I just deleted 36K tweets - <AUTHOR> https://ethankaplan.com/i-just-deleted-36000-tweets-91e196dc129f#.eolhoswgr <comment><USER2> "As an experiment I downloaded my entire archive"

I've wanted to do this, but in order to do it, you need to verify your email address with Twitter. Whenever I request the verification email nothing is sent or delivered. (Checked spam and everything). Twitter's support hasn't responded to my inquires, so I'm basically stuck. Anyone happen to have a solution for this?

<comment><USER3> Use a different email address?

<comment><USER2> You mean change the one associated with my account? Good idea. I'll give that a shot. Hopefully won't lock me out completely.

<comment><USER2> This ended up working. Thanks so much for the suggestion!

<comment><USER4> What email provider were you using at first on your account?

<comment><USER2> GMail. Only thing I can think is that at some point I may have opted out of all emails from Twitter, and somehow this got swept up in that block.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did a similar thing recently. Archived my tweets and then deleted them all. Something to note is that archives don't come with local copies of photos/videos, but I found a handy python repo to help with that [1].

[1]:[https://github.com/mwichary/twitter-export-image- fill](https://github.com/mwichary/twitter-export-image-fill)

<comment><USER6> Shameless plug: I have written a similar tool to also archive all of your tweets, with a delete option. It's a little more fully featured. [https://github.com/Datamine/Archive- Tweets](https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-Tweets)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My favorite quote was "Assembling reality from the fragments of nuance is as foolish as making a snowman by catching flakes in mid-air."

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the party line analogy, and for once the spectre of anonymous trolls isn't used as a catch all.

Twitter definitely jumped the shark a while ago. The hashtags got hijacked by brands and activists for hollow signaling and marketing. Retweeting and quoting got repurposed to shame and bully. Forced brevity got redirected into hot takes and memes. It was the core community who did it all first.

I suspect Twitter has been pushed aside by many for more private and granular services like Discord and Slack. Discovery there is a problem though, a million chat rooms of 10 people each make for a poor community. In some ways it's like the living rooms of Iran: most know public discourse is messed up and broken beyond repair, so they only speak openly behind closed doors.

If Twitter could admit that and shift gears, there might still be some hope and a future in it. As it stands, all they're doing is giving people better shovels to dig themselves deeper into the hole of their own making.

<comment><USER8> Twitter was ahead of its time and tried build a messaging protocol on a doomed stack (ror). Then they nuked the third party apps they didn't already buy and the list goes on. I sometimes wonder how history would be different if they deleted Trump's account for trolling while they still had a chance.

I still think a new twitter like service could still be relevant minus the baggage of what twitter has become. They could solve a lot of their issues by quarantining trolls including Trump into a different sub domain.

The biggest problem with most social networks is that once celebrities flock to your service they tend to dominate all discourse and you end up with a dichotomy of leaders and followers.

Facebook somehow manages to still keep trolls from dominating dialogue though it can be suffocating and reddit manages to counter the trolls with quality subreddits for people fed up with trolls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is funny to me, because while I used Twitter, I mostly did it to broadcast mundane things to my friends, and never really participated in the "Twitter community", whatever that actually means to people. Facebook cloned one of Twitter's core features with the 'Status' prompt that served as an effective replacement for real-life friends, while Tumblr was a better place where you could pseudonymously post long-form content with many of the same pressures and rewards of virality, but its many different communities that had a lower propensity to devolve into flaming and trolling.

By the time professionals' "I'm leaving Twitter" posts became unremarkable and trite, the mass exodus was well on its way: to Facebook for its more granual privacy/audience controls, Medium for its analytics, social features, and perceived professionalism, or to the social black hole, having been disenchanted with an overtly social, always public presence altogether.

It's always bittersweet (though mostly bitter) when communities falter and fall apart, but to me Twitter was never a good place to build a community anyway. Most of its advantages came from media and commentators fuming over having missed the boat on Facebook, so there was a concentrated effort to never make that mistake again: hashtags and Tweets were everywhere more so than AOL keywords ever were, which quickly made Twitter mandatory for people who wanted to feel like they could be "influencers", or hang out in their company. In this social and reputational gold rush, only a few came out ahead, which should not be a surprise to anyone, as much as it frustrates those who tried.

<comment><USER10> Funny, I recently got into Twitter about two years ago. I've ditched Facebook b/c its creepy af, prefer my own static site with Disqus for blogging (won't get taken down, or at least easily portable if Github or AWS eventually fails), and consider Tumblr a cultural wasteland.

The important thing about Twitter is it's a really good real-time online CV/resume. I basically use it to tweet about things I care about professionally, and then link my Twitter account on my other personal pages. That way I can keep my personal pages relatively generic and point potential employers, employees, customers, or partners at my Twitter if they want to see a more current snapshot of my professional activities.

For the most part I don't get involved in the naval-gazing self-back-patting "Twitter Community" either, nor do I post about mundane personal shit, I keep it all professional-related. Most of my posts are intended for non-Twitter users (or at least people coming to my profile from origins other than Twitter) who are vetting me for some business opportunity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> i suppose i use twitter very differently than mr. kaplan. for me, twitter is almost like a social "one line a day" journal, where i persist random thoughts and jokes i have throughout the day. what he considers "fragments of nothing" without any worth, i consider memories. i can still look back at my old tweets from 2008 and remember what i was doing and why i made the tweet almost 10 years on.

i'm likely in the minority, but twitter for me is more personal than performative or social. i keep a backup of my tweets archive so that i will never lose any of my memories. and this is why i find tweet delete services so baffling.

<comment><USER12> My usage transitioned over time from a more mundane "here's what I'm up to" to more of a pulpit. I became bored with bother versions of me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish he'd said what service he used to delete all those tweets and to auto- delete his new ones after a certain amount of time has passed.

<comment><USER14> It's not automated, but I used Twitter Archive Eraser [0] to purge around 50k tweets around the new year. It worked well.

[0] [https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive- Eraser/](https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser/)

<comment><USER15> I made this tool, I'm glad it was useful for you :) I made out of frustration with other tools that didn't help with deleting my own tweets.

<comment><USER14> Thank you! Ever thought of doing something similar for Facebook?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've never used twitter, am I deserving of some sort of reward or recognition too?

<comment><USER17> Some people get off on tomb-stoning large amounts of data. Let him have his moment. Tweets are equivalent to taking a dandelion that's seeded and blowing it into the wind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wish we could petition y-combinator to allow them to allow a member to delete their Hacker News account and comments.

This year for spring cleaning. I deleted facebook, twitter, disqus, and thousands of comments I left on websites from over a decade ago. No archiving, just permanent deletion. It was the the most beautiful feeling. I felt free. Like a new person. Like there wasn't a part of me roaming around on the internet building up dust anymore.

I know space is cheap and startups love data but we should study what all that does to a person emotionally.

IF {Google Glass was suppose to keep us connected /BUT/ Google glass failed because we felt too connected /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to be left alone and let the mind relax.}

THEN {Permanently archiving all your content is suppose to be a feature /BUT/ people are deleting their content /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to start over, clean up, and not leave things strewn about}

That being said I really wish the Hacker News team would add a "DELETE ACCOUNT and all comments" feature. It's ironic that Y-Combinator's hacker news team stands up for so many positive internet movements yet feel that they can permanently keep all the content I generated. It is MY content after all. Do they own the copyright to MY words? The excuse has always been "it's a part of the public dialog". Everything is. Facebook, Twitter, & Disqus are also part of the public dialog. And they let me delete myself off of their services.

<comment><USER19> If it makes you feel any better, I am pro Hacker News not allowing you to delete content and also extremely against Twitter letting you delete content. You saying something to me should be just as much a belonging of me as it is of you. Imagine a world where you could just arbitrarily retract all the emails you ever sent me, all the text messages you ever sent me, and all the letters you ever mailed me, just because you decided you wanted a "clean slate". (And while I am going to mention in passing that way way too often I see people be extremely mean to other people and then use content deletion to gaslight others into thinking "this user isn't so bad and I can't find any evidence of your assertions otherwise", I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and only want to mention this at all as my comment feels incomplete as an essay without this.)

