt like they were trying to make the best product possible, whether I liked it or not. If you're telling me they chose gold just for Asia, that's pretty lame.

Personally I think the gold looks pretty tacky and a departure for Apple. I thought they made their own rules. Guess I was wrong. But what do I know, they'll still sell a quadrillion of everything. It's just a colour.

Happy Sunday

<comment><USER17> How can there be a "best product possible" without taking the prospective user into account? A phone that was so thin it sliced my finger, or so small that I couldn't see it, wouldn't be a very good phone at all. What Apple does really well is design products that very large numbers of people want to buy, and if there are a very large number of people who want to buy a gold watch, Apple will make it for them.

<comment><USER8> That's a little bit like saying: "if there are a very large number of people who want to buy a grey-PC-looking-box running Windows, Apple will make it for them".

Sorry, you're missing my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple used to position itself as a brand for rebels and bohemians. Remember the "Here's to the crazy ones" manifesto? An $18,000 gold watch is pretty far from that image.

Of course, the rebel image worked because Apple had a tiny market share at the time. But it's still pretty striking to see a company that built lime green laptops build insanely expensive gold watches.

<comment><USER19> > _Apple used to position itself as a brand for rebels and bohemians. Remember > the "Here's to the crazy ones" manifesto? An $18,000 gold watch is pretty > far from that image._

For one, that was one campaign, run at one time. Not some constant image of the company. They also made expensive laser printers, PDAs and high end laptops like the Powerbook -- do those tie well with "rebels" and "bohemians" in the original sense?

Besides being just a project image, "rebels" wasn't meant in the guerilla activists sense, but in the "creative" sense in a western context, which can include having lots of money. John Lennon, one of the guys in the campaign was a billionaire with a Rols Royce. The greatest rebel shown was Ghandi, which was included mostly because people just know/focus on his "peaceful" and "spiritual" qualities. As for bohemians, these come into two groups. The actual historical ones, living in Paris, Lower East Side, etc, in decades past, usually poor, and the modern middle/upper class "bohemians" (bohos, etc) whose "bohemian" attitude includes consumerism.

> _But it 's still pretty striking to see a company that built lime green > laptops build insanely expensive gold watches._

It's gold, it's supposed to be insanely expensive. Besides they also build a lot of insanely expensive laptops compared to cheap PC alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> thought this was common knowledge when they unveiled the gold 5s in 2013.

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/gold-iphone-5s-the-only- spark-a...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/gold-iphone-5s-the-only-spark-among- chinese-consumers/)

<comment><USER21> I have wondered if the riot-of-colour 5Cs were partly intended to appeal to certain Asian markets too, even if they don't seem to have done the business in China.

<comment><USER22> The riot of colour iPods were aimed at young people, so ot's plausible that the 5c was also aimed at younger people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I figured it's all about Jonathan Ives.

He likes gold and it's particular aesthetic, which is why all the new stuff has it.

My completely uninformed opinion is that Steve Jobs probably hated it, which is why it never existed until post-Jobs Apple.

<comment><USER24> As someone who took up an interest in watch repair later in life, I now understand why the better watches are cased in gold. It doesn't corrode.(makes working on easy) It warms(thermal heat transfer) up to the skin quicker than, I believe any metal. Easy to polish. The negative, besides wasting money(unless the consumer feels the gold iwatch is an heirloom), is you can't wear it everywhere.(certain people look at my old gold sea master like they would chop off my wrist in certain areas.)

That said, when I look at the current gold Iwatch--I just think about the melt value. I can't think of any gold watch manufacturer who didn't produce a watch thinking the consumer could theoretically keep that watch for life, with the proper care. Sorry, about rambling on--I have just thought about this watch too much. I don't have an exciting life.

<comment><USER25> Melting the watch won't give you shit, even by jewelry standards, because the gold they use is very light meaning that it is technically of a certain karat while having much less actual gold content. It is great from a design perspective, it is light and strong and just as pretty, but not so good for material worth.

I really hope that they work to offload as much computation to the users phone as possible as more features are added so that one watch can survive multiple iphones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If Apple is willing to make all of its product lines gold just to make China like it more, I wonder what else it's going to compromise on (thinking security/privacy here).

<comment><USER20> Everyone always brings up privacy with Apple.

Apple has a history of rejecting NSA blanket surveillance (until Jobs died- according to NSA leaks)

At the very least Apple has a business model that /can/ support user privacy. Google is an advertising company- what you don't pay in currency, they make up for by selling you.

