Why Some Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is a State of Matter (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/why-physicists-are-saying-consciousness-is-a-state-of-matter-like-a-solid-a-liquid-or-a-gas-5e7ed624986d#.x9chnrcqf <comment><USER2> This doesn't sound much like a physics paper from the abstract ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219](http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219)). "why do conscious observers like us perceive..." is an appropriate angle for philosophical discussion (or _maybe_ psychology, depending on where you took that).

But in physics, we use experimentation and observation of the physical world. Put a brain (or a human) on a table, do some experiments, and write about the results. If you find that atoms and molecules in the brain do strange things that they don't do when part of a brain, document, publish, and theorize.

And if you don't do any experiments, and instead probe the depths of your mind, that's not physics.

(sorry to sound so condescending, but it's frustrating for the word "physics" to be co-opted in the service of bunk science)

<comment><USER3> 1\. It's clear you did not read the paper and are ignorant that the author is high profile physicist and cosmologist famous for developing measurement methods.

2\. The view of science you are parroting is naive and mistaken. Theorizing and experiment are both necessary and inform and constrict each other.

<comment><USER4> There are plenty of great scientists who have nutty ideas about things outside of their specialty. I've only read the OP, but that's the vibe it gives me.

<comment><USER5> Which is good, isn't it? I mean, how nutty was the idea that matter could bend space(time)? What about time dilation? Black holes? Particle/wave duality? The brilliant dots in the sky being immense balls of burning gas? Big discoveries begin with a nutty hypothesis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's sad what's happened to physics. I remember being at an SPIE meeting for optical physics; some of my work on X-ray microscopes was being presented there. I happened upon a giant auditorium filled to the nostrils with people debating life on other planets. Debating. Life on other planets. These folks were full time thinking about this. They weren't doing anything about it; it reminded me of a weed-and-beer-fueled bull session in a dorm room, except all these people were effectively professional exobiologists being paid to have weed and beer fueled bull sessions on exobiology. It didn't even rise to the level of an interesting Science Fiction short story. This at a conference for people doing actual science, people who develop telescopes, optical computers and other optical doodads, as well as new mathematical techniques to master different kinds of optical tricks.

The "physicist" who has this big idea is actually a cosmologist and the first few sentences of his wiki page indicate he is a fairly fruity one. Cosmology itself has gone off in embarrassing directions, and is vastly too large in comparison to its actual importance to the human race. I'm not sure anything has actually been figured out by a professional Cosmologist, though they use cool math sometimes. The actual cosmological results we have come from people doing actual science; astronomers, radio engineers, nuclear physicists, stat mech guys. Mind you, if cosmology could actually figure things out, I'd be all for it, but it seems they mostly do "gee whiz" think pieces which feature some differential geometry and noodle theory. And, apparently, untestable mystical whoop-dee-do about consciousness.

I'm gonna get off my high horse in a minute, but this sort of "celebritization" of science is obnoxious. People used to hang on the words of Fermi and Einstein, and considered their weird speculations to be interesting because those men proved their scientific acuity in other domains; actually increasing human understanding of nature. Now a days we canonize guys like this to do the "gee whiz" think pieces that people enjoy reading articles about ... and they are not of the caliber to justify anyone paying attention to their weird ideas. They're speculative types: science fiction authors who know some impressive math. They don't deserve the appellation of "scientist" let alone "physicist" as they do not study nature in a scientific manner. While Peter Woit has done some admirable work exposing the impostures of the noodle theorists, we really need someone to cleanse the temple of science of such people in general.

<comment><USER7> This is incredibly shortsighted. First, at least some portion of science has always been dedicated "debating" things. That doesn't mean they're being unhelpful, especially since those are the types of debates which help to steer resources towards practical efforts.

How do you decide which telescope to build if you haven't decided, without such telescope, what exactly it's supposed to be looking at?

It's also worth noting that theoretical inquiries can be incredibly helpful. You know, like all of Einstein's work. After all, he was a mathematician just playing with numbers and then trusting their results – something most "real scientists" were too skeptical to do because the results didn't look like what they expected.

Of course, it didn't help that a lot of Einstein's (and other theoretical scientists) ideas were, at the time, untestable mystical whoop-dee-do, either.

<comment><USER8> Um, no. Einstein's ideas were, at least in part, testable. Parts of them were confirmed rather quickly.

<comment><USER7> Parts of some of them were confirmed rather quickly.

Other parts of some of them are still unconfirmed, and a subset of those are still _well_ beyond our foreseeable capability of testing. Black holes are one notable prediction that we have virtually no way to confirm.

What's your point? I'm not saying Einstein got things wrong, I'm saying that immediately dismissing science which is not immediately testable is risky. Especially as more and more of the low hanging fruit is picked – cutting edge scientific ideas are going to be more and more difficult to test.

Compare the Cavendish experiment to the Michelson-Morley experiment to the Large Hadron to... Creating a black hole?

Seems to be a steep increase in difficulty. It should be expected.

<comment><USER8> OK. This idea that we're actually discussing... is it testable? Is it even testable _in principle?_

<comment><USER7> I believe that's the whole point. This is someone trying to distill a seemingly intractable problem into a testable form.

I think the answer for now is "no," but that's precisely the question he is attempting to answer: "is consciousness something that can be modeled in such a way that we can answer whether or not it is [x]?"

Not: "is consciousness [x]?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The blog post is much more hand wavy than the actual arxiv article. The notion of factorization of the wave function in particular is interesting.

Scott Aaronson has fairly convincing arguments against IIT [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799)

</comment><comment><USER5> It says conscious can't be divided, but that's not true as far as I know.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split- brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain)

"In a more serious effect, the patient may have two different consciousnesses, one on each side of the brain."

<comment><USER10> I zoomed in on this comment to tap the upvote button, and the voting buttons disappeared. So hopefully it wasn't a downvote.

To respond to your comment, it seems that brain damage, psychoactive drugs, and transcranial magnetic stimulation are all evidence that, even if a "consciousness" can't be split in two (contradicted by your reference), parts of it can be removed or altered by altering matter, so it's still most likely a simple physical process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It irritates me, perhaps more than it should, how many people cite David Chalmers' term "the hard problem of consciousness" while proposing solutions that show they aren't remotely interested in the question (see for yourself: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness), [http://consc.net/papers/facing.html](http://consc.net/papers/facing.html), [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/)).

Maybe ignoring the question is right. Maybe philosophers have nothing useful to say about it. But if that's your view, then don't talk about that question.

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems extremely plausible to me that any matter that is organized enough to support meaningful arbitrary computation (ie. not Seth Lloyd's "it's computing it's own evolution" kind of computation) would share some kind of similarity of organization, or at least fall into a small number of phases, with an order parameter that somehow reduces to computation / unit volume.

That makes me think of "Action, Or the Fungibility of Computation" (1998) [0] wherein Toffoli argues that what the physical quantity known as "action" amounts to is computational spacetime density.

        [0]    PDF link in the upper right corner of http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.2410

<comment><USER5> But the problem is not computation, the problem is consciousness. I think we all agree that our level of general intelligence can be achieved "simply" by putting stuff together in the correct order. But consciousness? Why is it even there? Why is there something that it's like to be us?

<comment><USER12> I don't know. It's not clear to me what consciousness means, but if forced me to take a stance, I'd give a Hofstaderian response and say that it's a matter of degrees, and that perhaps consciousness is the experience of processing information. More than that, I don't think it can be said to be "even there"\---or otherwise it's something outside of the content, arrangement, or behavior of our constituent matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I didn't realize at first that the Physics arXiv blog was the author of this post. Here's the link to the abstract: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219](http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219)

<comment><USER14> I think it's open access. The PDF link works without a paywall.

Lot of complicated mathematical notation in the actual paper; will put this on my table and attempt to not get lost reading it on my flight tomorrow.

I also highly suggest reading Bostrom's "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" The mathematics he lays out isn't that complex and he makes a good case for the hypothesis that we are either in a simulation, will eventually be able to create a simulation of our work or we'll go extinct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems to be based on some pretty arbitrary assumptions.

It does not really sound like nonsense. Sounds like some form of information theory.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's by Tegmark. Make of that what you will...

<comment><USER17> Have no idea who that is. Explain, please.

<comment><USER18> Read Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe". All will be revealed, or not (depending on whether you open the box or not).

<comment><USER19> I don't get whether you mean he is a good solid physicist or he is a crackpot. Considering he's an MIT prof, I'm thinking he's good?

<comment><USER16> He is a solid physicst. Not sure what else he did, but what I do know about is his analysis of WMAP data.

But that's not all he does, and there's nothing that prevents smart people from having silly ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> bah, whatever algorithm necessary to implement consciousness is impossible to implement in reasonable time in this universe. Our brains just perform a suitable monte carlo simulation of that hypothetical algorithm.

<comment><USER21> but we are able to implement suitable monte carlo simulations digitally and we examine that action as lacking consciousness

that's why i think when we develop algorithms that will relieve our reliance on probability we will begin to see behaviours so inextricable from our notions of consciousness we will acknowledge these actions as being concious

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking at the ArXIV article, the key ideas apparently come from "Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto," by Giulio Tononi, who is a psychiatrist in Wisconsin.[1] His two big claims are that, for an information processing system to be conscious, it needs to have two separate traits:

1\. Information: It has to have a large repertoire of accessible states, i.e., the ability to store a large amount of information.

