Don't worry that your job is pointless - <AUTHOR> http://jshakespeare.com/dont-worry-that-your-job-is-pointless/

<comment><USER2> One of my favorite stories told by our software consultants (the people we send to client sites to train how to use our software effectively):

One day he went to a customer's site to train them on the new version of our software, and met with one of the bookkeepers of the company. He showed her a report that we recently added a column to as part of a feature request from our clients, and she started crying. He was asking her what was wrong, worried that we did something terrible. She replied: "You just saved me 3 hours a day. Now I can go home when my kids are home from school instead of after supper".

Just because we're not saving babies doesn't mean we're not making people's lives better.

<comment><USER3> _You just saved me 3 hours a day. Now I can go home when my kids are home from school instead of after supper._

The ugly part of this is that we rarely know whether we're saving time or cutting jobs (and depriving people of income). Between our low level of access to the relevant information, and the execrable leadership the world currently has, we can rarely know that.

When the world has good leadership, technological progress (even small victories) save time and create wealth. When it has bad leadership, it ends jobs (that are never replaced) and helps the working world shut itself down.

<comment><USER4> > _"whether we're saving time or cutting jobs"_

Those two things are basically the same.

In a shop with only one accountant, you're saving her three hours a day.

In a shop with 100 accountants, 30 of them just lost their jobs.

The trouble with our work is not that we don't know whether or not it's doing good or bad, it's that it's _almost always_ doing both at the same time. Determining whether the good outweighs the bad is both subjective, highly fraught with egotism, and treads uncomfortably close to rationalization and playing god.

<comment><USER3> If the 100 accountants are smart, they'll spend half the day studying for their CFA exams and not let management know that they're overstaffed.

You're right, though. That's the fundamental problem. I can always get on board with automating (and thus "killing") undesirable work. I can't get on board with depriving regular people (below $100,000 per year) of an income if I can help it. I am aware that society needs to cut jobs and that that's a really good thing; I just wish it would train up before trading up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I began college my carreer plan was this Bill Gates "be rich or powerful, than do good for the world" path. Well, it doesn't work like that. Actually, now I see this as kind of selfish, a pretentious delusion of self-importance. When I thought like this I wanted to be a hero, not make the world a better place. I realized my mistake in time, changed my major, started a carreer on the non-profit sector and I was cool with doing something adjuvant as part of something that was trying to do some good.

But that doesn't mean the more important conclusion of the OP, that is "Just because optimising Javascript isn't making the world a better place right this second doesn't mean you're destined to a life of misanthropic selfishness" is wrong. This has something to do with Steve Jobs connecting dots, with Gandhi being a lawyer before being Mahatma, with Muhammad Yunus being a humble professor of Economics in his native country before a Nobel laureate (Peace Nobel prize, not Economics).

I just quit my job on a non-profit startup, after 8 years in the field, and now I am a founder of a regular, for-profit startup. This is not my final carreer path, this is teaching me a lot about disrupting things. I mean, A LOT. The paradigm shift emerging through startups is very powerful.

On a final note, all this "I want to change the world" mantra that I often listen applied to tech startups is, 99% of the times, BS. Facebook indeed changed the world. For better? Not necessarily. Twitter did? Not in my opinion. "But what about the Arab Spring??". Listen, _people_ , empowered by technology change the world. So you may say that technology change the world. Not brands. SMS technology is changing the world in many ways all over Africa, internet changed the world, not Twitte, or Facebook. Some startups disrupted some technology use so strongly, that they became monopolists in their use. But still, don't confuse technology and brands.

Summarizing, optimizing Javascript may not be making the world a better place right this second, but if you are improving your knowledge, and - another good advice from OP - don't let yourself be defined by your job and is trying hard to create a big picture for yourself, than optimizing Javascript may be a very important dot that you will connect to make a difference in the future.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely agreed. I would take it a step further and say that you can't "plan" to be rich and powerful, or have huge social impact, or be disruptive. It doesn't really make sense and it sidesteps the actual goal you should have, which is doing what you want to do and making the small differences you want to make daily, monthly, yearly. xkcd's alt text here (<http://xkcd.com/874/>) says something very powerful: "I don't trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at."

You pursue what it is you want to pursue, like, and has meaning for you--non- profit work, lawyering, javascript debugging--and the impact comes later, if it does at all. "Get rich, then change the world with it" is betting your future on the resources you might have tomorrow, whereas you should be pushing forward with the resources that you DO have today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Without doctors people would consult each other on what to do about their illness. Without nurses people close to each other will help out. Without firemen people would be passing the water bucket.

Any job can be made to be useless, the difference is that when someone tries to specialize he/she becomes good at it. It's how the world works. You optimize JavaScript, which in turn helps someone else be more productive.

This Disney song should give you better feeling of yourself after reading this dark and depressing blog post. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whDr4MJbIhs> :-D

<comment><USER8> I agree. Without demeaning medicine, clean water and hospital sanitation have had the biggest impact on health by far in the course of human history.

