Android Overtakes Apple in Australia - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/android-overtakes-apple-in-australia-20121212-2b8q2.html <comment><USER2> Does this really surprise anyone? The cheapest you can buy an iPhone (4 outright) is $450AUD and contracted plans with newer iPhones start at around $50-60AUD per month. Android are outright starting at $49 and available at all spend levels on plans.

To be honest what's surprising is it took this long...

<comment><USER3> > To be honest what's surprising is it took this long...

I agree. I think this goes to show just how much Australians are willing to pay for technology in general. It's a shame that we get shafted on a lot of technology/electronics but the fact is that people are willing to pay.

<comment><USER4> Speaking as a Canadian transplant to Australia via the US, the Australian mobile market is actually quite competitive compared to the US or Canada.

There are more operators relative to the population, there are more shorter- term plans (i.e., 1 year vs. 2 or 3) and the monthly rates are decent.

<comment> dorian-graph Most plans are 2 years.

<comment><USER5> Optus and Telstra both allow you to choose your payback plan and rate? So yearly is always possible, even if not seen on the posters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those who missed it, this is the most important paragraph in the article:

 _"It's a tablet Christmas there's no doubt about that," said Ben Mcintosh, general manager of technology and entertainment at Harvey Norman. "There is no doubt in my mind that we will sell out of just about every tablet we have in stock by the end of the month."_

I'd better go out and get mine before they run out!

See: <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Australians have always been big Apple users, in my experience. Despite seeing statistics showing increasing share of Android, I always only ever saw Apple devices on the bus/train. Not very scientific, I know, but I have noticed more and more Android devices whenever I'm on the train in recent months.

<comment><USER7> I see the same thing, but here's some numbers to back up what we're seeing: [http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-AU- monthly-201112-20121...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-AU- monthly-201112-201211)

The jaws are closing, but slowly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see a lot about Android having a high market share. I've seen numbers like 70-75%. But I think Apple buyers are more affluent and buy more apps even though their market share is only 20%. A lot of people who used to have feature phones or buy the cheapest pre paid phones they can get, now get android phones. Virgin Mobile has one for like $60 my in-laws have. So my point is, while the high android market share is there, as an app developer, the market share in relation to app usage and spend is still skewed towards Apple for now.

<comment><USER9> There is a lot of data supporting your claim.

But the key point is _for now_. Given current market trends, in the not too distant future there will be more money in Android. (Particularly since you don't need to give Apple a 30% cut.)

<comment><USER10> Actually if you want to sell apps through the Google play store you still need to give google a 30% cut [1]. With android you always do have the option to try through other app stores, or just allowing users to download the .apk from your website. However given how few people actually look anywhere else but the play store, you are going to take a hit much larger than 30% if you are not in google play.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play#Applications>

<comment><USER11> With Android you don't have to go through their store. For example I bought one Humble Bundle [1] pack of Android games (which was quite successful) directly from their website. Then I got a link in my email for their downloads and I could install them directly.

> _given how few people actually look anywhere else but the play store_

I do not believe the truthfulness of this statement, considering how many services get popular outside any app store. Do you think people find out about Twitter or DropBox by browsing the app store?

> _you are going to take a hit much larger than 30% if you are not in google > play_

It really depends on what channels of distribution you can tap into. Some apps are popular only because they get promoted on the play store. Other apps are popular by other means. And no, you don't necessarily need a middleman.

IMHO, Android is much better in every regard, because on Android the walled garden is optional for everybody.

[1] <http://www.humblebundle.com/>

<comment><USER10> Heh, actually I bought the Android humble bundle as well. I loved the fact that they could do something like that on Android. Its true that there are loads of services that people find outside the app/play store such as twitter or drop box. But if I wanted to install a drop box client, the first place I would go is to the play store to search for dropbox!

It would be a really interesting experiment for an existing service to host an .apk on their website in addition to listing in the google play store. I wonder how many people would side load the app, vs just going through play?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this has something to do with the economy? Apple devices are expensive while on the contrary, you can get a prepaid Android phone starting at $49 in Australia with a camera and ability to download apps. I'm surprised it's taken this long, we always pay twice sometimes three times more than our American counterparts for shiny Apple gadgets (let alone everything else), I guess the appeal of Apple products are starting to become lost on us Aussies.

<comment><USER13> Apple's pricing in Australia is generally very competitive. I know for laptops you pay significantly more in Australia for brands like Lenovo (in comparison with their USA pricing).

<comment><USER14> On iPhone pricing in Australia, can someone let me know if this is a contract thing, like hidden costs on the US version, because the US store lists the cheapest iPhone 5 as $199, where the AU store lists it as $799. $199USD =~ $189AUD.

On the face of it it seems pretty unfair, is there something I'm missing?

<comment><USER3> $799 is the outright price: that is, not on a contract. If you buy one one a contract you might pay $5 per month over 24 months (depending on the plan and model you get).

<comment><USER14> Thanks, I had a suspicion this might be it, I don't suppose you've got any idea why Apple sell/advertise them in a contract by default there but not here?

<comment><USER15> So Going to Tesltra: [http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/mobile- phones/iphone...](http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/mobile- phones/iphone/) or Optus: <https://www.optus.com.au/shop/iphone> or Vodaphone: <http://www.vodafone.com.au/personal/iphone/home/iphone-5> the iPhone 5 is FREE* (*With Monthly payments of $50-$100 on a 2 year contract)

<comment><USER14> Sorry, I'm not sure if you're point out the existence of the plans here, or that they seem to be more expensive than what grandparent comment said they run for in the US.

If its the former, I was aware you could get them on a plan with a provider here, I was wondering why Apple hasn't partnered with Telstra or whoever to push the plans as the primary price point like they do on the US site and presumably in stores.

If its the latter, I wouldn't be surprised if that's just down more expensive data/phone usage plans?

<comment><USER15> Sorry - the point I was attempting to make (While tired/slightly-drunk) was that all the major carriers have _free_ plans. SO the upfront cost of the phone would be $0 (Which is exactly the same up-front cost as he SGS-3, HTC-1XL, etc). I'm not sure that apple want to position themselves like that. For apples perspective -- having it be a $700ish phone is better than a "free" phone.

As to Apple not pushing the plans -- it could just be the fact that they don't have a "primary" partner. Since every Telco had the phone on launch -- Apple would become an intermediary offering choices (Is Optus or Telstra better in my area?).

<comment><USER14> If anyone stumbles on this, I actually ended up looking this up, thought I'd add it to the record ; ). Turns out it's considered third line forcing, and is illegal here, prohibited by the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, previously covered by the Trade Practices Act, here's the relevant section (hacked apart for clarity) [1]:

 _(a) supplies, or offers to supply, goods or services; (b) supplies, or offers to supply, goods or services at a particular price; or (c) gives or allows, or offers to give or allow, a discount, allowance, rebate or credit in relation to the supply or proposed supply of goods or services by the corporation; [...] on the condition that the person to whom the corporation supplies or offers or proposes to supply the goods or services [...] will acquire goods or services of a particular kind or description directly or indirectly from another person not being a body corporate related to the corporation._

Note that this only prevents Apple from selling a locked/contract device, carrier locked devices and contracts are fine, as long as they're part of a deal made explicitly between the customer and the third party. Back in 2008 they were making exclusive deals with single carriers in several countries, which would have pretty clearly violated this, so seems like Apple Australia were restricted to outright & unlocked devices, or only selling via carriers.

Now, though, Apple give a choice of carrier and an option to buy outright in the US (And other countries, I assume), which, IANAL, is probably still prohibited by section (b) or (c), ie, 'you can still buy it if you refuse the contract, but you get a cheaper price if you take the contract' sounds like it would still be covered by the 'at a particular price' clause.

[1] 47(6): [http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2012C00877/Html/Volume_1#_...](http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2012C00877/Html/Volume_1#_Toc342312407)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am not sure why exactly is this a big deal and even surprising. Apple's iOS sells on limited hardware and they do a release annually or lately semi- annually. On the other hand, there is a new worthy Android device coming out every two weeks from big shots like Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson to name a few. So it was only a matter of time before Android caught up with iOS and captured the market.

</comment><comment><USER5> Android is the new Feature Phone in some ways (as well as high end models too).

Google always intended saturation to prop up their Ad model.

Interesting to hear stirrings of Apple iterating faster.

Apple already pwn the market profit-wise. But do they need to fend of a competitive OS which aims to saturate?

Or can they live side by side? And nudge out Windows phone together?

</comment><comment><USER17> This makes me happy since Apple made Samsung miss out on sales last holiday season.

<comment><USER5> Samsung made itself miss out.

<comment><USER17> Reasoning required.</comment></comment></comment>


P ≠ NP - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/35539144/pnp12pt <comment><USER2> Several points on the question of whether the proof is likely to be correct:

* As far as I know this paper wasn't circulated for informal peer review before being made public; I heard no talk on the grapevine. (Edit: apparently it _was_ circulated and someone other than the author made it public.)

* Therefore a proper assessment is going to take a while. Until then we can only speculate :-)

* While the crank attempts at P =? NP are statistically much more common (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347295>), this isn't one of them. The author is a legit computer scientist: <http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/>

* On the other hand he hasn't published much on complexity theory and isn't known in that community. Which is weird but not necessarily a red flag.