2\. Integration: This information must be integrated into a unified whole, i.e., it must be impossible to decompose the system into nearly independent parts, because otherwise these parts would subjectively feel like two separate conscious entities.

1) is reasonable, although it doesn't say much about how much memory is required. 2) is clearly bogus - we know that biological brains don't work that way. They have at least a hundred or so subunits handling different functions. Some are very specific, such as face recognition. Tononi says that in his paper: "different parts of the cerebral cortex are specialized for different functions, yet a vast network of connections allows these parts to interact profusely." So he admits it's not one big component; it's a network of components with explicit, limited connectivity.

Where Tonini is coming from is the concept of "qualia".[2] This is a philosophical concept, roughly "The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc." Toroni hypothesizes that qualia can be (are?) represented as points in a space of 2^n dimensions. He writes "Each axis is labeled with the probability p for that state, going from 0 to 1, so that a repertoire (i.e.,a probability distribution on the possible states of the complex) corresponds to a point in Q (Fig. 5)." This is similar to the internal state of an artificial neural network.

The physics paper conjectures that if only we had some materials (?) called "computronium" and "perceptronium", we could get work done in qualia space, through a process where energy is removed from the system in a way vaguely similar to simulated annealing. There's a lot of math and discussion around the idea that some randomness has to be applied to make the thing go; not enough, and it stalls out; too much, and it's just noise. There's a suggestion that certain forms of noise will make it work better. All this sound vaguely similar to the way the random initialization of ANNs matters a lot, and recent work has made ANNs better by choosing the random initial conditions in certain ways. Neither paper mentions what's going on in the ANN world, yet they seem to be approaching some of the same concepts. I'm not an ANN expert; someone in that field may have a better idea of whether the concepts are related.

All this is from the "consciousness is special and magic" crowd. Both authors assume that is the case, and try to reason from there. That's closer to theology than physics.

[1] [http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full.pdf+html](http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full.pdf+html) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)

<comment><USER23> > 2) is clearly bogus - we know that biological brains don't work that way.

But the brain entire is not consciousness (it's probably in the prefrontal cortex). Some parts of the brain, such as heartbeat, object tracking, etc, are obviously not integrated into consciousness.

It's not one big component, but it at least has to _integrate_ all the components of consciousness (again, not all the brain functions), or else we wouldn't have the apparent sensation that "I" am an indivisible whole. By "I", I mean my consciousness, my will and personality, not my body, which is obviously made up of parts, including the brain and its parts.

It might be an illusion, but that doesn't mean that that illusion is not worthy of study, since it is probably the main thing that defines the human experience.

<comment><USER24> >But the brain entire is not consciousness (it's probably in the prefrontal cortex). Some parts of the brain, such as heartbeat, object tracking, etc, are obviously not integrated into consciousness.

So only mammals are conscious? Sucks to not be an Eagle I guess! Beware zombie Dinosaurs!

Sometimes I have distinctly non integrated experiences, like when I speak and the sentences flow from me containing grammatically correct concepts in logical order, and I didn't have anything to do with it, but there it is an argument that "I" made.

<comment><USER23> I think other animals, such as certain birds (crows, parrots), might be conscious, maybe octopuses, but that's just my pet theory. To be sure, we'd need a definition of what consciousness is exactly (more than "I'm pretty sure I am conscious, and other people, too") , and probably really good brain scan technology, far better than what we have now.

<comment><USER5> I like this definition I've heard from Sam Harris (paraphrasing): An entity is conscious if there is something that it's like to be that entity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think I'm channeling Feynman accurately when I say "oy ve" to this one. Come on, conciousness is very cool, and a great mystery; but a state of matter? Maybe in the degenerate sense that any object is a "state of matter". But please don't feed the woo-woo quantum-mechanics-is-god crowd with stuff like this.

<comment><USER26> What is a "state of matter" other than an emergent property of quantum behaviors? States of matter are merely a construction to simplify those behaviors, and there is nothing inherently flawed with viewing consciousness this way.

That said, there are serious flaws in this write-up, including many simplifying and already debunked presumptions about unified consciousness.

<comment><USER27> No, there's nothing wrong with it. Exact as javajosh said: it is an abstraction whose analogous forms would make anything a state of matter. If consciousness is a state of matter, why not plant? Isn't plant a state of matter? Why not life? Why isn't sleep a state of matter?

You _could_ see it that way. You could see anything anyway you like. The objection is that seeing things this way causes confusion, not understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Deepak Chopra is wetting his panties. He was right all along. :)

<comment><USER18> Bah. DC is Gucci, not fam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> In this comment we (1) propose the bullshitonium, which is a paper crammed full of assertions and a heady concoction of weird diagrams and unintelligible mathematics. The bullshitonium introduces fancy sounding terms which can then be written (in crayon on the walls of asylums and secure wards, or more worryingly on internet sites by people who should know better). Having written this "thingy" we (2) will smile enigmatically and make wild claims to anyone who will listen in the hope that they will take a lot of notice of us (3).

(1) me, I, that which is of the thing that I really am.

(2) __sighs __you really are a glutton for punishment, you 're checking these footnotes a little bit toooooo seriously! See (1)

(3) See (1)

(edited to reformat!)</comment>


Hurl - <AUTHOR> http://hurl.it/

<comment><USER2> I'm getting the following error "Cannot allocate memory - fork(2)"

You can check out this video to learn more about hurl <http://vimeo.com/6238577>

<comment><USER3> I e-mailed Chris and Leah a friendly notice last Sunday about these errors and never heard anything back...

<comment><USER4> I don't think you'll see it fixed any time soon.

Using a fork per request is the easy way out. The problem as you've all seen, is that memory will be used up very very quickly.

The solution is to rewrite the app to use an event loop like select or epoll, or to queue the requests in a message queue: doable, but worth the effort? I doubt it, since the website looks like a hobby rather than a commercial product.

<comment><USER5> Forking could fix the fork problem.

That is, if someone forks hurl (<http://github.com/defunkt/hurl>) and rewrites it to use one of the fixes you referred to above, I'm sure they'd merge that in and deploy that.

Doing it with Resque would make a lot of sense since hurl uses Redis already.

<comment><USER4> Well sure, if someone does the work for them.

I'm saying that's probably why Chris and Leah haven't fixed it already and probably for many days to come.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I know. I just wanted to point out that we're not totally helpless here like we would be with closed-source software, and maybe encourage someone to fix it :)

<comment><USER4> And I just wanted to point out that this isn't a simple 2-3 line fix so people won't get their hopes up trying to see if it's ready every few hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hurl inspired Twitter's API console: <http://dev.twitter.com/console>

It's open sourced, and contains some great code: <http://github.com/defunkt/hurl>. I used it as an inspiration when working on my first Redis project using Sinatra.

</comment><comment><USER7> Since Hurl.It isn't working, thought I'd mention a site I've been using for this for over a decade.

Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer - _See exactly what an HTTP request returns to your browser_ :

<http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're on a Mac: <http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/> .

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's open-sourced, <http://github.com/defunkt/hurl>

</comment><comment><USER9> How did you get a .it domain? As far as I know they are restricted to EU citizens or companies.

<comment><USER10> There are companies which act as proxies, e.g. EuroDNS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could we please give this a more descriptive title?

</comment><comment><USER12> This little app won the 2009 Rails Rumble, but they put it on Sinatra after that I suppose. It's a really nice example of a proxy server coded in ruby if you're looking for that sort of thing. And reading the source is a good introduction to Redis integration as well. I actually have a local copy running on my computer most of the time for debugging web apps.

<comment><USER13> They won the completness category and really deserved it - the little bits of polish made it shine. It's also worth noting they actually wrote it in Sinatra during the competition, not after, a railsrumble 2009 was more a rack rumble ( but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I made myself a Flash app a while ago that creates POST requests and has a little profiles system. I would not be able to fix half the bugs I find without it.

Since both my app and this website have unavoidable network delays, I think I'll be retiring my program. That is, when the "Cannot allocate memory" bug gets fixed.

</comment><comment><USER15> On OS X I use à little app called HTTP Client to do THE Same.

</comment><comment><USER16> Might I recommend the poster plugin for Firefox? <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2691>

Has the added benefit of working on stuff you are developing on your own machine.

</comment><comment><USER17> Pretty amazing idea. Now if they could fix the "Cannot allocate memory - fork(2)" error...

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmmm. So given that you guys just broke it, can anyone explain what it did?

<comment><AUTHOR> Like this really: <http://web-sniffer.net/> (but you can store urls looked-up in your user history, alter headers sent, add parameters, ajax, follow redirects, use Basic Auth, and have permalinks)

<comment><USER18> Ah, cute, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I fail to see the usefulness of this... curl + http requests are easy and highly googleable in most languages..

</comment><comment><USER20> I just use python / urllib

<comment><USER5> And you get no syntax highlighting, no prettyfying of the response (adding linebreaks and stuff), etc.

Plus, my experience (as a novice Pythonista) trying to get http basic auth working with urllib was hell. It takes like 5 obscure lines, you have to know the "realm", which I didn't even know about before. That's way more complicated than just typing stuff into text boxes

<comment><USER21> You just have to base64 encode the username/password and add it in as the value of an HTTP header. Tedious compared to most other HTTP libraries though, I agree.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's not so subtle political backing - <AUTHOR> http://steven.bitsetters.com/2010/03/04/apples-not-so-subtle-political-backing/

<comment><USER2> The Obama campaign in 2008 beat out Apple to win marketer of the year. I can't remember his opponent's symbol. (Do other people remember McCain's symbol (not slogan) off the top of their heads?)