As for your copyright, the terms of service on websites deal with this, making certain that the content you provide is licensed to them (it has to be, or they wouldn't even be able to distribute it at all), and can spell out altered terms to avoid the problem of someone insisting their comments be deleted later. Further, even without extra clauses, I would argue for copyright purposes the "work" is the conversation, not your words, and so any lack of clear ownership should either argue for the entire conversation to be deleted due to one objector (which I think might be more likely by law, and what the terms of service are dealing with) or none of it to be able to be deleted until everyone agrees (which seems more clearly correct and what the terms should state if deletion is to be allowed); I can't come up with a scenario where it seems OK for you to delete just your part unilaterally.

You decided to go to a public forum and contribute to a public conversation. The fact that you said something meant that some people replied to you and others upvoted you instead of saying the same thing, making your comments load bearing and structural. You going back later and deleting what you said changes the context of what I said. For a great (related, though slightly different) example, seek out the account on reddit whose name was something like "edited_to_make_you_look_dumb", which would later edit what they said to make all people who responded to it look really dumb. The two hour window on Hacker News feels about perfect to me, giving time to fix typos, make minor structure and formatting fixes, and even delete things while other people still have time to react and adjust, but then locking the content in for the later record when the content becomes part of the archives.

When you go on a redact and purge, you are destroying something that not just that you created, but something that tons of other people took part in, and you are individually revising the historical record. One may as well argue "I also want everything I said in public comment at last week's City Council meeting redacted from the minutes and I want everything I said at last week's trial redacted from the transcript". This is how you should treat saying something in public as part of a public dialog: you said something in public, and now are part of the public record. Again: if you weren't prepared to say something in public, _don 't say it in public_.

And honestly, I would much rather you _not_ contribute to a conversation if you are going to come around later asking for your part to be deleted. It is as if we are going to paint a mural together, but for some reason every five years you go around finding all the murals you helped with _and take back all your paint_. If you hadn't have been there at all, someone else might have helped more, and it isn't at all clear our mural would be drastically worse off: but you removing your paint _destroys_ the mural and invalidates all of the work of everyone else involved. It _wasn 't_ "your paint", it was " _our_ mural", and you shouldn't get to unilaterally alter it :/.

<comment><USER18> I disagree 100% with you on this. You have good points but those very points are the very reason why I'm for deletion and against data retention.

 _" And honestly, I would much rather you not contribute to a conversation if you are going to come around later asking for your part to be deleted."_ That statement perfectly describes what's wrong with the silicon valley "dataphile" era. You're encouraging the shutting down of conversations, not the growth of more.

Even Y-Combinator said it in interviews that founders reveal more during more intimate interviews and talks than ones on camera. When you go around with a microphone and camera and record and set into stone what people say it doesn't encourage them to say more, but rather less. Because they're not sure if that information can be used against them in the future. When you fail to give users privacy and data retention rights they may just run away from your platform altogether.

There's a dread a user feels when they realize they don't remember what they said or who they were 10 years ago, but the whole internet does.

1) I don't mean this as an insult but what is your age? Because when I was younger my views matched yours, as I grew older the mental stress of my digital self being all over the place began to build up. It's something that happens with time and age. Sure there are outliers but for the most part we all slowly tun into privacy advocates as we get older.

2) _" When you go on a redact and purge, you are destroying something that not just that you created, but something that tons of other people took part in"_

It's better to create and delete rather than to never have created at all. Also, we're talking about Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, and blog comments. This isn't a scientific journal, National Geographic, a Newspaper, or a text- book. We're talking about internet comments here. There's a time and place for data retention and I don't believe this is it. The burden of feeling like your life is cataloged on the internet with you having no control over it. The burden of feeling like your identity is split up in a million different little pieces is not a feeling you want your users to feel. No facebook or twitter or HN post is worth undermining basic user rights of privacy and deletion.

3) Your views on data retention seem extreme to me, the very conversations you're trying to permanently save will in a few months become outdated, no longer visited, not important, and useless. So what if someone deletes a comment and people reading 5 years in the future don't see it. What is the importance or significance of it that makes it worth destroying user rights. This is a sort of "Data Pack-Rat mentality", an obsession with archiving and compiling everything that everyone has ever said into a perfect neat little collection. And anyone that gets in the way of that perfect collection is a threat to it. You're more sympathetic and caring toward "the collection" than the users who create those collections.

I'll agree to disagree with you. I can't and don't want to change you but at least now you know why I am the way I am. Who you were 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago is not who you are now. What you care about changes, what you think changes, your identity changes, your dreams change, and unfortunately comments do not.

I believe User rights are more important than a perfect archive of some internet comments on a website.

<comment><USER20> I sympathize and am inclined to agree with your position, but be a little more charitable and don't try to psychoanalyze other commenters; the second half of your third point is unnecessarily harsh, and doesn't help the argument.

I can understand the viewpoint against allowing deletions, and it's not necessarily a "ratpack mentality" of storing it all: it's losing the pearls in the chaff. Sure, most comments are worthless after a few days, let alone months or years, but a few are still valuable. I've been browsing the web for quite a while now, and I've never bookmarked much, let alone tried to "save it all", yet it still pains me a little that the few links I did save are mostly lost.

That said, I don't think that's enough to justify not allowing deleting comments. I'm just saying we shouldn't paint a caricature of people with different positions, even if we fully disagree with them.

All that aside, there's another point: HN can't actually delete your comments, they can only delete their copy. Dumps have and will be made, and a simple search can find comments by your nickname outside of news.ycombinator.com, and this is inevitable on an open site. Isn't there the danger of creating a false sense of privacy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "As an experiment I downloaded my entire archive"

This is still possible? I've done this when the feature was new and tried it again a few weeks ago and there was nothing. Thought it is broken.

<comment><USER22> It works for me-

go to [https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data](https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data) and scroll alllllll the way down, there's a link to 'Twitter Archive'

<comment><USER21> They want me to approve my e-mail address (again) and this process seems to be broken. No e-mail. Nothing in junk.

Well, …

<comment><USER23> Same here, I'm debating on changing email address but worry that will fail too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I also recently deleted most of my >10K tweets after signing up around 10 years. I'm keeping certain tweets that have a specified string in them, and I'm keeping all the favourites.

I used this Ruby application to do so, together with the archive CSV, customising it a bit.

[https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete](https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete)

I think Twitter became less local or personal and became more serious.

</comment><comment><USER25> I just found 12 bricks.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how many of those tweets that were ever retweeted. Retweeted tweets are replicated and will never go away. I know you shouldn't expect things published publicly on the internet to ever go away, but I think that this one of the cons of Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER27> This post inspired me to do the same thing. 41,000 tweets deleted (but archived first). I quit tweeting and unfollowed everyone a few weeks ago, so deleting everything was a good next step. We'll see how long my 773 followers stick around now :P.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not a heavy Twitter user so I must be missing something. How does a Twitter history make any difference to current usage? Do people actually dredge up and react to old tweets?

<comment><USER12> It's like detritus without context. Memory is so subjective and left over tweets from ten years are a pseudo objective slant on memory that doesn't really work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guess I can answer questions here too. Hi there.

</comment><comment><USER29> Everyone I know from #FrogTwitter got banned so the remaining few went back and deleted all their tweets.</comment>


Microsoft Surface Mini to debut in mid-May? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-surface-mini-to-debut-in-mid-may-7000028744/ <comment><USER2> If it has a proper digitizer and if it's not _extremely_ expensive then it's an instant buy. The reason is OneNote. OneNote + ultraportability + high quality (as every Surface so far) + digitizer = unique, killer product. At least for me.