<comment><USER25> Ultimately what privacy comes down to a lot of the time is how much information the companies have access to. Even if Google had the same stance towards privacy that Apple does, they would be inherently much much worse just because their entire business model relies on having tons of your data, which is the exact opposite of the way Apple operates.</comment></comment></comment>


Dear Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mankins/dear-twitter-7264c315705a#.cix0lv4dv <comment><USER2> Product plug post is disguised as a Twitter-feedback post.

Meh.

I found the twitter analysis to be great up until the nonsense that is "help us get paid" (not completely irrational, but weak IMHO). If you're launching a product, just say it!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's tough, you know? This is kind of an A/B test along with this one: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/atri-turn-your- into-a5f37494c42f...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/atri-turn-your- into-a5f37494c42f#.tjwjp9u1i)

Figuring out how to launch the product, which will have a more official launch in the next week.

But I hear you. We still mean it and think that something has to change.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Create a Deep Fake Video from Any Image - <AUTHOR> https://myvoiceyourface.com/?1 <comment><USER2> This just looks like a simple web app wrapper around First Order Model:

[https://github.com/AliaksandrSiarohin/first-order- model](https://github.com/AliaksandrSiarohin/first-order-model)

The license for the code specifically states "Non-Commercial".

Is your code something else? Also seems like you've double posted it.

Edit: Your other posts also have a similar look - are you testing the waters for a viable biz model by adding web-app wrappers around ML papers who have published their code on Github? Not being accusatory or anything, just trying to understand.

<comment><USER3> I am not the OP nor a lawyer, but I believe one can charge for the service provided (the code is running on OPs servers). This should still not violate Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

<comment><USER4> I am not the OP nor a lawyer, but this case looks like clear violation of CCNC license, i.e. it's piracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone wants to play around with this in a hosted gpu supported jupyter notebook, check out:

[https://colab.research.google.com/github/AliaksandrSiarohin/...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/AliaksandrSiarohin/first- order-model/blob/master/demo.ipynb)

I think this is just a wrapper of that script

</comment><comment> tech-historian Your pricing plans:

[https://myvoiceyourface.com/pay/](https://myvoiceyourface.com/pay/)

$20/mo for 20 videos. While the technical output you've achieved is notable, just curious, who is your target audience? How do you see these videos being used?

<comment><USER6> I am sure politicians and campaign managers or every sort and ideology would very willingly pay for this. Then there also the Rule 34 aficionados around and they don't mind spending cash at all.

Then you also have trolls, "news channels", conspiracy theorists, youtube comedian personalities to name a few more.

The market definitely exists.

<comment><USER7> If the results were 4 to 5 orders of magnitude better, maybe it could fool somebody :)

<comment><USER6> The results can be improved with time. But the market opportunity will still be there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just because you can build it doesn't mean you should.

</comment><comment><USER9> Failed on the first image I dropped. [https://i.imgur.com/UE9wuOP.png](https://i.imgur.com/UE9wuOP.png)

<comment><USER10> Same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Worth noting that there is a recent videos at the bottom of the page. Be careful what you upload!

</comment><comment><USER12> Immediately turned off by the first demo being someone yelling angrily.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looking at the recent videos, albeit not knowing the original videos used as source, I'd assume this needs a lot of work still to be of any practical use, even if you just aim at making funny memes with this.

Also some manual filtering would probably be very appropriate, as there were some including racial slurs and NSFW audio and visuals.

<comment><USER14> It's funny memes until it's a weapon. That said, funny memes have become a weapon too. One of the worst things about the modern Internet, IMO.

<comment><USER15> The worst thing about funny memes is people use it as answers, come backs, etc... as if they were adolescents...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It crashes after a couple seconds. [https://i.imgur.com/L9gLEck.png](https://i.imgur.com/L9gLEck.png)

I've tried cropping the image and the video several times to make sure only the head is visible but it doesn't work.

My image is around 250KB and the video slightly under 9MB. I'm saying this because of the two following lines:

RuntimeError: imageio.mimread() has read over 256 MiB of image data. Stopped to avoid memory problems. Use imageio.get_reader() or memtest=False.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why did you resubmit this so soon? There was already a discussion in an earlier thread.

Context, another post from 12 hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423372)

</comment><comment><USER18> When I hear "deepfake" I usually think both video and audio being fake. This is cool but I'm not sure what the use case is of my friend having my voice.

<comment><USER19> I guess mostly for fun. The baby video example on that page was pretty funny. Although if I see 10 of them it might get a bit less funny.

<comment><USER20> I just tried it for fun, and it was fun. I uploaded a photograph of my six- month-old grandson and then I videoed myself saying something profound in a deep serious-adult voice. The resulting video is, I humbly believe, very cute. I'll share it only with family, though.

