skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The meat of this deal isn't likely the streaming service. Beats Music had only 111,000 subscribers as of March [1]. Compare that to Spotify's 10 million paying subscribers, 30 million non-paying users, and $4 billion valuation.

The deal's financial logic is driven by Beats's $1.3 billion business (in 2013) of selling high-priced headphones. Given Apple's P/E ratio of 14.9x earnings [2], the acquisition would make sense so long as Beats were running at least a 15% profit margin on those headphones. That's a surer basis for a $3 billion bet than a nascent streaming service.

[1] http://nypost.com/2014/05/27/apple-cuts-purchase-price-of-be...

[2] https://www.google.com/finance?q=aapl&ei=_0qGU5C_BabzsgeenYH...
7 Things to Think About in the New Era of Selling
I thought the inferred relation was clear in his original argument. If Apple makes their private API public, it is then possibly infringing. That's the difference between making an alternate implementation for a private API and something that doesn't exist; there is a higher likelihood that the private API will be made public than that an entirely new API will spring forth that covers the same area. It's already written, just not public.
The math doesn't work at the moment, but if robots take over the jobs, we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production, and give the money to the people who would have been doing the work, we'd have about the same overall balance of payments as now.

That assumes the robots don't cost a significant fraction of what employees did, but long-term I think that's a good assumption, and shorter-term it just means the people will make less than they did as employees.
Is that not what Apple did with the iPod and iTunes? I don't see a problem with that statement
Apple redefined the mp3 player market, the ultraportable laptop market, the smartphone market, the tablet market, and now they're buying a company that reinvented the higher-end headphone market. Is it smart of a brand that has traditionally created their own iconic images to buy another cultural icon for $3 billion? I don't think so.

Maybe this gets used a lot, but would Steve Jobs have done this? Or would he have created his own headphones and music streaming service?

I'm willing to bet anything this is going to be seen as where Apple's golden age began to wane.

EDIT: I said "higher-end" because it's perceived to be, even though audiophiles would never agree. The consumer market believes that Beats and Bose are king though. That's another reason that I'm against this purchase; Apple isn't even buying anything technically higher end (Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic, HiFiMan, what have you).
What's uncontroversial about that? The iTunes Store did make (legal) digital music mainstream. That's not to say it was the first store of its kind, but it was certainly the first to have widespread success.
Examples and documentation are not substitutes in my mind. If you want your work to be used, you need both.
Well, they did invent the iPod.
Obviously people have their preferences but there is a point you made that puzzle me:

>> "too many taps to[...]just shuffle play a playlist."

I don't have my phone on my but isn't there just a shuffle button on the play screen and I thought another one at the top of a playlist?

Personally I have an account with Beats and Spotify. I keep my Spotify one for desktop usage. I don't like using any streaming service through the browser but Beats really sucks atm. I have problems with songs not playing again after I've paused.
Talking is great, but often constrained to the limits we set ourselves (our town, our experiences, our acquaintences) but reading is not bound by our imagination, only by the authors. Helps us step out of our comfort zone.
This article is a bit low on details, so it's hard to judge the quality of the proposed solution (without having tested a similar setup).

We faced the choice of either upgrading our aging Foundry load balancers or building our own solution a few years ago and came up with a very stable and scalable setup:

2+ load balances (old web servers sufficed) running Linux and:

* wackamole for IP address failover (detects peer failure with very low latency, informs upstream routers; identical setup for all load balancers works, can be tuned to have particular IP addresses preferably on particular load balancer hosts) http://www.backhand.org/wackamole/

* Varnish for HTTP proxying and load balancing (identical setup on all load balancers) - www.varnish.org

* Pound for HTTPS load balancing (identical configuration on all load balancers, can handle SNI, client certificates etc. ...) http://www.apsis.ch/pound/

This scales pretty much arbitrarily, just add more load balancers for more Varnish cache or SSL/TLS handshakes/second. We also have nameservers on all load balancers (also with replicated configuration and IP address failover). Configuration is really easy, only Varnish required some tuning (larger buffers etc.) and Pound (OpenSSL really) was set up carefully for PFS and good compatibility with clients.

The only drawback is that actual traffic distribution over the load balancers is arbitrary and thus unbalanced (wackamole assigns the IP addresses randomly unless configured to prefer a particular distribution), but the more IP addresses your traffic is spread out over, the less of a problem this becomes.
Agreed. Also many applications for this you might just not care if a flow gets broken. Really depends on your use case.

Persistent hashing is key if you care about it though, I honestly don't know which routers do this off the top of my head :)
Nitpick: Truecrypt is proprietary (it's source is viewable, but you aren't licensed to distribute modifications of it).
The fixation on working more and more is much weaker outside America.

