Why I get my entertainment via BitTorrent - <AUTHOR> http://luminarious.tumblr.com/post/5416346842/20-web-services-not-available-in-estonia <comment><USER2> As someone with money who enjoys a lot of American TV, I'm not really interested in excuses why these services are not available worldwide.

Quit making excuses and make it happen. The torrenters don't seem to have any trouble building a global distribution network, and they are hiding from the law while simultaneously kicking your butt.

If you don't want to make it happen, quit whining about losing money. I have money and you have TV shows, so let's make a deal.

<comment><USER3> The delay in geographical releases is because studios license the copyrights to a regional studio or a distribution company.

Unfortunately, this arrangements prohibits them to use any alternate distribution channels to release the content on their own. Also, the regional company is unlikely to have any arrangements with services like Netflix and Hulu.

In the end its all about the money and bureaucracy.

<comment><USER4> Surely they realise they are losing money?

<comment><USER5> Are they losing money? If you canabalize your existing revenue stream by destroying distributor relationships in exchange for a new revenue stream that is tiny, you will lose money. Contrary to popular belief, most of the people making lots of money as executives are not stupid. They just have more data than the arm-chair quarterbacks have. What seems 'obvious' to us hackers is not always as clear cut when you have the numbers in front of you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I try to explain this type of thing to people who are ardently anti-piracy:

You can never, ever, expect people to miss out on the culture that's happening during their lives.

If money, or geography, or whatever is preventing it, they'll still do the best they can to make sure they don't miss anything.

<comment><USER7> This is so true, and I reckon people in the US have no idea how crippled online access to entertainment is abroad. Moreover, culture is going global, which should be an opportunity, but in reality exacerbates the problem.

Recently, while in Germany, I found Youtube content to be highly restricted. I could not view music videos that I can view in Ireland, and I find this arbitrary restriction oppressive. I would imagine that others do too, and will just avail of whatever other means are available to them. Torrents and such are just filling a vacuum.

In Ireland none of the mainstream music streaming services (Spotify, Rhapsody) are available. Grooveshark is.

<comment><USER8> This is very annoying, especially in situations when it's not a music video, but the video has some background music not available in my county.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As an English speaker in Germany I was particularly interested in using things like iTunes (which is available here) to access TV.

What do you know, it is exclusively German language content. And it is also only released when it airs in Germany rather than when it first airs in the US or the UK.

Where is the logic there? If I wanted to get German language TV when it airs on TV, I would just watch TV.

The whole system doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER10> The whole system makes eminent sense. Content that has been permitted by the owner is released in your country, when the owner permits. If you are resort to piracy because of this, you are still stealing.

<comment><USER11> _Content that has been permitted by the owner is released in your country, when the owner permits._

There is no legal means for someone to restrict where and when I can and cannot choose to view or use content I own, as much as they would love to think so. And they indeed love to think so: I've actually seen companies claim that it is illegal to _use the software they sell outside of the country they sell it in_.

If a movie by company X is released in country A but not country B, company X cannot prevent me from watching their movie in country B. I may have to go out of my way to import a copy, but there is nothing illegal about doing so (at least not under the laws of typical Western countries).

If this wasn't true, it would basically be illegal to take any sort of media- carrying device (laptop, iPod, etc) outside of the country where you bought the relevant media.

<comment><USER12> And so you can import it, assuming your country's laws permit.

But if you want the content owner to sell it to you directly, you'll have to wait for them want to do so. The reasons for them not wanting to do so could include laws, expenses, or other craziness that you aren't aware of.

Believe it or not, we experience the same crap here in the US in regards to foreign stuff. BBC shows are really popular here, but are usually delayed at best. Trying to find foreign-language stuff is almost impossible.

So while I share your pain, I also know that there's more to it than it might appear at first glance.

<comment><USER13> > But if you want the content owner to sell it to you directly, you'll have to > wait for them want to do so.

.. or use BitTorrent!

If the content owner refuses to sell the content to someone, then that person isn't depriving them of any income by pirating it. If an activity harms no- one, then it can't be immoral to do it. If the law says otherwise, it's a bad law.

<comment><USER12> If someone refuses to sell you the Mona Lisa for the price you want, it's okay to copy it?

Because let's be honest, they aren't just refusing to sell the TV episode to you... They're refusing to sell it at market rates. If you offered them a million dollars for the latest episode of XYZ show, they'd make it happen on your schedule.

What you're saying is that if you can't have it your way, it's perfectly ethical to just take it. And I can't agree with that.

<comment><USER14> >If someone refuses to sell you the Mona Lisa for the price you want, it's okay to copy it?

Yes! The Mona Lisa is in the public domain, copying it is perfectly acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And that's why the European counterparts of MAFIAA shouldn't be able to appeal to lost sales in many of these countries because _don't have any fucking sales to lose_.

I've long advocated a fair-use rule that where a copyrighted work in some format isn't readily for sale in some geographical area, then people in that area should have the legal right to produce a copy of it in that format for themselves. The format is relevant because if people want CDs or uncompressed FLAC albums but they can only buy a lousy DRM-ridden 128Kbit/s MP3 instead, it shouldn't count.

Same goes with old music or films: if nobody's selling, people have the legal right to copy. If the copyright holder decides to start selling again, the legal right to copy goes away. Then the longevity of a copyright would matter much less.

<comment><USER16> Indeed. I'd add to that that paying 15 Euro for a BluRay may be perfectly acceptable in the Western world, but a huge budget hit in the rest of the world.

The buy 'physical media via the Internet' argument doesn't fly there either.

<comment><USER17> Right, and a 250k Lamborghini is also a huge budget hit for me in the West. Which is why I drive a shitty Citroen.

I'm sick and tired of the entitled whining. Nobody owes you the right to listen to the latest album of whoever is at the top of the charts; in fact, nobody owes you anything but what they agreed on. The proposition is very clear: there are people who create something. They give it to you, on the condition that you pay for it. They may not want to offer it to you because it's too hard to do business in your country. If you don't agree to their terms, or their decision not to offer you their stuff, that still doesn't give you the right to just take whatever it is they're offering from another source.

Feel free to find other people who make things you want and offer it at terms you accept; or petition people to offer things at a cheaper price; or whatever. But taking things from creators against their wishes is not only criminal but also immoral.

(Maybe you still do it, even if it's criminal and immoral. That's a personal decision. But then just acknowledge it for what it is and don't try to weasel yourself out of the moral responsibility).

<comment><USER18> I gather from your comments that your moral code depends heavily on the rule of law. Many people don't base their moral code very heavily on the laws currently on the books, except as far as those laws reflect the original intent of law - to make the world a better place to live overall. It's generally agreed upon that stealing physical goods, murdering, etc. make the world a more unruly, unpleasant, inefficient, discouraging place for meek, cooperative people. Filesharing doesn't fall into the same league in those terms, so many don't really believe it's immoral, especially if one wasn't going to buy those files if there was no alternative. In that case, it's like happiness created from nothing. This other moral code makes the morality question a good bit murkier.

That's my understanding, anyway.

<comment><USER5> If filesharing undermines the creators to the point where they stop creating, will the world be a better place? In case you haven't noticed, we've had YouTube for years but the home-made movies are not on the same level as the ones produced by the major studies. Most indy bands are good, but can't reach their full potential without financial support. Filesharing undermines that whole system, especially because it would be near technically impossible to prevent something from being shared in all countries except those where the work is not being sold.

<comment><USER18> Good question, but the more important one is whether filesharing is doing that. This is where the question of whether someone would have bought something otherwise or not comes in.

Anecdotally, most of the people I know who fileshare just consume more now than they did, in a wider variety. Some of them have stopped buying stuff, but most of them haven't, and many went to Hulu, iTunes, Grooveshark, Pandora, etc. as soon as those became a good enough alternative.