* Looking at his papers, it's possible he's been working on this for about 5+ years -- he has two threads of research, basic and industrial, and the former line of publications dried up around 2004.

* On the other hand I don't think anyone knew he was working on this. The only known serious effort was by Ketan Mulmuley at U Chicago.

* It has been known that the straightforward combinatorial approaches to P =? NP aren't going to work, and therefore something out of left field was required (<http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~gsarkozy/3133/p78-fortnow.pdf>). Mulmuley's plan of attack involved algebraic geometry.

* This paper uses statistical physics. This approach doesn't seem to have been talked about much in the community; I found only one blog comment [http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/how-to-solve-pnp/#c...](http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/how-to-solve-pnp/#comment-1260) which mentions the survey propagation algorithm. (Deolalikar's paper also talks about it tangentially.)

* If the statistical physics method used here is powerful enough to resolve P != NP, then there's a good chance it is powerful enough to have led to many smaller results before the author was able to nail the big one. It's a little weird we haven't heard anything about that earlier.

* Finally, since the author is using physics-based methods, there's the possibility that he is using something that's a "theorem" in physics even though it is technically only a conjecture and hasn't actually been proven. Physicists are notorious for brushing technicalities under the rug. It would be very unlikely that the author didn't realize that, but still worth mentioning.

* If that is indeed what happened here, but the rest of the proof holds up, then we would be left with a reduction from P != NP to a physics conjecture, which could be very interesting but not ground breaking.

Conclusion: overall, it certainly looks superficially legit. But in non peer reviewed solutions of open problems there's always a high chance that there's a bug, which might or might not be fixable. Even Andrew Wiles's first attempt at FLT had one. So I wouldn't get too excited yet.

<comment><USER3>
      * If the statistical physics method used here is powerful
      enough to resolve P != NP, then there's a good chance it
      is powerful enough to have led to many smaller results
      before the author was able to nail the big one. It's a
      little weird we haven't heard anything about that earlier.

Well, Wiles didn't publish intermediate results either, partly because someone might have beat him to the final result with those intermediate results. It would also give away what he was working on. Deolalikar was aiming for the grand prize as well, so skipping the publishing of intermediate results doesn't seem strange to me.

<comment><USER4> The conclusion might seem to be that prizes harm science.

Which sucks, but intermediate results are important for science as a whole; if there's significant financial reason to withhold them, we're no better than the alchemists.

<comment><USER5> But, there was no prize for solving FLT other than being able to list on one's CV "Proved FLT."

<comment><USER6> You wouldnt actually need to put that in your CV

<comment><USER7> You actually won't need a CV.

<comment><USER6> That is a more precise statement :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The paper's origin was that the author mailed a copy for review to some very high-level folks in the field (Cook, Mazirani, Sipser, etc). Here's the mail:

Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 21:28:39 +0000 Subject: Proof announcement: P is not equal to NP

Dear Fellow Researchers,

I am pleased to announce a proof that P is not equal to NP, which is attached in 10pt and 12pt fonts.

The proof required the piecing together of principles from multiple areas within mathematics. The major effort in constructing this proof was uncovering a chain of conceptual links between various fields and viewing them through a common lens. Second to this were the technical hurdles faced at each stage in the proof.

This work builds upon fundamental contributions many esteemed researchers have made to their fields. In the presentation of this paper, it was my intention to provide the reader with an understanding of the global framework for this proof. Technical and computational details within chapters were minimized as much as possible.

This work was pursued independently of my duties as a HP Labs researcher, and without the knowledge of others. I made several unsuccessful attempts these past two years trying other combinations of ideas before I began this work.

Comments and suggestions for improvements to the paper are highly welcomed.

Sincerely,

Vinay Deolalikar Principal Research Scientist HP Labs

<http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/>

<comment><USER8> Somewhere, deep in a dark corner of my heart, I hope and pray that this paper is correct, just so we can keep and revere the immortal words "I am pleased to announce a proof that P is not equal to NP, _which is attached in 10pt and 12pt fonts_."

<comment><USER9> I'm not academic - can you explain why he mentioned the font sizes? Why are they relevant?

<comment><USER10> I find the sentence comical in its humility and practicality; I assume leif did too. Acangiano puts it in the same league as Fermat's famous note in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica.

I assume he included the paper in two font sizes to suit the reader's preference; no deeper meaning.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, basically I found it funny juxtaposing the announcement of such a magnificent result (should it end up proving true) with such a mundane, utilitarian comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 102 pages via one of the most annoying PDF readers on the planet? No thanks.

There are good, free, PDF readers for every major operating system and for every major mobile device. I wish people would just link directly to PDFs.

<comment><USER12> Have you tried Scribd since they've transitioned to HTML 5? I now find it quite usable.

<comment><USER13> I got their flash viewer for this. I do sometimes get the html5 viewer, and I assumed the selection was based on a preference set by the uploader. Isn't it?

<comment><USER14> It seems they're A/B testing it. I got the html5 viewer all but one time viewing this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Scott Aaronson expresses his confidence that the proof is wrong by offering to supplement the million-dollar Clay prize with $200,000 of his own money if it's correct:

<http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=456>

<comment><USER3> I find it strange that he doesn't explain his confidence with at least a general description of the way in which he thinks the proof will fail.

I suppose he could have safely claimed this with Wiles's original proof as well, since it did have at least one non-trivial flaw that required amending. It's quite possible that the proof contains flaws, but will still hold up in the end, because the flaws can be corrected. But I feel that's a bit of a lame gamble.

<comment><USER16> Sometimes there are also flaws which can not be corrected.

But I cannot make a qualified guess if this might be the case here.

<comment><USER3> Of course, but that's an even larger gamble, if you don't have at least a very specific hunch about the way in which a proof will fail. All in all, this announcement by Aaronson seems rather rash. I don't understand why he would do such a thing.

<comment><USER17> I am OK with it. He put his money where his mouth is, instead of just putting his mouth somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I skimmed through the synopsis but this philosophical statement baffles me (although obviously it is unrelated to the validity or invalidity of the proof):

"The implications of [P ?= NP] on the general philosophical question of [..] whether human creativity can be automated, would be profound."

How so? If P!=NP, that is obeyed by the brain as much as by computers and whatever trick our brains does to be creative despite of this, will be available to computers as well, regardless of P?=NP. What am I missing?

<comment><USER19> You must read it in context.

What it says is that if P == NP then the implications are profound for applications such as cryptography and on the general question of whether human creativity can be automated.

You can see why P == NP would have profound implications for crypto: many of our widely used techniques would turn out to, um, be easy to crack.

I believe the intent regarding human creativity is that humans often end up with a practical need to deal with some real-world instance of a size-able NP- complete problem. We don't know any way to efficiently find the optimal solution so we creatively deal with what we can figure out (the traveling salesman's optimization problem, placed into the real world, might count). Are our creative guessworks and heuristic discoveries essential? Or can automation based on P == NP eliminate the need for them - and do better than we do on these problems.

<comment><USER20> Lets assume that P==NP, why assume that we would be able to find algorithms to easily crack crypto?

Let me put it another way, lets say that we finally discover that it is possible to time travel to the past. However, the energy needed to travel back int time is the equivalent of a million Suns because that is the amount of energy needed to warp space enough so that time will reverse itself. And we found proof of this when we observed the black holes of two galaxies colliding. So, even if it were possible it would still not matter. Practically speaking, it would still not be possible to travel back in time.

My gut feeling is that if it were to turn out that P==NP that would not necessarily mean that all of a sudden we would be able to find the exact algorithms that make it easy to crack cryptography algorithms easily.

<comment><USER21> We would know from the proof that such algorithms would exist, and possibly get a method from the proof as to how formulate them.

Also, gut feeling doesn't work in math. I mean, not at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's a list of many other proofs for the P vs NP problem: <http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm>

<comment><USER23> I hope this become wrong as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very interesting approach! How cool if this is the real deal. The last 30 years has seen a lot of theoretical work on computation as a physical process. If the greatest conjecture in CS is proved using tools from physics it really brings together math, physics, and CS.

Edit: As someone else pointed out a few minutes ago <http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/> confirmations began arriving today. How soon before Vinay has a Wikipedia entry? For those who are qualified to evaluate this, I suspect a consensus as to validity will develop within weeks if not days. If thumbs up, he must be worthy of one of the outstanding large-cash-value math prizes. Perhaps even the Nobel?

<comment><USER25> Wrong area for a Nobel prize, the prize areas are physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature, and peace. There is also a prize in economics given at the same time.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps he could steal the Economics "Nobel" prize, like lots of other mathematicians have done.

There was a paper about how recognizing bad securities is a NP hard problem a while ago. So this is applicable. (Tongue-in-cheek.)

<comment><USER26> [http://scholar.google.com.br/scholar?q=%2B%22np+complete%22+...](http://scholar.google.com.br/scholar?q=%2B%22np+complete%22+%2Bfinance&hl=pt- BR&btnG=Pesquisar&lr=)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> His personal home page <http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/> seems to have been updated.

"Manuscript sent on 6th August to several leading researchers in various areas. Confirmations began arriving 8th August early morning. Final version of the paper to be posted here shortly. Stay tuned. "

<comment><USER28> It's been updated again, with a revised version of the draft ("minor updates") dated August 9, 2010.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've not seen any discussion of his paper yet, but the author has an impressive CV:

<http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/>

</comment><comment><USER30> Bummer! It's like proving conclusively that the tooth fairy, Santa and the Easter bunny definitely don't exist.