<comment><USER21> It looks as if the site is showing recently uploaded videos unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What are you doing with the data collected? I don't see anywhere a privacy policy, gdpr or anything</comment>


Consumerism, Conformity, and Uncritical Thinking in America - <AUTHOR> https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/8846775 <comment><AUTHOR> My wife came across this paper today and we've been glued to it since. Prescient work that identifies problems we still (even more so) grapple with today around education and advertising.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you get LinkedIn endorsements from people that don't even know you? - <AUTHOR>

Lately I've been getting quite a few "endoresements" on LinkedIn from people that barely or don't know me or the work I do. It leads me to believe these endorsements are worthless across the board. Half of the ones I receive aren't even for my leading skills. <comment><USER2> Yes. LinkedIn endorsements are the new "I will follow you on twitter, you should follow me back."</comment>


AutoCanary: machine-readable, digitally signed warrant canary statements - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/code/project/autocanary/ <comment><USER2> I can't help but feel canary's are missing the 'spirit of the law' (I don't like calling it that, but the phrase fits) of the gag order, and will ultimately not stand up in court.

The gag order says you can't do anything to notify people that you're received one. By having the canary expire, you're alerting them. No questions, end of story.

I get the concept of 'they can't force you to sign a false document because of the First Amendment' line of thinking, but the gag orders themselves don't respect your constitutional rights, why would you expect it's different in regards to canaries?

<comment><USER3> Well, here's a somewhat analogous issue where the courts have decided differently. A 10b5-1 plan is set of rules set up by someone, like a company exec, to trade stock even if that person holds inside information at the time of the trade. That is, you could set up a plan that automatically sells 100 shares of stock per month. You can NOT change the rules of the plan while you have inside information.

However, you CAN cancel plan orders even if you have inside info. For example, if you knew great news was coming, you could cancel a sell order. If I understand it, this is because courts have ruled that insider trading laws can only be applied when a trade occurs, not when one doesn't occur. IANAL so someone correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER4> that is an interesting line of argument...but i think ultimately, the fight over the application of law isn't one which can be won over by sheer logic. Men in power who wish to manipulate the world for their own agenda will be able to do it, if the common folk don't care or fight back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've been over this before.

If you communicate, by any signal, including the lack of sending a signal, or any prearranged protocol, that you received a warrant when you were ordered not to talk about it, then you are in violation of the order.

No amount of technical trickery changes that; courts are run by humans.

The page includes a note about warrant canaries never having been tested in a court of law, but you shouldn't be hopeful.

<comment><USER6>
        >  courts are run by humans

Not only that, courts are run by humans who have the ability to imprison you indefinitely if they think you are disrespecting the spirit of their rulings

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

<comment><USER7> Which is a violation of due process itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If country X's laws are the problem, then the owners must not be citizens of X, the servers must not be in X, plaintext must not hit X, the jurisdiction of the organization must not be X, and preferably there's no import/export agreement for commercial activity in X. Knowing this, the companies that are merely changing jurisdictions or server locations shouldn't trick you into a false sense of security.

The only sure-fire way to do things is to (a) not become popular amongst targets in X or (b) don't do business in X whatsoever. I've met a number of chip designers and security engineers that have been doing (b) for a long time. I did that for foreign threats. Even if you practice these, your OPSEC and INFOSEC still must be good enough to stop the attackers they send.

No surprise some governments and companies are just eliminating electronics from security-sensitive areas. I think the Russians even use typewriters now for some things. Not that they don't have their own vulnerabilities. ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious, has the constitutionality of warrant gag orders ever been tested in court? How does the government's interest in a gag order trump my right of free speech?

<comment><USER9> This is a sincere question. It's one thing to be involved in a court case and have a gag order in place while a case is in progress. But here, I'm operating my business lawfully, and out of the blue, the government tells me what I can and can not say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is illegal in Australia, no bill of rights /constitution to safeguard anything so when the spineless maggots we have as our elected legislature say "warrant canaries are illegal" [1] then we are fucked, it's illegal, and the extremely long fight to convince the next batch of spineless maggots to vote the shit out of existence, begins.

1 - [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/australia_out...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/australia_outla.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> In the spirit of what others have said, why not take it a step further? Say: "we have not received 1 request," "we have not received 2 requests" etc etc. Somehow, I think this won't work.

<comment><USER12> Or even: "The first byte of a message we are unable to deliver is not 0x00. The first byte of a message we are unable to deliver is not 0x01. The first byte..."

<comment><USER13> While we're playing games of semantics, we might as well have fun.