Almost any job you can think of is as critical or pointless as you make it.

<comment><USER9> Oh, I thought it would be antibiotics and immunology.

<comment><USER10> Check out these stats: <http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html>

_Water, sanitation and hygiene has the potential to prevent at least 9.1% of the global disease burden and 6.3% of all deaths_.

And that's _today._ I can't even figure what that number would be when poo- tainted sludge was the default drinking water worldwide.

I assume you mean vaccinations when you say immunology. Vaccines make life better, but the impact is pretty small -- look at the outcomes for the diseases we vaccinate against. Take polio for example. Even if you do manage to contract polio, 90-95% of cases are asymptomatic and a further 4-8% are minor.

What's the biggest way people got polio? Fecal transmission in water/food, which brings us back full circle to clean water.

<comment><USER9> According to Wikipedia, smallpox 'killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans annually during the closing years of the 18th century (including five reigning monarchs), and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Of all those infected, 20–60%—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease. Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century.'

Of course, this disease was contained by vaccines. And immunology is definitely more broad than mere vaccines. In fact the modern immunology plays a quite central role in today's research of physiology, virology, microbiology and pathology.

Back in 2003, when SARS broke out in Beijing, the streets were emptied. Nobody wanted to meet each other, nobody dared. If immunology had not existed, such scenario might not be just one incidence, but incidence after incidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I always find these self-flagellation articles interesting, but feel like I'm observing a phenomenon from an outside perspective.

Do most people agonize over the supposed "importance" of what they do? Do they feel so insecure when comparing what they do to what others do? Do they feel that what they do really is going to change the world or matter in some spiritual context?

I don't really worry about it. I figure that if I'm content doing what I do, with my work-life balance, with the money I make... then why worry about it. Whenever little thoughts or concerns of self-importance come to mind, I always think of Ozymandias.

<comment><USER12> For some, the concern stems from this line of thought: "This is my one life, and after its gone I'll never get it back. I need to make the best of it."

So then we imagine what the best life could be. We don't even have to try hard to imagine the best life - examples of people who had a better life are constantly made apparent. Whether a life more noble, more enriched, more fun, more profound, or any other adjective, it doesn't matter because we see them all.

Then we see that elements of our life are not notable and we regret that others may have done something better than ourselves. And then we feel guilty, sad, upset, or angry that our ONE CHANCE, our life, isn't what it ought to be in order to be the best.

So, we trudge on making the best moves we know how. Its sometimes a bit of relief to see articles like this which, for a few minutes, give a sense of relief that maybe we don't have to cram every ounce of our lives with greatness... I don't buy it though.

This is my one chance, and I'll be damned if I waste my most functional hours of the day on something that doesn't matter.

<comment><USER11> _This is my one chance_

That's the thing. Your one chance for what?

 _I'll be damned if I waste my most functional hours of the day on something that doesn't matter._

Do you have some notion of an afterlife where that even matters?

Really, I'm not that nihilistic in the way I live my life, but intellectually I don't really fight it.

<comment><USER12> Thats the thing: I don't know what the most important thing for me to be doing is. So the best thing I can do is figure it out. Putting myself in a position of wealth and power opens more doors so that I have more opportunities to figure out just what the hell I'm supposed to be doing here. If I were to "give up" and not strive to grow, I'd have less access to the variety of things which can be done. Therefore, I _must_ work hard and must get better and must do things that matter so that I have a better chance at figuring out what I'm here for. If it turns out that I'm not actually here for anything at all, then I really haven't lost anything because there was nothing to win in the first place. But, giving up before you even know the answer? Thats a sad story.

<comment><USER11> Okay, I like that answer. Just asking out of curiosity. Personally, I've never found a greater purpose to my life. I don't really think I'm looking for one any more. I have my family, my work, my hobbies, etc. I never feel like I must have some higher purpose to get up in the morning and do my thing... but I know that everyone is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not smart enough to make a Nobel-price-worthy contribution to science, to cure an epidemic disease or to invent a new way of producing energy. I don't have a physics degree to help build rockets nor a biochemistry degree to design better food. I didn't choose to study to be a doctor, and even as I somewhat regret that choice, it's too late now. I also don't own any land, so I can't be a farmer.

The only way I can change the world for the better is to earn a huge amount of money and then spend it on other people that actually _can_ do one of the above. Like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. So even if my career pursuits are totally focused on money, that's not a bad thing!

<comment><USER14> Maybe us "not so smart individuals" could be a small cog in some bigger picture, like a world interdisciplinary project to cure cancer (think Manhattan project, or NASA). But in capitalism it's more important to work on SEO and sell stuff to people. All of the advances of modern computing boil down to advertising, such a shame.