You don't need to prevent it completely, that's putting your eyes on the wrong goal (though this seems to be the tack that they're taking). You just need to make the alternative as easy or easier and inexpensive enough to not think too much about if you're moderately well off. It's a stupid company that tries to force their market to act in the way they want it to, rather than finding a way to cater to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is no need to rationalize why you use Bittorrent, there is no argument to win and nothing to defend.

It's not stealing, it's not not stealing it's just a fact that people will continue to use bittorrents as long as there is too much friction to get it legally.

Bittorrent will be around as long as the content owners insist on localizing copyright and not offering their content to a globally oriented customer base.

<comment><USER20> I think that's a bit of an oversimplification.

You can use bittorrent to download and watch a film that's been released on DVD. This deprives the content created of a sale/hire/watch on demand, so in theory they lose out on revenue.

You can also use bittorrent to download and watch a TV show that was broadcast in another country the night before and that will never be shown on your country's TV network. Think about NBC or Comedy Central - 30 Rock and Colbert aren't going to be broadcast in the UK any time soon, and their content owners refuse to let international users watch online. Torrenting this content is therefore a victimless crime.

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't surprise me either if the ones torrenting end up spending more money on the show that those who catch is casually when it finally does get aired.

I've been to concerts where the artist is touring Australia for the first time and hasn't ever done any Australia specific marketing and they manage to fill out venues. Doubt that would have happened before file sharing.

<comment><USER20> Without a doubt - look at a band like Tool. I don't mind saying that I torrented every one of their albums. Grew to love them, bought the CDs, went to a dozen of their concerts, spent at least £50 on merchandise over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Same goes for Holland, this, and TV is very unreliable and a year behind the USA. Plus movies are usually released a few months after the USA.

<comment><USER23> Germany is usually even more behind, _and_ TV broadcasts and movies are horribly dubbed versions. I'd gladly pay three to five times as much for Netflix as it costs in the US if it were available...

<comment><USER6> If you're willing to pay that much, sounds like you just need to grab a $20/month server in the US and use it as a VPN endpoint, then use whatever services in the US that you like.

<comment><USER24> For Netflix, he'd also need a US credit card.

<comment><USER6> Ah, didn't realize that. Maybe gifting or something would work.

<comment><USER16> The better alternative is iTunes. You don't need a VPN, since Apple is not blocking based on IP address.

You'll only need a US address (I am at Starbucks pretty much all day) and a US iTunes gift card (easy to get by), and you are settled.

It's a grey area, but MAFIAA should prefer it over piracy ;).

<comment><USER25> It is illegal in pretty much every country (US included) to give fake information. If you don't own/rent a place in the US, you shouldn't inform it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, this is just rationalizing.

Stealing something (or obtaining it illegally) just because someone doesn't want to sell it to you (or give it to you for free) is still stealing (or obtaining it illegally), regardless of the fact that you want it so bad.

As long as you own something, you have the right to choose if you want to sell it to some country, give it for free or do whatever else.

<comment><USER27> It really is a symptom of the decadence and entitlement of your typical Internet user. If somebody doesn't want you to have a thing they made, why not do without instead of acting against their wishes, taking it illegally, and rationalizing it?

<comment><USER28> Because it's easy, and the costs are low?

I sometimes torrent TV shows that I forgot to DVR and don't really feel bad about it.

 _It really is a symptom of the decadence and entitlement of your typical Internet user._

If the entire internet disappeared tomorrow, am I allowed to complain about it? Where do you draw the line? ("Be thankful for your brocolli, there are starving children in Africa")

<comment><USER27> Breaking car windows with spark plug ceramic is easy and just like piracy, you don't directly bear the costs. Cheap and easy isn't a justification for immoral behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I recently found an interesting DNS based service that will allow you to access some of them:

[http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2011/04/07/hulu-and-iplayer- outsi...](http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2011/04/07/hulu-and-iplayer-outside-the- us-without-a-vpn)

The advantage over a VPN-based solution is that there is no need to route all of your traffic over the VPN. Most of the time they only redirect the geo- location stuff and once you receive the videostream URL, that transfer will go over your 'regular' connection. It also allows you to just put their DNS servers into your router and your Apple TV / Wii / iPad ... will automatically use the service.

Security wise, they might be able to redirect any domain resolution to their servers, but they still won't be able to fake the SSL certificates. As long as you're using IMAPS/HTTPS/*S you should be fine I guess.

<comment><USER30> For many of the services listed you need a credit card with an American address.

<comment><USER29> They link to a virtual debit card:

<http://www.unblock-us.com/how-to-set-up/netflix/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And even if some of these services are available in your country you might get screwed. For instance I once bought a music album on iTunes. A few weeks later a friend of mine sends me a link on grooveshark to a song from the same artist. I've never heard the song before but to my surprise it is supposed to be on the same album I own. I do a little research and find out that the album sold in US iTunes store contains two extra bonus tracks! I check to see if there is another version of the same album in my 'local' iTunes store, but no, it appears these two bonus tracks are only available in the US

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't think that the services mentioned _want_ to exclude non-Americans. All of them deal with music or video, both of which require country-specific licensing.

<comment><USER33> slicing up markets artificially is the first sign of collusion, cartels.

<comment><USER34> In this case the boundaries aren't artificial, they're historic.

The world will move to laws which are unified (or at least close enough) and allow day and date releases and true international markets but it's unrealistic to expect it to happen overnight.

But a resistance to change (some of which will have it's feet in positive intentions, some in negative) is different to collusion.

<comment><USER35> _In this case the boundaries aren't artificial, they're historic._

They can be both, actually.

 _The world will move to laws which are unified (or at least close enough) and allow day and date releases and true international markets but it's unrealistic to expect it to happen overnight._

I hope you're right about this.

<comment><USER34> Sorry, should have been clearer - they may be artificial but these are historic boundaries which while they may support (in some ways) certain business interests, are not there because of them and in almost all cases pre- date those interests by a considerable period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Same thing happens in Argentina, I tried some times to buy certain games online, but for some weird reason for digital content, the purchased is limited to the US and Mexico. Why does this limitation even exist for digital content?

<comment><USER25> I've only seen one Steam game that couldn't be bought in Brazil (I still don't know why).

I'm guessing it depends at which store you are buying it. Many of the US stores don't sell to foreigners, though. Could they be afraid of fraud?

<comment><USER36> I saw it in several games in Direct2Drive, (this games had the same restrictions in other online stores). I don't think is fraud though, as the same site sells other games to Argentina. This is what direct2drive says on the matter: Why are some games "country restricted" ? This is a limitation set by either the game developer or the internet distribution laws your country. We have to abide by both of their wishes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Some of these (I'm looking at you, BBC iPlayer) aren't even available in the USA.

<comment><USER38> And likewise none of the streaming options for American shows are available in the UK.

Now, with American shows, I think there could easily be a good business model - we've seen English TV channels pick up American shows (sometimes running almost in sync with America, more often than not running a year or two behind) with success. Examples include The West Wing, Friends, Glee, Will and Grace, Family Guy, CSI and so on. So I think there could be enough of an audience over here to be worth doing it.

But iPlayer for non-UK viewers, it just isn't feasible. Firstly, BBC have the content licensed for UK viewing only, and they can't pay extra for international viewers because they are funded by the public (TV license over here). For the BBC website, international viewers see adverts, but that model can't be extended to iPlayer for a few reasons. Firstly, and least importantly, BBC never puts advertising into its shows, and they don't want to go against that, even for an international audience. That could be got around quite easily. Secondly, selling video adverts is a lot more complex (from a sales point of view, not technical) than shoving them into a website, it would take more work from them. And finally, if they were to sell adverts and open up iPlayer to an international audience, I doubt they would make enough revenue from the adverts to justify internationally licensing the content, i.e. there just wouldn't be enough people watching it.