<comment><USER3> I thought this for a bit. Had a pile of shit (100+ notes) in OneNote on OneDrive and then suddenly WHAM half my notes disappeared out of the blue. Fortunately I had a backup but I'm not going to trust it again. If you're offline you're probably OK though.

Gone back to a lab notebook and space pen for the mean time.

Side issue: does anyone know where you can get decent lab notebooks in the UK - shipping them from the US is expensive?

<comment><USER4> > If you're offline you're probably OK though.

Isn't the recent OneNote free version only able to work with the MS syncing? Copies coming with Office packs probably aren't limited that way (corporate users wouldn't take it), but your average Joe consumers are stuck.

<comment><USER3> That is correct.

You don't have to sync if you paid for anything from Office 365 Home and above.

However it bugs you constantly to do it and all the save dialogs in Office 2013+ promote saving to "The Cloud". It's terribly irritating.

<comment><USER5> > _However it bugs you constantly to do it and all the save dialogs in Office > 2013+ promote saving to "The Cloud". It's terribly irritating._

File - Options, Save, Save to Computer by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Microsoft execs also announced at Build 2014 that Microsoft would be making > Windows free on Windows Phones and tablets with screen sizes of nine inches > and under.

I wonder if this could be applied to a dongle type device? A winRT HDMI stick combined with a nice keyboard/mouse presenter would be a nifty platform, since WinRT has a better track-record for keyboard/mouse support than Android.

<comment><USER7> Microsoft used language construction "available at zero cost" instead of "free". They also said that they have plans to make "Windows for Internet of Things" as a special version of Windows for enthusiasts who want to create experimental devices, also "available at zero cost".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought I saw one of these under this Bing for Schools "earn a surface" page, second pic down, but I could be wrong and it might just be a ref design from someone:

[https://www.bing.com/explore/rewardsforschools](https://www.bing.com/explore/rewardsforschools)

Mirror:

[http://imgur.com/lANCUd8](http://imgur.com/lANCUd8)

</comment><comment><USER9> Microsoft Surface is amazing. Only MS would simplify development of this platform.

</comment><comment><USER10> Netbooks, round 2?

<comment><USER11> The stylus/digitizer is really the killer feature for me. I'd looked at the Surface Pro, but it's just too bulky for what I want.

A 7-8" Windows device with a 1080p display and stylus would be perfect for me during meetings. I'd be able to leave my similarly sized 5x8" notepads in the office _and_ have access to my systems when needed.

EDIT:

I had previously looked at the Note Tab line, but couldn't get over the cheap build quality and god awful Samsung software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So they're just now jumping on the mini-tablet train? Wasn't the time for that like two years ago if they wanted to get into the market? They really need to get their act together and figure out how to be at the front of innovation, not always years behind.

<comment><USER13> In some regard, they were on the front of innovation on tablets, if you definite it as getting tablets out to consumers early on. Unfortunately that burned them for years because the tech was not there, not the batteries, touch screen or OS. This is a better move, especially if affordable and has real pen input, that would make it unique. hopefully it's an 8 inch tablet. That seems to to be the sweet spot for work, weight and portability.

<comment><USER12> My point was that the nexus 7 and ipad mini have been highly successful in these markets for a while now. I want to see competition but they're coming kind of late.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What makes a good Vlog? - <AUTHOR> I just moved to Cambridge, MA to start a masters at Harvard. I'm up to some interesting things, and I'd love to share through a youtube channel! <comment><USER2> Engaging content, of course, but after following Casey Neistat's channel for a while, his mastery of _editing_ and their conciseness (concision?) makes his work stand out for me. So many videos I see are made by people without the slightest notion that good audio is necessary, that people aren't interested in watching someone drone endlessly into the camera, and that unless you're doing a feature-length piece, ten minutes or so should suffice--cut the cruft! Oh, and putting text into a video makes a difference, especially when one is trying to convey specific information.

Another example of good work is Papa hiker's channel. Lately I've been thinking about getting a tarp for camping rather than a full tent, and there are a lot of videos that attempt to illustrate how to pitch a tarp in various configurations, but most are just overlong, sodden messes of rambling talk. Papa hiker's videos aren't perfect, but they're concise and well Illustrated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just took a shot at my own! I'm really eager to learn how to edit and create fun films as a part time thing. Lemme know what you think! [https://youtu.be/dC-1OQ-3fb8](https://youtu.be/dC-1OQ-3fb8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> quality stuff less than 4min long

</comment><comment><USER4> content is the king.

<comment><AUTHOR> How's this for a start? [https://youtu.be/dC-1OQ-3fb8](https://youtu.be/dC-1OQ-3fb8)</comment></comment>


Python Enums for Humans - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/1920153 I've been doing Python web apps for a few years. All of them have involved some pattern of declaring runtime vars to represent DB values, and also mapping those DB values to user-facing display values in your view templates. The practice of keeping the { var --> value } and { value --> display string } maps separately led to annoying dev-time bugs. Here's my short and easy solution.<p>MIT License. Enjoy. <comment><USER2> Does nobody else find the repetition objectionable? e.g. NEW = ('N', 'New'), If your values have good names, you can easily deduce "Some Constant" from SOME_CONSTANT or vice-versa. While I'm at it, having abbreviations built-in seems iffy too.

<comment><AUTHOR> The apparent repetition is due to the triviality of the example. Imagine if you had to translate the display string or change the display name without renaming all of your code references to the constant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What makes that better than just using strings?

<comment><AUTHOR> [ Edit: add more context ]

My use case for this is to map between the database and application logic.

In the example, the short string 'N' is for storage in a db column, *.NEW is for use in code, and "New" is for use to display in an UI. You don't necessarily want to persist the display or var name because you may want to rename them in the app later. IMO it's a bad idea to store display representations as data.</comment></comment>


Nectarine Demoscene Radio shuts down after 18 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.scenemusic.net <comment><USER2> So long, and thanks for all the chip tunes!

<comment><AUTHOR> I still wonder why they shut down though

<comment><USER3> There is some discussion of the details here: [https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11430&page=1](https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11430&page=1)

For anybody else missing their fix, the stream source and mirrors still seem to be up, including:

[https://nectarine.from-de.com/necta192](https://nectarine.from- de.com/necta192)

[http://privat.is-by.us:8000/necta192.mp3](http://privat.is- by.us:8000/necta192.mp3)

and many other internet radio sites including TuneIn.com</comment></comment></comment>


Mary Meeker's Internet Trends failed to mention one of the biggest platforms - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mary-meekers-internet-trends-tells-us-growth-slowing-motschwiller?trk=eml-b2_content_ecosystem_digest-hero-14-null&midToken=AQE5WL03u_Wx3w&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=3thusGRugEzTg1 <comment><AUTHOR> @Moderators - The title I've included is the title that LinkedIn used when this item showed up in my (email) news feed. Since it seems more concise than the article's title on their site, I chose this one.</comment>


When Dorothy Parker got fired from Vanity Fair - <AUTHOR> https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/when-dorothy-parker-got-fired-from-vanity-fair/ <comment><USER2> Dorothy Parker's successor is perhaps Cintra Wilson, who was fired from the New York Times for this review [1] of the Manhattan J.C. Penny store.

 _" J. C. Penney has always trafficked in knockoffs that aren't quite up to Canal Street's illegal standards. It was never "get the look for less" so much as "get something vaguely shaped like the designer thing you want, but cut much more conservatively, made in all-petroleum materials, and with a too- similar wannabe logo that announces your inferiority to evil classmates as surely as if you were cursed to be followed around by a tuba section."_

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/fashion/13CRITIC.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/fashion/13CRITIC.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, just followed her on Twitter.

Can you imagine Dorothy Parker being on Twitter? It would have been made for her...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The lady had incredible wit that would undoubtedly offend more than a few delicate ears. When asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence by her Round Table compatriots, Dorothy came up with "You may lead a horticulture but you can't make her think". (oh to be a fly on the wall during one of those lunches...)