<comment><USER10> Selling stuff to people isn't a bad thing. My own personal example:

I work for eBay Inc., so my job is to be a cog in a bigger picture like you said. That bigger picture is game-changing commerce. I don't know the numbers, but some large amount of people have found a way to make a full-time living selling on eBay, or Magento, or some other platform using PayPal to take payments. They feed their families by selling stuff in our marketplaces. On the buyer's side, we help people get what they want for the best price. That makes people's lives better, too.

Maybe it's just rationalization. :) But I do think that many capitalist companies create a net positive for the world.

<comment><USER15> I think you could deduce the net positive from comparing capitalist companies to communist combinats. Somehow they churn out more, cheaper and better. They're people who spout that that's materialism and bad, and then they say we should help the poor. But more, cheaper, better helps the poor. So no matter how you turn it, it's a net plus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The fact is that if all the web developers (or investment bankers) > disappeared tomorrow the world wouldn't change much – at least not compared > to doctors or nurses or firemen. There wouldn't be a global meltdown.

I really beg to differ.

<comment><USER17> I think if all programmers disappeared the world actually might shut down.

Just think of all the places in the global infrastructure that require software to work: financial trading, military, flight control, all modern business accounting and financial reporting, medical systems, etc.

<comment><USER18> All that software already exists and is running though, and I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'shut down.' These industries might no longer be able to update, but I think it's possible to run just about any industry without IT, or on legacy code, just on a smaller, slower scale. You could predict some level of catastrophe for the disappearance of any large sector that affects commerce -- from truck drivers to sewer workers to even maybe interns. I think this implies the tenuous nature of our economy more than the relative importance of programmers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wholeheartedly believe you can save lives (including babies) with javascript. <http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/> The way healthcare professionals use computers is slowing down r & d and ultimately costing lives. I worked at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center last summer. They claim that they are the leader in healthcare IT. Yet my job was to copy clinical data from one computer system to another _by hand._ They had a developer doing manual data entry at a Harvard teaching hospital! Today, healthcare needs programmers as much as they need doctors (maybe not in the same quantities).

</comment><comment><USER20> Great article. It looks to be down at the moment, however.

Here's a link to a mirror/cache of it:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kY15Yvu...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kY15Yvu4rOMJ:jshakespeare.com/dont- worry-that-your-job-is-pointless/)

</comment><comment><USER21> > In reality, we do what we do because we're good at it and doing it makes > money.

Speak for yourself. I work because I enjoy both making things and the act of working.

<comment><USER22> Donate your salary to charity, then.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure that follows. He was saying that enjoying the work and building things is sufficient to get him to work, but that doesn't mean he would prefer earning $0 than some number bigger than $0. It just means that if the 2nd option wasn't available, he would still work.

<comment><USER21> Thanks. All I meant was that to me my work is not a means to pay the bills, and perhaps I'm not even particularly good at it. I just enjoy doing it. OP is being offensively presumptuous with that statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I agree with the OP's general point. Career aspirations? What I give back to the world? To me, I just want to be happy in my life, I guess some can argue it's Utilitarianism. This is my big picture. So if I can pay my bills, live the lifestyle I have (not very lavish btw), go to work and be happy working there (above average, you're always gonna have bad days), have a healthy relationship with parents, friends and the other half, and be able to save some money to ensure my and my family's future happiness, then I'm happy.

So whether I am a graphic designer, charity worker, investment banker, even a saint, if I can continue to be happy and do the stuff I said above, then I couldn't care less if the job was 'pointless' or not. Who is to judge? It's worth something to me!

Disclaimer: I work at a bank as a developer. Perhaps not the 'coolest' job out there, but if it means I can go home and be happy, then I consider myself a success. Don't get me wrong, if anyone asks wouldn't you want to be a millionaire, of course I would, but sacrificing my happiness? It'll require more thought.

Final thought: maybe I'm only 27 and I haven't hit the mid life part yet. I am keeping an open mind as to how my thoughts will change...

</comment><comment><USER25> This is an important idea. Several years back I quit a well-paying job in finance because I wanted to work on meaningful problems. What I realized fairly recently is that most problems are social problems. It's not like some demon is draining the world of natural resources and polluting it, creating antibiotic resistant bacteria, or starting wars all over the world. We're doing that.

You want to save the world? Start with being a good parent.