</comment><comment><USER31> While the author of this paper does not appear to be a crank, nowhere in the entire paper does it discuss why the fundamental barriers of naturalization, algebrization, and relativization don't apply to the work, making it seem unlikely that those barriers have actually been overcome.

<comment><USER32> From what little I understand, those barriers prevent only certain proof strategies from working. So for instance, the Razborov-Rudich barrier concerns a class of combinatorial proofs (the so-called natural proofs); this paper uses two techniques - statistical mechanics and model theory - which I gather are out of the province of RR.

<comment><USER33> "only certain proof strategies" is technically correct, but its closer to "essentially every proof strategy we can conceive of".

And besides, the question is over the entire proof strategy and not the specific techniques involved. It seems plausible that one could give a relativizing proof using some method of calculation from statistical mechanics, for example.

<comment><USER32> Again, I'm no expert, but relativization and algebrization are properties of proofs that invoke oracles, which this paper doesn't appear to do.

<comment><USER33> Ah, that is not how those "barriers" work. Roughly, the relativization barrier goes like this: Say you have a proof that P!=NP. Does it also prove that P^A != NP^A for any oracle A? If it does, then the proof is flawed, because there <i>does</i> exist an oracle A such that P^A = NP^A!

Such proofs are said to relativize -- i.e., they are still valid relative to any oracle.

<comment><USER32> Ah, thanks for explaining!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'd like to say congratulations to Vinay Deolalikar for getting to this point and putting the paper out there. As randomwalker and others have said, this appears to at least be a legitimate attempt. It must take some seriously thick skin to work on a paper that a) is in an area so full of failed attempts and error filled proofs; and b) that EVERYONE is going to read and try to tear apart.

</comment><comment><USER35> We created a prediction market for the next winner of the Clay Prize here <http://smarkets.com/current-affairs/clay-prize/next-winner>

</comment><comment><USER36> WOW.

Assuming this isn't a hoax, and the proof holds up, this is front-page news kind of big deal.

As I recall, this has way more real-world practical usage than the Fermats Last Theorem proof.

Read the "Consequences of Proof" section in the Wikipedia article here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem>

[edit] The responses below are correct. Proving P=NP means the world gets turned upside down. P != NP is already sort of assumed.

<comment><USER37> a) Complicated academic proofs take (and _should_ take) months if not years to verify, and will only be "front-page news" after verification. This is hardly the first unverified proof of the [edit: possible (in)]equality of P and NP.

b) The practical consequences of P=NP are immense. The practical consequences of P≠NP are that we can stop looking for computational unicorns and fairies.

We have for some time thought that P≠NP, but boy do people like those unicorns and fairies.

<comment><USER38> I doubt it'll impact the unicorns-and-fairies searches significantly. _Most_ people already work under the assumption that P≠NP.

Similarly, _most_ people believe the world is round, and we go around the Sun. This hasn't prevented serious flat-Earthers nor geocentrists from existing.

<comment><USER39> It has been something of a damper on their funding, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> At least for this, we should have a reddit like system for peer reviewing, so that comments from all reviewers can be seen by everyone.

<comment><USER41> This is actually not a bad idea, and some scientific groups are pressuring to move to this model. See Yann LeCun's proposal ( <http://www.lecun.com/ex/pamphlets/publishing-models.html> ) for an example. ICML almost does this. The review is done privately (due to some well- discussed elsewhere issues with double anonymity), but there's a public discussion site for all papers <http://mldiscuss.appspot.com/> . And people do use it, and for some papers you will find important information there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Some background on the P ≠ NP problem:

<http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem>

<http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/>

<comment><USER43> Edit: Actual link is

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Anyone got a link to any proper discussion?

<comment><USER45> Yeah, I'd be curious to see what people who are still working in the field have to say. My red flags went up as soon as I read "statistical" in the abstract, since that could easily imply the common problem of assuming the existence of a secure PRNG. However, I haven't read the entire paper in depth (and likely won't have time to anytime soon), so I don't really know if that common trap was fallen into.

<comment><USER46> Statistical _mechanics_ : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics>

<comment><USER45> "is the application of probability theory"

My comment still stands.

<comment><USER46> I wonder, since you said your problem was that it " _could easily imply the common problem of assuming the existence of a secure PRNG_ ". Statistical mechanics involves real, true randomness, and the statistical comes in e.g. where you use statistical _models_ of things at the micro scale to explain macro scale behavior. I don't get the impression that it involves statistics in the way you are using the word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think that whether P is NP or not could turn out to be undecidable and in fact one could add either equality or inequality as an independent axiom. The theory of computational complexity is about asymptotic results as the size of the instances goes to infinity and involves `there exists` statements whose meaning when applied to infinite sets is typically ambiguous. For instance, it turned out to be a matter of choice whether or not you want the set of all subsets of real numbers between zero and one to equal or to be strictly larger than the set of so called measurable sets. And whether or not a set is measurable can be characterized in a very concrete way about the possibility of approximating it by unions of intervals. So the question of whether or not there exist non measurable sets turned out to depend on `what you mean by set`in a way which people hadn´t thought about before. I suspect the question whether or not P is NP will depend on what we mean by P and NP in ways which so far no one thought about.

</comment><comment><USER48> I think this is getting unwanted publicity. The author never released the proof in public or made any announcement. He only sent it to his expert friends so that they can point out potential flaws. May be this needs more research and putting him in spotlight is not helping anything.

<comment><USER49> Actually I think a leak is more helpful than either the author himself releasing the proof publicly or keeping everything under wraps.

Especially since the cold fusion thing[1], researchers have been loath to publicly announce revolutionary findings lest the findings fail to pan out. Researchers don't want to be known as publicity-seeking cranks, they want to be known as earnest and honest academics, which I suspect entails playing to the in-crowd and letting the system work[2]--the system being to talk to your colleagues before hand, release everything through peer-reviewed journals, and if everything passes muster, you've eliminated any risks to your reputation while achieving renown as the guy who proved P != NP.

On the other hand, having the proof publicly available to anyone who can understand it can massively parallelize the process of having it verified, or having errors found and potentially corrected. Meanwhile, the researcher's reputation is maintained, because he did the right thing, and if any errors are found he'll be judged to have acted prudently and conservatively in advance of having his findings reviewed.

[1] Fleischmann and Pons publicly claimed to have discovered a means to induce nuclear fusion at room temperature in 1989, but their results couldn't be replicated.

[2] And the system _does_ work--this is no criticism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Why isn't this in a peer-reviewed journal?

<comment><USER51> Because it hasn't undergone the proper level of review in order to be published in one. As it stands, there is no reason to take it seriously until it has been. There have been several posts of such papers here before, and I would highly advise the level of skepticism expressed by a fellow HNer with submissions like this c.f. : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=893877>

<comment><USER52> Granted, but this author does not set off any crackpot flags: he's had plenty of prior publications in areas relevant to the proof and works in an industry research lab. Another poster points this out: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585999>

<comment><USER5> Also, the paper was written using LaTeX. I have a friend who spent a semester helping to edit a small mathematics journal, and, with virtually 100% accuracy, you could tell the crackpot papers from the serious ones based simply on whether they used LaTeX or not.

<comment><USER53> Submissions in .doc format can also be immediately judged with near 100% accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So: What publicly traded firms benefit from a confirmation that P!=NP and are there any that lose (e.g., that were betting that P might == NP).

There's gotta be money in this news :-)

<comment><USER54> There sure is: <http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/>

<comment><USER19> Ah, yes. No, I meant for the outside investor with early news of the purported proof who is willing to bet that it holds up.

For example, if there is some crypto company whose business is premised on hedging that a "P == NP" proof is just around the corner - short them. Alternatively, maybe buy the firm we think of as RSA. That kind of thing.

This paper hasn't yet got a lot of press attention and I'm only about 1/4 joking when I say I'm curious as to what effect it will have on various stocks if it isn't quickly debunked.

<comment><USER55> HP will get some prestige out of this, and not much else will happen short term. Almost everyone was already assuming P != NP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I think there might be a way to solve all n-SAT problems (if reformulated using conjunctive normal form) in O(C) best up to worst O(C * N * N) time and O(C * N) space (C = number of AND-clauses, N = number of distinct literals from all clauses). would that still be polynomial and a valid proof or even possible (not a mathematician I am)? on the other hand, proving P = NP would not be wise, morally seen, would it?

</comment><comment><USER57> Looking at the comments at [https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/a-proof- that-p-is-...](https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/a-proof-that-p-is- not-equal-to-np/) there are many points to clarify. Specially the intuition from statistic physics is not true in other examples and the difference is not clear. So ...

</comment><comment><USER58> 4 possible problems with the proof: [http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/issues-in-the- proof...](http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/issues-in-the-proof- that-p%E2%89%A0np/)

</comment><comment><USER59> This is sad: This result, if correct, is the mathematical result of the century; however, it still hasn't appeared in Google News or Google trends.

<comment><USER60> It's a leaked PDF of an unverified proof which has yet to appear in any mainstream news source and is relevant, probably, to no one but computer scientists. So it's not even remotely surprising that it has not yet appeared on Google News. I have no idea what part of this you think is sad.