<comment><USER5> If you've not watched "Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle", run, do not walk, to see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did that webpage change the colour of my scrollbar, or am I going mad?!

Haven't seen that since the early naughts.

<comment><USER7> It's gotten more browser support lately. I appreciate it, makes building a cohesive design system easier.

Go to css-tricks.com to see how not to do it.

<comment><USER8> It's useful on MacOS which likes to hide the scrollbar for some damn reason, allowing you to make it more pronounced so users actually know content is scrollable in small content panes such as a menu.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't Want to Lose Your Domain Name? Do This. - <AUTHOR> http://www.domain.me/blog/dont-want-to-lose-your-domain-name-domain-to-do-list-4468

<comment><USER2> Plug: you can also use <http://domainical.org/> to create auto-updating iCal feeds of your domain and SSL certificate expiration dates.</comment>


When it comes to DRM, Amazon is a bottom feeding Hell Beast - <AUTHOR> http://www.attendly.com/when-it-comes-to-drm-amazon-is-a-bottom-feeding-hell-beast/

<comment><USER2> Apple was in a position where they could make demands on publishers, so they demanded to strip off DRM and away they went. It was nice gesture, although you're still using iTunes media files but still, they exerted their power for The Greater Good (we can argue about why Apple would do that, but it was good for us all).

If anyone can exert pressure on book publishers to ditch DRM, it's Amazon, but why would they? Aside from The Greater Good they've got themselves a nice little vendor lock in, and unlike Apple who was making money hand over fist with the iPod and using the iTunes store to help get consumers to start building digital libraries, Amazon isn't making staggering amounts of money on the Kindle and they _really_ need people to stick on the platform.

Seems like a few publishers have seen sense regarding DRM (Tor and Angry Robot are the first two who spring to mind), so maybe they'll eventually wise up and start dropping the DRM requirement.

<comment><USER3> AAC is not a proprietary format ("iTunes media files" — it is to MP4 what MP3 is to MPEG). Other media players can and do support AAC if it has no DRM.

Amazon not only uses DRM but it uses a non-standard ebook format and its hardware does not support vanilla ePub (out of the box, you can download third party viewers to the Fire devices).

To go back to a comparison to Apple: iPods do play WAV and MP3 out of the box, and so does iTunes. The only non-standard media format Apple pushed (Apple lossless) it has mad free and open. Apple's book reader supports ePub out of the box. (Apple does push its own enhancements to ePub for interactive textbooks, but it has done these in the "correct" way.)

<comment><USER4> > AAC is not a proprietary format ("iTunes media files" — it is to MP4 what > MP3 is to MPEG). Other media players can and do support AAC if it has no > DRM.

Both AAC & MP3 are patent encumbered and require licenses for implementation.

<comment><USER3> You are of course correct, but (a) that's not what the GP was implying since most non iTunes music players and all significant non-iTunes stores support MP3, (b) it doesn't matter to most users, and (c) Ogg Vorbis is only unencumbered to the extent that is too insignificant to represent a useful lawsuit target.

<comment><USER5> As for (c), AOL did legal research before publishing the Vorbis decoder for WinAmp, and Microsoft used Vorbis for various game titles (I'd guess they also did some legal research).

Of course, anyone can sue over anything, and keep you engaged in court for a long time, even without a good reason. MP3licensing (or MPEG-LA for the newer stuff) doesn't indemnify licensees, as can be seen every year when Sisvel lets German customs confiscate media players on Cebit over MP3 patents not part of the pool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazon didn't insist on having DRM, although it worked out to their advantage. The publishers did: [http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/01364817725/how- pu...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/01364817725/how-publishers- repeated-same-mistake-as-record-labels-drm-obsession-gave-amazon-dominant- position.shtml)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, as Charlie Stross pointed out on his blog some time ago, the publishers effectively demanded that Amazon have a monopoly on the eBook reading public & only now are they (slowly) realising that this might not have been a great idea. Bezos must have been laughing all the way home from those meetings...

<comment><USER8> It's worth noting that _some_ of the publishers have woken up and taken corrective action.

Holtzbrinck, a giant German family owned publishing conglomerate you probably haven't heard of, actually owns Macmillan, who you might have heard of, who own Tor, who you probably _have_ heard of if you're part of the regular HN demographic. A few months ago they came to the same conclusion, and have dropped mandatory DRM on genre fiction titles. I believe they're also open to arguments both for and against DRM on other publishing categories, rather than maintaining the doctrinaire "DRM on everything" policy of some of the other Big Six.

The long term effect of this policy is ... well, it remains to be seen. Because publishers traditionally sold to wholesalers who sold to bookstores, they don't routinely sell direct to the public. A move by any of the big publishers to set up a direct-sales channel for ebooks, rivaling Amazon or Barnes and Noble, would probably be seen as hostile or monopolistic by the bookseller trade, and might even generate anti-trust lawsuits! But I'd be unsurprised to see one of the Big Six (now Five) follow the example of smaller direct-sales publishers sooner rather than later -- like <http://www.webscription.net/> for example.

<comment><USER7> It would certainly be seen as hostile by Amazon!

<comment><USER9> But this does seem like the sort of role that the Internet tends to disintermediate. If I can get ebooks straight from the publisher in standardized formats that aren't DRM-encumbered, thus allowing me to use any reader I choose, what value is Amazon bringing me that Google is not already bringing me? Nonzero, I think, but not enough to sustain their business on.

Heck, even the publisher stands in risk of being disintermediated here, let alone Amazon functioning as essentially a _fourth_ party in the relationship.

Whereas I find they bring me a lot of value as an intermediary of physical goods. Sometimes I try to order something straight from, say, a food vendor, but always end up choking on the fact the food vendor wants to charge me $15 shipping on my $30 order, because the food vendor's idea of shipping is the local Fedex drop point and Amazon's idea of shipping appears to involve some sort of teleportation technology.

<comment><USER8> _Heck, even the publisher stands in risk of being disintermediated here_

Only if you don't know what a publisher does. See also:

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html)

<comment><USER9> That's why I said only "at risk of" and not that it was certain. But, as is the way of the internet, it's not hard to imagine in ten years that the many things you say go into the publisher's set of responsibilities could themselves be dispersed to more than one entity. Publishers previously had an effectively-physical moat around that set of tasks, because they had control over the book and essentially force you to consume all the services from them to get to the physical book. Now they're going to have to ensure they are bringing value throughout the process.

Which in your domain, they probably will. But this is one way of viewing the ever-growing academic revolt against Elsevier. They do a couple of their duties OK, but the whole bundle they are providing is increasingly less compelling vs. what they are trying to charge.

<comment><USER8> Alas, "publishing" is actually about a dozen different business models flying in loose formation. Generalizing from, say, trade fiction publishing to peer- reviewed academic journals to text books to newspapers is, shall we say, not going to work terribly well.

<comment><USER9> I didn't. If you find it not unlikely that _some_ publishers may themselves be disintermediated in whole or in part, that's all the support I need for the point I made. I never said that all publishers are doomed. I only said that given that publishers are themselves going to be facing this sort of pressure, even if some survive it quite well, how much more so would Amazon, trying to be a fourth party in the already-pressured three-way reader/publisher/author relationship.

<comment><USER7> Dude, just drop it already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it possible to have the DRM discussion without becoming hyperbolic? I mean, I'm not thrilled about DRM, but "Bottom feeding hell beast" is probably a little over the top.

Furthermore, it seems weird that his primary stated use case (copying a section of a book and sharing with his friends) is totally supported on the kindle. There are all sorts of social features built into the device.

Yes, we get it, DRM is a non-starter for most technical people, but we need to have a constructive dialog around the issue.