<comment><USER39> Why couldn't the BBC charge international viewers directly? $(License_fee/12) per month, say.

<comment><USER38> Technically they could, but it would mean creating and managing a new license fee system.

Right now there's no enforcement of the license fee, just the knowledge that, to watch live broadcasts (either on TV or online) you must have a license, and if a TV license inspector catches you, you'll be in trouble.

<comment><USER40> With the iPlayer service, if you watch any of the live-streaming channels and you don't have a TV License you will eventually get a letter informing you that you need to pay the license fee. Fail to obtain the TV License after that point and you are subject to the normal fines.

I think the BBC must have some form of tie-in with the ISPs as I know a number of people that have had this happen to them.

<comment><USER38> I'm regularly tunnelling all my traffic through a UK VPS (not for geolocation regions, I'm in the UK myself anyway), and never had any issues watching iPlayer.

And if I watched to avoid it, I could always use something like www.tvcatchup.com to watch the live content, and just go onto the iPlayer for VOD content (for which you don't need a license).

I wonder - traditionally a TV license is per household, not per person, meaning that if I want to watch on a TV in a friend's house, they need to have a license, not me. With internet access, how does that work. For example, say they were able to prove I had been watching iPlayer live streams in my house, what if it was a friend watching on their laptop, and they own a license? What if you're watching from a public WiFi or a 3G connection on a train? The "license for the house" doesn't quite translate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm going to guess that a lot of the reason these services aren't available in a lot of other countries is not that they don't want your money, but rather that your governments either have ridiculous regulations to navigate, or there are concerns about their ability to protect intellectual property rights.

<comment><USER42> I highly doubt it is the former. I hear the US have pretty ridiculous regulations if you want to do crazy things like broadcast videos over the internet: <http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.html>. Somehow these services manage to exist in the US regardless of the ridiculous regulations there, but allofmp3.com got stamped on despite complying with Russian law because they fell afoul of licensing interests in the US.

As for the latter, what exactly is the point in "protecting intellectual property rights" in Estonia if you don't sell anything there in the first place, and as a result everyone there who would like to buy your stuff is getting it off thepiratebay.org? Sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.

<comment><USER41> The fact that the U.S. might have ridiculous regulations has nothing to do with it. If you're a business, you might be willing to wade through all that red tape once, especially for the biggest consumer market in the world. Are you willing to do it 30 times? 195 times? If the Estonian market represents a paltry amount of money, why bother?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I would also add to this list audible.com which restricts certain books to US only. I am a platinum subscriber to audible, however, I couldn't get my hands on Stephen King's Under The Dome. So I got it from the thepiratebay pretty much on the next day. I did buy other King's books on audible though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note that a large number of these are apps stores. I can imagine the licencing fees or whatnot being the showstoppers for audio/video, but what on earth is so difficult about selling applications?

</comment><comment><USER44> I bought the Apple TV2 in the UK, was so excited to fire it up and switch on Netflix and Hulu and Justin.tv. #researchfail

</comment><comment><USER45> Last I checked, Estonia can use Android Market. Although maybe that's one of the "new" additions?

<comment><USER46> Only free apps work.

<comment><USER47> They announced yesterday that they added 99 new countries for paid apps. See: [https://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1437...](https://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=143779&hl=fr) (previous list, not translated yet as of now)

[https://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1437...](https://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=143779&hl=en) (new list)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why not start just one of those ? Seems like an opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wait. This is YCombinator right? Why on earth does no-one create a startup to make buying digital copies easier wherever you live? Why is that so hard?

<comment><USER50> It's actually part of #1 on YCombinator's list of ideas they'd like to fund: <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

But it's a tricky problem, because of the heavy involvement of intellectual- property laws and tangled webs of existing licensing arrangements (defended by large incumbent players with large legal teams).</comment></comment>


How many times should you draw a random number from [0,1] to have it sum over 1? - <AUTHOR> http://bayesianthink.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/the-expected-draws-to-sum-over-one.html

<comment><USER2> Again? We jhad this a week ago or so. I can't use HNSearch, because it doesn't work on the Blackberry browser (don't ask why I'm using that) but I'm sure there was significant discussion.

In particular, although he gets the right answer, no one can work out why he's using the PDF he does.</comment>


Cameras Can Spot Shoplifters Even Before They Steal - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-04/the-ai-cameras-that-can-spot-shoplifters-even-before-they-steal <comment><USER2> This article is amazingly light on details - nobody except the "Vaak" people are named.

It also strikes me that this is just a "Gee, Whiz!" article, like the perennial favorites, urine powered battery, fusion power in 10 years, and flying cars. Sure, you can do it once (except maybe fusion), but the odor or the difficulty of flying ruins it. Therefore, I've got $20 that says we don't hear anything more about Vaak until they go bankrupt.</comment>


Pinterest Is Poised to Explode with the Pinterest Developer Platform - <AUTHOR> http://arc.applause.com/2015/05/05/why-pinterest-is-poised-to-explode/

<comment><AUTHOR> Pinterest is at a similar place to where Facebook was in 2007 and Twitter in 2010. The direction it chooses will greatly shape what type and size of company it becomes.</comment>


Malcolm Gladwell, Meet This Genius Called The Indian Parent - <AUTHOR> http://statspotting.com/2013/01/malcolm-gladwell-meet-this-genius-called-the-indian-parent/

<comment><USER2> hmm, I would have loved to hear, more proof of the naming pattern, but from what I read, it refers that naming your child with A, gives them a significant advantage, well that might be true uptil a point, for ex: my own name starts with A,so for 12 years of school, I was the Roll no1, It did had its own advantage, in the form that I used to sit in the front, thus being more attentive out of the fear of getting caught by the teacher, and was exposed to more of their attention. But as I said, that advantage stays uptil a point, it doesn't mean that those who were named by any other letter, were not able to be successful in life, as its not just the name, but also, genes, emotional structure,influences, exposure, self discovery, etc.

One fat guy racing another slim guy to the burger joint, might be at disadvantage by more than few grams, but that doesn't mean he can't find a shortcut, or what if the burger joint is too far away, and the slim guy loses out on stamina :)

<comment><AUTHOR> True. Some of these variables do not matter in the long run. But it gives some short-term positives, that might get amplified. Life has big amplification effects - [http://statspotting.com/2012/12/life-has-huge- amplification-...](http://statspotting.com/2012/12/life-has-huge- amplification-effects/)

<comment><USER2> but it is also true, that whoever has lots of such visible advantages, becomes the favorite, and this energy/advantage is counter balanced by one big point, which is that people prefer to have a soft side/support for the underdog.

So it might give you advantage, in certain way, but then again, people aren't gonna just start naming their kids with A only :D

The guy B in your sited article above, have a way to turn around, what if while Candidate A was getting accostomed to the job at XYZ company, during that time, he founded his own company, and even if in one year it is still in natal stage, it would count in many cases as a better experience. Since He took the challenge head on.