<comment><USER26> ...Or don't have any kids at all, since kids turn into adults and adults are the cause of pretty much all the social problems we have, such as pollution and depletion of natural resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A problem with us as a tribe is that we tend to misunderstand the fact that _most_ humans require conflict to reach for greatness. We, as technologists, perceive a natural conflict between what we want (whether it's to live for 1000+ years, to fly to Japan for $50 on a non-polluting electric airplane, to have all of the world's information accessible at a computer terminal, or just to have more interesting jobs) and the actual state of the world, which we see as dismally primitive. We don't need a human enemy to have conflict and to inspire us to greatness; primordial entropy _is_ our enemy. Most people don't think this way. It takes a fight to unlock their energies. This is especially true at the complacent top of society. The best way to create social mobility for smart people is to create a massive, irreparable cleavage in the elite. In 1540, it was the Protestant Reformation, leading to exploration and trade and new theories about politics, culminating in rational government and modern capitalism. (Henry VIII was no saint, but one of the reasons for his horrible reputation is that he promoted smart commoners to work out his split from the church, angering nobility of the time.) In 1965, it was the Cold War, resulting in incredible technical progress, including the space program and the Internet. Neither of these rifts was free of harm or pain, but ultimately, humanity is better off with its elite cleft in two halves that hate each other's fucking guts (and will therefore promote smart people from without in order to win their existential struggle) than it is with one elite that can singularly focus on keeping itself established and the "without" outside. When there's harmony in the elite, there is no progress.

Most of our jobs are based on conflict. Hedge fund traders are trying to outsmart other hedge funds in a winner-take-all market. In VC-istan, it's all about ad dollars (hence, I call it "ad-banking"). Most of the great technologies we use (e.g. the Internet) were funded by military projects: people wanting to out-innovate and out-technologize the Russians. It'd be better if we could do great things _without_ all the negative side effects of conflict, but human organizations are lethargic and no elite has been immune to the temptation of parasitism.

The pointlessness we perceive in our jobs comes from the fact that most of what we do isn't about civilization's advancement, but about helping one party compete against the other. Web development is mostly about making one business more _attractive_ than the other guys, which has a zero-sum, arms-race feel to it. All of this conflict leads to multiplicity of efforts, left-against-right work, and weird indirections that sap our efficiency. It _seems_ like this renders 95% of what we do pointless.

The problem is that, in reality, without the business conflicts that waste 95% of our work, most of us wouldn't have jobs or money at all, so the wastage would be 100%. The only thing that will allow transfer of wealth out of an elite and into new talent is some kind of severe conflict within that elite. The ideal of capitalism (until a parasitic, socially-connected corporate elite hijacks it and subverts whatever mechanisms it uses to force competition) is that business elites in competition with each other will always perform better than single monopolistic powers.

This is also why VC-istan sucks Hitler's necrotic scrotum. VCs collude and decide, as a group, who's hot and who's not. They don't compete with each other. They'd rather get invited to each others' parties and in on each others' deals. The lack of competition within that elite leads to downright awful terms for the people actually doing the fucking work.

<comment><USER27> Your assertion that the Protestant Reformation was responsible for renaissance exploration and trade is extremely dubious.

By all accounts, Spanish and Italian monarchs were behind the push for exploration, this occurring before the reformation. They wanted trade, and it didn't take a religious schism to provoke that. Rather, this happened in the thirteenth century when the Arabs lost their stranglehold of the Silk Road, and the Mongols opened it up (hence Marco Polo's travels).

Advances in naval technology made the travels of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries possible. These trips were simply not feasible beforehand, it was not a matter of some nebulous cabal of "elites" suppressing the merchants and scientists.

I find your interpretation of this history revisionist, framed to support your "VC-istan" thesis, which probably doesn't need historical evidence from the renaissance. You'll find plenty of suitable fodder in the past fifty years.

<comment><USER28> >Your assertion that the Protestant Reformation was responsible for renaissance exploration and trade is extremely dubious.

You've misread michaelochurch's comment. He wasn't asserting the Reformation came before the Renaissance. His point was that the states newly energized by the Reformation became very active in exploration and trade and ultimately created the economic and political institutions that define the modern world. And, while he is correct about England (which, despite insularity, was never a great naval power before it began being ruled by Protestants), his best example would have been the Northern Netherlands, which featured: the first modern republic, religious toleration, the first stock exchange, extensive civil engineering, the revival of drill-based military techniques etc. Unlike earlier mercantile republics (say, Venice), the Dutch model also found ready imitators in many of its aspects (Sweden in its golden age, England especially after 1688, the North American colonies) and developed directly into the capitalist / parliamentarian society that many of us live in today.

<comment><USER27> The kernel of his thesis is

      The best way to create social mobility for smart people is
      to create a massive, irreparable cleavage in the elite. In
      1540, it was the Protestant Reformation, leading to
      exploration and trade and new theories about politics,
      culminating in rational government and modern capitalism.

That is entirely backward and has little grounding in history.

The points you make are sound and accurate, and had they been his, I would have had no reason to criticize.

<comment><USER3> The way I might be wrong is in the assertion that the Protestant Reformation was responsible for creating cleavages within the European elites that might have formed in other ways and for other reasons.

Did society _need_ the Protestant Reformation, at that specific point in time, to get those advances? Possibly not. Did we need a Cold War with the Soviet Union, rather than some other kind of conflict, to get the Internet? Again, no.