<comment><USER9> I would observe the hyperbole is usually coming from the consumer side, where it is histrionic. The consumer always has the option to simply not consume, one I use quite frequently when the DRM deal is not in my favor.

This is an author, realizing he's being enticed into the car trunk with pretty candy, and that he got taken awfully far in before he noticed. I think a bit of hyperbole is a bit more justified, so as to warn the others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems everything the author is concerned about would be solved it there were a centrally/open-source managed, non-profit, DRM out there. The DRM which would be analogous to SSH.

So one thing I've never understood: Is this really not technically possible or is the problem that the people who have the knowhow to create that are ideologically opposed?

<comment><USER12> There is open DRM (e.g. OMA) but companies that are using DRM as an excuse for lock-in will never adopt it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One place Amazon appears to be noticing the benefit to reduced or eliminating DRM is in game sales. On Reddit in the /r/gamedeals subreddit, we often discuss if a game has DRM before concluding if it's a good purchase or not. The Amazon rep Tony often hangs around there to answer questions or posts deals himself, and he sees that DRM-free games do sell more. He now says if a game is DRM free or not when posting deals.

I understand they have also had a few experiments into working with publishers to sell games without DRM to measure the effect.

So, just an anecdote from a small part of Amazon, but that information may propagate to the books section eventually. We can only hope, because nothing puts me off purchasing media like digital rights management.

</comment><comment><USER14> Seen a few posts of this nature from John Birmingham. So how does he explain all his books being available on Amazon then, for download to Kindle?

He even has his own Author's page: [http://www.amazon.com/John- Birmingham/e/B001IOBFQA/ref=sr_tc...](http://www.amazon.com/John- Birmingham/e/B001IOBFQA/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1352768892&sr=1-2-ent)

His latest book, "Angels of Vengeance", published in April 2012, is available for Kindle, paperback, hardcover and audiobook.</comment>


A former Tesla employee's NDA has expired - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376 <comment><USER2> Extensive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835760)</comment>


Shout: The self-hosted web IRC client - <AUTHOR> http://shout-irc.com/ <comment><USER2> I've switched to Matrix[1] with auto-bridging to freenode. It automatically syncs new notifications across all devices, that way when I read something on the desktop, the notifications on my phone are gone. It has a slew of other cool features, too.

I use vector.im for desktop and matrix console for android.

[1] [http://matrix.org/](http://matrix.org/)

<comment><USER3> The homepage says

> Fully distributed persistent chatrooms with no single points of control or > failure

but looking at vector.im, channels seem to be based at specific servers, like "#matrix:matrix.org". How does that work? Also, what's the plan to deal with banning spammers and so forth if there's no central control?

<comment><USER2> Disclosure: I'm not a matrix dev.

The API intro page[1] is a good start. Basically, a client authenticates with their homeserver. Multiple homeservers can "access" a single room. There is a server-server API for synchronization. I don't know how this maps onto vector.im / matrix.org

Lots of good discussion by official devs here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8997844](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8997844) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8267610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8267610)

Spammers: each room can have mods / admins, just like in IRC. I don't know how bans are enforced on a technical level.

[1] [http://matrix.org/docs/spec/r0.0.1/intro.html](http://matrix.org/docs/spec/r0.0.1/intro.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used this for months. It stops working for no reason. I think it eats up too much memory and keeps increasing memory usage. I don't know, but I know it crashes after a few days.

<comment><USER5> How are you running it?

I've had a shout server running on my DO droplet for 8 months now, and I've never had any issues.

I run it using nginx and Passenger (and the setup was quite simple, I had never set up a node app in production before doing this).

<comment><USER6> Could you do a blog post or something to show what you did?

I used it until I got the crashes just like parent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's great to see projects have detailed deployment instructions for getting up and running very quickly:

[http://shout-irc.com/docs/deployment/docker.html](http://shout- irc.com/docs/deployment/docker.html)

I've seen some projects now even have "Deploy to Heroku" buttons, which is fantastic. I wish Digital Ocean had something similar. Looks like you should be able to run this on a cheap $5 droplet?

<comment><USER4> A cheap $5 droplet can run 20 instances of this, probably.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about 20 instances. It uses up about 173MB of memory on my instance.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, probably not 20. See related comment thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013579)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I run this for PonyChat and run into memory leaking issues. It runs out of memory on a 1 GB node about weekly.

<comment><USER8> I've been using it for over 6 months now with multiple users connected to multiple servers with quite a few active channels. I've had it crash from memory leaks (on a 1GB Linode VPS) once in all that time. Maybe PonyChat is just waaaay more active than the channels I'm in? At the moment, HTOP reports it using about 17% of my memory.

<comment><USER10> Not a memory leak. Messages are persisted in-memory. So more messages == more memory usage.

<comment><USER11> > Messages are persisted in-memory.

Unbounded storage is a leak. What kind of server would one build that would always eventually crash under completely normal usage?

<comment><USER12> Lots of them in fact, when you consider logging to disk.

<comment><USER11> ...and I sincerely hope you are using log rotation or your server will eventually become useless, too.

<comment><USER9> I have 4 years of IRC logs in about 4 GB of uncompressed text. YMMV but IRC is not bandwidth or disk-intensive.

<comment><USER11> Sure. It would also be a pretty shitty server if it crashed because nobody had the forethought to realize history uses memory. 4GB of memory will always be enough....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a (small) network owner, this is not yet ready to use on the network web site, because it does not support WEBIRC and so all web clients appear to come from the same IP. There's an issue open on GitHub about it.

</comment><comment><USER14> What does "self-hosted" mean in this context? Just that you host your own instance of the Web application?

<comment><USER8> Pretty much. You would run your own instance of Shout on your own server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be great if you could add some kind of avatar system on top of (or outside of) IRC with this client. Also auto expandable URLs, emoji support and pretty much everything Slack offers.

We need an IRC-based Slack alternative badly!

<comment><USER16> I'm going to put this out there because I'm not sure where else to.

Recently I had the need for a better gitter-irc two-way gateway than gitter- irc-bot. Specifically, I wanted to be able to run multiple mirrors off a single bot/account. I started writing a multi-protocol gateway and the goal was to support slack, gitter, mattermost, irc and possibly matrix with a plugin API.

Here's the prototype: [https://github.com/jleclanche/gitterway](https://github.com/jleclanche/gitterway)

It's in python. I started rewriting it in Go and then found out toml support in go was lacking, then I sort of gave up... if anyone's interested in picking it up, file an issue on there!

<comment><USER17> Toml support in go is... lacking? Did you try [https://github.com/BurntSushi/toml](https://github.com/BurntSushi/toml) ?

That author also wrote a test suite in go that compares all the _other_ toml implementations for interoperability. I'd say it's pretty high quality.

<comment><USER16> I did! I should have said it's incomplete. I ran across #70[1] which is kind of really needed for the config structure I had in mind. After that I just went back to working on other stuff...

[1] [https://github.com/BurntSushi/toml/issues/70](https://github.com/BurntSushi/toml/issues/70)

<comment><USER17> Ah. Bummer. Interesting to know, though.

I'm kind of un-bullish on toml in general, sadly. I tried toml in a couple of projects, and found for structures nested beyond a certain level, it doesn't really seem all that simple anymore. I ended up going back to json or yaml (only with a parser that doesn't implement most of the fancy features of yaml, for conservation-of-sanity reasons, of course).

<comment><USER16> Have you seen inline tables? It solves what you mention pretty well, which is why I was looking for it for this project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've used Quassel ( [http://www.quassel-irc.org](http://www.quassel-irc.org) ) for a similar purpose.

An Android client, QuasselDroid ( [http://quasseldroid.iskrembilen.com/](http://quasseldroid.iskrembilen.com/) ), has been my best IRC experience on Android.

<comment><USER19> By the way, we are currently rewriting the Android client — with material design, far more features, and hopefully better notifications.