Its as simple as they say: Success comes to people who find ways, and Failure to those who find excuses.</comment></comment></comment>


Extracting 25 TFLOPS from AWS Lambda, or #TheCloudIsTooDamnHard - <AUTHOR> http://ericjonas.com/pywren.html <comment><USER2> Is 25 TFLOPS a lot? How big of a cluster would you need to achieve this level of scientific computing "at home"?

cf. a modern GPU which can do 5000-8000 GFLOPS</comment>


One Thing Well - My Linux Setup - <AUTHOR> http://onethingwell.org/linux-setup <comment><USER2> s/Linux/GNU\/Linux

<comment><USER3> Just curious, do you actually think that the author or any of the people here don't recognize that the libc and coreutils (for most distributions) come from the GNU project? I don't understand why people insist on being so pedantic about the GNU/Linux thing.</comment></comment>


Don't blame the system aka there are no free lunches for founders - <AUTHOR> http://startupnorth.ca/2013/02/05/dont-blame-the-system/?__lsa=2af5-2d27

<comment><AUTHOR> We need to break the culture of entitlement that seems to run rampant with Canadian wannabe founders. I'm tired of the broken record, "people won't fund me therefore there is no capital". There is no capital for shit ideas and even less capital for shit founders.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Immutable.js a dead project? - <AUTHOR> It seems like there's huge interest for this project, with almost 20,000 stars. However, the last stable release was more than a year ago (April 2016). An alpha version was released on March of this year, but it's broken for most users and almost no pull requests have been approved since then. Issues sit idle for months at a time with no response.<p>Did Facebook give up using this internally for something else? <comment><USER2> That is actually a concerning fact that the alpha hasn't been stabilized. I do know the stable release does work in production though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't say it's a dead project. The stable release is doing fine - we just incorporated it into a new project recently.

Facebook's teams have a lot of projects going on I wouldn't be surprised if they're focusing on something else.

</comment><comment><USER4> i think the new project is called clojurescript</comment>


Hugging Face: New Transformer Container and Notebooks - <AUTHOR> https://ml-showcase.paperspace.com/projects/hugging-face <comment><USER2> Just a quick note: Morgan Funtowicz from HuggingFace did an awesome webinar overview of the transformers library here for anyone who is interested [https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=SUqi_E_Lyjs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=SUqi_E_Lyjs)</comment>


Show HN: scri.ch − Draw, save, share, repeat - <AUTHOR> https://scri.ch/ <comment><AUTHOR> I introduced scri.ch 6 years ago here [1], and I am still happily using it almost every day since then. I thought now would be a good time to share it again here, as I think more people could enjoy its simplicity.

It's 100% built using boring technologies [2], and virtually no feature has been added in the last four years! :-)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2288834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2288834)

[2] [https://github.com/lisezmoi/scri.ch](https://github.com/lisezmoi/scri.ch)</comment>


Putin calls the Internet a "CIA project" - <AUTHOR> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_RUSSIA_PUTIN_INTERNET

<comment><USER2> That's for internal, in Russia, consumption, for those who don't know better. Pay no attention... to the phrase itself.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I heard an interesting quote from former POTUS Bush 43' when he was asked about the current situation in the Ukraine. He said when he spoke with Putin when he was in offie, Putin always saw everything that happened in the world as either as an advantage to Russia or an advantage to the US.

It struck me since it seemed to be a rather one dimensional thought process for a guy who seems to be quite intelligent.

<comment><USER3> dudes ex-KGB, so it kind of makes sense that that's how he sees the world

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Putin is a KGB project, so he would know. :)</comment>


Ask HN: Why is tracking/advertising so bad? - <AUTHOR> I'm from a developing country, where even people working as devs/engineer prefer apps with ads over paid apps. I think the privacy argument is looked at from a wrong angle. Not everyone can afford to pay for a subscription or even a one-time fee. Especially, if you're from developing parts of the world. If there are a couple of ads which subsidizes something that is otherwise unattainable for someone, I don't see why that is bad.
What's the worst thing that could happen from Google tracking me across the web could? Show me a couple of ads that it thinks is relevant from history? I don't see why that's the end of the world.
While I do believe that there should be transparency in what's collected and how it is used to prevent misuse, some of the pro-privacy arguments seem too extreme. I'm open to other views, of course <comment><USER2> > What's the worst thing that could happen from Google tracking me across the > web could?

Discrimination. Public humiliation. You assume Google is only using the data it collects to show ads. What if they sold the data other organizations? What if the data was used to prevent you from getting a job or membership to an organization? What if there was a data breach, and suddenly everyone knew about every site you visited?

Taken to a further extreme, what if the government used this data against you to strip you of certain rights/privileges?

These scenarios may seem extreme, but they are all feasible. You and I may not have anything to hide, but others may, and they are entitled to that privacy.

</comment><comment><USER3> The purpose of advertising (with few exceptions) is to manipulate you into buying something you wouldn't have otherwise, or paying more for something than you otherwise would have. Apart from having better things we should be spending my money on (or even saving it, god forbid) advertising is responsible for much of our consumer culture and the environmental problems and other social ills it causes.

Tracking at the moment is mainly to better target the manipulation, but the more data we give them the more they can implement price discrimination. Imagine searching for a USB cable on amazon and because they know you're well off you'll see the expensive name brand options whereas a less wealthy person would be shown the cheap generic ones. Then imagine this becoming more ubiquitous and having to pay a price premium on every purchase based on your profile. To an extent this is already done by geographic location, a store in a wealthy area will often be more expensive for the exact same items than one in a poor area, I'd be willing to bet that a lot of basic produce in your country is cheaper than the exact same produce in my developed one even if it's not produced locally. Even these examples are just scratching the surface of what can be done once they have the data.

If you're from a developing country it might be hard to grasp just how much we spend on things not because they're expensive, but because companies can get away with charging for it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ads are costing you more money (in a less directly-obvious way) than a subscription would, while providing less value to everybody down the chain, because of the cycles & network traffic involved.

Adtech is basically a form of gambling (with inflated expected odds): one party gives an estimate of how likely an impression is to turn into a sale, and pays some fraction of the product of that estimate and the revenue from a sale in return for an impression, but because ad effectiveness is mostly a function of novelty, the actual likelihood that this estimate is chasing is in a constant state of free-fall. Targetting stepped in as a way to increase the likelihood that ads are effective, but targetting really turned into its own internal market, only tangentially related to serving ads (and the only source of cash it's likely to continue to have is in the form of non-advertisers who want specific information -- for purposes of law enforcement, blackmail, training data for statistical models, or some combination of the three).

So, ultimately: you are paying the cost (in power, in bits transmitted, & in time) to see ads for things you don't want, and then paying the cost (in power, bits transmitted, and time) for information about you to be sent to a third party market in personal information, and in the end the person who paid to show you the ad isn't getting anything out of it either.

It's more cost-effective in most cases to just eat whatever it cost to develop an app or run a site than to host ads -- but, since those costs are foisted upon the end user in the form of device lifespan, it's not often done.

</comment><comment><USER5> These are two separate things - advertising and tracking. Advertising has been around for millennia. I'm sure an orange seller on the streets of ancient Bagdad used some form of advertising to sell his oranges. But when we discuss tracking we're actually taking about data collection and what the data is used for. This is a privacy issue. The problem is that we have no idea what the data collectors are doing with our data or even who they are. Advertising is intentionally and overtly manipulative - we know it happens and we're kind of ok with that. On the other hand, tracking and data collection (also called surveillance capitalism) is covertly manipulative - we have no way of knowing who, what or why. The problem is that tracking often piggybacks off advertising. Ultimately, I reckon this will be bad for advertising. Sure, the data is useful to advertisers but only up to a point. It's ironic that surveillance capitalists sell their technology to advertisers through advertising. Advertisers are being manipulated into buying technology that helps them become better manipulators.</comment>


How Class Works - Roots of Health Inequity - <AUTHOR> http://rootsofhealthinequity.org/how-class-works.php <comment><USER2> This is brilliant. It's so well done. And it really picks up from 4:00 on (although I loved the part about the discourse of class in America)...

There's a sense that believing in what this video shows will turn you into a socialist... but that's untrue. You can still believe in working hard to get ahead; there's just a movement now to ensure that, if you do work hard to get ahead, you receive sufficient rewards for doing so. The kinds of rewards a worker is entitled to: regular wage increases and job stability (with smarter outsourcing to other countries).