It's not _specific conflicts_ that humanity has needed to advance, insofar as history could have played out in a million of other different ways. However, it has been the case throughout most of humanity's history that social health (rather than slow degeneracy due to a parasitic elite) requires some kind of intractable enmity to exist within the elite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "if your job wasn't performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I'm not sure I believe it's necessary"

Awesome quote.

</comment><comment><USER30> But what about my deep-seated need to feel like I'm fundamentally better than investment bankers?

</comment><comment><USER15> I find we're really bad at defining goals. Let's play a short question game. You win if you read through these questions and you say "Nah, got this covered" without feeling guilty. What are you working for? To better society? To make an impact? Sure. That's a little vague though, isn't it?

Ok, maybe it's to better society. Define better (Well, uhmm...better, you know?") and define society (Uhmm...the country? Ohh wait, the world? Maybe those kids in africa?). You kinda see where I'm going with "this is way vague for a life purpose"?

Ok, let's take the impact example. Which impact? Do you want to be remembered? Just remembered, or positively remembered? Or do you want to make a lasting change on the face of earth? How long should it last? How visible should it be? Or do you want to change somebody? How do you want to change them? What will you do to change them?

The gist is definition.

A lot of "career planning" is an improperly defined goal for an even larger time period than the usual resolutions we make. Stop smoking, lose weight, work out more. How often do you keep your new years resolutions? Proably not that often. So why are you entrusting your life purpose to the same kind of expectation making that you do for your new years resolution, to some goal with quicksand consistency?

You know the feeling you get in mid february that you didn't keep up with your resolutions, right? You feel guilty because you've wasted another year and still haven't gotten these things done. Lack of willpower, right? Ok, imagine you're 35, look at your life resolution, realize that you haven't lost weight nor changed the world, and you feel guilty. Really guilty. Because your former me is ashamed of what you've done. And it's not just a new years resolution, it's your life goal you haven't gotten done.

Ok, fair enough. Figure out what exactly you are trying to do till when, preferably with why you want to do these things. Name - date - reason. You can't worry about the pointlessness of something if you got the point on a paper in front of you, 12pt Times New Roman. Then factor that into object(ive)s and method(ology)s, so you can whip up the source of your life one task after another. You'll get there.

<comment><USER31> > Ok, imagine you're 35

Did I read that right? Are you really using 35 as an arbitrary number meaning "some distant point in the future"?

<comment><USER32> More like 35 as that point when you realize you're not young anymore, this is actually your real life, and you need to stop daydreaming and deal with it.

<comment><USER33> Although there's nothing wrong with constantly wondering what you want to be when you grow up. . .even when you're "old" - however you define that. . .as long as it doesn't lead to unhappiness or obsessive navel-gazing.

<comment><USER18> As someone who's experienced both depression and obsessive navel-gazing at 35 I can attest to its counterproductive nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> As someone who has the goal of "making enough money so I can give back", I've realized that doing something NOW is important for a couple reasons:

1) I could die tomorrow and 2) Habits form, and if I plan on giving services/time/money at a latter point in my life, I might as well start now and get used to it (even if the amount is small).

</comment><comment><USER35> There's plenty of ways to make a difference in the world without having a job that is immediately altruistic.

<http://80000hours.org/career-advice> has a lot of good information along these lines.

</comment><comment><USER36> Seeing that your site is offline, I'm going to have to disagree with you.

-Sysadmin

</comment><comment><USER37> A job that can be automatized _is_ /unimportant/. Your finance wizard can just be replaced by a few line of code _because_ his whole world is already part of this technology world. Now try to automatize the one doing to the coding.

People losing jobs are a consequence of an economic decision, not because of technological advancement. Knowledge is still power.

</comment><comment><USER2> I ended up blogging a response to this - [http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/03/20/saving-the-world-with- sof...](http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/03/20/saving-the-world-with-software/)

TL;DR - We change the world for the better in so many ways that we don't even realize. Don't sell ourselves short.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm seeing a Cloudflare page that states that the site is offline and there is no cached version available. I wonder if this is because they decided to set up cloudflare right when their site was getting hammered by HN.

<comment><USER39> That could be it. Still, the server is down, and Cloudflare is showing that it can't really do anything. Even if reasonable, it's pretty bad publicity for Cloudflare (at the very least, definitely not good).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Fantastic article. Thank you for writing it.

</comment><comment><USER41> "Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it"

Mahatma Gandhi

</comment><comment><USER42> thank you</comment>


Fairphone: Android phone that puts social values first - <AUTHOR> http://www.fairphone.com Fairphone is manufactured using raw materials from conflict-free regions in Africa (D.R. Congo).<p>A completely open source, rooted, hardware and software on which you can also install FirefoxOS and UbuntuOS too. <comment><USER2> Keep in mind, this phone utilizes a Chinese MTK6589 processor and god knows what else for chips. Unless MTK is committing intellectual property violations, many games won't be optimized for this device, if that's your thing (it seems to be a lot of people's things).