 _" A message we are unable to deliver is NOT 0xa89adf8d9a9c9a96899a9bdf9edfb19e8b9690919e93dfac9a9c8a8d968b86dfb39a8b8b9a8ddf8d9a8e8a9a8c8b969198..."_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Using this might give you a warm feeling inside, but if anything, it has the potential to cause harm by providing confidence in an entity that is being compelled to continue issuing the canary.

"The legal theory behind warrant canaries is based on the concept of compelled speech. The First Amendment protects against this in most circumstances."

These things are pointless if they compel surrender of the key. Does anyone think even for a moment that "constitutional rights" will be considered?

</comment><comment><USER15> What speaks against putting a system in place that makes it impossible to comply with a gag order? Maybe even technically impossible, e.g. backed by a hardware fuse that you'd need to break to comply with a search but by doing so making it impossible for you to sign another canary?

Or, say, you cooperate with someone overseas in a safe country that requires you to visit him every quarter to make the canary together?

</comment><comment><USER16> How many organizations have warrant canaries by now? Of those, how many have let the canary expire, indicating a warrant was issued? If the answer is zero, which is more plausible: 1) that no such warrants have ever been issued, or 2) that they have, and warrant canaries have already failed the test in secret?

<comment><USER17> It's not zero, see Silent Circle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What if there were a third-party polygraph service to sign the warrant canary statements? It would need to solve the problem of a remote polygraph since it would have to be located in another jurisdiction.

<comment><USER19> First the service would have to serve the problem that polygraphs are not working very well: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#National_Academy_of_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#National_Academy_of_Sciences)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm kind of concerned about "mere instrumentality" being said by some prosecutor at some point in the future, here.</comment>


Dwarf Fortress 0.31.01 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

<comment><USER2> I wish I felt I could justify spending time to learn this game. Just reading the changelog is interesting enough.</comment>


How many To-do apps do we need? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@LewisMenelaws/how-many-to-do-apps-do-we-need-484750382a98 <comment><USER2> Funny enough, I was actually searching for a ToDo app 'that-does all' one more time after fixing on one three months ago. The issue I generally see with Todo lists are that they are one part of a very nuanced workflow. For eg. I often get worked up choose between a ToDo app or a Note app when I still working on the details. Currently settled on Trello for a multi-modal workflow of saving links, notes, keeping lists of tasks classified by stages is feeling good. But I miss a good mobile app, markdown support and easy creation and maintenance. Any suggestions?!

<comment><AUTHOR> I honestly use Wunderlist because I just need something bare bones simple. Trello might honestly be your best option if you are looking to do stuff like custom values etc.

<comment><USER2> Wunderlist definitely looks cool and impressive with apps for all platforms - looks like a cure for Notes taking on Mac + Android users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> OneNote, Google Keep, Evernote, Wunderlist...the list goes on

<comment><AUTHOR> We need a to-do app to show all to-do apps.

<comment><USER4> I'd put that on my to-do list but I might have trouble finding it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's simple!! There's over 500 options to choose from

<comment><USER5> This is also the standard greeting for JS newcomers. Perhaps being 'web developers' has an impact on their perception of simplicity.

Making a better todo system is on my todo list as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The MIT Press and UC Berkeley Launch Rapid Reviews: Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2020/mit-press-and-uc-berkeley-launch-rapid-reviews-covid-19-0629 <comment><AUTHOR> > Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19), an open access, rapid-review overlay > journal that will accelerate peer review of Covid-19-related research and > deliver real-time, verified scientific information that policymakers and > health leaders can use.

> Using artificial intelligence tools, a global team will identify promising > scholarship in preprint repositories, commission expert peer reviews, and > publish the results on an open access platform in a completely transparent > process.

> There is an urgent need to validate — or debunk — the rapidly growing volume > of Covid-19-related manuscripts on preprint servers.</comment>


APIUX: URL Design for RESTful Web Services - <AUTHOR> http://apiux.com/2013/04/03/url-design-restful-web-services/

<comment><USER2> Would be better titled "URL Design for Web Services"</comment>


An interview with Andreas Rumpf, designer of the Nim language - <AUTHOR> https://sourcesort.com/interview/andreas-rumpf-on-creating-and-growing-nim <comment><AUTHOR> I did this interview a couple of weeks ago with Andreas. I hope it's a good read for anyone interesting in systems programming and the new breed of languages like Rust and Go that have gained a lot of traction in the last few years.

Also, if you're interested in broader thoughts on language design, he has a good set of writeups here: [https://nim-lang.org/araq/](https://nim- lang.org/araq/)</comment>


I, Toaster - <AUTHOR> http://www.reason.com/news/show/134322.html

<comment><USER2> Pet peeve:

"As for "pre-toaster" lives, most people who lived in the age before the toaster could expect to die by about age 40 (the toaster was invented in 1893, when life expectancy in the U.S. was about 43 years)."