ETA is around April.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If anyone wants to give Shout a try - you can run it in Azure for free (via free web apps). Also, you can deploy it with one click: [https://github.com/felixrieseberg/shout- azure](https://github.com/felixrieseberg/shout-azure)

Disclaimer: Love Shout, just made this

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting app, I've been using it here and there, mostly with a self-hosted IRC server. More or less a completely self-hosted chat system.

The UI is clean, and once it's up and running the experience is pretty smooth for users. However : \- Quite a hassle to install and maintain your own IRC server ... \- The server stores everything in memory. Pretty neat the first time you use it, but it tends to leak. \- Your user DB is just a bunch of json files, with no extensibility built-in. It could really use a "users" plugin, that connects to an external auth system ...

</comment><comment><USER22> I use ZNC ([http://wiki.znc.in/ZNC](http://wiki.znc.in/ZNC)) as bouncer for years now. It is stable, fully developed, has support for multiple networks, SSL support, IPv6, a Web interface and lots of other features. Plus its easy installed as 'yum install znc'. I did not read any advantage, neither in comfort nor in features that Shout has compared to ZNC. What reason could one have to switch? Except to be on the bleeding edge?

</comment><comment><USER23> Thanks for including a demo, I enjoyed getting the preview and using it. It looks like a bunch of people from HN are enjoying it right now as well.

</comment><comment> vertex-four I've been using this as my primary IRC client for a while now, and am really enjoying it, aside from it being difficult to reconnect to IRC servers when it occasionally disconnects. It's perfect for use with Chromebooks, tablets, and similar.

</comment><comment><USER24> You can self-host Kiwi IRC,[0] which is also a web-based IRC client.

Disclosure: I'm one of the Kiwi devs.

[0] [https://kiwiirc.com](https://kiwiirc.com)

</comment><comment><USER25> I use IRCCloud.com, but this looks very interesting to throw on my Linux server on Google Cloud to play around with.

</comment><comment><USER26> Love the clean, simple UI.

What utilities were used to build? I see Node, obviously. Socket.io it looks like? Any sort of framework?

</comment><comment><USER27> Will it work with [https://sameroom.io](https://sameroom.io)?

</comment><comment><USER28> oh, how I miss the days when everyone was on IRC. Unrelated question, but what is IRC used for nowadays, most often?

<comment><USER29> Similar to mailing lists, IRC might be less mainstream but is still heavily used in niches, i.e. for development and support of open source projects. The simplicity of the protocol makes it easy to use for automation (bots), i.e. CI servers or similar. I've also seen networks dedicated to file sharing.

<comment><USER28> Interesting, would never think of CI use! Thanks for the reply!</comment></comment></comment>


Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance - <AUTHOR> https://www.kevin-indig.com/why-i-left-substack-and-the-email-renaissance/ <comment><AUTHOR> 2 years ago, I started a newsletter on Mailchimp called Tech Bound and built it out to +3,000 subscribers. 3 months ago, I decided to migrate to Substack. One week ago, I went from Substack to publishing on my own site. In this post, I explain why, what my current stack looks like, and a larger trend that has been in full swing for 2 years.

<comment><USER2> Great read! The problems that you point out with social networks served as the motivation for my co-founder and I to create Readup [1]. We rank articles based on complete reads which slows down the overall pace considerably and cuts out a lot of noise since users cannot post or comment on articles they haven't really read.

I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on our proposed business model since it's based on compensating writers when Readup users read their articles to completion. In short, users pay $10/mo to use Readup, we keep $5 and divide the other $5 among the writers whose articles the user has read to completion during that month.

You keep your own stack and there's nothing you have to do other than verify a Readup account with us so we know who you are and collect any money earned. Readup users can read your articles using our browser extensions or mobile apps (I just did! [2]). You can view the full pitch [3] on YouTube.

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

[2] [https://readup.com/comments/kevin-indig/why-i-left- substack-...](https://readup.com/comments/kevin-indig/why-i-left-substack-and- the-email-renaissance)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFw- OiK3zjI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFw-OiK3zjI)

<comment><USER3> I was suspicious about your "complete reads" claim so I signed up to see how it works. Impressions:

1\. Doesn't work on Safari. Definitely not a great first impression.

2\. Sure, let's switch to Chrome (one of the three supported platforms: Chrome, Firefox and iOS). Now all I get is a blocking modal "To read on Readup, add the Chrome extension. Add to Chrome — It's Free". Sorry, not about to install an extension for something that hasn't explained why it needs an extension, let alone demonstrate any value to me, whether it's free or not.

Stalemate.

So let me ask: how do you tell a skim from a read? How do you distinguish a complete read from scrolling down to comment section (maybe even slowly)? Reading speeds vary greatly, and there's no mind-reading web API yet.

<comment><USER2> Not a great first couple of impressions!

1\. Safari uses a completely non-standard extension model and right now I'm the only developer so we're Chrome and Firefox only for the time being. Definitely sucks.

2\. That's great feedback on that modal. Seriously, it never even crossed my mind that we don't explain why the extension is required before displaying it. Also that the "Add to Chrome" button makes it seem like it will trigger an install instead of bouncing you over to the Chrome store where you can see screenshots and a description of how it works before choosing to install. We really need to fix that ASAP.

Re tracking: When the extension is triggered (limited permissions, it only runs when you click the icon) it runs a script on the web page that tries to identify the primary text of the article. Once identified, we mark the individual words as having been read, starting at the top left of the viewport. Since we keep track of individual words you can scroll around and read out of order and the tracking will still work properly.

This process runs on a timer that allows for a pretty fast reading speed (probably around 500-600 wpm) but doesn't allow a user to just sit on the page for a long time or scroll right to the bottom. As you point out you can cheat it by scrolling very slowly through the entire article. Still waiting on that mind-reading API!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the reply and glad the feedback is of some value.

Re extension: I'm not clear on why an extension is needed for reading on readup.com (as opposed to on publishers' sites). Seems to me you can do all the tracking just fine with regular sandboxed JavaScript running on the web page? To be clear, when I'm not logged in or on an unsupported browser, I'm presented with two options: "Read it on Readup" (with a "Get Started" button) and "Continue to publisher's site", the former apparently being the recommended path; when I'm logged in there's only the "To read on Readup, add the Chrome extension" modal, but if I understood what you track correctly, reading on Readup shouldn't require any extra capabilities, whereas reading on publisher's site should. So in theory a user should be able to read everything on readup.com without using an extension, just like they would on instapaper.com or feedly.com (but with some added tracking). Is that not the case simply because you haven't had the time to develop native tracking, or did I miss some fundamental limitations?

Re timer: 500-600 wpm is pretty fast on average but I can certainly beat that when reading information-sparse content (e.g. most digital magazines) or when I consciously try to read fast, and I know people who read way faster than me... Also note that some people can maintain a high comprehension level even at high speed while others struggle to comprehend even when reading word by word. I guess your compromise may be okay, but it's certainly rather crude (not that I have a better idea).

Btw, Safari 14 is adding WebExtension API support.[1] (You're probably already aware of this but doesn't hurt to share.)

[1] [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/safari_web_extensions) (documentation is crap though, at a glance)

<comment><USER2> Re: "Read it on Readup" \- Again, great point. It should be read _with_ Readup. To clarify, you're always reading _on_ the publisher's site. It would be a crazy violation of copyright if we copied the article text into our web app for you to read on readup.com. That's why we need the extension, to inject the tracker into the publisher's article pages. Can you tell it's just the two of us an neither of us are designers or UX experts?

> I guess your compromise may be okay, but it's certainly rather crude (not > that I have a better idea).

Haha 100% agree. One day, maybe a reading speed calibration during new user onboarding? As you pointed out though, speed varies even for an individual depending on what kind of content they are reading.

> Btw, Safari 14 is adding WebExtension API support.[1] (You're probably > already aware of this but doesn't hurt to share.)