See France passing a law banning company emails outside work hours, and European countries passing laws about shorter work weeks.

Here in Northern Canada, working the least amount possible to have the lifestyle you want is the norm, not the exception.
I think he's getting at the fact that the iPod and iTunes were what first made people think of music in digital terms. An audio CD might as well be analog as far as people's perception goes, since until MP3 players came around, ripping CDs was not the typical use case.
Google's Self-Driving Car Project Will Kill Uber with Knowledge
Facebook: Do not release your new app feature that listens to users
Its bit exaggeration. But come to think of it, we could not clearly state anyone else did more impact to DIGITAL music than Apple.
> Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work.

This is of course a ridiculous argument when the parameters of the discussion haven't even been established.

For example, we could get rid of all our social services and use the outlays and administrative costs on a basic income (minus the administrative costs of the basic income itself). That might not be a good idea for various reasons, but there's no law of mathematics preventing it.
Wiser men than I will choose to not name-call, though I live to no such standard. If you are a male and feel your rights are being impinged, you're as much of a loser as you are delusional. Get your head out of your ass and stop being a little bitch.
> I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation.

Then he needs to do some math. There are just under 300 million people in the United States, for instance. He doesn't have to give all of them an income. Just tell me which demographic slice, and how much they're being given.

Either it's not "universal", or it's so low it's not income.

> This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something.

Businesses would be asked to shoulder even more of the national revenue at that point. Unless you're suggesting that your $12,000/year universal income should be pissed away right back to the IRS... at which point it's not enough to survive on.

So they're shouldering all of burden of what used to be personal income tax, extra on top of it, and somehow will still have the money to buy the robots that will make it all happen?

The math just doesn't work.

> The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation.

How do you intend to extract that extra revenue? Besides, this illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how it will all play out.

The increased productivity will happen simultaneously with a reduced demand (no one can afford to buy the products). We'll get all sorts of fluctuations, but eventually the robot owners realize that they don't need to sell things to remain wealthy. The robots are the perfect slave, and they turn raw materials (which the wealthy own) directly into luxury products. Why sell something for cash, to turn around and use the cash to buy luxury products that you can just have made to order?

This even avoids all sorts of taxes. If you have no income, there is no income tax.

A better way to envision this is to think "soon, the important and rich people won't need you at all". Well, maybe not the audience here at HN, I imagine there are lots of robot software types reading my comment. You guys have a few more decades, I think.
Is it just the ability to discover new music that has people in love with BS?

I find that Google Play does a fantastic job on my phone, and for any sort of real use I fall back to my Sansa MP3 player. I personally dislike others making my playlists, so perhaps I'm far outside the demographic.

Is there something I'm missing here, some sort of killer feature perhaps, that validates the huge valuation of this acquisition?
Someone posted a video of Dre drunk at a party confirming the deal. I'm guessing Apple is in damage control mode at this point and would have liked to announced it later.
CDs are digital music, everyone was listening to digital music before apple did anything. People were using walkmans long before the iPod.

The point is trying to credit apple for "digital" music as opposed to "analog" music. That is just absurd. Credit them from making a business out of selling digital music, but not for making digital music popular.
considering heartbleed... yes
Except the majority of Beats headphones sold are much less than $450. Looking around, most of the catalog is $250 or less. Even the article says "up to $450".
So it will become rather easy for him to become a billionaire if he invests it correctly. Pretty good for a guy from the streets of Compton.
We believe that any "REAL" accelerator will NEVER ask for upfront cost, let alone most will never accept entrepreneurs/companies without meeting them firsthand...
I would have never guessed that Apple's largest acquisition ever would be Beats.
Unless some kind of backdoor was about to be discovered...and they'd rather close it down before it gets discovered.
At the bottom of this page it says "WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure"

Looks like they've taken out the ambiguity.
iTunes is 64% of the digital music market and 29% of all music sold in the world. I don't see what's wrong with that statement.
Your argument makes sense, but it kind of falls apart when you consider that Beats aren't actually good headphones, to the point where The Wirecutter actually did an article[1] where they listed all the various Beats products and then provided examples of better deals (some of them with significantly better quality at half the price).

I don't understand why Apple would buy a headphone company that makes pretty but lousy products whose price is only justified by the brand name; Apple gets that unjustified criticism already, they hardly need to reinforce it by acquiring a brand to which it actually applies.

[1] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/faq-what-are-some-alternati...
Same key as the previous binaries? I doubt it, given that the keys were replaced mere 3 hours before the new binaries were published:

http://sourceforge.net/p/truecrypt/activity/?page=0&limit=10...
No one said mass people in the streets, and the data shows 45k people a year dying[1] from lack of healthcare. So stop looking at life expectancy and trying to infer deaths from that and just look at the data on deaths from lack of healthcare. It's been studied, no need to try and infer it.