I hate when people talk about how people in the last century could expect to die when they were about 40, because that is skewed by the ridiculously high infant-mortality rates. The data that that paragraph links to says it all: if you lived to age 10 by 1900, you could expect to live another 50 years _more_ , i.e. you would most likely die when you were about 60.

Take a good look at the data. At birth in 1890, your life expectancy was only 42 years. At 10 years old in 1900, your life expectancy is now 50 _more_ years, i.e. you've aged 10 years but now you can expect to live an additional 8 years on top of that. Your total life expectancy went up by 18 years just by virtue of having made it through the first 10 years.

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, this means about 1/3 of babies died before age 10, which seems about right...

<comment><USER3> Very good point.

 _Your total life expectancy went up by 18 years just by virtue of having made it through the first 10 years._

Aubrey de Grey makes the same point in talking about extending life further in this talk:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "It's a peculiar kind of "helplessness" that enables us to benefit from the shared labor of millions of workers and the collected knowledge of millions of people accumulated over hundreds of years by merely traveling to the nearest Wal-Mart or appliance store, or, better yet, by merely clicking the mouse on a computer a few times and having the toaster (or, for that matter, groceries, or clothing, or medicine) brought directly to our homes.

"And where Read expressed awe at the way so many people worked together-- motivated only by self-interest--to produce not only pencils, but millions of other products that make our lives better, Thwaites oddly sees waste:"

Good find. There is still a lot of misunderstanding of economics in a lot of posts here, so this article "delights the mind" for many HN readers.

<comment><USER5> To play Devils' advoate (although I think this is an excellent essay) I think the point of the toaster project was to question the amount of effort that goes into producing cheap toasters, which are of relatively narrow utility. There's a lot you can do with a pencil, as with any general purpose tool: the production of pencils (or keyboards, or CPUs) is an example of capitalism at its finest.

A toaster, on the other hand, sacrifices flexibility for efficiency. It's faster and uses less energy than opening up your stove and making toast on the broiler (a Good Thing), but that's _all_ you can do with it - toast bread products. If you want to have egg with your toast, it's no help at all (unlike your stove, which allows you to cook things in many different ways). If you follow the toaster approach, you end up with a kitchen full of one-purpose appliances which are individually excellent but ultimately cater to peoples' inability to cook. At some point it's worth asking the question of whether having multiple specialized appliances is really more efficient than having one or two that can be turned to many different ones. If you look in the kitchen of a diner or restaurant, there are relatively few fancy appliances but the cooks really know what they're doing.

There's room for both approaches. Programming everything from scratch without libraries would be terribly wasteful. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't respect a programmer who relied solely on library functions and was unable to derive any algorithms of their own, no?

<comment><USER6> That's also solved by the collective intelligence. Is it better to have simple devices which do only one thing each, or something big which does all, or something simple which can do a lot of things but with more labor? The market has tried all (or a lot of) choices, and the winner is still the toaster.

<comment><USER7> I like toaster ovens, personally.

It's really got nothing to do with the versatility and more to do with the size of the heating elements and the space required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really?

I hate to break it to the author of this piece, but toasters and pencils do not magically spring fully-formed from the uncoordinated, joyful, dignified labor of confident Ayn Rand heroes.

A company decides to get into the toaster business. That company then deals with coordinating everything needed to bring the pieces together and put toasters on the market. That company places orders with others which provide raw materials. That company builds or acquires factories and machinery. That company gets workers to build toasters, probably on an assembly line. That company sets up distribution channels.

In other words, the toaster company has to -- gasp! -- engage in centralized planning of how toasters will be produced, distributed and sold. Fortunately, centralized planning and coordination is only doomed to fail when the government does it, right?

And the odds are that most of the people in the chain are not working with much joy or dignity, especially the closer you get to the manufacturing and raw materials. They most likely work not because they find their life's purpose in mining the ore that furthers the wonder of captalism, but because mining the ore is about the only option in whatever place they had the misfortune to be born into.

Of course, when you put it like this it's not a juvenile libertarian's wet dream anymore, and Reason wouldn't want to publish anything like that. But ideology and reality don't often match up (and, to be honest, I've no doubt that if the author of this piece had been born in Stalin's Soviet Union, he'd have used similar logic to extol the wonders of the Glorious People's Ore- Mining Facilities, which bring raw materials from far-flung places to produce the Toaster of the Motherland, in a striking blow to the decadent imperialist capitalist pig-dogs).