More than likely the designer knows that fact or is generally aware that more people recognize Obama's logo. Not really "political backing." After all, Al Gore is on their board. They don't need to be "subtle" if they want to back Obama. Jobs even sat down for dinner and discussion with newly elected Obama.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it expected of a new CTO to redefine the development stack? - <AUTHOR> The company hired a new CTO. He's taken it upon himself to set the development stack for both back and front end development. Our application is migrating to micro services. Is it normal for a CTO to set a single technology to be used in all services? <comment><USER2> Rewrites are dangerous for companies. They cost time and their benefit is small at best, often they leave the system in a worse state, see "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" [1]. As a CEO I would be very suspicious if a CTO rewrites the stack.

That said I did come into companies as CTO where I should have started a rewrite. The code plainly was not able to scale the way it was written. We had lots of trouble with scaling and I struggled balacing feature pressure and technical rewrites of parts of the code base in order to scale. Getting in and start with rewriting the code base for 6 months so it would scale would have made things much easier for all developers.

As a CTO coach this is also what I tell my coachees now :-)

[1] [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you- should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never- do-part-i/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends.

A CTO is responsible for ensuring that the company is able to deliver what's needed, and if the current stack has issues, including ok-now-but-won't-scale issues, then they should switch it out for one that positions the company for success.

OTOH, it could be motivated by a range of unjustifiable things: personal familiarity, resume building, blind trend following, asserting of authority, etc.

In most cases, the engineering staff can tell whether the motivation is good or not.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's an example of a larger pattern, which is that new execs like to shake things up. There are charitable and uncharitable explanations of why, but really it varies by individual.</comment>


Netflix Quietly Smothers 3rd Party App Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://goodfil.ms/blog/posts/2012/06/18/netflix-quietly-smothers-3rd-party-app-ecosystem/

<comment><USER2> I'm constantly amazed at the entitlement attitude so many have when it comes to APIs and other people's data. Netflix wishes to change the rules on their API so that it fits in with some broader strategy no one knows about, so what? They wish to restrict the flow of data that they collect for their own uses, so what? They no longer wish to allow third-parties to monetize data accessed from a public API, so what? Regardless of what the article states, it is their data and they can do with it as they please. A person's viewing history on Netflix is not that person's data, it is Netflix's data as they are the people who spent the money to collect it. No amount of whining or complaining will change that.

I can understand people thinking this might be a bad idea for them and I agree that it's possibly a PR mistake. But there is a difference between complaining about access and demanding access to a company's data.

<comment><USER3> From article: _It appears Netflix considers what films you've watched and what you thought of them as their data, not yours._

What you've watched & thought of it is, of course, your data.

However, Netflix is in no way obligated to act as your memory in when & whatever manner you demand.

<comment><USER4> They are not obligated. However, I'm fairly sure banks aren't obligated by law to send you statements* - they certainly aren't obligated to let you download them in, say, quicken format (who could be seen as a competitor). It's just such a big feature that no one would do business with a bank that didn't offer it.

Similiarly Netflix's APIs add value for customers, and apps and outboard memory are/have been a big part of Netflix for me. Will loosing that make me leave? I don't know - but clearly this is a major downgrade in their service.

\--

* It looks like they pretty much are obligated by law - thanks benatkin.

<comment><USER5> I've been under the impression that it's required by law that banks send statements, because I've been presented with the option to receive electronic statements but never with the option to not receive statements at all. I searched and found a U. S. government site where it says that statements are required for accounts that have EFTs (which seem to include debit cards). So my bank is obligated to send me statements. [http://www.helpwithmybank.gov/get-answers/bank- accounts/gene...](http://www.helpwithmybank.gov/get-answers/bank- accounts/general-account-questions/faq-bank-accounts-gen-account-01.html)

I get an email each month, that I don't think I can opt out of, that says "New (name of bank) eStatements Available" and links me to the bank's website, where I can view and download it.

You're probably right that they aren't legally obligated to provide transaction data in a machine-readable format.

<comment><USER6> everything is context.

banks used to that to gain customers. Some time ago, every developer working at banks knew that customers were measured in cost per customer. You'd had the cost to please them, and then you'd make money investing their money.

then, fast forward a measly decade, and banks are seen as obligatory. nobody things about NOT having their money in a bank. So banks drop all of the benefits, and we start to measure clients as profit per account. banks now are profiting from investing your money AND holding that money for you just because you never though about not paying the bank.

So, that's the time when we started to have some regulations and minimal service the bank's supposed to provide.

<comment><USER7> It seems unfair to me to paint all banks with this broad brush... credit unions, and even some traditional banks, are quite worthwhile. There is a lot of competition in retail banking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These look like great changes. An alternate interpretation:

1\. Third parties can't do nefarious things such as share my data with Facebook or tell my insurance company should I have watched some "surviving cancer" documentary in the past. They're enforcing laws which protect the privacy of my viewing history.

2\. Someone can't gouge consumers by layering on additional fees to access what you've already paid for. eg: "Want to watch Netflix on your mobile device? That'll be $5/movie, please, and will show up on your next AT&T statement."

3\. An application presenting itself as being a Netflix app can't pull the rug out from under you and make it easy to accidentally click on an iTunes version of the movie, get charged $4.99, and the third party gets an affiliate commission.

4\. Third parties can no longer in bad faith scrape the Netflix database and use it for non-Netflix purposes. Do they really need to enforce common sense and decency here? There are many other sources for movie data if sites need that info.

<comment><USER6> i'm pretty sure the previous one already covered all of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Given how many companies are now rushing to get API's ready, opening them up at hackathons and getting developers motivated this seems like a really big own goal.

Consumers just like nice ways to use the services they're on, developers like nice ways to integrated services into their projects. Companies like revenues from people discovering their service outside of their normal channels. So, without knowing their genuine reasons for changing the API access it seems like Netflix basically have made a really stupid decision.

<comment><USER10> From the sounds of it, they want to monetize their data.

<comment><USER9> Which is really good, additional revenue streams are an excellent idea. Doing it like this? Less excellent. There's probably much better ways to monetize rather than upending the apple cart and having developers go 'huh, this isn't a great idea'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Netflix is in a battle with the VPPA, which covers video rental history (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act>). This smells like some side-effect of a compromise they've been able to achieve in congress. Netflix's "broader objectives" are unattainable without changing some of the laws in the US, so they may be between a rock and a hard place here.

<comment><USER12> Probably, but they've just managed to switch me from supporting them in that fight to hoping they lose it.

Not that it matters one bit what I think, and they clearly know that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good lord, what stupidity. The only usable netflix interfaces are the 3d party ones. The vanilla site is atrocious.

<comment><USER14> I mostly used their application on the PS3, but I also used the boxee implementation for a while. And yes, I do agree with you that the website is less-than-ideal.

<comment><USER15> Those are official apps, though, right? They shouldn't be affected by this because they're probably covered by terms negotiated between the platform provider & Netflix?

<comment><USER14> They are official apps (PS3, Wii, XBox), but not Boxee's implementation. That type of thing is what would be detracted from in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Updated:

Update: We've received word that the new API Terms of Use aren't as sinister as on first glance. From VentureBeat:

We are not prohibiting sites from showing competing services, however we do not want anyone to use Netflix content such as titles and descriptions to advertise a competing service.

We're not prohibiting developers from monetizing their applications by selling them directly to consumers. We will not, however, permit resale of our information in a business-to-business fashion.

</comment><comment><USER17> From Nils in the comments there:

 _All developers should stop integrating netflix in their services and concentrate on the competition. They have nothing to lose as they are not allowed to make money using netflix anyways._

Can anyone see this going any other way? There will be no 3rd party apps supporting Netflix anymore.

</comment><comment><USER18> The bean counters are out in force. Must be a sign that they are threatened.

</comment><comment><USER19> Don't forget Amazon does the same for physical goods purchases (I don't know about their streaming service). Your purchase history is not available via their API. Product reviews are also no longer available via their API.

They don't mind listing their products alongside other retailers. Otherwise many shopping comparison engines would go bust. They probably allow it, not from the goodness of their hearts, but only because it drives sales seeing that they usually come out on top in price comparisons.

Netflix probably doesn't make much money off people coming to them via comparison apps (because they are already signed up anyway).

Building your entire business on top of one or two powerful companies' data and APIs will always be extremely risky. So, it's best left for hobby apps.

</comment><comment><USER20> My take on this is simple: many competitors (Hulu, Amazon, Verizon, Comcast, etc.) are likely using the API or screen scraping services like Instantwatcher to gain critical competitive data about Netflix's catalog size and composition, deal term length, content popularity, etc. With the former dataset, you could basically build a list of average contract term length, suppliers, genres, popularity, etc. What leads me to believe this is the case is they first killed expiration date - obscuring when titles expire makes it difficult for competitors to pick of your best stuff. The recent changes probably came after Netflix took a closer look at how the API was being utilized.

</comment><comment><USER21> Another bad decision in a long stream of management incompetence.

<comment><USER22> From this vantage point they look like the next Blackberry. A company with so much going for it you'll look back and wonder how they threw it all away.