[1] http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-find...
No need to allege some kind of payoff conspiracy. I got the same pitch. Editors just decide whether it's interesting enough or new enough to warrant a post or not. Some readerships are far less likely to have heard or other mobile security options, so a high-profile one adding this makes it news - like when Facebook adds 2-factor auth years after Twitter does it.
"If we don't need people to work, why should the government bend over backwards and "get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans over algorithms"?"

I respect Bill Gates' ideas but this one is totally wrong. His solution is neither practical nor logical. The same solution could have been presented 100 years ago when people were being laid off due to the industrial revolution. We would not have progressed this far if we had given people's employment priority over power and efficiency of machines. In many cases algorithms are simply better and faster over humans and they are just going to get even better and faster. They will not only get things done safely but also reduce human errors and reduce energy consumption.
Just trying to make sense of the news, ( did I miss something, or is this the current state of the rumor mill?)

1. Truecrypt.org redirects to TrueCrypt's sourceforge account.

2. The sourceforge page is defaced.

3. There is a signed(?) binary which can only be used to migrate.

Sounds remarkably bad ( and remarkably much effort for the lu1z.) So is there a defined version for the audit? ( Such that there is a known good version to roll back to?)
> we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production

Those corporations will have less revenue. There won't be many blue-collar types buying new clothes dryers and bigscreen televisions. They can reduce prices to try to increase demand, but there on the wrong side of some sort of reverse Laffer curve.
That's a fairly arbitrary and unsatisfying exception.
The numbers seem to indicate you're right, but anecdotally I've used iTunes Radio and the Beats app. Beats is a vastly superior experience. I'm excited to see Beats integrated into iTunes Radio.
>We shot off an email to Apple Technical Support — one of the two free emails Apple allows developers to send (after which they cost $99 for a 2-pack).

Wow, this statement is such drama.

There is no "allowance" for how many emails you can send to Apple. The Apple developer evangelist email is public and emails to it are not limited. The author is confusing emails and TSIs (Technical Support Incidents).

You can also call the developer support line, which picks up after a couple rings with a live human. And you can file bugs. And you can tweet to the developer evangelists, which may be the fastest, most effective way to get an urgent problem like this on their radar.

The two TSIs that are free with your developer account (and then cost after that, if you ever even use your first two) are for code-level support, meaning "how do I accomplish this with code." This is clearly spelled out (see https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/submit/).

They will get your question answered, if an answer is possible. Apple pulls out all the stops to get these resolved, and it's a huge misunderstanding of their purpose to use them for an outage report, and further to claim that you can only send two emails to Apple without paying.

Far from being indifferent, the Apple developer relations team is hitting it way out of the park. Yes, outages happen, and that's unfortunate. But there's no need to make something out of it that it's not.
Robots in the car industry have removed very many jobs! Sure, you need people to build, sell, deliver, install, program, operate and maintain those robots but those jobs are still fewer than the numbers of people who ised to be on the production lines.

You still find many people in electronics factories, but surface mount pick and place machines are throwing 30,000 components per hour onto PCBs. These machine shave replaced benches of people stuffing components onto PCBs with one or two people operating the machine.

Barista work is low pay low status. Social interaction is the reason we don't see barista robots in coffee shops, although we do see them beginning to enter supermarkets and roadside service stations. (Often with foul coffee).

And job descriptions change. "Baker" used to mean someone who used recipes to make breads. Now it appears to mean someone who takes presupplied gloop out of the tub, shapes it; and bales it for the time specified.
> Beats is inferior to Spotify (or other competition such as Rdio) in my opinion.

> Beats is quite rudimentary in terms of music management, and requires way too many taps to add multiple songs to playlists or even just shuffle play a playlist.

By comparison, I am a Spotify subscriber, and Spotify until recently didn't even have a way to 'save' albums wholesale (which is my preferred way of listening to music). Instead, you had to save each album as its own unique playlist, which got old fast. Now they have introduced a way of 'saving' albums and browsing through them by artist/album/song, but this new feature still hasn't propagated to all their clients (e.g. their Roku client). So it's not like Spotify is that much better.
Next IE Version: Web Audio, Media Capture, ES6 Promises, HTTP/2
> reinvented the higher-end headphone marke

There's zero high-endness about Beats headphones. They're all right (at least if they were priced around 30% of their current price), but really, they don't sound particularly good.
To shuffle a playlist, you actually have to hit the play button for the playlist so it begins playing in order. Then, you enable the shuffle feature in the now playing screen, and then you can skip past the first track to a random one.