Employers simply need to be more accountable to their employees.</comment>


FTC Charges Surescripts with Illegal Monopolization of E-Prescription Markets - <AUTHOR> https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/04/ftc-charges-surescripts-illegal-monopolization-e-prescription <comment><USER2> Any medical related software seems to attempt customer lock-in in quite brazen ways in the USA. I'd hate to be trapped in that industry, dealing with baroque databases and shady business practices.</comment>


Skale Music Tracker, ported from C++ to Flash - <AUTHOR> http://www.skale.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a bit of background:

[http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/09/28/a-powerful-music- tr...](http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/09/28/a-powerful-music-tracker-in- your-browser-completely-free/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you've never used a "tracker" before, hit the "Disk Options" button, hit "\modules", choose a track, and hit "Playing" to start.</comment>


A Letter to Einstein from the Future - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/a-letter-to-einstein-from-the-future <comment><USER2> Fun read. Makes me wonder how one would write a similar letter to Socrates or Plato...

"About the Philosopher King thing, we are in kind of a predicament at the current moment in international politics...."

<comment><USER3> Their reaction: "With so much technological advance, so little change in human nature..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the description of some modern tech in terms that Einstein might understand... however the biggest change would probably be computers.

(I think I remember hearing that) We're getting small enough with integrated circuits that quantum mechanic effects are important considerations, including potentially forcing us to come up with new models of system function.

</comment><comment><USER5> That was cute. :-)

I wonder if "science run" would be recognizable lingo to Einstein. It feels like newer terminology.

</comment><comment><USER6> That was a great read. If only he could be here to help.

</comment><comment><USER7> I bet he'd be confused by the modern practice of interrupting

 _FRAGMENT FROM LATER ON_

the article with a large-font different colored random sentence fragment from later on in the article.

 _SO BIZARRRE_

I see this practice all the time, and it's always struck me as so bizarre.

<comment><USER8> This is called a "pull quote". It's widely used in print magazines. I don't know when it started, but I've seen it since around 1980. The first known use of the term is 1978.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pull%20quote](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/pull%20quote)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We should write him about the miserable state of science. And tell him how a few CEOs and shareholders of large companies reap most of the financial benefits of his work.</comment>


Freenode Live Call for Proposals and early bird tickets launch - <AUTHOR> https://freenode.net/news/freenode-live <comment><USER2> Shouldn't we get told about this 5 minutes after it ends?</comment>


Ask YC: Where's the best place for online discussion? - <AUTHOR>

I've moved completely away from Reddit now and have Hacker News as my homepage. Great articles and obviously some great people.  <p>What interests me is what forums / sites people on here use to discuss startups?  I've always got questions - either of a technical or a business nature and after being in business myself now for around 14 years I've also a lot to offer (though I say so myself!) with various topics.  There is a lot of talk on here about physical meet-ups, which is great, but we're all online so my interest is where we can meet up to help each other online. Where do you do this now? <comment><USER2> \- here

\- <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/> (programming languages)

\- <http://joel.reddit.com/> (software in general)

I once asked a similar question, and someone recommended dreamincode.net ... don't bother... most of the questions are like "what is a boolean?"

<comment><USER3> Crikey what is "boolean"? I thought my law books were complicated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We should create one off this site. I'd definitely use it

<comment><USER5> my proposal: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82245>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some time ago I tried to start a mailing list* with colleagues from the university, but after 9 messages on June the list died.

Maybe now it can reborn from its ashes!

The list is available at <http://groups.google.com/group/eucaliptus> and email@example.com and no, it is not a misspell but Eucalyptus in Catalan. (Note: someday to be migrated to eucaliptus.org)

So, feel free to subscribe and lets see if it gains enough momentum.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you have any question then asking it here is usually good enough, I asked a question a few days ago and got some great ideas.

The only feature here that is sorely missing for this to be a kick-ass forum is that it doesn't accumulate knowledge.

If it only had a decent search feature, it would have an excellent forum.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like forums, but for some things they are a bit stale. It's like having a pen pal as opposed to going down the pub with some friends. Some great ideas are born from discussions at the pub over a drink.

I created #startups on irc.freenode.net so feel free to come and chat/hang out there.

<comment><USER6> The problem I have with IRC is that there is no decent search/logging option (and please don't mention bots). And I hate having to nag everybody with a question that was asked a few days ago or answering a question that was already asked unless there is some new twist.

How about setting up a 37sigs campfile account? The only problem is that I'm not sure that we'll fit in there (the premium account only supports 60 users simultaneously chatting)

<comment><USER7> Yeah I agree. For question/answers a forum is probably better suited. Chat is good for brainstorming and socializing/networking though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _ahem_ i believe 'hacker' is an attitude - not a statement that the site/forum is only about programming and web start-ups (just a comment from your friendly neighbourhood energy R&D chemist)

</comment><comment><USER9> Joel on software's, Business of software: <http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz>

</comment><comment><USER10> Depends on what you're discussing.

</comment><comment><USER11> I thought that THIS forum was what you're talking about. What am I missing?

<comment><USER12> Hi edw519, Mainly that Hacker News isn't a forum. The format makes discussions here ephemeral. Hacker news is a niche site for posts of general-interest to that niche.

A forum is topical, so narrow interest posts are channeled into topic areas. In a forum you might have a topic "Co-Founders Wanted" but only people interested in being/finding co-founders at a given time would read and post in that topic. If Hacker news was mainly narrow-interest postings (ever seen this bug?, co-founder wanted) the signal to noise ratio would degrade.

A Hacker News Forum would be great because 1-this community is great and 2-I could browse topics I'm interested in at the point in time they're of interest to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Much more eloquently said than me, but thats what I was getting at. If some kind of forum mechanism was added to Hacker News I'd use it straight away

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> its not obvious huh?

<comment><AUTHOR> not to me :) This site is obviously filled with people who are passionate. Some of the startup sites are terrible and not focused on web/online startups. Programming forums are generally that but a fusion site, mixing programming, design and business would be great.

<comment><USER14> Good idea inovica. That would be a great mix for a forum.

<comment><USER13> and what makes you think that there are no biz dev, designers, and programmers here?

<comment><AUTHOR> You've completely missed the point. I'm saying that the people who post and read here ARE these people, but that its not always the best mechanism for all meeting up or getting advice from one another.

<comment><USER13> No, I think you've completely missed the point. Anytime I've had a question, I've posted here. Sure, there are other forums, boards, groups, etc that you can go to, but if you tried to bring them all together, it would get muddled and all the good hackers would leave. Kind of like digg, reddit.

<comment><AUTHOR> The question was "What interests me is what forums / sites people on here use to discuss startups?" as I'm curious at what other mechanisms (other than this site) people use in their daily routine. It would be interesting to see if there are certain sites which stand out. For me posting too much on this site - if everyone did it - would seriously increase the noise ratio when this is primarily a.... news site

<comment><USER13> I do see your point in that regard. The key is, if you just want to discuss a startup, you need only ask the question ("is my idea good..."), etc. If you are looking for partners, just post "looking for cofounder..". What else about startups is there to discuss, besides what is posted here and what you would talk to your cofounder(s) about? Am I missing something?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


CITE: A $1B city that nobody calls home - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/06/business/test-city/index.html <comment><USER2> This is total vaporware, and likely total bullshit. See the Wikipedia article. That project has been promoted for years, by some guy who has no funding for it. He was previously promoting a private spaceport at White Sands.[1] Nothing was ever built. And a private satellite network using lasers.[2] Also didn't happen.

He's good at PR, though.

[1] [http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/international- commercia...](http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/international-commercial- space-launch-facility.html) [2] [http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/laser- light-communicati...](http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/laser-light- communications.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Others are skeptical of the premise of testing without people."

The quotes following that are what annoy me about journalism today. No one is saying "never test around humans!". It's that wouldn't it be nice to put, say, 50 autonomous vehicles in a controlled city-scape and see how they behave? Run them 24/7 and see how long it is until an accident occurs. Now add in 10, 20, 30, etc human driven cars and repeat the experiment.