<comment><USER2> I think you're missing something very important when you talk about the centralized planning in companies:

Failure.

A toaster company doesn't have to get it all right in order for toasters to be produced. It merely has to come close enough that someone else realizes that a toaster is a good idea, tweaks some features, and does it better. Eventually we end up with a working toaster, even if 99.9% of toaster companies _didn't_ produce a working toaster.

It also helps that the toaster company can rely on the metal-casing company already have gotten most of that right, and the heating-element company having gotten most of that right, and the timer coming having gotten most of that right. It doesn't have to start from scratch for every component of the toaster, only the toaster-ish ones.

The difference between governments and corporations is that corporations can fail. When they can't (eg. Citigroup, GM, and AIG in the current financial crisis), central planning in a corporation is every bit as harmful as central planning in the government. But most of the time, when a corporation fails, other people pick up the pieces, tweak them a bit, and try again with a newer and better corporation. Hell, most of the time the newer and better corporation comes along first and _makes_ the outdated one fail. (See: Toyota vs. GM, Google vs. Microsoft, Microsoft vs. IBM, etc.)

When a government fails, usually lots of people die. At the very minimum, there's lots of misery and uncertainty.

You could argue that one of the greatest things about the U.S. government is its ability to tolerate failure without bringing down the whole government. When a president royally screws things up, like the last one did, he's out in eight years, there's a peaceful transition, and someone new picks up the pieces. Could you imagine something like that happening in Castro's Cuba, Saddam's Iraq, or Communist Russia? For most of history, the modus operandi of governments has been to continue growing in power until they're so big they can't do anything but fail, then have a bloody revolution where the new radicals throw out everything the old guard did - even the parts that worked - and start from scratch. It's hard to make progres like that.

<comment><USER9> A few random notes:

* The ideal size of corporations is an interesting subject. If central planning is so bad, why are some companies so huge? Why do companies get big if small is better? Why aren't we all just individual contractors, rather than employees?

* Free trade is generally seen as 'good' by economists, but a move in that direction may not be a Pareto improvement; i.e. while everyone is generally better off, there may be some people made (significantly) worse off. Technology improvements are the same way: people may be better off using computers than typewriters, but not typewriter repairmen. One strategy to mitigate the worst effects of this would be a bit of redistribution from all the winners, to the losers. Everyone is thus better off than before the move to free trade, or new tech, and the losers have some cushion to fall back on. Of course this presents problems of its own and is a long and complicated debate.

<comment><USER10> _The ideal size of corporations is an interesting subject_

ObCoase.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, he's the famous one.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase>

I don't know what else has been done in that field. Any pointers?

<comment><USER10> I don't know either, although that hasn't stopped me from opining about it on kragen-tol from time to time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hmm. Somebody wrote your text editor.

Another wrote your kernels, plus an army of programmer.

Some guy halfway around the world wrote the Ruby intrepreter more than a decade ago.

Another wrote your build tools.

Several indiviuals wrote several different package management tools and you use it all. (apt-get, rubygem...)

Somebody wrote your browser and someone invent the language in which Hacker News was written in.

Yeah, even as hackers, we are all "helpless" and that's a good thing. It mean we can focus on writing new software instead of reinventing the wheel.

<comment><USER12> Yeah but especially on open source platform you could argue that most of the software stack wasnt created because of capitalism, people who made it had different motivation than money. If everybody in Soviet union acted as open source programmers ...

<comment><USER13> But what is capitalism if not the freedom of people to freely trade the goods that they acquire or create for other goods that they value more? There's nothing that says that it has to explicitly be money that is traded; it could be something as amorphous as trading your time and effort in return for public recognition and acclaim.

As software developers, the software stacks we use are a great example of the decentralised 'invisible hand' aspect of markets. Nobody planned the transition from Assembler to C to Java to Python (etc), there's no panel of experts deciding that we're all going to start programming in X language from next year or some government department building the One True Language/Framework/OS. The fact that most of what we use is free is largely irrelevant, because time and effort are not free and all trade is about each party's perception of relative, not absolute, value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember when I first read "I, Pencil" after hearing a lecture on it. It really presents an incredible way to look at the world which has stuck with me ever since.

</comment><comment><USER15> At the end, the author talks about the free market versus central planning and how the emergent, chaotic nature demonstrated in I, Pencil renders futile any efforts to manage. It seems like a bit of a fallacy, though, to say that because it didn't work in the past, it's been proven hopeless. Soviets didn't have the Web, for instance. Still, it is good not to underestimate the self- organizing intricacy of the ad-hoc situation we have, especially for people who think it's simple to replace with a managed solution without all the information.