<comment><USER23> I don't think it's really fair to Netflix to say they're throwing anything away. They exist totally at the pleasure of big content, and big content has decided that they want people to use cable. There's not really anything you can do when your distributors buy out one of your competitors and start to cut out the middle man (you.)

<comment><USER24> I hope the [relative] corpse that Netflix will inevitably become is made a poster boy for copyright reform. Netflix was used as the "streaming delivery" guinea pig by big content, and now that they've seen it to be profitable, they don't see why they should give Netflix a slice of the pie (thus comes Hulu). I completely agree that the media companies are actively trying to harm Netflix.

Netflix, of course, is aware of this and is quietly attempting to procure rights to in-demand programming. This is the motivation behind picking Arrested Development back up. It's a good strategy if they believe they can swing it, but it's very threatening to the media conglomerates (who are already terrified of the internet); certainly a tough act to balance. Netflix is between a rock and a hard place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Your blog post is broken, the link to the netflix post is set as the title of the href.

For anyone that wants to read it: [http://developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Upcoming_Changes_to_t...](http://developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Upcoming_Changes_to_the_Netflix_API_Program)

<comment><USER26> And fixed. Thanks for the heads-up.

<comment><USER27> johnb == geelen ?

<comment><USER26> John and I wrote the post. We're the cofounders of Goodfilms: <http://goodfil.ms/help>

<comment><USER28> _My email client keeps crashing this evening for some reason, and what I want to say doesn't fit into the 'feedback' page you have there, so I say it here:_

 _I'd like to use your site, but I don't have a Facebook account (removed it a couple years ago), and don't want to be bothered to remember what my twitter password (which I virtually haven't used once in the past years) was._

 _I understand why you might want to enforce a social network account (1. engaging people to be more social and bring their friends and 2. simpler management of accounts), but I personally have literally zero interest in what my friends like to watch, and have never and would never use Twitter/Facebook. Why can't I use your site? I know I'm not the norm, but you should allow everyone to use your service. If you're valuable to them, they'll bring their friends with them, and if they're not, then having their friends' usernames won't help you. Registering and keeping track of users is absurdly easy, so I think you should re-consider your choice of mandating social accounts._

 _(Sorry it's not relevant to this topic, just wanted you to know that there are people like me who shy away from any and every service that requires OAuth)_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Regardless of your opinion on Netflix's decision, announcing any negative news on a Friday afternoon (though I'm not surprised they did so) is bad form.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely what got us going. We wouldn't have even done the diff on the legals if the blog post wasn't put up with such vague language so late on a friday afternoon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This worries me as a customer. As a consumer, having access to other interfaces, even if I'm not using them, seems like better value than however Netflix thinks they can monetize their customers' viewing data. If they do find some other income stream, maybe they can use it to keep pricing flat or buy more content. But after the Qwickster debacle, I'm not too confident in their ability to do this. Discouraging other enterprises from building businesses around them isn't a good signal. If Netflix drives itself out of business, I hope someone else (Amazon perhaps) will pick up the lead. I really have no interest in getting a cable subscription.

<comment><USER2> I'm curious as to why you think a company discouraging a third-party from building a business around them isn't a good signal of the survivability of the company. Are you implying that Netflix needs these third-parties in some way?

I would imagine that the vast majority of Netflix's customers not only do not use this third-party app ecosystem, but that they have no idea it exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I disagree with the author's assertion that the following point means you can't sell an app that uses the Netflix API:

"charge, directly or indirectly, any fee (including any unique, specific, or premium charges) for access to the Content or your integration of the APIs in your Application,"

It seems pretty clear to me that this point says that you can't add additional fees to include the Netflix API data in your app, or charge an additional fee to enable such a feature. Nowhere does it say that you can't charge for an app that includes the API.

However, that no enterprise-app statement is quite odd. I wonder what the specific driver was for that addition? There was likely some straw that broke the camel's back there, and it would be entertaining at the least (IMO) to learn what it was.

<comment><USER32> "charge... _any_ fee... for access... [to] (your integration of the APIs) in your Application,"

It certainly reads like that to me. (How else are you supposed to use the APIs in your application?)

<comment><USER31> "(including any unique, specific, or premium charges) for access to the Content or your integration of the APIs in your Application"

Is the actual text, the part you added was your interpretation of the meaning - however, there are some indicators (starting with the parenthesized text in the original) which imply you're reading it overly broad.

"For access to the Content" (the Content being the content served by the API), and "or your integration of the APIs".

Nowhere does it say, "You may not charge any fee for any application which accesses these APIs," which if it were the intent of the lawyers to ensure that only "free" applications used the APIs, they would've stated so.

Instead, they talk about fees for accessing the content and fees for integration, which seems to be to be clear that they are indicating that they don't want people selling the content served by the API or charging extra for using the Netflix API.

<comment><USER32> The word 'any' precedes the parenthetical statement which I take it to mean, well, any. You are free to interpret the word 'any' however you'd like. I must say though, I do like your interpretation more. :)

From <http://developer.netflix.com/page/Api_terms_of_use>, section 1.9:

1.9 Appropriate Conduct and Usage Restrictions. You are responsible for your own conduct while using the API and for any consequences thereof. You will use the API only for purposes that are legal, proper and in accordance with these Terms and any applicable policies or guidelines provided by Netflix from time to time. In addition to the other restrictions contained in these Terms, you agree that when using the API, you will not do the following, attempt to do the following, or permit your end users or other third parties to do the following:

...charge, directly or indirectly, any fee (including any unique, specific, or premium charges) for access to the Content or your integration of the APIs in your Application, or use the APIs to build an enterprise application (e.g., that you distribute to other companies);

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What 3rd party app ecosystem? Honestly I've never used anything outside the netflix.com client.

<comment><USER32> I presume <http://abetterqueue.com> and <http://instantwatcher.com/> and the like use the APIs as well.

One thing I like about instantwatcher is that title _do_ expire from netflix, and instantwatcher will sort by expiration date: <http://instantwatcher.com/titles/expiring>

<comment><USER33> Ok, so those are actually useful. Though it looks like Abetterqueue and instantwatcher will still be allowed under the new API rules.

<comment><USER32> Well, except that instantwatcher operates on the freemium model: <http://instantwatcher.com/about_premium>

<comment><USER33> Ahh didn't look too hard at the app, my mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Unrelated directly to the article's content, but I found your type extremely difficult to read and reworked it in browser so I could read it more easily. Here's how it looks and the modifications I made - hope this helps!

Screenshot: <http://cl.ly/HTyu>

p { font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.7em; color: #555; } .hentry header { magin-bottom: 1.5em; }

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the suggestion! I met you half way :)

<comment><USER35> I'd also suggest that you add some margin to your bullets - as it stands now the bullet is further left than the text, and then the text lines up with adjoining paragraphs. I think it would look better if the _bullets_ lined up with the other paragraphs instead.

<comment><USER36> Those are called "hanging bullets"[1] -- It's a very old typographic convention that was up-ended by the default behavior of the web.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_punctuation>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Netflix's problems with user history may be relevant here:

<http://www.reelseo.com/netflix-privacy-problems/>

</comment><comment><USER38> It seems quite clear to me that we are in dire need of a redefinition of 'my data' and who owns it. IMO, if my brain thought it up and you aren't paying me -- it's mine.

</comment><comment><USER39> OT, but I wondered if anyone with the new MacBook Air (either i5 or the i7) has tried Netflix to see if it still sets the fans spinning loudly, or if the processor is able to handle it like the MBP can?</comment>


GitLab 8.12 Released with Cycle Analytics and Global Code Search - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2016/09/22/gitlab-8-12-released/? <comment><AUTHOR> We're here as usual for any questions or comments!

<comment><USER2> How do review apps work? Seems like the best addition, but how are they destroyed or modified?

<comment><AUTHOR> They are neither right now, hence the 'experimental' in the blog post. I believe I also wrote it in the blog that this is the case.

We're planning to do this in the future [0].

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/20255](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20255)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are accounts that relentlessly spam HN allowed to persist? - <AUTHOR> For example:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kids_book <comment><USER2> The spam catcher flagged all those submissions as dead, so they can't get to the front page or be commented on. If you don't want to see them at all on the new page, go to your profile and set Showdead to no.

</comment><comment><USER3> The moderators can provide a definitive answer and can be contacted using the link at the bottom of the page.

If I had to speculate I would give two possible rationals:

\+ Technically, it is easier to divert a known stream of waste with a computer script than to play the wakamole arms race.

\+ Philosophically, persistent obnoxious promotion is not at odds with startup culture and startup culture is an aspect of Hacker News (for better or worse).

In the end, the contents of the HN front page is not a bad key performance metric.

</comment><comment><USER4> If they are banned/shut down/deleted/whatever, that would probably lead to creating a new account.

Best discussion of HN's shadowban/hellban approach I could find, from long ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6216996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6216996)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kids_book](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kids_book)</comment>


Ask HN: What can I expect in Google Troubleshooting interviews? - <AUTHOR> Can someone provide me any book or articles to prepare for this interview? Any list of the questions or blogs? <comment><USER2> Cracking the Coding Interview, LeetCode.</comment>


Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960) - <AUTHOR> http://memex.org/licklider.pdf#8 <comment><USER2> "... to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs."