<comment><USER4> Shouldn't existing autonomous vehicles already be tested that way? Aren't they?

Why do we need a new corporation-town?

<comment><USER3> I'm sure they are, to a degree, but if we're at all thinking about starting to replace wide swaths of our vehicles with autonomous ones over the next few decades, a wider scale test site, with things like a freeway and off ramps (from the picture), seems like it would be necessary.

<comment><USER4> I was under the impression that some autonomous vehicles have been driving existing freeways and off ramps for many years.

Am I wrong?

<comment><USER3> No, but you're starting to be kind of pedantic.

What percentage of possible scenarios involving getting on and off a highway do you think autonomous vehicles have encountered so far? I would guess the number is quite low.

Now extrapolate that across a city. And the point isn't that it is not possible to test these scenarios in the real world, but that it would be far easier to do so when you can control scenarios to a greater extent.

The bigger point: When you create a new version of software, do you re-run your existing tests on it, or just play around with it in production and call it good enough? The real world is production. This would be your QA environment.

<comment><USER4> And your QA facility will not have every possible on-ramp, off-ramp, or other.

My point is that these things have already been tested on a much larger scale than this QA (I actually think it was billed as Research) facility would seem to provide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like the original plan for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_\(concept\))

Well, minus the residents :)

</comment><comment><USER6> _" You can bring new things to have them stressed, break them, and find out the laws of unintended consequences"_

It seems to me that human beings are often the very stressor needed to produce the unintended consequences.

</comment><comment><USER7> >Planned for a population of 35,000

Does that mean it is possible to build a city for $28,571 per person including housing and business sectors? Sounds good to me. I wonder if it really is livable or just mock-ups.

<comment><USER8> I have a feeling that the land there ("In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert") is really cheap though.

<comment><USER9> Dirt cheap. I'd wager that land would ordinarily go for about $250 an acre if all purchased at once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Couldn't you just buy a slice of Detroit?

</comment><comment> bra-ket it seems like one of these ideas that look great in a PowerPoint presentation

</comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't make sense to me. Tech for people does indeed need people, otherwise you just test it in the company/lab's back yard. Now, what would be really interesting is if they created a city called BETA, which you could sign up to live in for a year, obviously after also signing a clutch of no-sue clauses and safety disclaimers. I think they'd find 35000 willing participarnts for that.

</comment><comment><USER12> > You can bring new things to have them stressed, break them, and find out the > laws of unintended consequences

Sure. But how will they do it without people?

Say you want to stress-test the new sewage handling system. How will you get the sewage? How will you get 35,000 people pooping in a day with a certain distribution?

<comment><USER13> There may be some prior art here:

[https://patents.google.com/patent/CN203310960U/en?q=feces&q=...](https://patents.google.com/patent/CN203310960U/en?q=feces&q=simulator)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting that communications lines are underneath water lines. The engineer in me wonders if that's a good idea, and also wonders if there's a good reason for it. Anyone have an idea?

<comment><USER15> My best guess is that's not the actual layout, it was just "simplified" for the video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That they're testing a place designed for human interaction and living without people is retarded. They should instead consider allowing people to live there that would cause minimal disruption and accept tradeoffs. Whole area doesn't need to have people but activity going on would be good for research. Might even pay for some of it in form of taxes or bills for infrastructure. Later they can test the stuff in areas with more diverse crowds.

Seems having people there would be minimally disruptive while giving more real-world information about the stuff. I'll also throw in that they might have those people there in one spot and people in other spots picked for controlled studies. You can do both.

</comment><comment><USER17> what happened to Eureka?</comment>


PG: It's OK to be disconnected from reality - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/paulg/status/731917508827975680 <comment><USER2> In terms of evolutionary fitness, this statement can only be true if you believe that seeing reality as it is isn't the best strategy for success in all circumstances. (Or, does the term "reality", when in quotes, refer to something other than a reality that exists independently of consciousness?)</comment>


90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I showed my middle school aged son a handful of keyboard shortcuts and now he's regarded as a "hacker" by his peers.

They're not teaching this stuff at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm willing to wager that this number has dropped in the six years since the article has been written.

<comment><USER4> How much would you be willing to part with? :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's that hotkey for forwarding an e-mail in MS Outlook, right?

<comment><USER6> OMG that drives me crazy at work. I believe it is the only application I use that doesn't honor it as a search function.</comment></comment>


LinuxAcademy to Be Acquired by ACloudGuru - <AUTHOR> https://linuxacademy.com/news/press-release/acloudguru/ <comment><USER2> Now hurry up and let me take LA courses with my ACG membership :)</comment>


Why isn't 1 a prime number? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/why-isnt-1-a-prime-number/ <comment><USER2> Funny true story about this: One time a man came up to me and handed me his phone, and asked me to call his mom. He was about to pass out and he asked me not call an ambulance (God bless America) , he appeared to have a concussion. By this time there was about 10-15 people around him and he could barely talk. I asked him what his phone code was and instead of just giving it to me he said "it's the first four prime numbers". Immediately, about five people shout "1,2,3,5". I am no longer holding the phone, because I handed to someone else to make sure it was okay. Sure enough, I was in a mathematical proofs class and we had just discussed this topic. So, I say "one is not a prime number". Of course, we get the phone unlocked in the second try with "2,3,5,7" and the guys mom is on the way. Everyone thought I was a genius a hero.

<comment><USER3> That's great. Thank you for sharing.

Seems a rather cryptic way to go about things with your health on the line.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of The Riddler...

<comment><USER5> This is totally something that Monday and Frankly would've encountered on Mathnet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very nice article! Also of interest, 1 not being prime can be viewed as a particular example of a more general phenomenon that occurs throughout mathematics, known as the 'Too simple to be simple' principle:

[https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/too+simple+to+be+simple](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/too+simple+to+be+simple)

<comment><USER7> Could you have discovered the example through use of the principle?

Or likewise, does the principle let you extend to other conclusions?

<comment><USER6> Do you mean the example of 1 not being a prime, or the example in the article of Z[root -5] not having unique factorization? You could certainly discover the former, but not the latter as far as I can see. The idea is that the principle should guide you on what the 'right' set of definitions are, so that your theory detects interesting theorems and isn't riddled with edge cases. You might make an analogy to programming, finding good primitive data types and interfaces so that you can implement elegant and efficient algorithms and well structured modules.

Perhaps the key insight of the 'too simple to be simple' principle is that we want the definition to impose both _existence_ & _uniqueness_ of something. In this case proper divisors (divisors strictly less than the number itself e.g. the proper divisors of 6 are 1,2, & 3).

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Let me give a concrete example of how it might be used.

\- Uniqueness is captured algebraically here by the notion of a 'subsingleton' set: a subset where any pair of elements are equal. This can happen if (1) the subset has only a single element, or (2) the subset has NO elements (in which case the uniqueness requirement is vacuously true).

\- Existence is captured by the notion of a 'singleton' set: a subset with exactly 1 element: any two elements belonging to the set are unique, AND such an element exists.

First lets apply this to the definition of the regular primes: the set of proper divisors of 1 is the empty set. The set of proper divisors of any other prime is the singleton set {1}. Thus the naive definition says 'proper divisors of primes form a subsingleton': it asserts they are unique, but not that they exist. The more sophisticated definition of the primes (which excludes 1) asserts the proper divisors of primes form a singleton: uniqueness and existence.

Now lets try to apply it (somewhat informally) to the fictional example of even numbers and 'even primes'. Examples:

       2 is an even prime,
       4 = 2*2 not an even prime
       6 is an even prime,
       8 = 4*2 is not,
       10 is even prime,
       30 is an even prime is as well, and so on.

Here I have uniqueness of proper divisors (they form a subsingleton), but only because _existence_ of proper divisors fails for every even prime (not just 2)!