I'm really struggling to buy into Fairphone's vision when it appears they started with a cheap Chinese reference design with cheap Chinese parts manufactured in Chinese factories. It's a good start, though.

Edit: Here's the block diagram for the CPU:

[http://www.cnx-software.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/Media...](http://www.cnx-software.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/Mediatek_MT6589_Smartphone_Block_Diagram.png)

The GPU appears to use LPDDR2 memory, which causes it to falter in benchmarks against devices with the same GPU cores (the standard right now is LPDDR3 GPU mem)

<comment><USER3> It is a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 with an Imagination PowerVR 544 GPU, so, yes, it is a low power, low cost, low performance device.

But why would you think MTK is comitting any intellectual property violations with the design?

<comment><USER4> Because China is an easy target for suspicion and scorn. An outlook heavily pushed and perpetuated by our (western) media outlets.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, there is global suspicion and scorn for Chinese manufacturing, including from Chinese people themselves.

<comment><USER6> Seriously, some of the most cynical people I know concerning China, are Chinese. They know what's going on...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I applaud the effort, but in today's world you simply cannot compete with a slow CPU, a crippled GPU and a non-retina display. I am never, never, never going back to a non-retina screen.

And it's 325 EUR. For just a little more I can get a Nexus 4 that has really good specs. I understand why the Nexus 4 is so cheap and how these guy cannot compete on price, but I'd be willing to pay, say, 600 EUR for a truly open device that has good specs than half of that for a really awful device.

> Android OS (4.2 Jelly Bean): Special interface developed by Kwame > Corporation

Oh please, I'd have expected a project such as this to know better than not to screw up with stock Android experience.

<comment><USER8> > _you simply cannot compete with a slow CPU, a crippled GPU and a non-retina > display. I am never, never, never going back to a non-retina screen._

> _And it's 325 EUR. For just a little more I can get a Nexus 4 that has > really good specs._

So, in fact you just don't put social values before the specs...

<comment><USER9> Is this really about social value?

I would suggest that this is about social value as much as when all those movie stars bought Toyota Prii.

If you want to help Africa, give money to Doctors Without Borders or UNICEF, don't buy a smartphone and and brag about it on twitter while sipping fair- trade coffee.

<comment><USER10> "If you want to help Africa, give money to Doctors Without Borders or UNICEF, don't buy a smartphone and and brag about it on twitter while sipping fair- trade coffee."

Hear, hear TylerE -- well put. It reminds me of "Smug Alert": [http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s10e02-smug- al...](http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s10e02-smug-alert)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Fairphone is manufactured using raw materials from conflict-free regions in Africa (D.R. Congo).

A completely open source, rooted-by-default hardware and software on which you can also install FirefoxOS, Ubuntu and Debian too (<http://www.fairphone.com/#faq>)

<comment><USER11> That's the first time I've ever heard "Conflict-free resources". What exactly does it mean? There are no wars going on in the regions they picked? What happens if a conflict starts before I get my phone? Can I get a refund?

<comment><USER12> It means that the funds used for buying the resources don't fund wars.

<comment><USER13> this is not an absolute statement. For example, if you buy any resources in the US, you are indirectly funding wars through the US taxation apparatus and military. It's better qualified by saying the funds used for buying the resources are not predominantly extorted or directly controlled by military juntas.

<comment><USER12> Good point. Maybe I should say that the resources aren't directly nor officially used to fund wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Due to their web design choices I couldn't get much info from that page. No scroll bars, brilliant...

</comment><comment><USER15> Is it _that_ different from the general phone you can find on the market? I thought most manufacturer had conflict minerals policy now (maybe I got duped!) and though I applaud the idea of choosing your OS and wish more people would go that route, I'm still confused at how original this project really is...

<comment><USER16> Many companies don't make an effort to audit their supply chain to ensure their minerals are sourced ethically.

For some reference as to which companies do the best, check: [http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/content/conflict- minerals-c...](http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/content/conflict-minerals- company-rankings)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 325 EUR is a lot cheaper than I was expecting. I'd be curious to know how much of a premium they're paying for ethically sourcing their components. If the percentages are as low as that price point suggests, it gives me a lot of hope for pushing for change.

<comment><USER9> It's a huge premium. This would be like a $20 phone if Samsung made it.

<comment><USER18> Tell me where I can get a phone like that for $20 without a contract?

<comment><USER9> Well, it's $50, but here:

[http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Virgin+Mobile+-+PCD+Chaser+No- Co...](http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Virgin+Mobile+-+PCD+Chaser+No- Contract+Mobile+Phone+-+Black/4245229.p?id=1218471854131&skuId=4245229)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really don't want to be the one overly-critic HN comment - but this color combination makes me cringe: <http://i.imgur.com/tBWheTr.png>

</comment><comment><USER20> First as tragedy, then as farce... <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g>

<comment><USER13> The video has the hidden presumption that capitalism is a problem and then goes on to prove that capitalism is a problem. It's circular logic at its ugliest. So what if some charity gets associated with profit? No one is stopping you from giving charity for its own sake, unattached to the profit motive, AND there is a marginally increased amount of good being done in the world, AND there is a marginally increased amount of awareness of important issues.