I just checked and don't see any specific shuffle buttons, but if there's one I'm not seeing then that'd make me happier.

It's not a huge deal, but it's still one of those things I shouldn't have to do manually in this day and age-- shuffle is a rather standard feature.
Ask HN: What business credit card do you use for your startup?
What credit card do you use for your startup, how does your startup manage employee cards and paying for 3rd party services?

I seems the Amex Plum card is very popular. It provides 1.5% back if you pay within 10 days, which is great for funded companies. Are others using that or something else?
> reinvented the higher-end headphone market.

Rebranded mid-range electronics with pop star endorsements and hype.

Do people really consider Beats to be high end?
ehhh i understand where you are coming from, i mean honestly there are multiple existing Hip Hop Billionaires. They are the owners of the record labels, radio stations, etc. Dre is really 'just' the first hip hop artist to make a billion. And from what is currently known, he wont really be a billionaire after the deal. really its just a case of hip hop bragadocio
If I may chime in with my own anecdote:

My Dad reading to me as a kid are the most cherished memories I have. I'll never forget how wonderful it was to sit on the floor with my brothers while my dad settled into hid dads big old rocking chair to read to us.

My dad has always been a busy guy, so it means all the more to look back at my life and realize that my dad set aside 2+ hours a night just to read to me and my brothers for nearly 5 years. This display of consistency and loyalty to his family makes me emotional even now just thinking about it.

Additionally, the books my Dad read really helped me connect with him. He read to us the same books he read as a kid: A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, all of Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan, and many more. Having been exposed to the same media, it helped my brothers and I relate to our dad, and makes our relationship stronger to this day.

Read to your kids. It's an easy "parent-child" activity, and if you start with material that's interesting, you'll both enjoy it.
Eh, Apple is Apple. They announced iTunes Radio at WWDC 2013, and that doesn't have an API or anything for developers.

And I'm not sure about announcing acquisitions outside of market hours. Apple does plenty of acquisitions that they never announce. Beats would probably need to announce being acquired if they were a public company, but they aren't.
>> "Beats Music had only 111,000 subscribers as of March [1]. Compare that to Spotify's 10 million paying subscribers, 30 million non-paying users, and $4 billion valuation."

I don't see how these numbers are useful. Beats is US only right now and has only been around a few months. Spotify has been around 6 years and is available in a huge number of countries.

Also - Beats doesn't have a free option which will probably stop a lot of people trying it.

At this point it doesn't really matter. Apple is late enough to the game that they don't have time to wait another 2 years while they build a good streaming service. Purchasing was the only way to get to market fast and what better than an established music brand, with the deals and software, just launched so that they can make whatever changes they want without too much uproar.

The money the headphone business makes for Beats really helps justify the deal though. Even if things flop with the music streaming service they can make their $3bn back relatively quickly through headphone sales.
I think the author is referring to digital music stored in electronic storage (e.g. flash memory, hard drive) versus physical media (e.g. compact disc).
The replica makers, I wonder what their profit margin would be on a pair of $450 headphones.
The TrueCrypt license is not OSI approved, so probably noone wants to touch it for the same reason noone wanted to touch OpenSSL for all those years ... unless you really really have to and have no alternatives.
Awesome!!! Can't wait for the future of IO.
s/high end/costly/
"…this is going to be seen as where Apple's golden age began to wane."

I heard that kind of talk when Steve died.
That would be funny, but I think that makes less sense than Apples move. I've heard a lot of speculation, but nobody really knows what Apple's plans are.
> would Steve Jobs have done this? Or would he have created his own headphones and music streaming service?

I don't know, would he have? You asked the question in such a way as to imply the answer that no, he wouldn't, but you can't actually know that for sure. Also, we shouldn't be holding Apple to the standard of 'Steve Jobs was perfect so if he wouldn't have done this then it's bad'; Jobs made his share of mistakes anyway.

The confusing part is that Apple is spending $3bn on a company that makes mediocre, overpriced headphones with lousy sound quality. It makes no sense to me that they would buy a company like this when they have the money to create their own headphone line with better technology, equivalent or better design, and overall better result, likely at a lower price.

I guess we'll have to see where things go from here.
From the video, it seems like a lot of it is going into paying licensing costs so they can give it to schools for free.
I completely agree with this. Jobs would've already made a subscription service and tried different headphones to sell by now. This is more of an aquihire and it's unimpressive.

If you watch MKBHD's videos on youtube, he shows why beats headphones sound good and why there's plenty of others that sound better for a cheaper cost.

Basically it's not really a move Jobs would've done but that's what happens when your co-founders aren't running the company anymore. It's like the NFL draft.

I'd say Google is going up and Apple is going down.