Wow, I was not aware! This is awesome! Thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm planning to launch a newsletter soon for a site I own that gets a moderately decent amount of traffic. Here is a snippet of some handy things I've found:

The cost of sending email is a lot on some platforms (Mailchimp is $30/month for 2500 subscribers and $50/month for 5000 subs), but a lot cheaper with Mailgun or Amazon SES. Sendy [0] and Mailcoach [1] are both self-hosted newsletter sending apps that use Mailgun/SES if you want to DIY.

There is a handy blog post [2] from the creator of cron.weekly on his newsletter workflow.

Don't put "weekly" in the newsletter name because then you're really setting that weekly expectation. At some point, you might not want to be publishing weekly unless you've got some serious automation happening.

There are some interesting ideas on newsletter businesses on gaps.com [3]. A year ago I thought that a newsletter should link to my own content. But now? Many, many newsletters are link aggregators.

[0] [https://sendy.co/](https://sendy.co/)

[1] [https://mailcoach.app/](https://mailcoach.app/)

[2] [https://ma.ttias.be/how-to-cron-weekly- newsletter/](https://ma.ttias.be/how-to-cron-weekly-newsletter/)

[3] [https://gaps.com/six-figure-newsletter/](https://gaps.com/six-figure- newsletter/)

<comment><USER5> Note: do not attempt to use something a low-level as SES to send newsletters unless you understand all the plumbing that has to be built around it (unsubscribe/opt-out, bounce handling, click tracking, IP pools, DKIM/SPF, etc). This especially applies if your list is low-quality or old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I'm one of a few that saw the power of RSS, which is now coming back in the shape of podcasts"

I don't think the rise of podcasts is massively due to RSS. I think it's because of the low cost / high creativity balance of the format, where the format uses RSS.

<comment><USER7> It's somewhat ironic that podcasts have effectively outlived the two technologies they were based on (rss and iPods). Accidents of history and all that...

<comment><USER8> Not ironic at all. All that matters is the content, not the way it is delivered to the user.

<comment><USER9> Yeah tell that to the music industry.

<comment><USER8> Music oligopoly, you mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The biggest thing for me is canonical URLs.

If I'm trying to BUILD an audience, I'm going to write content for free. If I already have a website I post content on, you bet I'm going to keep posting my free content there. Why am I competing with Substack on SEO for my own free content? That's just stupid.

Eventually, if I actually get an audience that's willing to pay, I would use Substack to offer that walled garden. Just like Youtube creators offer their free content on Youtube, and paid content through other means like Patreon.

Even Medium supports canonical URLs. I'm not sure why Substack isn't satisfied with being the distributor of my content, but also wants to be the home for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was one of the reasons I decided to go with my own platform. But Substack is not like Medium because it provides less discovery and more of a platform for writers. Medium, on the other hand, is more like an aggregator.

<comment><USER10> I was glad to see the canonical URL issue mentioned in your post, since that was the main thing bugging me about Substack. Thanks for writing this!

When I sent Substack Support an email about the issues of content ownership and canonical URLs in late May this year, I got this response:

>On Substack writers own all of their content, but we don't support synchronizing with external website or have external websites as the canonical url. Substack is meant to be the home for individual writers. Sorry about that

I love many things about Substack. Chiefly, the user experience of setting up the newsletters, and the iframe embed (though it can be improved) are great.

But I hope Substack reconsiders what their idea of being a "home for individual writers" means. Substack shouldn't have to be the source of my content, but rather be the plumbing for it. It seems not supporting custom canonical URLs was a conscious decision to force me to make Substack the source of my content, which is disappointing.

I'll have to look into ConvertKit in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd be interested to see if the author will get as much exposure to new potential subscribers without a platform like Substack of Medium promoting it. IMO, it's always been the community aspect of these platforms that keep the authors locked in rather than the technical difficulties of setting up your own website.

<comment><USER12> Substack doesn't offer exposition, they barely have a discover page [https://substack.com/discover](https://substack.com/discover) which always show the same newsletters

And actually the effect can be negative as, Substack is known to make payment based newsletters, people could avoid those links

<comment><USER13> As a consumer, I actually think this approach is great. I think a lot of the issues platforms deal with in terms of making hard decisions around content standards comes down to the fact that they put things in front of the user, and therefore have some responsibility for what you see.

I think the only way you can really have a true "free speech" platform is to make it entirely self-serve. As soon as there is algorithmic content discovery, bad actors will attempt to game it to get their ideas in front of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised Substack's business model is charging ~10% from one's revenue. A fixed pricing would make more sense. Why would anyone who is planning on profiting from their newsletter would go with a deal like that? Building a newsletter site these days is a pretty simple task with many no code solutions. I'm not saying what Substack provides is not worth paying for, just that it's a bad deal for people with successful newsletters that generate money, and a good deal for everyone else. But the former users are the ones Substack need in order to make money.

<comment><USER15> They're charging "ad valorem" \-- relative to the value received. The value that a Substack user with 4000 subscribers receives isn't the same as what someone with 50 subscribers receives. This is a very common fee structure that exists across industries.

<comment><USER14> The fact it's a common fee structure that exists across industries doesn't mean it makes sense for Substack. And I wouldn't call 10% standard. Most companies I know of, take Stripe for example, charge much smaller fees percentage wise and rely on high volume transactions.

Maybe a better example I can think of is a referral site. Maybe a site like Kayak can charge Marriott 10% each time they refer someone who books a room. If that room wouldn't be booked otherwise it's probably a good deal for Marriott. Substack does help with discoverability, and that's probably where their main value is (similar to FB, Instagram, etc), but the problem is that unlike the Marriott example, the fee is not a one time payment.

<comment><USER16> And you think Substack can achieve the same high volume as Stripe does?

> Substack does help with discoverability, and that's probably where their > main value is (similar to FB, Instagram, etc), but the problem is that > unlike the Marriott example, the fee is not a one time payment.

No, they also provide the platform, the tools, the analytics. They are not just an aggregator. Also, Marriott has to pay for every transaction, just like someone using Substack. You pay per transaction.

<comment><USER14> > No, they also provide the platform, the tools, the analytics

Maybe I'm in a bubble but I don't see it as their main value for _successful users who make money from their newsletter_. I've setup a newsletter with analytics a few weeks ago without writing a single line of code and with a fixed cost (and custom domain...). Yes, starting with Substack is cheaper to start with but long term it'll cost you).

> Marriott has to pay for every transaction, just like someone using Substack. > You pay per transaction.

I guess I'm not familiar enough with Substack. What does it mean you pay per transaction? It's a newsletter - you make money from paying subscribers who pay monthly let's say. Are you saying Substack users pay per email sent to their paying subscribers?

<comment><USER14> > No, I was referring to the whole Marriott thing. If you book a Marriott > hotel with an aggregator (like Kayak), Marriott has to pay for that booking. > If you do it the next week again, Marriott has to pay again.

> Substack fees work the same, you pay a fee to Substack whenever a person > renews (transaction).

> So to make the loop back, no the Kayak example works the same way as > Substack does.

Replying here since HN doesn't let me reply to the comment directly (probably reached the max number of nested replies).

I now understand your example but I disagree with it. A newsletter, unlike a hotel, relies on a small number of paying users who are likely to renew their membership. Many even pay for annual membership. The main cost is finding a new paying user. Once the user is subscribed it's the newsletter's job to keep that user paying. Marriott pays Kayak only for new users. Next time the user can book a room via the Marriott site. It doesn't need to keep paying Kayak for life every-time that user books a room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good for you. I quit using tinyletter after two years, switched to substack and quit that last week. [https://jetgirl.art/2020/06/27/going-back-to- blogging/](https://jetgirl.art/2020/06/27/going-back-to-blogging/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is it that one cannot export content from substack?

<comment><AUTHOR> I dunno. There's no feature.