<comment><USER11> It is highly doubtful that central planners can in fact gather all the necessary information much less being able to understand and decide what and how to allocate resource in a way that satisfy the population best.(Let say that central planner's goal is to satisfy the population to the most extent possible)

More over, since the population do not have the same taste, wants, or preferences the central planner must cater to all tastes. Since even group with the same preferences are made of individuals, the central planner must also produce enough to satisfy all the needs.

He must balance all parties' conflicting needs and wants and must decide what to produce and not to produce since the end that there are only so much resources to go around.

Pretty tall order isn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is Read's "I, Pencil": <http://www.scribd.com/doc/11603927/IPencil>

<comment><USER17> Or scribd free:

<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 'If the world could remain in a single frame, like a painting on the wall.. I think we'd see the beauty then, and stand staring in awe'

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You know, I'm not sure "I, Toaster" is a more accurate summary of this article, since the article is in fact a _critique_ of "I, Toaster".

<comment><USER19> I think it is. "I, Toaster" is a play off of "I, Pencil" attempting to show how the truth is, our positions in society are tenuous and because we have become unlikely to be capable of fending for ourselves, we are helpless.

This article, "I, Toaster", turns it back around and places the art piece parallel in meaning to "I, Pencil".

[There, fewer words.]

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoah, you're right, I'm wrong --- I misread the first graf of the article, and thought "The Toaster Project" was actually called "I, Toaster".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In some cases, centralized planning is the better choice over the alternative. Would the toaster company survive without roads, laws, and a stable currency.

Something do not scale well without central planning.</comment>


Sample Rate and Bitrate: The Guts of Digital Audio (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://thestereobus.com/2008/01/12/sample-rate-and-bitrate-the-guts-of-digital-audio/

<comment><USER2> "The higher the rate, the closer you'll get to the smoothness of the first image."

oops.

</comment><comment><USER3> "The Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem states that a sample rate of twice the maximum frequency of the signal being sampled is needed to describe the frequency."

ouch.

</comment><comment><USER4> related video : [http://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml](http://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml)</comment>


Songbird: Spatial Audio Encoding on the Web - <AUTHOR> https://google.github.io/songbird/ <comment><USER2> Hello everyone, thanks for checking out the new repository. I've resolved the CDN link issues, but feel free to file any more issues at [https://github.com/Google/songbird/issues](https://github.com/Google/songbird/issues). Looking forward to seeing all the great stuff you all make with it. :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I'm confused about what this is, exactly, from the description:

> Songbird is a JavaScript API that supports real-time spatial audio encoding > for the Web using Higher-Order Ambisonics (HOA). This is accomplished by > attached audio input to a Source which has associated spatial object > parameters. Source objects are attached to a Songbird instance, which models > the listener as well as the room environment the listener and sources are > in. Binaurally-rendered ambisonic output is generated using Omnitone, and > raw ambisonic output is exposed as well.

My confusion is that The Web Audio API [1] also supports real-time spatial audio for the Web [2]. It looks like Ambisonics is a format that encodes spatial audio into a fixed set of audio channels, rather than just playing audio into PannerNodes directly.

Some questions: (1) Is Songbird indeed an alternative to the PannerNode API like I'm suspecting? (2) If so, why would you want to downmix your audio into a set of intermediate channels, rather than play each source directly into a PannerNode? (3) Is there any advantage to using Omnitone, which I suspect does the HRTFs, rather than using a PannerNode and its HRTFs directly?

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API)

[2] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API/Web_audio_spatialization_basics)

<comment><USER2> Hi Toomin,

Thanks for your interest! Let me try to clarify and answer your questions:

1\. Songbird is indeed an enhanced alternative to PannerNode.

2\. It internally works with ambisonics, but outputs stereo (we use Omnitone internally to render the multichannel audio down into a stereo track).

The general reason people use ambisonics instead of direct HRTF rendering is because ambisonics allows for head rotation prior to rendering, so the user can easily turn their head, etc. without you having to adjust all the incoming sources' hrtfs.

The reason we feel Songbird is an upgrade to PannerNode is three-fold:

One, you can control the quality of the localization/spatialization effect by adjusting ambisonicOrder (1st to 3rd, atm).

Two, PannerNode is costly... 2 convolutions per source, while songbird is a fixed number of convolutions irregardless of the number of sources, so it ends up allowing you to get more for less.

Three, PannerNode doesn't support any sort of room modelling and Songbird produces spatialized (ambisonic) room reflections and reverberation.