Sounds like basically the opposite of the world we live in. Nice to see this on the front page.</comment>


Logging Without Side-effects - <AUTHOR> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7810909/writer-monad/chunk-html/index.html <comment><USER2> The author begins with some harsh words about conventional logging: he uses the term "dysfunctional environment" to mean "system not using functional programming", and says about attempts to separate concerns so that the programmer can focus on actually getting the job done when not looking at logging "None work. But you already knew that". On the other hand, "In functional environments, we delineate the essence of a problem from its execution model." and the author's system looks for "the essence of logging".

So, it seems we're entitled to hope that his monad-based functional logging system will accomplish what "dysfunctional" ones fail to do: separate things out so that your ordinary code isn't polluted with logging nonsense.

Here's an extract from the "demo" at the end of the presentation, illustrating the system at work. This is the Scala version; there's a Haskell one too and it looks very similar modulo syntax.

        val r =
          for {
            a <- k withvaluelog ("starting with " + _)
            b <- (a + 7) withlog "adding 7"
            c <- (b * 3).nolog
            d <- c.toString.reverse.toInt withvaluelog ("switcheroo with " + _)
            e <- (c % 2 == 0) withlog "is even?"
          } yield e

        println("Result: " + r.a)
        println("LOG")
        println("===")
        r.log foreach println

Oh. So introducing logging has required that the computation be broken down into separate steps (fair enough; that's to be expected); that the syntax be "monadized" (if you were doing this without logging and didn't need a particular order of execution, those assignments would look quite different); that _every bit of the calculation that doesn't need logging have a ".nolog" appended_.

Note also that for a less-toy example where you want a single log for everything your program does, the whole thing needs to get this treatment. (Either that, or you need some _extra_ mechanism to combine the logging efforts of different bits of the system.)

This is meant to be an improvement over scattering logging statements through your code? It's supposed to _reduce_ the intrusiveness of the logging system, and make it easier to "focus on the programming task"?

If you're going to present a logging system that is _in every respect worse_ than the ones used in imperative, side-effect-happy, statement-based programming systems, I think it is unwise to talk about "dysfunctional environments" and "the essence of logging".

<comment><USER3> I would like to help you better understand the point here. Please let me know how I might do this.

<comment><USER4> From the perspective of a reader not steeped in functional programming, your proposed solution to logging is probably unpersuasive, for the reasons the above commenter articulated better than I can.

* When using loaded terms such as "dysfunctional" to describe programming paradigms that the reader may be very comfortable with--and may have produced useful software using--make sure to thoroughly defend this characterization.

* Do you believe that there exist extremely intelligent, productive programmers who remain unconvinced of the merits of functional programming? If so, force yourself to adopt a charitable view of their skepticism. If not, what's the point of this presentation? Those committed to functional programming don't need to hear why their approach is superior, since that's just preaching to the choir; you can skip to the implementation section.

<comment><USER3> * I'll happily defend the use of the term dysfunctional programming. Using this term serves quite a lot of purpose, in particular, among other things, to break a false dichotomy that regularly misleads. Your next question emphasises this, unknowingly I assume.

* Yes, there are legitimate complaints about functional programming. However, there are many "arguments" that are "not convinced of the merits", which simply argue from ignorance. I am not interested in discussion at this level, unless it's ultimately constructive i.e. teaching.

None of the points made in the original post are compelling. They can all be easily over-turned. I can also make predictions about how much is understood based on the points made (there are many examples of this, raising my confidence that this is simply a very far-out misunderstanding). These predictions would help for teaching.

I am offering an invitation to remedy the misunderstanding. I do not care to address arguments from ignorance.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IBM Wants Everyone to Try a Quantum Computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/technology/ibm-wants-everyone-to-try-a-quantum-computer.html <comment><USER2> All these years we had the buzzwords _quantum_ and _cloud_ separately. Today the buzzwords can finally merge to bring you _quantum in the cloud_. OMG, I predict the tech journalist will go crazy on this!!

A very similar quantum circuit simulator (in JS): [http://www.davyw.com/quantum/?example=Grover%27s%20Algorithm](http://www.davyw.com/quantum/?example=Grover%27s%20Algorithm)

And now a shameless plug: If you want to learn quantum mechanics and quantum computing, you should check out my upcoming book on linear algebra: [https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSguide2LA_previ...](https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSguide2LA_preview.pdf#page=115) available via [https://gum.co/noBSLA](https://gum.co/noBSLA)

<comment><USER3> I have my own shameless plug to add.

Another drag-and-drop quantum circuit simulator that runs in your browser is "Quirk" [0].

Quirk is faster than Davy's simulator thanks to webgl. It calculates varying operations on up to 16 qubits in real time as you drag gates around. It also lets you drop inline state displays into the circuit. Plus you can link to circuits, though the links can be a bit long so you may want to do so indirectly [1].

That being said, Quirk lacks the ability to compile circuits into a gate. Also it doesn't have a QFT gate (yet). I'm working on it. [2].

0: [http://algorithmicassertions.com/quirk](http://algorithmicassertions.com/quirk)

1: [https://t.co/qi12H3aVU1](https://t.co/qi12H3aVU1) (6-qubit grover circuit with displays, near the getting-laggy limit in terms of op-count)

2: [https://github.com/Strilanc/Quirk](https://github.com/Strilanc/Quirk)

<comment><USER4> That looks good. Yeah, mine wasn't really focused on performance so much as ease of use (being able to compile and reuse circuits).

One thing I never got around to that IBM did was measurement operators. They break my simple compilation strategy but would definitely make it more useful.

<comment><USER3> Oh! Didn't realize you would see this. Gives me the opportunity to say thanks for the simulator. I found it really useful for learning. So useful for sanity checks.

(Speaking of measurement. Quirk allows measurement... but it cheats. It refuses to let you hit measured qubits with operations that would superpose them again w.r.t. the computational basis. So the deferred measurement principle [1] applies, and there's no need to use density matrices and square the simulation cost.)

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

<comment><USER4> Ha! I feel obligated to click when I see "Try a Quantum Computer" in a title.

That's an interesting strategy. I'm going to have to dig deeper when I get a chance. You said you're also using WebGL for a performance?

PS: Those continuous gates are especially cool!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, using the GPU makes a huge difference. It's also incredibly finicky because the hardware and browser support varies so much.

Basically I represent an n-qubit superposition as a 2^(n/2) x 2^(n/2) texture with each pixel being an amplitude (with red=real, blue=imaginary components). Then I use fragment shaders to operate on all the pixels in parallel when applying a gate.

For example, here's the GLSL in the main method of the "UniversalNot" gate's shader [1]:

        vec2 xy = gl_FragCoord.xy - vec2(0.5, 0.5);
        float state = xy.y * outputWidth + xy.x;
        float hasBit = mod(floor(state / bit), 2.0);
        float partnerState = state + bit * (1.0 - 2.0 * hasBit);
        vec2 uv = uvFor(state);
        vec2 partnerUv = uvFor(partnerState);
        float control = texture2D(controlTexture, uv).x;
        vec2 val = vec4(texture2D(inputTexture, uv)).xy;
        vec2 partnerVal = vec4(texture2D(inputTexture, partnerUv)).xy;
        vec2 outUncontrolled = vec2(partnerVal.x, -partnerVal.y) * (1.0 - 2.0*hasBit);
        vec2 outVal = (1.0 - control) * val + control * outUncontrolled;
        gl_FragColor = vec4(outVal.x, outVal.y, 0.0, 0.0);

(The UniversalNot gate isn't possible in reality, but it's easy to implement in the simulator. So I have it implemented, but hidden away. You have to manually tweak the URL to contain a "__unstable__UniversalNot" gate to use it. But then you can use it for FTL communication shenanigans. [2])

1: [https://github.com/Strilanc/Quirk/blob/master/src/circuit/Ga...](https://github.com/Strilanc/Quirk/blob/master/src/circuit/GateShaders.js#L45)

2: [http://bit.ly/1roNMCE](http://bit.ly/1roNMCE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR: 5 qubits as a service. Interact with them on your tablet.

From the press release: "The quantum processor is composed of five superconducting qubits and is housed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. The five-qubit processor represents the latest advancement in IBM's quantum architecture that can scale to larger quantum systems. It is the leading approach towards building a universal quantum computer." ([http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49661.wss](http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49661.wss))

From the demo video: looks like you can use hadamard and CNOT gates as well as measurements. Somehow it sounds like you can also apply oracles (not sure how you specify what they are when it gets run). ([https://youtu.be/pYD6bvKLI_c](https://youtu.be/pYD6bvKLI_c))

<comment><USER3> The oracle is just a circuit that negates one of the amplitudes. You specify it just like the rest of the circuit.

They use a trivial oracle circuit as an example. But Grover's algorithm works for any oracle circuit, so in principle it could be a circuit that verifies if its input is a proof of the Riemann hypothesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also [http://www.wired.com/2016/05/ibm-letting-anyone-play- quantum...](http://www.wired.com/2016/05/ibm-letting-anyone-play-quantum- computer/)

[https://quantumexperience.mybluemix.net/](https://quantumexperience.mybluemix.net/) is the actual site

</comment><comment><USER7> You've been able to do this sort of thing for some time, at least simulated, which provides the same results:

[http://www.quantumplayground.net](http://www.quantumplayground.net)

<comment><USER8> Same results but faster! The IBM version runs slower than a classical simulation of it, making IBM's project a tech demo toy. (Obviously. If it were actually efficient, they would charge a fortune to use it.)