<comment><USER59> This result is _much_ more relevant than either Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjuncture or Wiles' proof or Fermat's Conjuncture, both of which got huge coverage in the mainstream media. If you think this is relevant to "no one but computer scientists" you are naive about the ramifications of the result.

The proof is unverified but most qualified sources say it is one of the best efforts in many years, it could even be _the_ proof. This was the #1 news in most technical blogs yesterday.

<comment><USER61> The thing is, we can't talk about any result yet. So far, we only have a paper which didn't even underwent peer-review. I'm sure it will get enormous media coverage, but not sooner than it gets published.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> * RSA and all our other current crypto algorithms breathe a collective sigh of relief _

</comment><comment><USER63> Wow. 100% of zac's 724 karma points come from this post & his comments on it.

</comment><comment><USER64> bñpg en el cual se puede jugar al mitico mario bros.

<http://blog-de-un-youtube-facebook-tuenti.blogspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER65> Everyone has been suspecting or assuming that P is a strict subset of NP for decades. Still, every time someone proposes a serious attempt at proving it, it's front page news and smart people will have to comb over the argument for months to have confidence that it's right.

The opposite proposition -- that P is equal to NP -- is widely doubted. But if there were a proof that P and NP were equal, anyone with a good data set could verify the proof in a few minutes. Just run the proof on a hard 3-SAT or whatever and observe the answer returning significantly before the heat death of the universe.

So what we think is true is insanely hard to verify but what we think is false is blazingly obvious to check. Chalk another one up for irony.

<comment><USER66> P is a strict subset of NP. If you can solve the problem in polynomial time, then you can verify a solution simply by generating it.

<comment><USER67> That means it's a subset and is trivial. To claim it's a _strict_ subset means there's something in NP that's not in P.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> See, all these monstrous old companies such as IBM and HP, they hire pure scientists such as Chaitin and this guy, and every once in awhile it pays off. I have feeling, yonger companies, with their own research departments, they are still very down to earth, and look for immediate profit from R&D.

<comment><USER69> To quote the announcement email which zacs posted earlier:

      This work was pursued independently of my duties as
      a HP Labs researcher, and without the knowledge of
      others. I made several unsuccessful attempts these
      past two years trying other combinations of ideas
      before I began this work.

So based off this solitary data point, it seems that while they might hire the brains it doesn't necessarily follow that they have free rein to work on esoteric "non-profitable" projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> The two main consequences that would follow are (from Wikipedia):

"A proof that showed that P ≠ NP, while lacking the practical computational benefits of a proof that P = NP, would also represent a very significant advance in computational complexity theory and provide guidance for future research. It would allow one to show in a formal way that many common problems cannot be solved efficiently, so that the attention of researchers can be focused on partial solutions or solutions to other problems. Due to widespread belief in P ≠ NP, much of this focusing of research has already taken place."

"Cryptography, for example, relies on certain problems being difficult. A constructive and efficient solution to the NP-complete problem 3-SAT would break many existing cryptosystems such as Public-key cryptography, used for economic transactions over the internet, and Triple DES, used for transactions between banks. These would need to be modified or replaced."

So basically we can focus on finding good approximations to NP problems and feel safe that this proof won't immediately jeopardize all of our bank accounts.

<comment><USER71> The above is false (par for Wikipedia). While RSA is based on the difficulty of factoring, DES (and 3DES) are not. The DES cipher is based on substitution/permutation and not number theory.

Also, factoring is known to be subexponential (e.g., GNFS). While there is no known polynomial time factoring algorithm, this may give some evidence that the integer factorization problem might be in P. Factoring is known to not be NP-complete and we hope it is not in P. While a proof that P=NP would be disastrous for RSA, a proof that P!=NP does not mean factorization is guaranteed to be safe against future advances in algorithms.

In other words, proof that P!=NP would be an amazing result but someone could still improve factoring algorithms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Hee is another PDF: <http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP/Deolalikar.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER72> What to do? Read paper or hit next months deadline...

</comment><comment><USER73> P = NP if and only if N = 1 or P = 0

<comment><USER74> Beat you to it! <http://twitter.com/peterc/status/20667523417>

I didn't post it here because I realized it's a joke most people won't get and those who do get it won't find it funny ;-) This joke could even be a Reddit vs HN shibboleth as I just saw it made there too and it's being voted up.

<comment><USER26> P!=NP if and only if P=1 and N=1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> That paper is written just a smidgen above my reading level.

</comment><comment><USER76> I always felt that it was logical that N != NP. However, I certainly couldn't prove it.

</comment><comment><USER77> Interesting

</comment><comment><USER78> Can someone call Knuth? If he gives it the thumbs up then I'll believe it.

<comment><USER79> I'm not sure whether Knuth has the ergodic-theory background. Perhaps call Terry Tao?

<comment><USER28> Tao comments on it (very briefly) here:

[http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/pnp- relativisation-...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/pnp- relativisation-and-multiple-choice-exams/#comment-46431)

<comment><USER78> Thanks for the info. I originally posted my request (half serious, half jokingly) when not many explanations in the thread were there to respond to the validity of the paper. Thanks for your insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Proving P ≠ NP is like finding the Higgs Boson. It doesn't change anything and a lot of people spent a lot of time showing that they have spent a lot of time changing nothing.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you doing about Windows 7? - <AUTHOR> So, RIP Windows 7: 22 July 2009 - 14 January 2020. Or not?
It seems that larger businesses with enterprise-level IT management have mostly been migrating to Windows 10. So have some smaller businesses and home users, perhaps tempted by the offer of a free upgrade, wanting some new functionality that 10 offers, or simply concerned about security and future-proofing if they stay with an old OS that is no longer supported.
It also seems that many other smaller businesses and personal users have not moved to Windows 10. With the usual caveats about accuracy, various sites attempting to track OS market share still have Windows 7 on roughly 1/4 of all desktops with no obvious sign of accelerated migration by December 2019, which translates to hundreds of millions of active users. Possible reasons for this have been much-discussed for as long as Windows 10 has been around, and many of them haven't really changed and remain a concern or even a deal-breaker for some users.
So, what have past or present Windows 7 users among the HN community been doing? Have you willingly (or begrudgingly) upgraded to 10? Have you switched to another platform? Are you planning to stay with 7 for now despite the lack of further support? <comment><USER2> I recommended macOS to my non-tech friends and some made the switch. For the rest, when they only need a browser I've installed Elementary OS on their machine.

My tech friends were already running either macOS or Linux for the most part so I don't have to worry about them. Personally I switched to macOS since Windows 10 was first announced.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was using Windows 7 for my personal laptop, but switched to Ubuntu a year and a half ago. I have been pretty happy with Ubuntu as a replacement. There was some configuration required, but after that it has been smooth. The only downside I've come across is gaming support. While I've been able to get most games working without much issue, There are a couple of titles that are very unstable, even using Steam's proton. I'm not really a huge gamer, so this isn't a big issue for me. The real test will be switching my mom over. I've already switched her over to using Kdenlive for video editing, and she likes it.

</comment><comment><USER4> What does lack of further support mean to a user? Will browsers start breaking? Games stop working? I haven't DLed/installed updates on my Win7 for years now, will this be the same?

<comment><USER5> Semi truck cabs often have a communications/GPS/electronic logging terminal called a "Qualcomm" because that's what it says on the bezel.

The ones in my company run Windows XP, and the functional software is by Omnitracs, part of Qualcomm in some way.

The only sense of urgency I've seen for leaving these behind is from the recent debacle at the end of last year, when a huge chunk of truckers were forced to use paper logs for a month or two (eight days max is legal) because of an Omnitracs update related to the GPS rollover back in _April_. I'm just an end user, so I'm sure I have some details wrong. I also have my paper logs, dutifully kept in case asked for them.

In other words, the software running _on_ the OS is important to users/owners, and which version of Windows is running is probably irrelevant, especially if you're a captive customer.

My understanding is that my company is going to build its own ELDs, based on tablets. Oh. Joy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > What are you doing about Windows 7?

Same thing I've been doing for the last ten years or so, using Linux.</comment>


For HN: Polls histogram Greasemonkey script - <AUTHOR>

I made a Greasemonkey script which scrapes Hacker News polls and creates embedded histograms (using Google Charts API):
http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnpollhist.user.js
Note: This is a variation on my previous GM script which did pie charts (pie chart and histogram can coexist if you install both scripts). <comment><AUTHOR> Here is a clickable link:

<http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnpollhist.user.js>

And this is how it's supposed to look like:

<http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnhist.png>

Here is a previous pie chart version:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528172>

Some polls to see it in action:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553794> How much do you bill per hour?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=493152> How many hours do you really work each day?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039> How old are you?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681> Where are you from?</comment>


Quantum Neural Machine Learning – Backpropagation and Dynamics - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.06935z <comment><USER2> link address is wrong (contains a "z") at the end, should be corrected to -> [http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.06935](http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.06935)</comment>


Ask HN: Can you help out a blind guy by describing the look of an application? - <AUTHOR> Screenshot below.
I didn't write this application, but I do use it every single day and it was developed pretty much exclusively for screen reader users.  However I'll be giving a presentation involving some screenshots from it on Friday so some descriptions would be great!  How does it look to you?  What's the layout and do you think it works?  (I'm not expecting it to look that great.)
Many thanks if you can help out!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/okt34fulaoxg3b7/Screenshot%202016-06-08%2021.18.18.png?dl=1 <comment><USER2> The QRead application window is maximized taking up the whole screenshot.