Now what happens if we try and factor 60?

       60 = 2*30
       60 = 6*10

It not great surprise that uniqueness of prime factorization fails as well (one of several problems with this informal example). The principle didn't help me find this example, it suggests that if I use the above notion of an 'even prime', i'm not going to get a good set of theorems.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was glad that the article got into the definitions of irreducible, prime, and unit in more general algebraic structures! This question is all about these three concepts.

A unit is an operation you can apply multiple times and get back to the starting point, for example multiplication by 1 or -1. So these are units in the integers. Units are really important, but they don't get you anywhere on their own. We can think of non-units as building blocks.

So then the question comes up which building blocks can be broken down into smaller blocks, like "times 6" can be divided into "times 2, then times 3". Using a unit doesn't count, because you're still equally far from the starting point (so 6 = (-6)(-1) is not really breaking down 6).

Blocks that can't be broken down any farther are irreducible (like 7). But in common parlance, that's what we think of as the definition of a prime number. It doesn't include units like 1, because they're already broken down.

More generally, being prime isn't about being broken down, it's about building up. Suppose I tell you that n is divisible by 2, and n can be broken down into two pieces, n = ab. Then you know that at least one of a or b is divisible by two. So two is prime because anything that is built from two, when broken down into pieces, has a piece that can be built from two. (Example: 6 divides 12, but you can break 12 up into (3)(4), so 6 isn't prime.) This definition of prime also doesn't include units like 1 because they're not building blocks in the first place. Everything's already divisible by units.

Prime integers have both the prime property and the irreducible property. Either way, I think it makes sense that 1 isn't included -- being prime and irreducible are properties of building blocks, and 1 is a unit.

<comment><USER9> > A unit is an operation you can apply multiple times and get back to the > starting point, for example multiplication by 1 or -1.

Nope. That is an idempotent[1], or a _root of unity_ , i.e. x^n = 1 for some n >= 0. A unit is something which has an inverse, though that inverse need not be a power of x itself. For example, 1/2 is inverse to 2 in the rational numbers.

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

<comment><USER8> Oops, thanks! (been a while) Those are examples of units, but units are more generally "building blocks of 1" (if you apply a unit, there is some other unit that gets you back to 1). Thanks again for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem here is that "is not prime" doesn't imply "is composite". The number 1 is neither prime nor composite. Why? Because that is the choice that makes more math look nicer. If 1 were considered a prime, lots of theorems would have to say "let p be a prime >1", rather than "let p be a prime".

Mathematicians have struggled with this for centuries before agreement was reached. See "The History of the Primality of One: A Selection of Sources" ([https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL15/Caldwell2/cald6.p...](https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL15/Caldwell2/cald6.pdf))

The "math looks nicer" argument isn't unique to this example. It also is, for example, the 'reason' that 0⁰ equals 1, or that there are as many integers as rationals.

<comment><USER11> > The "math looks nicer" argument [...] is, for example, the `reason' [...] > there are as many integers as rationals.

I'm curious what you mean here: The integers and rationals have quite different algebraic and geometric properties, and the fact that they have the same cardinality has always struck me as a deep result, rather than just a matter of definitions.

<comment><USER10> I meant that mathematicians struggled with infinities for quite a while. Chances are they initially modified

      "two sets have the same size iff there's
       a 1:1 mapping between items in the set"

to

      "two *finite* sets have the same size iff there's
       a 1:1 mapping between items in the set"

before 'bending' the meaning of 'same size' a bit to allow a strict superset of another set to be of equal size as that set.

<comment><USER11> As far as I can tell, the idea of "same size means establishing a bijection" appears (in a formal sense) at essentially the same time as it was discovered that there are pairs of infinite collections where you can't do that (i.e. with Dedekind and Cantor in the late 1800s), so I don't think that second definition ever actually existed in a meaningful sense, although I think your intuition seems reasonable (albeit "bending" holds the wrong connotation, imo, as this would seem to be a rather principled generalization of an existing concept rather than an arbitrary decision among a number of somewhat reasonable options). Regardless, I'd be very interested to read a survey of the history of ideas about cardinality/ordinality if you have a good one, since modern treatments of these ideas are radically different than how humans understood them even 150 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bad example, if 1 isn't prime, 2 x 1 isn't a product of prime, so not all the number can be written as _product of primes_. My point is that you can't write an introductory article, supposed to be understandable to the masses, using a form able to confuse further the readers. A student, reading this, I don't think will understand this explanation that seems contradictory.

"My mathematical training taught me that the good reason for 1 not being considered prime is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which states that every number can be written as _a product of primes_ in exactly one way. If 1 were prime, we would lose that uniqueness. We could write 2 as 1×2, or 1×1×2, or 1594827×2. Excluding 1 from the primes smooths that out."

<comment><USER13> All positive integers can be written as a product of primes, where a product is a sequence of numbers that are multiplied together. In the case of a composite number like 45, the primes are (3,3,5).

When the sequence has one element, then that element is the product. So, 2 is the product of (2).

When the sequence is empty, the product is 1.

<comment><USER14> Furthermore, the ordered sequence of primes that multiply to any given positive integer is unique. If 1 were considered prime, that wouldn't hold, as you could keep adding as many 1s as you like to the start of the sequence: (1,3,3,5), (1,1,3,3,5), etc. Thus 1 encodes no useful information here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am not a mathematician.

I reached solace regarding this itchy issue (not even joking) by considering the following: Primes are the minimal set of numbers to generate another set of numbers, using multiplication (with repetition, yada yada) For the positive numbers, [2, 3, 5, 7, ...] is all we need, considering that, as many others have said, 1 = Product([]).

In that sense, to generate all integers, the integers you need are: [-1, 0, 2, 3, 5, 7..]

Similarly, to generate all gaussian integers (complex numbers with integer components,) you can follow the following link: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_integer#Gaussian_prim...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_integer#Gaussian_primes) however, am not sure why 0 is not considered a prime number in this context.

Gaussian primes are symmetric over the real and imaginary axes, and to me it's quite curious why 0 is not considered prime there, but I guess uniqueness of the multiplication matters too (0 can be repeated multiple times, which could make some theorems about uniqueness of factorization a bit cumbersome as well.)

<comment><USER16> You might be happy to know that 0 is considered a prime element in typical cases (barring those cases where there are 0 divisors, i.e. where two elements can be multiplied to create 0, obviously this is not an issue with regular numbers).

Edit: for historical reasons prime elements are slightly different from the usual prime numbers, and 0 remains a bit of a special case even now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wikipedia [1] also mentions that: "Most early Greeks did not even consider 1 to be a number, so they could not consider its primality". Both articles (scientific american & wikipedia) refer to the same paper [2].

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

[2]:[https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL15/Caldwell2/cald6.h...](https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL15/Caldwell2/cald6.html)

<comment><USER18> I always raise an eyebrow at statements like 'most early greeks', because who knows how many of them actually read Euclid or had any exposure to math at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone who says 'zed' and indeed cheerio, pip pip, won't say "negative five". They'll say "minus five", of course.

<comment><USER20> That depends - this divide is not just "USA English Speaking People" versus the rest. Within the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, there is a split between people who say "minus 5" and people who say "negative 5".

For some "minus five" is an operation, not a number, and for others "negative five" is meaningless, the correct expression would have to be "the negative of five". There are entire PhD theses written on the topic of how to avoid confusing young children when introducing them to numbers less than 0, and the words we should, and should not, use in that context.

<comment><USER21> Yes, and who on earth says "cheerio, pip pip"? "Toodle pip" or "cheerio" or "pip pip" are acceptable.

Those PhD theses seem a little misguided (if well meaning) to me. Language is riddled with ambiguity - "panda eats shoots and leaves" for example. Despite that ambiguity we generally manage to get along. Teaching critical thinking in general might be a better idea than fixating on specific issues.