<comment><USER9> What factors contribute to the performance disparity, and where could efficiencies be found?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So these things presumably run software? Or is it basically a bunch of quantum bits controlled by a conventional machine? What is it exactly and what can you do with it?

<comment><USER11> On 5 qubits, you won't run much software.

And of course you want a lot of conventional machine around the quantum processor (even a hypothetical much bigger one), as you would around any special-purpose hardware (you have it even around a GPU).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> But what am I going to do with it?

<comment><USER13> You could run Grover's algorithm on a database with 2^5=32 elements. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm) Or Shor's algorithm to factor a 5-bit number. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it possible to generate BitCoins on quantum computer?

<comment><USER15> Actually it is possible to bring the whole bitcoin system down with a (general purpose, large enough) quantum computer. The whole bitcoin system relies on ECDSA signatures, which can be broken with Shor's algorithm. You can't mine bitcoins faster with a quantum computer, because that's basically hashing, which you don't get a significant speedup. But you can steal everyone else's bitcoins.

<comment><USER16> You get quadratic speedup on mining, since the HashCash proof-of-work used in Bitcoin is a perfect application of Grover's quantum database search algorithm.

So while classical miners are brute forcing through a 2^70 search space, the quantum miner can find a solution in roughly sqrt(2^70) = 2^35 steps.

Other proof-of-work systems can be more quantum resistant, e.g. looking for a fixed-length cycle in a huge random graph, for which no efficient quantum algorithm is known.

<comment><USER17> Computing 2xSHA256 on a some hundred bytes block header with one section open for randomness will not be that easy on a quantum computer (the more complex the problem, the easier for noise to drown out the answer), not to mention you'll still need fast ASIC hardware to evaluate all QC outputs looking for valid blocks.

And you must reset part of the problem (the previous block hash, at minimum) when new blocks are released, adding some latency (you need to recompute the qubit configuration before resuming).

But perhaps a SIDH based proof-of-work algorithm could be implemented to further resist QC speedups. Don't know exactly how that would work. Does Grover's still apply?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The quantum computer is going to suffer the same fate as plan 9. As Kernighan said, it's not as novel of an upgrade to warrant a mass adoption. Especially considering the price. Not everybody needs a real time black hole simulator...

<comment><USER19> Arguably, quantum computers can perform supertasks and hypercompute, so I think that there will be widespread adoption in the 2nd or 3rd generation. While Plan 9 itself wasn't popularly used, many great technologies came out of it, like Go.

<comment><USER20> i'm curious to know what the argument is for quantum computers doing supertasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For those interested in seeing the hardware behind this service, have a look at: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7D8snlsnQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7D8snlsnQ)

</comment><comment><USER22> Quantum computing is one of those things I know I will never learn. It makes me feel like my current skillset has an expiration date, and I only have so much time before the bar for innovation is beyond my capabilities.

<comment><USER4> Most of the behavior of quantum circuits can be explained with just linear algebra. It's not that bad.

Plus, developers probably won't need to interact directly with this stuff when the day comes. I'm sure there will be some set of common quantum tasks abstracted away behind the scenes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Will the computer only work when observed?

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure why I'd prefer this over Microsoft's LIQUi|>.

Edit: Okay I'm ridiculous, it has a real nice graphical interface.

</comment><comment><USER25> What happens when you train a deep recurrent neural network on a quantum computer. I wonder if you get consciousness

<comment><USER8> You are getting downvoted, but no less than Sir Roger Penrose had the same idea for the origin of human intelligence.

<comment><USER26> And it was a bad idea when he said it, too.

<comment><USER19> Eh, the jury's still out.

I sort of agree with Scott Aaronson on why he thinks consciousness is finite[0].

The problem, IMO, that Penrose has is that his theories border closely on mysticism - there's some quantum "magical" process whereby consciousness arises. Both pictures are incomplete, but Aaronson's is the most plausible.

[0][http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/finite.html](http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/finite.html)

<comment><USER8> Does finite imply non-quantum?

<comment><USER19> No, but there is no evidence that biological neural networks exhibit quantum effects.

Classical (Newtonian) mechanics seem sufficient enough to explain how neurons work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just came back from an IBM user group meeting in Germany. Aside from presentations, customer experience session centered around ways to fix an installer and get rid of java in GUI. This mostly covered infrastructure monitoring (now part of middleware) products. Just saying...

</comment><comment><USER28> Cool PR bit.

Not really

</comment><comment><USER29> Can quantcom be used to compute genesis blockchain?

</comment><comment><USER30> Hum...

Why does the guy who discovered the time of quantum decoherence (Claude Cohen Tanoudji) says quantum computing might be a scam?

Okay, people may think he is a fraud, but he was able to trap very few photons in a cavity and measure that quantum decoherence disappear with order of magintude of 10^-13seconds.

Ho! And maybe quantum computing is fast, but how fast is it for an operator to translate a NEW problem (different from factorisation) into a quantum code?

Well, least but not last, reading the libquant (freely inspired from quantum mechanics to compute risks) I can't help that notice that most so called smart boys with degrees in maths are totally clueless about quantum mechanic, because quantum mechanics is based on probability, and most human don't grasp it. So how can I trust less than able non -as smart and honest person- as traders to grasp QM?</comment>


Jack Dorsey gives $1B to fund global Covid-19 relief - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jack/status/1247616214769086465 <comment><USER2> Quick summary to preempt more of the repetitive HN comments caused by not clicking through and then scrolling:

* It's an LLC instead of a 501c3 because that allows more flexibility. This is not unprecedented

* It's $1B of his wealth in terms of Square stock

* There is a spreadsheet to track where it's going [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-eGxq2mMoEGwgSpNVL5j...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-eGxq2mMoEGwgSpNVL5j2sa6ToojZUZ-Zun8h2oBAR4/htmlview)

* The order of operations is COVID-19, then girl's health and education, and UBI

* It's 28% of his wealth

<comment><USER3> Does this mean selling the shares now to get $1B cash or they keep the shares floating around and sell them as they need cash?

<comment><USER4> What would dumping $1B of stock do to the share price? I imagine it wouldn't be great.

<comment><USER3> Dark pool?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's something amusing to seeing $1B doled out over a Google Spreadsheet while some charities a microfraction of the size will spend thousands of dollars on a custom website.

Spreadsheets become SaaS products and SaaS products become spreadsheets in a never-ending loop.

It'll be fun to see where this goes!

<comment><USER6> I think it's surreal just seeing a 1B on a spreadsheet.

<comment><USER7> Clearly, you never worked in investment banking :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good grief some of the comments on here. Guy is donating 25% of his wealth. That's pretty f'n noble of someone.

<comment><USER9> The concept of charity is arguably unethical, let alone noble.

<comment><USER10> I'd love to hear this one.

<comment><USER11> Society should be structured in such a way that charity is not needed.

Given this, charity would be unethical because you are participating in, perpetuating, strengthening that system, and benefiting from that system from people worshipping you.

<comment><USER12> > Society should be structured in such a way that charity is not needed.

We are a few more millenia away from that one.

It seems our very nature wires us for an us-vs-them mentality and until we can get past that, those patterns will appear in the social structures we set up; naturally creating a ladder of progression.

The idea is nice but the incentives we have to create new products and wealth unfortunately also incentivizes us to hoard the wealth

<comment><USER13> Not sure that's true at all. Would need some further argument to be convinced. Essentially, does that mean that all people are fundamentally mean? That's trivially false.

<comment><USER12> Nah I don't think all people are mean or that we're doomed to failure, I believe we just often focus on short-term interests/gains and can be comically bad at thinking through long term consequences on a global scale (see: pollution, government interference in nation states, surveillance, anti-vax movements, all those who intentionally create and share misinformation, etc.)

I don't think we're fundamentally good/bad/anything. We have just have a set of learned/programmed biases and ways of thinking that can lead us to poor decision and the social programming takes several generations to change globally

<comment><USER11> > I believe we just often focus on short-term interests/gains ...

This is very narrow US-centric thinking. Just look at the Chinese government, who generally have a longer term view of just economic gain compared to the US. It's not hard to extrapolate from that.

I think the idea that humans are naturally self-centered, short-term thinkers is flawed. One could easily make the argument that humans are social creatures and are long-term thinkers. Short-term profits are incentivized by the current economic, political, financial system in the US. Doesn't have to be some innate human aspect or whatever.

<comment><USER14> longer term such as, suck as much money and IP out of the US over decades as possible? after letting millions of your own people die through fucked up policy and then reverting it and claimed you 'lifted them out of poverty' ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ok, this IS stepping up. 1B will make a difference.

The big problem is that if distribution is not properly managed it will go to waste via people taking advantage of the situation. Giving away money responsibly is hard. We see it all the time.

<comment><USER16> What is 1B going to do that the 2 point something trillion that the gov just spent can't?

<comment><USER12> They're not mutually exclusive. Extra money helps if its directed properly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If I got this right, he is not donating actual $$ but his shares are transferred to this new entity "Start Small" which is not even a non-profit but an LLC.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, that seems strange. If your motive is really to provide relief for people and not focus on getting profits, why would you do that with an entity that is used for profit motives? I'm not from or in the US, so might misunderstand what a LLC is, but could someone provide some reasoning why you would want to do this with a LLC instead of non-profit?