What, exactly is the moral alternative that Zizek would have us live by if not trade? Marxism for example, which runs under the philosophy "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" sounds great. But then, who decides what constitutes ability, and what constitutes need. And how can I make me and my friends that committee?

<comment><USER21> It's not circular logic. Zizek is operating from the assumption that capitalism is oppressive, and arguing that "socially responsible" capitalism is equally as problematic. This criticism is aimed at leftists who dislike capitalism, but feel like it's okay to engage in "socially responsible" capitalism. It's completely legitimate to disagree with that assumption, just keep in mind that is not the point he's trying to argue in this video.

He's also an unapologetic Marxist, so I suppose that'd be his alternative. You might start looking for answers to your questions in his books.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough. Given that I'm a libertarian that thinks that "social responsibility" is a personal virtue, I'm clearly not his audience, since I have some pretty serious quarrels with his starting assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's a great bargain for this phone even if you don't care about the world or society and the environment and whatnot.

</comment><comment><USER23> The screen seems to be 4.3", but does anyone have any idea about the other dimensions, weight, etc?

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks nice, I'd love to see a real world prototype instead of a render, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. You can catch a glimpse of the real phone at the production shop, around 00:50s: <http://vimeo.com/66409578>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really like the screen theme that they have got (with the battery and Skype notification). Looks a bit like Google Now if it had transparency.

Does anyone know if that is an existing theme or mod?

<comment><USER26> Unfortunately it's a theme: Android OS (4.2 Jelly Bean): Special interface developed by Kwame Corporation (Also open!) I hoped it would provide a vanilla Android.

<comment><USER24> Not unfortunate! I am sure you will be able to get vanilla android on this phone, and it's good that the interface is open and you can use it on other phones.

<comment><USER26> I am just curious why they invested in the development of a custom skin and didn't use the vanilla Android UI of the Nexus line. It would have been a real feature.

<comment><USER9> The same reason Toyota made the Prius look like a wedge. Had nothing to do with aerodynamics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good initiative. I can't seem to find any engineers in the team, am I missing something here?

</comment><comment><USER28> Is it wrong that when I saw the word "social", I imagined Twitter and Facebook?

</comment><comment><USER29> Tried to order one and the order form said my VAT number is invalid. :/

</comment><comment><USER13> !! I just lost my phone and would preorder one, but I am in the US.</comment>


A merry christmas to HN - <AUTHOR> My dearest online community,
I wish you all a merry Christmas! You are my favorite community on the Internet, by far. I appreciate the honest, factual and inspiring discussions I've had with you over the last few years. I have learned an incredible amount about technology, business, philosophy, politics and random quips from all areas in life by reading through extensive comment sections, links and insights you provided me. For that I want to say thank you.
For all of you who are unfortunately alone on Christmas - my heart and love goes out to you. I hope that you find someone and you will. Each and everyone of us is special.
And in that spirit I am looking forward to more years on HN,
mrleiter <comment><USER2> I'm not even a programmer or an entrepreneur (actually a sociologist working for an EU ISP) but this is the community that I enjoy the most.

Most people here puts some effort in their comments, try to hold themselves on commenting about stuff they know nothing about, and use a relaxed tone. That's so refreshing.</comment>


What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by coders? - <AUTHOR> http://pudo.org/blog/2014/12/03/newsclipse.html <comment><USER2> When I was working as a web editor at a metro daily paper a few years ago, I proposed something similar: an XML-like syntax that would allow for metadata to be included in drafts of news stories, some (but not all) of which could be made use of in online versions of the story (such as a link to a map when you're referencing a location).

A lot of wire copy already includes metadata, but it's generally just in a header that accompanies the story.

What I was envisioning was something more like what is being proposed for the semantic web:

<name id="1394">John Smith</name> was elected president of the <organization id="2315">New Castle County Council</organization> on <date value="2014-12-10">Wednesday</date> at the <place lat="39.685881" long="-75.613047">county headquarters</place>.<source id="23" name="Mila Jones" title="New Castle County public relations officer"></source>

I also wanted to use the metadata to help copy editors trim wire stories:

<priority value="1">This amounts to de facto resegregation. <priority="4">(And we all know how we segregation worked out the first time.)</priority> If the school district still values integrated schools, it must act swiftly to correct this effect.</priority>

It turns out, though, even when you create a UI that lets reporters and editors easily plug in this metadata without having to understand XML, they are not apt to fill it in, because they are just so overworked as it is.

Plus, in order for this to work on a larger scale, you'd have to get an incredible amount of buy-in. You'd have to get reporters and editors to agree that it's worth their time. You'd have to build software to support it. You'd have to get all of the different media companies out there to agree on standards.