Hope this helps clarify things! :)

Cheers, Drew

<comment><USER3> That's exactly the information I needed! Thank you! It would be great to have this on the homepage.

<comment><USER2> Noted! Will add a better explanation to the README. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everytime I see something like this rolling out of Google, all I can think is "if only this was a real project, and not yet-another-Google-shop-project". And no, that's not fair towards the people who make it, but then the entire thing is clearly marked as copyright Google, not copyright the people who deserve the credit, so Google doesn't even want me to think of this as something cool made by cool people, but another library pumped out by Google for the betterment of a market position.

<comment><USER5> What's bothering you? Google apparently allows people to make awesome stuff during business time, and then released it under Apache License 2.0, which seems to be a pretty permissive license ([https://github.com/google/songbird/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/google/songbird/blob/master/LICENSE))

It may not get the attention it deserves, but no project is guaranteed to have a maintainer-for-life.

<comment><USER4> Mostly the part where it stays a Google project, and despite Apache licenses, no one can contribute without signing a CLA that discriminates against any developer without a phone or a permanent address. "The lawyers insisted" means I don't like the way you think you're releasing useful code into the world when you're really presenting something you locked down so hard people need to give you their direct personal information before you let them help make it better (Facebook does the same thing, which is why I don't contribute to their projects despite loving quite a few of them and using them daily).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OT: This brings me back... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_\(software\))

<comment><USER7> Yea...I thought that was gaining a second life. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm. None of the examples are working for me. "The HTMLMediaElement passed to createMediaElementSource has a cross-origin resource, the node will output silence." in the console.

macOs Sierra 10.12.5 Firefox 55 64-bit

<comment><USER9> Worked OK on Microsoft Edge.

The spatial effect is not that bad, and that is speaking as someone who (1) loves 5.1 and other surround in games, movies and music, and (2) is usually unimpressed with headphone surround.

<comment><USER2> :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great to see! I have a side project to port the old Peep Network Auralizer to a web based project[1] and the code already has the concept of mono sounds originating at different points in a 3D space, so this should be relatively straightforward to integrate. I was aiming for Android/iPhone compatibility though; is there any multichannel audio support on mobile yet or would I need a fallback?

[1] [https://github.com/jhurliman/webpeep](https://github.com/jhurliman/webpeep)

<comment><USER2> Hi!

Songbird renders stereo-out using Omnitone internally, so Android/mobile is certainly supported. Feel free to file any issues you have at [https://github.com/Google/songbird/issues](https://github.com/Google/songbird/issues).

Cheers, Drew

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How is this better than PannerNode, which is built into HTML5? I can hear the difference in the demo, but can someone put words to it?

<comment><USER11> I think part of it is room simulation. I might be wrong, but I don't think PannerNode supports things like the room materials like in the 2nd demo

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> FreeSWITCH can do this in mod_conference using OpenAL, its pretty sweet.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've had lots of trouble with WebAudio and rendering to a file as output, though that was in the infancy of the relevant technology. I can't seem to find any information on this for Songbird nor Omnitone, though, but if it works it opens up a bunch of possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER14> Had my headphones on backwards and got confused when I moved the S and L around. The S was obviously the "Subject"/me, but I couldn't figure out what the L was for. I settled for "Loud thing".

<comment><USER2> Haha. Actually, you might have had your headphones on correctly all along. S was "Source" and L was "Listener". I've added some clarification to the examples. Thanks for testing it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any FOSS tools for capturing custom HRTFs? With photogrammetry for instance? I found a paper using a Leap Motion for a custom HRTF capture, but they didn't publish any code

[https://home.deib.polimi.it/antonacc/pubs/ICASSP_16_2.pdf](https://home.deib.polimi.it/antonacc/pubs/ICASSP_16_2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER16> Woah!!! This is perfect for a project I'd like to do....

</comment><comment><USER17> ahh, this is like the thing in realtec audio mixer that lets me change the room type, but in my browser and in realtime

</comment><comment><USER18> This is neat!

Can you share what techniques you are using for reverberation processing? Early and diffuse reflections?

<comment><USER2> We're using a room acoustics model that captures early and late reflections based on the acoustic properties (dimensions and materials) of the room. :)

<comment><USER19> Worth mentioning that this is just a box-shaped room. How many early reflections are calculated?

<comment><USER2> Hi Science404, yes indeed we're launching with the standard shoebox for now, but obviously we're thinking about the future too. :) Currently we calculate listener-based 1st-order reflections, optimized for performance. Once the ecosystem out there gets faster, we can explore fancier methods. ;) You can see this in EarlyReflections.js

Cheers, Drew

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm so glad ambisonics is finally getting its day.</comment>