Edit: thanks y'all for your answers, I didn't think to check the rest of his Twitter timeline to see if he already answered that question.

<comment><USER19> From his Twitter:

> Why is #startsmall a LLC? This segments and dedicates my shares to these > causes, and provides flexibility. Grants will be made from Start Small > Foundation or the LLC directly based on the beneficiary org. All transfers, > sales, and grants will be made public in tracking sheet.

Private + non-profit combinations are not uncommon. I'm not sure about the specifics in the US, but getting the status as a non-profit acknowledged is also a PITA in some jurisdictions, especially if he dedicates part of it to non-traditional causes like UBI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Probably the best time, since Square stock is gonna struggle a lot after these next two quarters

<comment><USER21> Why is that?

<comment><USER22> confused by parent comment as well.

square is the payment solution and foursquare the location-based app right? not sure why square would be impacted if we are all buying online or through apps.

<comment><USER23> A big chunk of their business is point-of-sale.

<comment><USER20> Almost all if you read their 10K: [https://s21.q4cdn.com/114365585/files/doc_financials/2019/q4...](https://s21.q4cdn.com/114365585/files/doc_financials/2019/q4/Square-2019-10-K.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not normally a fan, but I think Dorsey should be given massive props for being one of the few ultra rich indviduals (or even companies) to try to actually meaningfully step up to the pandemic challenge.

It's not just our governments and health authorities who have completely failed us, the response from extremely well resourced private parties and entities also has been extremely underwhelming.

It's been clear for months now that Testing/Tracking/Masks are vital to efficiently deal with this, all are basically low tech. And yet no single Western country has adequate capacity or taken any remotely serious steps to obtain it and non-governmental actors have not significantly stepped in either.

</comment><comment><USER25> I admire Gates more, for not just giving his money, but quitting his day job and giving his time. But Dorsey is young, he has time to increase his wealth more before stopping to wield it himself.

</comment><comment><USER26> Why is this an LLC and not a 501c?

Can someone comment on if this is truly charitable in nature? Or something else?

edit: thanks for the alert on mixing up my acronyms

<comment><USER27> I believe the only difference would be whether income is taxable or not. If there is no intended income for this fund -- that is, it's completely prefunded by the founder -- then there's no advantage to jump through the hoops that are necessary to get 403b status. That status is not freely handed out to everyone who walks up and claims their a non-profit. There's quite a bit of work that goes into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's remarkable is how this is a clear case study of the amount of wealth destroyed _by gutting government_

If I were to try to be pithy: Capitalism destroyed by the incompetency of libertarian ideals.

<comment><USER29> This is an inconvenient fact because most HNers tend to be wealthy or upper- middle class, first-world and myopic to their limited filter bubbles... and so utopian anarcho-capitalism and Austrian school economics seems meritocratic, functional, justified and superior to everything else.

<comment><USER30> I usually vote for "far-left" parties, yet I have no idea how Dorsey giving $1B away "is a clear case study of the amount of wealth destroyed _by gutting government_", so maybe the downvoters simple don't think emeerson has made a good and clear point.

<comment><USER28> To clarify my thinking: defunding Govt' pandemic preparedness became a forcing function for the individually wealthy to deploy private capital with much higher $$$ cost.

Point taken that its a stretch of the imagination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This seems kind of pointless when the Fed can just print 2 trillions out of thin air.

<comment><USER32> Let's not pretend they did anything as difficult as printing that much money. They just added 2 trillion to a value in a database somewhere.

<comment><USER10> Do you think that every dollar accounted for in the world is represented by a bill?

Currency is not money. It's not even a major component of what money is by almost any definition.

<comment><USER32> Either they printed 2 trillion physical dollar bills or they didn't. I'm saying they didn't. I'm curious what imaginary comment it is you're replying to.

<comment><USER10> When people talk about printing money in an economic sense, they aren't talking about running a literal printing press. It is synonymous with increasing the money supply.

In the lingo of modern economics adding a decimal to a database which results in increasing the money supply is phrased as printing money.

In fact this is specifically what they are talking about in most cases, specifically not operating a physical printing press.

When the original poster said they printed 2 trillion, he was not implying they physically printed anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If he was serious he'd know to spend the money on Covid-19, and only that.

Vanity projects like girl's health and education, and UBI show he's just not serious about the current issues at hand. (These are low even without covid-19 and have a lot of funding already)

Plus girls heath and education is best helped through helping pregnant mothers / with children up to 2 years. But that's science over feels.

</comment><comment><USER34> This doesn't even start to address the amount of damage he has done to the US and to the world through his bad management at Twitter. He bears a large slice of responsibility in creating the situation we are in.

<comment><USER35> I think it does start to. Maybe it doesn't entirely. But give the guy credit and let's see where he goes with this.</comment></comment>


IRS Gutted: Good news for the wealthy - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted <comment><USER2> I don't see how the IRS can be gutted enough: it remains a hive of ultra- liberals intent on shutting down republican support. Right now the liberals in the IRS are hunkering down, hoping Trump retires from office before noticing that so many IRS staff members came from leftist-leaning universities on the east and west coasts.

I will grant you that we need major campaign finance reform very, very badly - to the point that it should be _the_ one most important political item on the USA's agenda - above immigration, above China, etc.

Citizens United (the controversial Supreme Court decision saying that corporations had the same right as individuals to spend money to influence elections) is a travesty to democracy - one that I oppose along with the most flaming of flaming liberals. But the way that liberals have chosen (to burrow into the various bureaucracies and implement a de facto legislative agenda from there) to control campaign finance is simply wrong.

IRS gutted? Hardly. Go talk to one of them in one of his/her unguarded moments (perhaps after sharing a joint). Watch their eyes light up when you mention that maybe Beto O'Rourke can duplicate Obama's trajectory.

<comment><USER3> This comment is so wrong it's not even wrong.

The IRS is in charge of taxes. They have nothing to do with campaign finance laws. That's the Federal Election Commission's job.

<comment><USER4> The original poster was probably referring to the IRS Targeting controversy during the Obama administration where it was alleged that the nonprofit status and tax filings of conservatives groups were unfairly scrutinized. This could be interpreted as the IRS obliquely enforcing campaign finance laws.</comment></comment></comment>


Your body wasn't built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates - <AUTHOR> http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/ <comment><USER2> The MIT Technology Review held a contest of sorts, offering $20,000 to anyone who could prove that Aubrey de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate." They received 5 entries, 2 of which were discarded, and the other three can be found on their website along with de Grey's rebuttal and the subsequent responses.

<http://www.technologyreview.com/sens/index.aspx>

In his TED talk, de Grey claimed the the first person to live to 1000 may already be alive today.

Not saying I necessarily agree with him, but according to the judges at MIT - TR, it's at least not outside the realm of reasonable debate.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but showing that de Gray's ideas are not "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" sets a pretty low bar. I would disagree with that statement even though I fully expect to be in a grave along with de Gray in several decades.

<comment><USER2> I just thought de Gray's work was relevant because it addresses the counterpoint to the author's central thesis. The underlying assumption here is that the body has a built-in expiration date that we cannot avoid, but I didn't think it effectively answered the question of when that expiration date actually is.

My problem with the article, I guess, is the lack of a perspective over time. De Gray also posited that the first person to live to 1000 is probably already alive, I'm not saying all of this really makes sense, but it is scientifically feasible and should at least be noted in an article that asserts the opposite.

According to Wolfram Alpha, the probability of living past 100 (in the United States) increased from .17% to 1.4% between 1933 and 2000 and then to 2.4% in 2008. Living past 70 jumped from 45% to 75% to 76% in the same time period. This has a lot of interesting ramifications that I'm not really in a position to investigate, but they are clearly worth addressing.

edit: sources: [http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+...](http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+1900)

[http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+...](http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+2000)

[http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+...](http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+2008)

<comment><USER4> The article says there is an expiration date in the body. Nowhere it says that it can't possibly be 'avoided', just that current and foreseeable medicine is not quite there yet.

<comment><USER5> _current and foreseeable medicine is not quite there yet_

That's the key point. We all know eventually the singularity will arrive. And we know we have PLENTY of work to do today to make things a little bit better but still be far short of the singularity.

So it's wonderful to be a cheerleader for progress, but it can also be kind of annoying on occasion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR>
       "Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an
       exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999%
       certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130."

It pained me to read that. But because we don't know why the equation fits, we don't know that there is nothing that can be done to make it shift. Maybe one day we will talk about life span like a shifting demand/supply curve.

<comment><USER6> That statement would make sense with the addition of "at our current level of technology."

<comment><USER7> _(Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances)_

...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "You were made as well as we could make you". "But not to last."

<comment><USER9> The light that burns...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Too bad Moore's law doesn't apply to medical science, but in any case I'm hoping we'll see some major advances to put in the "cops" arsenal.

</comment><comment><USER11> Senescence is one of the prices of having evolved rather than having been specially created.

It's surprising that we don't work harder on fixing this. 10x what we're spending on AIDS might be a good place for a start. Imagine what humanity could accomplish if the standard life-span was just 200 instead of 70. Imagine what you personally could accomplish.

<comment><USER12> Would humanity really be better off by having individuals living longer? I can see the personal benefits of course, but younger individuals are less set in their ways and thus more likely to come up with the outside the box kind of solutions to problems that we need to solve.