<comment><USER20> > _Those PhD theses seem a little misguided (if well meaning) to me._

That's a strong statement to make as a throw-away. You haven't read them, you haven't done the research, so I'd ask - what experience do you have of tracking the effect of specific language on the acquisition and development of mathematical skills in a significant sized population of very young children?

I suspect the answer is not a lot, and dismissing someone's research on the basis of effectively no information is poor form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As the article says, one could consider this a matter of definition. The definition of choice for me (and some other category theorists?) is that the prime numbers are the second row in the devisibility lattice. (That is, n < m iff n | m.)

Then, the number 1 is the single element of the first row and all the prime numbers are the atoms immediately above 1.

</comment><comment><USER23> Interesting read. I'm an engineer and had considered 1 to be prime.

I guess you can say that 1 is just an absolute unit.

</comment><comment><USER24> Short answer: 1 could be counted as a prime number, and in fact it used to be counted as a prime number by some mathematicians [1]. These days, most people just choose not to do that, since this makes most proofs and definitions more convenient.

Shorter answer: Convenience.

[1] [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeNumber.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeNumber.html) (3rd paragraph)

</comment><comment><USER25> I understood prime as the minimal set of numbers with which you can generate all natural numbers by multiplying them.

There are infinite natural numbers and infinite prime numbers, but you need each and every prime number to generate any other natural number.

So I'm puzzled to learn that 1 is not a prime number because I do not know how to generate 1 if we exclude 1 from the prime set.

<comment><USER26> For that matter, even with 1, how do you generate 0?

<comment><USER27> Zero being a member of the natural numbers or not depends on convention.

<comment><USER28> I would argue that Zero is generally considered to be a natural. The naturals are often constructed via an initial object, and you can call that initial object whatever you want (some people write Z or Zed), but it's metaphorically a zero.

<comment><USER29> The pushback I have gotten om my tongue-in-cheek rants defending 0 as a natural number would suggest not everyone agrees.

Some people really care about 1/n being possible for every natural number N.

<comment><USER30> And other people care about natural numbers being the set of cardinal numbers for finite sets. Others want the set of natural numbers with addition to be a monoid. And actually most-known series in analysis are usually indexed starting from zero, because that's when the formulas are usually simpler.

<comment><USER28> But if you asked the same people to build the naturals, they'd likely include an initial object that behaves like 0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> When attempting to prove intelligence to aliens by mathematical proof, would we include 1 as a prime number?

<comment><USER32> Mathematicians: No!

Engineers: Eh, maybe?

The guy doing the engraving on the gold plaque on the side of the space probe: What is that, a potato?

Aliens: They treat root vegetables as numbers.

Alien anthropologist: They worship plants.

Alien TV presenter: In showing us agriculture, they introduced us to mathematics!

(Me: I think I need to cut down on the cold medicine.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> There are also a bunch of cases where you specifically want "odd primes" (i.e. excluding 2).

</comment><comment><USER34> I've always thought of 1 as the definition of what a prime number is. Therefore, because it's generally bad practice to define a thing in terms of itself, 1 shouldn't be categorized as a prime number. Instead, it's like the Aristotilian Ideal of prime made linear.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's just a definition!

</comment><comment><USER36> tl;dr: "...whether or not a number (especially unity) is a prime is a matter of definition, so a matter of choice, context and tradition, not a matter of proof."

In other words, because semantics.

<comment><USER37> That shows the author doesn't understand the issue well, because every definition is semantics. That's what the word means. The question is why certain semantics are prefered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just the definition.

 _a number with no factors beside 1 and itself, excluding zero_

1 does not meet that definition, since 1 is already counted, the other factor needs to be different.

<comment><USER39> Sure, but the next question—which the linked article is _about_ —is, why is that the definition?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> And, even more important: is it Numberwang?

</comment><comment><USER41> honestly this is where math stops being logical and follows emotions. The logical reason one isn't prime is because we don't want to ruin theorems that were based on faulty logic so we continue with the faulty logic... yay?

</comment><comment><USER42> The number 1 is a prank by Loki.

</comment><comment><USER43> "Whenever a product m×n is divisible by p, then m or n must be divisible by p."

Actually it's the other way around:

'Whenever m or n are divisible by p, then their product m×n must be divisible by p.'

The opposite is not true, i.e. the statement is not reversible and still true. For instance:

6x4 = 24; 24 is divisible by 8, i.e. 24 mod 8 = 0, yet 6 mod 8 = 6, and 4 mod 8 = 4.

[ed] I've stepped into a cognition discontinuity, move along, nothing to see.

<comment><USER44> If p is a prime number, then the product m×n being divisible by p means that either m or n is divisible by p. In fact, this is how prime numbers are defined when generalized to generic integral domains.

<comment><USER43> Doh, my reading balked at the embedded add. Yes, p being a prime actually inverts the statement successfully. My bad.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why there is no software architecture inspiration source? - <AUTHOR> There are tons of UI inspiration web apps and people upload their work.
Why is there no such site for software architecture?
Am I missing any sites out there? <comment><USER2> If you are looking for more practical resources related to architectures in the cloud, you should take a look at [https://coderecipe.ai](https://coderecipe.ai) . It is a dev community that allows others to share recipes (architecture + pros/cons/limitation/cost analysis + deployment instruction + source code) that can be used directly in real life situations.

If you have one or a few specific domain of architectures in mind, for example "how to do user management in AWS", you can search for a collection of similar architectures like this [https://coderecipe.ai/search?q=%23usermanagement](https://coderecipe.ai/search?q=%23usermanagement) , this way you can compare different alternatives. Similarly, if you are interested in different ways to "Store time series of data", there's also a collection of that here [https://coderecipe.ai/search?q=%23timeseriesdb](https://coderecipe.ai/search?q=%23timeseriesdb). The site contains a lot of recipes that is based on serverless design, so this will give you everything serverless related [https://coderecipe.ai/search?q=%23serverless](https://coderecipe.ai/search?q=%23serverless) .

I am the founder of this platform, currently we have mostly AWS related recipes but there will be more GCP and Azure stuff coming soon, let me know if you have any questions :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. I was thinking on the same line.

Like UX Pin, Dribble, there should be for backend/front end software architecture.

I liked the site. What's plan on adding more resources?

<comment><USER2> We are currently testing different domains, what are you interested to see more?

<comment><AUTHOR> End to end system design.

What is the architecture of coderecipe. It looks like angular on front end. What are you using for CMS?

<comment><USER2> When you say e2e, how big of the scope are you talking about? from frontend to everything in backend? can you give an example? I think the bigger the scope is, the more it will be used as a reference rather than directly able to use?

architecture of coderecipe: haha good question! yes we are using angular for frontend, and CMS is custom code built on top of AWS serverless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can look at:

\- [https://github.com/aosabook/](https://github.com/aosabook/)

\- [https://github.com/mspnp/](https://github.com/mspnp/)

\- [https://martinfowler.com/](https://martinfowler.com/)

Regarding distributed architecture:

\- [http://highscalability.com/](http://highscalability.com/)

\- [https://github.com/theanalyst/awesome-distributed- systems](https://github.com/theanalyst/awesome-distributed-systems)

\- [https://github.com/binhnguyennus/awesome- scalability](https://github.com/binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability)

Also [https://github.com](https://github.com) ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Azure docs are surprisingly great at enumerating and describing architecture and distributed systems techniques.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/azure/architecture/patterns...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/azure/architecture/patterns/)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://github.com/LiveAsynchronousVisualizedArchitecture/la...](https://github.com/LiveAsynchronousVisualizedArchitecture/lava)

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://highscalability.com/](http://highscalability.com/) is one of my favorite sites.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.github.com](http://www.github.com)</comment>