On the upper left there are the main menus, Document, Navigation, Speech, Window, and Help.

Directly below that are three tabs each containing a document.

Pattern-Oriented architecture, A system of patterns: Volume 1 (Wiley Software Patterns series) The Architecture of Open Source Applications (which is the currently active tab) Surveillance (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 3)

On the same line flush right are small left/right arrow controls that presumably cycle the tabs.

Directly below the tabs is the text of the selected tab, in this case its a chapter listing. There are 4 carriage returns between each of the Chapter listings.

At the bottom of the window is a Document Position slider, that presumably can be moved to scroll quickly through the text.

\</comment><comment>

Seems fairly functional to me, there is also a right scroll bar on the text field that I think serves a similiar purpose to the Document position control although less explicitly.

</comment><comment><USER3> The layout is a pretty typical Windows application layout. Toolbar on the top, below that there is a scrollable text area with navigational tabs across the top of it, probably for working with multiple documents, and finally, at the bottom, there is a horizontal slider labelled "document position". I imagine the slider progresses forward as the text-to-speech progresses, thus showing how far in the document the text-to-speech is, and how much of the document remains.

It looks like a pretty typical Windows application. A bit simple, but there is nothing wrong with that. It looks like something a Computer Science student might build in Visual Basic for a University project. I think it looks a bit dated, like it's running on a Windows 98 computer. I wouldn't call it pretty, but definitely functional. I feel like I could use this application without needing to be instructed on how to use it. The purpose of every GUI element seems obvious, which is a good thing.

I hope I helped! Best of luck in your presentation!

<comment><AUTHOR> You definitely helped. There will probably be one or two other visually impaired people in the audience on Friday so being able to give a detailed description of what everybody else is seeing will be a huge bonus for them also. Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Description:_

A lot like notepad with tabs for several documents, which are also opened in the screenshot. At the bottom, one can see a slider with the title "Document position" for easy navigation. Most importantly the Menu consists of the entries: Document, Navigation, Speech, Window and Help.

 _How does it look to me:_

It looks simple and functional. Seems to be optimized for screen reading as there is not a single icon or graphic.

 _What 's the layout and do you think it works:_

It's an older Windows layout with the menubar at the top, followed by the tab bar. Under that one, and covering something like 90% of the screen, is a notepad-like textarea and finally at the bottom is the slider.

Assuming the menu has submenus and it is not too difficult to navigate around there, I assume it works pretty well as it is as simple as it can get. Maybe the slider handling is difficult because I can not imagine how a blind person can ever click on the tiny position indicator. However, it probably has some keyboard shortcuts. But I can only imagine at this point.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just tab to the slider and adjust it with the arrow keys, page up/down, etc. Same goes for many of the controls inside most apps. I don't have enough usable vision to use a mouse even a little bit.

Thanks for your answers, I've got some really great responses to this posting so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is single large window displaying text, with lots of space between the lines. At the top, there are tabs with the names of different books. It looks like you can scroll in the large window displaying text to read a book. Also at the top, there are dropdown menus with what I assume are different application options. At the bottom, there is a sliding position indicator labeled "Document position".

It looks the way I would expect an older e-book reader application to look. It seems totally usable and intuitive. I know exactly where to click and what I might expect to happen.

There could definitely be some aesthetic improvements, but as far as "UI functionality" is concerned, this is great.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its a very plain layout, mostly a big document area where there is text.

At the top of the window below the window title are the menu items: Document, Navigation, Speech, Window and Help

Below those are open document tabs going horizontally - they can be very verbose like the entire title of the book with author

below that is the big document area there is also a vertical scrollbar to the right of the document.

Below the document is a vertical slider control spanning the width with the name "Document position"

And below that there is apparently a status-bar (like on web browsers, going across horizontally,) and seems to be divided in half for messages either on the left or right. currently blank.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey there, I'll do my best.

QRead looks like a minimal ebook reader application. There is a tab bar at the top to select an open book/document and the book/document is displayed in a large text field in the centre, looking not unlike notepad. At the bottom of the window there is a slider control to navigate the document.

</comment><comment><USER8> It looks very old, kind of like from windows 95 or something. Everyone else described the actual content but that is what stood out to me.

Edit: Clickable link that doesn't download: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/okt34fulaoxg3b7/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/okt34fulaoxg3b7/Screenshot%202016-06-08%2021.18.18.png)

</comment><comment><USER9> You're getting a lot of good help here, so this is just a comment. My name is John. Contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you have an idea for an Amazon Echo application to help blind people.</comment>


Growth Hacking, Email and Mullets - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailgun.net/post/28067460458/growth-hacking-email-and-mullets

<comment><USER2> Jason Putorti had a great post on Quora regarding how Mint.com acquired 1.5M customers without a high viral coefficient. Check it out:

[http://www.quora.com/How-did-Mint-acquire-1-5m+-users- withou...](http://www.quora.com/How-did-Mint-acquire-1-5m+-users-without-a- high-viral-coefficient-scalable-SEO-strategy-or-paid-customer-acquisition- channel)

</comment><comment><USER3> wow, Patrick Mckenzie is really THE main influence behind this kind of marketing.

<http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/>

<comment><USER4> Patrick is smart and good at what he does, but he is by no means the main influence or the main innovator in the space of PPC, SEO, A/B testing, or e-mail marketing. He took a lot of existing information, tools, ideas, and processes and applied them intelligently to his business. Then he wrote about them on his blog.

People in the affiliate space were talking about and doing these things like ten years ago or more. I've been doing it myself on various projects since 2005. I think he started blogging a lot about it in 2007, which is awesome.

Patrick is not the first, and probably isn't the best, but he IS the first to write about it in a way that developers and hackers understand and can get behind. It's great that he's done such a good job of informing so many people of these very useful ideas and techniques.

Just don't think he is THE influence, because like everyone else, he got there by standing on the shoulders of those who came before.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure that Patrick didn't "invent" email marketing, SEO or A/B testing, nor it was my intention to undermine the contributions of all the people involved in the field. I myself have an academic background in most of what is now called "Data Science", so I kind of understand how some areas of knowledge, already applied in industry, can be "rediscovered" and "rebranded" giving the impresion of a "new field"

Maybie I should have been more specific. I meant the influence in the HN microcosm, which sometimes seems to work as a "collective unconscious". Of course this is all gut feeling and maybie I shouldn't had brought it up, but I do get the impresion that either Patrick "gets" some upcoming "trends" beforehand and applies/writes about them in his blog, or he triggers the trends himself (the popularity of HN is no secret).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, now tell us how to actually attract those email subscribers in the first place.

Maybe I'm cynical but getting existing subscribers to do something like a call to action is trivial compared to building that subscriber base in the first place.

<comment><USER6> This is my big question. I mean I can spam a few mailing lists or groups that I am a member of, but we are talking maybe 50-60 people. Nothing Major. I might get a few followers out of it.

-edit to say I have seriously considered waving a sign in the middle of Seattle traffic to get attention. But I doubt that is effective.

<comment><USER7> What are you doing in terms of getting traffic onto your site?

Get traffic, and make emails a micro-conversion. Do whatever it takes onsite to build that list. Landing pages, modal windows, play around and see what gets you email addresses without upsetting users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How do you get those subscribers in the first place? Ask them. Pitch them something. Offer something of value. Give them a free trial if they sign up to the newsletter. Doesn't matter what it is, just find something useful to offer as a reward for signing up and make the offer incredibly visible.

It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

<comment><USER5> How do you get that message in front of potential subscribers, besides advertising?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is the first time I've seen the spacing effect used for spam^Wemail notifications. I'm not sure how I feel about it.</comment>


How to permanently delete a Facebook account - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 <comment><USER4> To all the skeptics in threads like these: asking that Facebook actually, entirely, erase all your data isn't a reasonable demand.

Unless, if course, you're also OK with Facebook's walled-garden, Facebook-is- the-Internet, Compuserve-wasn't-so-bad strategy.

Anyone who ever tried to delete content from the internet knows this: The Internet Archive has long since made a copy of what you're trying to delete. Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever.

If you don't want that, then you'll need to accept that a single entity has full control over what happens with your content, locks it behind a log in so that it can't be easily mined, and does with it what it pleases.

I'm not willing to accept that. I'd rather that my content belongs to everybody than that it belongs to Facebook. But you can't have it both ways.

<comment><USER5> It's perfectly possible and reasonable to delete all of your data.

It's just hard.

We have to do this with our clients if they shift off our platform and believe me, it's not much fun deleting 20-100Gb datasets from a shared database with over 2000 tables in it on production kit.

But we do it, because we are honest.

Facebook are dishonest. Simple as.

<comment><USER4> Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by "our platform", but if I post a youtube video, it gets popular, but I get ashamed of it and decide to delete it again, the video will have spread far and wide to other video sites again.

Some for public web pages and the internet archive, for stackoverflow answers/wikipedia entries and SEO rats, and so on.

How is "your platform" going to help me delete my embarrassing drunk student video from the internet's video sites?

The only way "your platform" can do this, is by actively working to block public access to that video in the first place. Then you can have fun (or not) deleting those 20-100Gb datasets. My point is that that means accepting that you're posting stuff to a walled garden.

<comment><USER6> It sounds like his platform is perhaps a private enterprise platform? In other words, it doesn't sound like Facebook or Youtube where information can easily spread, which is probably a prerequisite for having control over your data.