Plus, they're more likely to accept the world as it is now instead of moaning about how much better everything was fifty years ago... (I think there's some kind of statistic or history tracking that has shown that in the mind of society, everything has always been better fifty years ago. I recall reading something about how the young are only interested in partying and fighting - written by a monk two hundred years or so ago).

<comment><USER13> This entire argument is predicated on the false assumption that you know what being young and healthy for 200 years will be like. We don't. We don't know if old people are "stuck in their ways" because it is an intrinsic part of being old, or if it is because their brain is becoming _physically_ less flexible, and subsequently they rationalize the ways they first learned.

It's also predicated on the assumption that it's actually bad for long-lived people to get a little stuck in their ways. This may not be true either; society is unstable, in the physics sense of the term, what with the constant influx of new naive people. Adding some more "momentum" into the system may be safer and better. Again, I'm not saying this is true or false, only that the casual assumption of the truth is unjustified.

Having 120-year-old youth will be a genuinely new phenomenon, and nobody knows what that means. Preventing such technologies from being used or developed (or even arguing against it) based on such terrible arguments would be a terrible thing to do.

<comment><USER14> _It's also predicated on the assumption that it's actually bad for long-lived people to get a little stuck in their ways. This may not be true either; society is unstable, in the physics sense of the term, what with the constant influx of new naive people. Adding some more "momentum" into the system may be safer and better. Again, I'm not saying this is true or false, only that the casual assumption of the truth is unjustified._

With a 200 year lifespan, we would have people trying to enforce cultural norms from 180 years ago. In 1829, women couldn't vote, slavery was common, imperialism was considered good foreign policy, it was common sense that women and blacks were incapable of complex tasks or higher level reasoning, and forcible relocation of American Indians was being practiced. Meanwhile, the steam engine was considered pretty hot shit.

To ask someone who grew up in that era to accept the son of an African immigrant as president, gay marriage, streaming pornography, the fall of the European empires, globalization, and software startups as facts of life is absurd. Likewise, if we lived long enough to build the world of 2189, it would have the same petty biases and taboos that we have today.

It's important sometimes for generations to forget bygone eras and move on.

<comment><USER15> Why is it absurd. Many of our grandparents have seen all of these things change in their lives and they have accepted them.

<comment><USER14> Because they are increasingly outnumbered by younger people. The social norm changes, probably faster than they're comfortable with, but with or without them as they die out. Black people go from slaves to sharecroppers in a generation, but it takes over a century for any of them to become millionaires, CEO's, and presidents. Women have progressed even slower.

My grandparents are all dead, but I suspect that few of them would be pleased with the prospect of a black president. Even my parents would be less than pleased to learn that I was bisexual.

Your grandparents may be more open minded than mine, and that is a credit to them. But for every one of them there's ten old people who don't keep up as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free SaaS tools for companies on a budget - <AUTHOR> https://canny.io/blog/free-saas-tools-for-budget/ <comment><USER3> Lock in and information loss is something important to consider with any SaaS solution, especially if you're going to use the free tier. Migration with data and history is often very difficult or impossible. If you think a SaaS platform would be worth paying for in the future across the different pricing tiers, then go for the free or lowest tier and move up as your needs increase. If not, there's always email and local spreadsheets to take care of whatever you'd need, though it would be cumbersome. But you'd at least have the data with you in formats that everyone can understand and improve.

<comment><USER4> (Tbh, if you're talking about Google Docs, it's not even that cumbersome. Still, I prefer Office 365 and would probably plump to spend my own cash on that. This is not the point of what I was going to post though.)

I think what you say is totally valid but an additional observation is that once a SaaS gains some traction, or perhaps because they need the cashflow, sometimes the free tier can disappear or be significantly reduced.

The canonical example here for me is UserVoice: it used to have a free tier, no longer does and, in fact, whilst I was writing this post I was searching for current pricing... but it turns out they're not even transparently priced any more (please feel free to correct me if I missed something).

Anyway: beware.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah UserVoice starts at ~$15k/yr nowadays, and it'll take you ~3 calls with their sales team to even get a price. Canny is a modern alternative with upfront pricing, and is actually the company behind this thread's blog post!

Comparison page here: [https://canny.io/compare/uservoice](https://canny.io/compare/uservoice)

<comment><USER4> > Yeah UserVoice starts at ~$15k/yr nowadays

Holy ####.

I'd used it on small projects, and I know Microsoft still use it (or at least were as of a few months back) for Teams amongst other products. I remember wanting to use it for a side-project a few years back and being disappointed that the free tier had gone, but thinking it would still probably be worth it for something with commercial value.

But... $15k/annum. I mean, I hope it's working out for them but that's pricing out a huge chunk of the market. Maybe they've just done their segmentation really well and are coining it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm co-founder of Missive [1], mentioned in the post. If any of you have questions, I would be happy to answer them.

[1] [https://missiveapp.com/](https://missiveapp.com/)

<comment><USER6> How suitable is it for a support email inbox? I've used intercom in the past but their pricing is annoying and their entire tooling is … problematic. I could get into it but point is they don't fit the bill for mid-to-large b2c businesses with free support inboxes.

<comment><USER5> One of our primary goals is to create a AAA email client that behaves like you expect an email client to. A second goal is to inject collaboration in the email experience. Those two goals make Missive a perfect candidate for email support.

<comment><USER5> Sorry! Yes, we do. Assignment, comments, triaging, Out of office status and more. [https://missiveapp.com/features](https://missiveapp.com/features)

<comment><USER6> Excellent. I'll give your product a try and email you if I have feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I could suggest my company's own tool as an addition to this list, [https://ReferDigital.com](https://ReferDigital.com) is an affiliate marketing platform without any signup/monthly fees, and no volume tiers at which this phases out. (It earns money as a fraction of any commission earned only - <USER2> sales driven by affiliates, no fees due).

<comment><USER8> hi

Checked out your profile/web page.

Can i email you about a small biz-dev opportunity?

We PAY YOU a monthly commission. We dont want any customer or account data. We dont compete with u, or your customers.

I hope this doesn't sound too spammy..

<comment><USER9> Why don't you just use [https://referdigital.com/homepage/contact](https://referdigital.com/homepage/contact)? But because you are asking: It sounds a bit spammy ;)

<comment><USER8> Hopefully hackernews is a better starting point for a conversation?

For what's its worth. Its a totally new startup. This is my first (failed?) attempt at finding partners online?

Maybe we are like Robinhood? Paying millennials a higher interest rate AND giving them zero-commision stock trades :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Always think of tools in terms of your company's long term goals.

A free tool that doesn't offer possibilities to scale or won't remain cost- effective at scale or doesn't offer features to migrate to other tools can easily cost more than going with something that looks expensive or less appealing right now.

Also, evaluate tools in terms of their familiarity to developers, sales and customers in your domain.

<comment><USER11> You're absolutely right. We're not saying that companies starting out should just go for the free plan no matter what and not think about it at all. That's why we added the entry level pricing as a side note, as well as a link to the pricing page and reviews for further investigation. The added calculation sheet also helps to see potential costs based on any plan, not just the free ones, to see how it would affect the total money spent. We also very much held back on including free, yet very low quality/limited tools. And yes—awesome point about the familiarity aspect!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I see way too many market leaders on the list - just because they have a free plan doesn't mean they are good "for companies on a budget". The free tiers are designed to hook you in, but switching once you hit the limits can be very expensive (resource wise) and shouldn't be part of cost-saving strategy.

Take MailChimp for example - it's a very expensive email marketing solution.

BigMailer.io is a great alternative to EmailOctopus because it supports transactional emails (EmailOctopus doesn't) in addition to bulk and auto/drip, and it offers a more generous free tier - up to 5,000 contacts.

</comment><comment><USER13> The free tiers are great but trying to run a business with those limits can be difficult then you get locked in to the expensive platform just as you start to gain traction and have to payup or reinvest in the stack.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the comment! That's 100% true—that's why we added the entry level pricing as well as the link to the pricing page for further evaluation. As a bootstrapped company, at Canny, we're a big fan of (high-quality) free options at least to start out with, when you really just need the basics. We have had to upgrade/change a few times when the free tier doesn't cut it anymore as we grow, but they did for enough time to save us some money when it was extremely important to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wrote about a similar but shorter list for early stage bootstrappers - [https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/10-early-stage-tools-every- boo...](https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/10-early-stage-tools-every- bootstrapping-entrepreneur-needs/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting/odd that Canny does NOT have a free tier. I was about to say "where were you 3 weeks ago when I really needed a feedback tool with a free tier" but then I saw all their plans are paid...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, you're correct. We've definitely talked about adding one, and still may in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how may of those tools could just be self-hosted on a $100-$200/month dedicated server.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think self-hosted versions of many of these tools exist. Are you suggesting you build them yourself? It'd take years and your time is worth far more than the money you'd save.

<comment><USER15> You'd be surprised how wrong you are. Most startups base their value proposition on the fact that by buying saas instead of software, you don't have to pay a guy for infrastructure, maintenance and system administration.

Which makes totally sense for large organisations but less sense for small ones where it could be easy to manage most services off a single box, provided that regular backups are made.

Consider git alone: you can run a small gitlab instance for free. You can do ci/cd off a jenkins instance. Ticketing systems are one of the oldest things around.

Some basics of system administration is all you need.</comment></comment></comment>