<comment><USER19> "Guys, a few of our customers are unhappy and want to leave. We need Engineering to drop everything and start building a feature to let these customers stop paying us more easily."

<comment><USER20> I don't pay Substack anything. In fact they've paid me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > you can monitor ad or organic performance with tracking pixels!

Use of tracking pixels is not a pro. It is a dark pattern that needs to go away.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there a self-hosted alternative to Substack?

<comment><USER23> Ghost.org has membership features and email integration.

Could use the substation theme: [https://substation.rdnthemes.com](https://substation.rdnthemes.com)</comment></comment>


A Complete Guide to Mastering Eshell - <AUTHOR> http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2010/12/13/complete-guide-mastering-eshell/# <comment><USER2> Seems to be reposting the following, from 12 hours earlier. Not the octothorpe at the end of this post's URL (above).

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2002037></comment>


The 1 percent is you - <AUTHOR> http://area20.com/the-1-percent-is-you/

<comment><USER2> I agree that being myself is a great asset, though it can also be a great liability especially if that self is not yet honed to its greatest potential. However, being yourself is still a great way to be an asset someday.:)</comment>


SSRI Stories: Antidepressant nightmares - <AUTHOR> http://ssristories.org/ssris/ <comment><USER2> If you want the "full story", with peer-reviewed sources, about SSRIs, including a true/false on the various assertions that get passed around the Internet often with little justification, I strongly recommend [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than- yo...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than-you-wanted- to-know/). Scott is both a licensed psychiatrist and a very good rationalist with access to a lot of good data, who doesn't easily fall for Internet misinformation and definitely doesn't gloss over the "complicated bits" about the flaws and methodologies in clinical trials. This post is my go-to source for most discussions about SSRIs.

</comment><comment> some-guy As someone who's been on SSRIs for the majority of my life for Panic Disorder[1] (from age 11 to age 28), there was a period of time when being on Paroxetine (Paxil in the US) I started to read these stories and sympathize with them, trying to blame all of my behavioral / mental problems on the drug, even though the drug literally saved my life. Paroxetine isn't without its issues, and it took many many years to taper off of it without side-effects, but these sorts of anecdotes do nothing to help people in these situations.

There's a stigma with SSRIs that you either a) lose your creative ability and become a pharmaceutical drone or b) become suicidal. I've heard people tell me that anti-depressants are bad since they are not "pure" and you aren't being "yourself". They clearly don't know what it's like to have something like Panic Disorder, or severe depression. It was this stigma that made me taper off Paroxetine. I felt like I was "cheating". Eventually my anxieties started coming back (though less severely) in my later years and I'm on Lexapro now, and I've realized that not only have these drugs worked, my life is in _every_ way better than it was before. Who cares if it's cheating?

I know this is just an anecdote just like the ones in the link, but I think it's important that people do what they need to do to live a good life, and if you're reading this and considering anti-depressants, there is nothing wrong with trying, and the stigma should be fought.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> "science". This stuff comes from this org: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Coalition_for_Dr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Coalition_for_Drug_Awareness) and Dr. David Healy, long time campaigners against antidepressants. Draw your own conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article is alarmingly sloppy, even without getting into questions of core accuracy.

Statements like "it is important to withdraw slowly from these drugs, sometimes over a period of a year or more" paints with an unconscionably broad brush. The drawdown period for antidepressants is completely dependent on the actual drug, and some (like bupropion) have no withdrawal symptoms at all.

Similarly, the claim that antidepressants cause people to lose their fear of death treats an open question like settled science. The antidepressant-suicide correlation is complicated and ill-understood - failing to even mention that there are other theories (e.g. antidepressants treat low energy faster than low mood, which enables but doesn't cause suicides) is downright dishonest.

It's worth learning about SSRIs if they're relevant to your life, but this piece skips over open questions and conflates nearly-unrelated drugs to the point where it's essentially useless.

</comment><comment><USER5> NSI-189 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSI-189](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSI-189)) is starting to look like a potentially big game changer in antidepressants. It's a novel drug that (to my understanding) works in a way that's different from any other drugs.

</comment><comment><USER6> The plural of "anecdote" is not "data"

<comment><USER7> People like to repeat that. But you know what's funny? It actually is!

(for large numbers of anecdotes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Exercise really is great and should be tried before anything else. It's the only thing that I've found that works for me in a reliable, safe way. As far as SSRIs and Wellbutrin (which is not an SSRI like the chart states), I can confirm that after about 8 months or so, I did indeed have unprecedented thoughts of suicide and no longer cared about living much. I can also confirm meeting many doctors who were extremely eager to prescribe it after as little as 5 minutes of getting to know me (I declined). Basically, taking SSRIs was indeed one of the worst decisions of my life and almost cost me my life. So I stick to exercise now.

</comment><comment><USER9> I highly suspect melatonin-receptor (MT1 and MT2) agonists will be more useful in correcting mood disorders such as depression than anything that messes with monoamine neurotransmitters.</comment>


Chinese Quantum Computer is 24,000 times faster than international counterparts - <AUTHOR> http://m.economictimes.com/news/science/worlds-first-quantum-computing-machine-made-in-china/articleshow/58492628.cms <comment><USER2> that sounds like a US national security issue.</comment>


Study: Association of Maternal Insecticide Levels with Autism in Offspring - <AUTHOR> https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17101129 <comment><USER2> Interesting, but from the abstract it looks too underpowered to allow firm conclusions.

Of the two stated primary measures, one was not associated with autism and the other was only very marginally significant (at p=0.05), so it is rather vulnerable to a reversal if the research is replicated.

<comment><USER3> I also wonder why they did simple case-control matching rather than propensity scores. The number of unobserved confounders you could imagine is high in an analysis like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like this is too underpowered to get anything out of this. The 95% CI is 1.02-1.7. Considering that the great majority of statistical tests in studies like this have null results (but usually aren't reported), there is a very good, possibly more than 50% chance, that this is bogus.

I've basically stopped paying attention to studies like this. In replication studies in medicine and psychology, these kind of fishing expeditions have a very low chance of being successfully replicated.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, but given that DDT (of which DDE is a metabolite) was banned except for a few specific use cases, can we really do much about this now? Is this DDT/DDE from the few specific use cases were DDT is still legal (disease control of malaria) or is this from previous accumulations from the environment from when DDT was widely utilized?

Reference: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#United_States_ban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#United_States_ban)

<comment><USER6> It's probably the latter. From the first paragraph of the wikipedia page on DDE [1]:

 _Due to DDT's massive prevalence in society and agriculture during the mid 20th century, DDT and DDE are still widely seen in animal tissue samples. DDE is [..] rarely excreted from the body, and concentrations tend to increase throughout life. The major exception is the excretion of DDE in breast milk, which transfers a substantial portion of the mother 's DDE burden to the young animal or child_

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

<comment><USER7> The breast milk thing makes me think: If a substantial portion of the DDT is removed from the mother through breast milk, what difference does it make for subsequent children? And could it be somehow exploited to help remove more of the risk?

<comment><USER8> Or, you should see a big difference in breast fed children vs those that had formula. I'm pretty sure that variable has been heavily researched without any significant difference.

<comment><USER7> I'm saying something different: does it remove enough DDT from the mothers body to affect womb development of _subsequent_ children?

<comment><USER8> I see your logic and it makes sense. My point was more that if we posit DDT in breast milk caused autism, we'd expect to see a difference in rates of breast vs bottle fed kids, which we don't. So I'm skeptical of it being a big player, but I'll admit I haven't looked into this area deeply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what other pesticides are associated with autism?

You'd of course hope the FDA/EPA would research this [autism risk] before making a pesticide legal, but how could they? In actuality, they give a very high dose to rats/dags/rabbits for a short term and use that as their best approximation of safety[1].

[1] [https://www.epa.gov/risk/human-health-risk- assessment](https://www.epa.gov/risk/human-health-risk-assessment)</comment>