The company I work for deals with background checks and screening information on behalf of our clients' clients. I could definitely see us safely removing all of that personal information from our system and not being able to recover it. But at the same time, we're a much much much smaller organization compared to Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At least I have the option to delete my FB account. On the other hand, Google has lately been aggressively pushing me to convert my YouTube account into a G+ account. Once this is actually forced upon me, is there any way to 'delete' my Google+ account without deleting my YouTube one?

<comment><USER8> It seems so: [https://plus.google.com/u/0/downgrade/](https://plus.google.com/u/0/downgrade/)

<comment><USER9> Thank you. I never use Google+ and I was so irritated by their youtube migration attempts recently that I didn't look back.

<comment><USER8> That's weird. I got asked _once_ if I wanted to migrate my YouTube account to G+, I said no, and never got asked again.

<comment><USER10> I've seen stories both from people who continually got pestered (like myself) and from people who didn't (such as yourself). I dunno why though.

<comment><USER11> I get all those messages too. I think it's because I'm using an old youtube account that I later connected to the google one.

<comment><USER9> That's what happened to me too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I work on this at Facebook and we do permanently delete your content when you delete your account. It's an interesting distributed systems problem, and we're happy with the framework we've developed for this. We're working on a blog post with more details and hope to publish that soon.

Also, I mentioned why account deletion is a non-trivial problem in this comment thread last week: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947).

<comment><USER13> Just to vouch, though not in Facebook's case, it _is_ complicated.

Many sites use a CDN (Akamai, Limelight, Amazon's Cloudfront, etc.). The whole idea of a CDN is that it distributes content. Even if the origin goes away (your copy), the CDN may continue serving it for a long time. If someone has a specific item URL within that network, they can still access it. Working with CDN APIs to delete content (especially if, say, that content has various instances based on sizes, previews, etc.,) can be ... interesting.

And if third parties are presenting your content, they might also persist it, say as a Google preview or cache, or Archive.org, or other tools.

Even within your own systems, data can be replicated in ways which are difficult to access fully. Backups can exist which cannot be easily accessed for wiping. There are war stories of magically re-appearing data resulting from data recovery operations.

So, while it's possible to flag content as "don't present" pretty easily, actually rooting all of it out thoroughly can be a much more involved task.

Un-seeing is difficult.

<comment><USER14> Facebook uses CDNs; how is it not complicated in the way you describe for them too?

<comment><USER13> I phrased that poorly: I'm vouching for the general case, not for Facebook specifically. I've not worked for them or on their systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Saved to favorites - Right next to Lucy's Instructions for kicking a football.

So I visited my Linkedin profile earlier this week. They had automagically added a long disconnected telephone number to my profile - as in disconnected for over five years. I suspect it came either from extended internet data mining or more likely an obsolete contact in some acquaintance's uploaded address book.

A Facebook profile is mostly a Collection of Pointers. Deleting the pointer doesn't delete the values at the other end. Until garbage collection, they will persist. In other words, unless my friends and family and groups to whom I have sent information delete their accounts, data about me will persist.

Accounts are not zombies. They are vampires, never having died in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER16> pretty sure this is not a real full delete. Probably just switches around the profile_status field:

0 - visible/default/active

1 - <USER2>

2 - it is gone, really! I swear! _crosses fingers_

3 - suspended for tos abuse (we don't like you but your data might be valuable at some point)

edit: also to be fair:

4 - memorial mode

<comment><USER17> Coincidentally, Adam Hupp from FB spoke at HN London last night and he made a comment that when you permanently delete your facebook account, they do actually wipe all the data stored on you. In Europe at least, there are significant due diligence processes that they are legally required to follow in this regard.

<comment><USER16> I have zero trust in Facebook and probably would not even believe them if Mark swore on his mother that they perform a proper wipe of your private data.

With that in mind you shouldn't have a hard time understanding why it sounds to me as if they delete all copies on servers in the EU but US mirrors of your profile remain untouched. How else could their algorithm deduct that your ladyfriend used to be a man without analyzing old conversations from deleted profiles. Could you live in a world where facebook sells birth controll pills to former biological males.

Ok I admit it's a hyperbole/edge case but I know that you know what I mean ;)

<comment><USER18> You can be pretty certain the NSA's copy isn't wiped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In the UK there are laws requiring businesses to retain certain data for several years, so that the authorities can get at it if they need it for evidence in the future. Yeah, I know...

So, is facebook bound by the same sort of laws? If not in the US, what about the UK and other counties? Are there different policies per country, or does FB only do what US law says, if it says anything at all.

If they are bound by such laws, then we cant really blame FB for keeping the data. They may have no choice. Also, by then, the likes of the NSA/GCHQ could already have a copy of such data.

I went through this delete procedure a while ago. I don't know how I try to find out if my data was deleted or not. No way do I want to try to login as I am worried it will reactivate my account and data. So, I'm just left with some one's say so.

I wonder if in the UK a freedom of information act application would reveal it?

Added: How do you even contact facebook? Looked at their site and I see nothing. Of course in order to ask on a FB forum you need to sign up. Is there a simple email address?

</comment><comment><USER20> I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago through this process. I was very careful not to log back in, and when I tried a few months later I was rejected - no account linked with that email address.

Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - <USER3> phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click OK, and I'm redirected to my "new" account with all my old Facebook friends (on the opposite side of the country) showing up as "people I may know."

Nothing is deleted from Facebook, ever.

<comment><USER21> The other possibility is that it's people that have looked up your name on Facebook before you had an account. So HQ logged it as X wanting to find Y. When Y makes an account, we'll let him know X was trying to find them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Careful - if you even attempt to log in during the two week window, they will reset the timer for deletion (it can be easy to almost unconsciously log in if you're a heavy user). They even do it before you confirm or deny that you're reactivating your account. Seems like one of those psychological games: "come on, do you _really_ want to leave? Now you have to wait even longer for your account to be deleted! Just come back to the fold!"

</comment><comment><USER23> UPDATE user_perception SET deleted = 1 WHERE user_id = ?;

</comment><comment><USER24> In terms of privacy I see two categories of data on a network: (1) data that leaked/has been copied to other people and (2) data that hasn't yet leaked.

The thing is you can never know with certainly when a piece of data has changed from "not leaked" to "leaked", so effectively you have to act as if all data is leaked in all circumstances as soon as you put it on the network.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI it takes 14 days to permanently delete the account. They wait for 14 days, if signed in before that you are given an option.

</comment><comment><USER25> Worth adding, because it's not mentioned on the linked page:

When I deleted my account in 2010, there was a one month cooling off period, during which any sign-in would cancel the deletion request.

Perhaps that's sensible to catch malicious/accidental deletions, but I imagine it also makes it hard for Facebook addicts to leave.

<comment><USER26> This is very true. I can't bear the deafening sound of trumpets blowing on FB so rarely visit it. On occasions though, it's service as a 'Friends Reunited v2' works well for me.

<comment><USER9> That's exactly what I used Linkedin for. Don't use the service, but it's a handy way to keep up with my extended business network.

<comment> k-mcgrady Isn't that one of the main features of LinkedIn? Maybe I'm misunderstanding but aren't you essentially saying the equivalent of "I don't use Google's services but it's a handy way to help me find websites"?

<comment><USER9> Somebody "friends" me on LinkedIn, I accept. If I need to contact that person and I don't have their email, I go into LinkedIn and send them a message.

So it's essentially a backup in case my address book fails. I'll pop in there maybe a dozen times a year. That's not exactly using their service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently > deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 > days, you will have the option to cancel your request.

I guess I better delete all cookies before I accidentally get logged in back.

Why can't they just delete it?

<comment><USER28> What if someone knew your password and requested it to be deleted? Wouldn't you be "Why can't they just not delete it after a period of days?"?

<comment><USER27> Ah, the old security vs freedom debate.

I would know whom to blame if I had used a weak password that got cracked in order to delete my account. And I think you should expect the same from every reasonable adult.

But yeah, FB should add a stronger auth for that dialog - more than a password and a captcha field.

<comment><USER29> > And I think you should expect the same from every reasonable adult.

FYI: Facebook is not primarily populated by reasonable adults.

<comment><USER27> Can minors legally accept a contract like the Facebook TOS in the US? (Real question, I'm not an US citizen and not a lawyer).

<comment><USER30> I think the emphasis was on "reasonable"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> THANK YOU! I just needed to erase a FB account today and after struggling for a while I came across this. Made my life so much easier. Thanks again!

</comment><comment><USER32> If a user deletes their account using one of these forms, can a new account be created with the same username ?

<comment> k-mcgrady I doubt it because your username is linked with your Facebook email address (email@example.com). It would probably lead to other people getting your emails if they reassigned the username. I was actually surprised when I found out Twitter reassigns usernames. After I closed my account it wasn't long before someone took mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just needed to erase a FB account today and came across this. Made my life so much easier. Thanks you!

</comment><comment><USER33> I gather this link points to facebook.com. Funny, I deleted my facebook account years ago, but Im sure as heck not going to click on a facebook.com link and find out if I really did!

(subtitle, I react to facebook.com links as if they were phishing links and what would be the difference? scraping my contacts, selling my personal data, rewriting my TOS at every opportunity. I view the home page of facebook even without logging in as a phishing site. Sorry Mark. :()

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "I gather this link points to facebook.com. Funny, I deleted my facebook account years ago, but Im sure as heck not going to click on a facebook.com link and find out if I really did!"

So although you don't want a Facebook account, if you have one you forgot about you'd rather not know about it??

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Good try Facebook, good try ....</comment>


Covid-19 treatment program recommended by doctors in Wuhan - <AUTHOR> https://www.covid19readings.com/articles/2020/02/14/Wuhan-Union-Hospital-COVID-19-Treatment-Program <comment><USER2> Can you remove the 'Please share!" part in the title?

"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important." [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated.</comment></comment>


David G. Hartwell (1941-2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.locusmag.com/News/2016/01/david-g-hartwell-1941-2016/ <comment><USER2> I will miss his editorial voice.

I have two or three Hard SF and Space Opera anthologies edited by him. Wonderful material bought to my attention through his efforts.</comment>


I found a tech co-founder. Here is how. - <AUTHOR> http://junecpy.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/i-found-a-tech-co-founder-here-is-how-1-of-4/

<comment><USER2> Interesting! 1.5 years is quite long, I appreciate your tenacity.

<comment><AUTHOR> haha... thanks! Only 2 months in that without full time job, so it's not that hard.</comment></comment>


Does Exercise Boost Immunity? - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/phys-ed-does-exercise-boost-immunity/

<comment><USER3> I recommend experimenting to figure out what works best for you.

My personal experience matches:

[http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-241-285-- 12386...](http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-241-285-- 12386-0,00.html)

IMO the studies cited there mirror the results with the mice, so the best bet is to run the 30-75 minutes recommended in the Runner's World article, not several hours as used in the experiments.

R.I.P. mice.

</comment><comment><USER4> In the first experiment's and 2nd experiment's experimental group, it sounds like the mice over trained. It's a commonly known phenomena among athletes and these symptoms certainly sounded like it.

It would have been more interesting if they had trained the mice up over a longer period of time and then exposed them to flu.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, a big reason people exercise is for the long-term health benefits. Of course the study is interesting, but not as something that should directly affect personal workout routines.

<comment><USER6> Exercise for officer workers is definitely needed, however there are serious side effects to over-exercise. Not only can it be counter-productive (increasing the time to actually get physically fit) but opens you up to prolonged infections.

The big problem is that lack of rest between exercise can increase the risk of strokes and other circulatory problems, which is extremely counter productive. Damage to connective tissue and the consumption of muscle tissue during exercise can have life long effects (for anyone who doesn't know, your heart is a contractile protein, which is the type of protein consumed during excessive exercise periods).

Regular and regulated exercise are the key to health, and it has to be a regimen built for you. For some people over-exercise can be beyond a 20-minute light jog, for others it's a marathon. Not everyone is a marathon runner or body builder and believing differently is dangerous to your health.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do 30 minutes of treadmill every day (between 6 and 9 Km/h, with 4%-12% inclination) and my feeling is that my body really enjoy this. It seems natural btw that stressing too much the body is not a good idea for your immune system.

<comment><USER6> It's rather logical in fact. When you exercise you damage your body, keeping your repair mechanisms active.

However overexercise typically does more damage in a session than your body can heal before your next session. It's rather safe to assume that when you contract a virus that when the immunological warfare is going on (our bodies first response is rather brutal and untargeted, the sore throat from a flu isn't from the flu, it's from your own immune cells killing - IIRC - <USER2> 20 healthy throat cells for 1 infected cell) and damaging our body that the repair mechanisms are coping with all too much.

Not exercising doesn't put stress on our healing mechanisms, however it doesn't keep them active and trained (so to speak). Put it this way, the Police would take considerably longer to get to your house from the station than from one of their patrol routes; essentially the same is for our healing mechanism.

Even if exercise doesn't have an effect on our immune system, I'm sure it will certainly increase recovery time (assuming you're not on the treadmill when sick) by decreasing healing time, which is ostensibly the factor that kills you and not the virus itself (assuming you haven't contracted the 1918 Spanish flu).

I've only ever had one noticeable case of the flu (which happened when I moved country, so I'm unsure if it was a strain I'd never experience, similar to the current H1N1 'pandemic'), which I believe is due to frequent exercise (a job involving heavy lifting ~90lbs and constant weight carrying ~10 lb tool pouch and ~10lb hammer drill).

<comment><USER7> Thanks, interesting explanation. Maybe another factor is the change in blood pressure, because while you exercise parts of your body that normally receive little blood, will receive a lot more, and blood carries antibodies that may kill viruses before they start to spread in the rest of the body.

I noticed that sometimes when I had a start of a cold, but still feeling well, to exercise lead to a stop of the infection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's missing here - and which you can't really test with mice - is the emotional side of things.

Exercising because you've been placed on a treadmill, as was the case with the mice, is akin to people exercising because they "have to", or get a trainer to "stay motivated". When you actually do it because you "want" to and it feels good it's a different story because the feelgood chemicals have a lot to do with your immune system.

For many years during my late teens and early twenties I went to the gym so that I could get buff and be fit. I hated exercise, but forced myself to do it and pushed through the pain. Yes I even got a personal trainer at one stage. The results? I either got sick, injured myself, or just plain depressed (at the lack of results), only to repeat the cycle over and over again.

Back to this article - what I'm trying to say is that stress, anxiety, happiness all play a HUGE part in your immune system (and fitness).

</comment><comment><USER9> I do regular strenuous training, and this makes sense to me. You are weaker immediately after a strenuous workout than immediately before. That's why adequate recovery time is just as important as workout time. It makes sense to me that immediately after the workout, before your body has had a chance to recover, your immune system is weakened and you're more susceptible to illness.

Personally, what keeps me coming back to my workouts is the challenge. I'll take the extra risk of the occasional cold or flu over the risk of dropping my workouts entirely from disinterest.

<comment><USER10> Don't forget that the immune system doesn't just fight the flu, it also fights cancer.

<comment><USER9> I also risk my life daily by driving a car. There's a point at which you have to accept the risks of certain activities to lead the life you want.

<comment><USER10> Absolutely, just what many smokers tell me and they are right. I just think we should at least know about the risks.

<comment><USER9> Ha, I've never had my workouts compared to smoking. My workouts have many other positive benefits, which I think outweigh the risks. Smoking has no positive benefit other than it's something to do while sitting in bars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Like anything in life, it's about balance. Eat healthy and balanced diet and exercise 3 to 4x a week. If you over extend yourself, you will get hurt or sick. Ditto if you do nothing and overeat.

</comment><comment><USER12> The answer is no; it decreases it.

My personal experiences match the findings of these studies. My diet and supplement use is much better during heavy training and exercise periods, so I'm hoping that that will offset it.

<comment><USER13> er, what about the second experiment, where light exercise reduced infection to 12% versus 50% for no exercise and 70% for 5x as much exercise?

that seems to suggest that doing a little bit of work keeps the body healthy.

furthermore, the study doesn't say what the mice did before the experiement. perhaps the mice were used to 20-30 minutes of exercise a day, and it is change that is most damaging. what one mice considers exhausting, another mouse might find boring.

edit: the article mentions "(Although definitions of intense exercise vary among researchers, most define it as a workout or race of an hour or more during which your heart rate and respiration soar and you feel as if you are working hard.)"

<comment><USER14> Not going to touch on the finer points of the atheltisim of the mice. As your right it would clearly alter the results.

But I do have a question.

What is the ratio of 30 minutes of exercise for a mouse compared to a human. As I would be highly surprised if its 1 to 1.

This article reinforces the need to listen to your body and react accordingly.

On a side note for those looking for ideas.

Based on the example in the article...

I would happily volunteer to take a saliva test before running and after. To help build up the data available for the test.

A website to cater for "crowd sourced data" scientific discovery would be an amazing site. ( clearly there would be pitfalls, im just throwing it out there )

<comment><USER15> patientslikeme.com is doing crowdsourced "scientific discovery." I use quotes because of the obvious difficulties in having proper scientific procedures in crowdsourced efforts, but nevertheless I think it's useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Were the mice in shape?

</comment><comment><USER17> The comments in this thread will revolve around running. Running is the main form of exercise accepted by HN.

Forget playing team sports or weight lifting. Cycling might crack through HN's barriers once someone experiments with pedaling barefoot.

<comment><USER18> My exercise regime involves taking the stairs to my apartment. I also keep all my snack food and cigarettes in my car.

<comment><USER19> How many flights of stairs? I used to live in floor 5, and can run up all the way without getting out of breath. However I tried to run to floor 16 in a hotel a few days ago, and was powered out around floor 8.

<comment><USER18> Just 6 flights - but it is fairly high (each level is fairly high).

At work it is 13 which is better exercise (the lifts are also shaky so the stairs at least feels safer).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Circle Trailer: Emma Watson Takes on Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/12/the-circle-trailer/ <comment><USER2> It'll be interesting to see how well they pull this off. I read the novel and enjoyed it, although not as much as I had (hoped|expected|whatever) based on the premise. Still, the movie adaptation should have a chance to be pretty interesting.

And on a sorta related note... I just started watching Black Mirror and halfway though episode one (if not earlier), I was thinking "this is like _The Circle_ by Dave Eggers".</comment>


Snapchat $3 Billion Rejection Letter to Mark Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> http://www.policymic.com/articles/73429/snapchat-ceo-evan-spiegel-s-3-billion-rejection-letter-to-facebook-s-mark-zuckerberg#

<comment><USER2> _Editor 's note: This is a satire, but you already knew that, right?_

In case it's missed.

</comment><comment><USER3> $3 billion cash is a no brainer.

I for one would certainly feel schadenfreude if SnapChat becomes Digg 2.0, spurning a heck of an offer and then losing steam and becoming the redheaded stepchild of startups. $3billion is a heck of a price for a company that is super popular but has little to no lock in.

It's only worth $3 billion because there are three major competing social networks (Google, Twitter and Facebook) and Facebook doesn't need it, but doesn't want either Twitter or Facebook to have it.

I can't even imagine what companies like Tencent think they'll get out of acquiring SnapChat.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is funny, but at the same time, I don't think turning it down was so crazy. The founders already got to take $10MM off the table, so anything they do now is fairly risk free. Might as well shoot for the stars. As a platform, I think it's much more interesting than FB. FB updates are more of an announcement (that I scroll through thinking "don't care"), while snapchats are like playful messages than make you feel like someone is saying "hey" without an agenda.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's an unspoken rule that satire should be funny.

</comment><comment><USER6> privileged and a douchebag, star CEO

<comment><USER7> It's a satire piece, not actually written by the CEO ...</comment></comment>


Tools for designers – Color Palettes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@order_group/tools-for-designers-color-palettes-335181d612c3

<comment><USER2> I`ve tried several tools and as for me the most comfortable is "Adobe Color (Kuler)". Yep, Adobe makes really great product. Than take for example "Color Hailpixel". It is uncomfortable and user can be lost with mouse hover to find need color. "Coolors" is a little bit similar to "Kuler" but has less opportunities. Anyway if you are making some graphic design each program has the same tools already build into the program. And if you just need quick to find the right color – this is tools are really nice.</comment>


Prince Has Died - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/21/11480332/prince-has-died-tmz-reports <comment><USER2> Truly one of the all-time greats. Minnesota will go into deep mourning tonight and tomorrow we'll all wear purple and throw a hell of a party.

When asked what it feels like to be the best guitarist alive, Eric Clapton said, "I don't know. Ask Prince."

<comment><USER3> I'm sure Clapton is mourning his promotion today. Sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A nice writeup by the LAT in 1996 about how much Prince strove to have things his way when it came to publishing:

[http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms- prince-a...](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-prince- archive-19960714-story.html)

> _Tensions between artist and label first came to a boil in early 1994, when > he decided to drop the name Prince and asked that people start identifying > him by an unpronounceable symbol--thus disassociating himself, in a most > burdensome way, from the guy who recorded some of the most popular and > acclaimed albums of the '80s._

> _To further express his frustration, he stopped performing Prince-era > material in concert and began appearing in public with the word "slave" > written on his cheek. In 1994, he also released "The Most Beautiful Girl in > the World," a successful single that was distributed not by Warner Bros. but > by the independent company Bellmark Records._

> _In one breath, he 'll say, "If I knew the things I know now before, I > wouldn't be in the music industry." In the next, he'll talk about his craft > with such passion that it's impossible to imagine him working in any other > field._

I suppose few of his independent ambitions here sound that crazy today...but this was in 1996, 5 years before the first iPod.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "Tensions between artist and label first came to a boil in early 1994, when he decided to drop the name Prince and asked that people start identifying him by an unpronounceable symbol--thus disassociating himself, in a most burdensome way, from the guy who recorded some of the most popular and acclaimed albums of the '80s."

I might be wrong but my understanding is that it was a way to get around his contract with his record label (not to disassociate himself from past material).

<comment><USER5> > I might be wrong but my understanding is that it was a way to get around his > contract with his record label

My understanding is that it was a hack to make life difficult for the label while fulfilling the letter of the contract in order to prod them to release from the contract. I think marketing his music became a headache for the label, and DJs ended up calling him "the artiste formerly known as Prince"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I imagine TMZ is blacklisted from normal submissions, but they deserve the credit for breaking the story while having a nice roundup of highlights in his life, including this solo at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=214&v=6SFNW5F8K9...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=214&v=6SFNW5F8K9Y)

[http://www.tmz.com/2016/04/21/prince-dead- at-57/](http://www.tmz.com/2016/04/21/prince-dead-at-57/)

<comment><USER6> And while I am sure there will be a lot of "why is this story on HN" comments, Prince was an occasional news maker in the area of digital music.

He was a bit of a curmudgeon when it came to digital music in that he wasn't a fan of it or the services that provide it.

Interesting, however, that he was a fan of SoundCloud.

[http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/957510/prince-the- int...](http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/957510/prince-the-internet-is- over)

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110624/12140014847/princ...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110624/12140014847/prince- digital-music-has-different-impact-your-brain.shtml)

[http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/02/prince-pulls- mu...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/02/prince-pulls-music-from- all-streaming-services-except-tidal)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I understand that HN isn't supposed to be a replay of mainstream front pages...but some celebs are transcendent -- especially someone as dominant and skilled in his work as Prince was. Bowie got a decent amount of discussion here, seems like Prince should warrant a mention, particularly because of how young he died.

<comment><USER7> amen

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ƭ̵̬̊

[http://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince- symbol-i...](http://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in- unicode/)

<comment><USER9> Now is the time to lobby the Unicode Consortium. Love Symbol codepoint now!

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r This article has at least one inaccuracy - they claim he died in his "Paisley Park home", making it sound like Paisley Park is a city. It isn't, it's just the name of the studio he built. I drive past it often.

The statement from the local paper is much more useful: [http://www.startribune.com/authorities-investigating- death-a...](http://www.startribune.com/authorities-investigating-death-at- prince-s-paisley-park/376578441/#1)

</comment><comment><USER10> "Dearly beloved... We are gathered here today to celebrate this consensual illusion called 'life'..."

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't want to be that guy but I would like to know if his faith, Jehovah's Witness, has anything to do with not treating his 'Flu'. If he had a treatable condition it would be a shame if he died for somebody's idea of God.

<comment><USER12> Unless it involves blood transfusions in any form, there's no issue.

At the risk of being argumentative, it would be a case of dying for his own idea of God.

From my point of view, he wasn't a straight-and-narrow JW member because he kept performing material which didn't fit that view. I doubt that anyone had the pleasant surprise of Prince knocking on their door one Saturday morning.

<comment><USER13> [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/24/soup-with- princ...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/24/soup-with-prince)

"Prince had his change of faith, he said, after a two-year-long debate with a musician friend, Larry Graham. "I don't see it really as a conversion," he said. "More, you know, it's a realization. It's like Morpheus and Neo in 'The Matrix.' " He attends meetings at a local Kingdom Hall, and, like his fellow- witnesses, he leaves his gated community from time to time to knock on doors and proselytize. "Sometimes people act surprised, but mostly they're really cool about it," he said."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hate you, 2016.

</comment><comment><USER15> From most reports the guy pretty much lived in the studio. It shows on something as utterly amazing as "Plectrumelectrum" though some might disagree with me. Very fitting he was in his creative space when he departed. Will be very much missed for a variety of music and individualistic reasons.

<comment><USER16> He played basketball too.

<comment><USER15> That he did. I saw an interview with his High School coach. Apparently even as a Freshman on Varsity, he wanted more playing time and was...vocal about it haha. Quite a dynamic person, no doubt. Sad he's no longer among us but what a legacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Bowie, and now Prince?? Dylan, hang in there...

<comment><USER18> so Chyna doesn't even rank? where is your artistic compassion?

<comment><USER18> one thing I've learned is that too many people on HN have absolutely NO sense of humor.

<comment><USER19> There's something a little distasteful about making jokes like that about a person on the day of their death.

<comment><USER18> you know what they say about opinions...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Eric Clapton was asked what it feels like to be the best guitarist alive. He said, "I don't know. Ask Prince."

Minnesota will be collectively mourning with the rest of the music community.

All of our guitars gently weep.

</comment><comment><USER21> Given the current linked article clearly is hinting at something.

It was AIDS complications is what other forums are saying.

If this is considered irrelevant on HN perhaps the article linked shouldn't mention anything.

</comment><comment><USER22> i do remember that, in the music industry, he was quite an early adopter of interactive technology when he released "(Prince) interactive" back in 1994 [http://www.mobygames.com/game/prince- interactive](http://www.mobygames.com/game/prince-interactive)

</comment><comment><USER23> I suppose he died doing what he loved. There are worse ways to go. Requiescat in pacem!

</comment><comment><USER24> RIP you prolific genius. He left us with so much.

</comment><comment><USER25> He was truly creative. Much can be learned from him and applied to a variety of efforts.

</comment><comment><USER26> ...was formerly alive.

</comment><comment><USER27> Doves are crying. RIP

</comment><comment><USER25> I really admired him.

</comment><comment><USER28> He died young. Fame kills.

<comment><USER29> > _Fame kills_

The cause of death has not been released yet, but reports say he had the flu. That has nothing to do with fame.

<comment><USER30> There are also rumours that he had AIDS, although I haven't heard this from any official sources at this point.

<comment><USER31> If it's true, I doubt we'll ever know. The flu can take you down, though. As hard as Prince was known to work, I have to wonder if his body just couldn't fight it off. Happened to my uncle in his early fifties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0lLDyknUjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0lLDyknUjw)</comment>