It's just ... not what the media industry is (or should be) focused on right now. They've got bigger things to think about, like how to find a viable business model.

<comment><USER3>
      <priority value="1">This amounts to de facto resegregation. <priority="4">(And we all know how we segregation worked out the first time.)</priority> If the school district still values integrated schools, it must act swiftly to correct this effect.</priority>

Forget about editors, use this kind of mark-up for your readers. Imagine changing an in-depth article into a truncated, 200-word summary with the click of a button. Activating a different tag would include the reporter's subjective commentary (or perhaps have multiple editorials based on the same "scaffolding")?

<comment><USER4> In print journalism, you're supposed to include information in descending order of importance. As a reader, you're expected to stop reading once you get to details you don't really care about, confident that you won't miss something more important buried farther down.

<comment><USER5> The so-called "inverted pyramid". I'm finding it applied less and less frequently.

I've also noted that it's become pretty much standard practice for news bureaus to write single-sentence paragraphs. Literally, every sentence of a story is its own paragraph. I don't know when that became standard practice, but sometime in the later 1990s or 2000s, particularly as stories moved online.

<comment><USER6> Sadly, hardly anyone writing now outside big traditional media orgs has done any sort of formal journalism training.

<comment><USER5> That's ... not _all_ bad.

I think there's too much insularity within much of the journo community. But many of the newcomers are also subject to outside influences which call their credibility strongly into question. Lack of uniform copyediting, for better or worse, means a wide range of writing quality.

Though I'm seeing that even in long-standing brands -- NY Times, Forbes, and elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been messing around with something similar, specifically though focused on tracking strengths and weaknesses in US infrastructure:

[http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html](http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html)

It's actually a lot easier than you'd think, because thanks to Zipf's law pretty much every article in these evergreen topic areas is using the same set of 1,000 or so facts. And these facts mostly come from the same set of government or NGE reports, which are updated at most once a year, and often only once every ten years.

The cool thing is that you can then use a javascript snippet to track which facts are being used in which documents, automatically mark facts as outdated when they change, etc.

<comment><USER8> Bookmarked. Editing nit in the FAQ.

      C.f. comments on Peter Thiel's graph of the year...

Should be "Cf." \-- also I believe "cf." should be read as "compare", so really it shouldn't even be that (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cf.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cf.))

<comment><USER9> aaaaaaand no one cares.

<comment><USER10> I didn't know about the English equivalent, so I did care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I wrote my disertation I used Scrivener: [http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php) which is a wonderful tool for writing. An expanded open source application similar to that with a good plugin system might be very useful.

<comment><USER12> My first thought upon seeing the article title was "How is this going to be different from Scrivener", which is what a huge chunk of the pro writers I know seem to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most journalists are barely informed cut'n'paste merchants.

Journalists value the sensational over the factual, and work hard (true) to tight deadlines.

So they _already_ do not care about the tech features promised, namely indicating:

* there is not enough evidence to make a given point

* a certain person or company has not been investigated thoroughly enough

* a certain point is not relevant

[edit: data points]

Cut'n'paste obituary from Wikipedia: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/03/wikipedia_obituary_c...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/03/wikipedia_obituary_cut_and_paste/)

"Hack": A self referential term journalists use for each other in the UK [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_writer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_writer)

<comment><USER14> Hard to see how this apparent stereotyping (a) wouldn't apply to people working in nearly every industry and (b) is relevant to this tool.

<comment><USER15> I guess it's relevant because the OP is saying that they wouldn't use it because they think that facts are irrelevant.

Definitely, we'd have to look at the studies in this space, namely whether journalists cite their facts, or write their pieces using citable studies/facts, etc. So I also won't accept the OP's statement of it as fact.

Though, in my, supposedly biased, opinion I'd say journalists are quite adept at twisting facts to suit their points, and also of omitting (i.e. cherry picking) facts that support their views/points.

<comment><USER14> Of course. I just hope you recognize comments like these do precisely the thing they lament: make unsourced assertions designed to advance a point of view.

"Journalism" is a broad tent. I suspect there's plenty of room for tools like this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's true that coders have lots of great tools for working with textual representations of programs... But IMHO programmers' tools are stuck in a certain kind of local maximum due to the difficulty of moving beyond text. We've done all we can to make textual programs easier to manipulate, but there are fundamental difficulties that can't be solved this way.

I'm personally interested in this question: What if coders had design tools as powerful as those used by architects and construction engineers?

I wrote a blog post about this recently: [http://blog.neonto.com/?p=44](http://blog.neonto.com/?p=44)

<comment><USER17> I believe that's the idea behind this: [http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/](http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/). I know a software engineer in the aerospace field that loves this product and describes it the way you do (except that it's more for embedded systems than for user experiences)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I worked full-time as a journalist for a bunch of different news organizations before leaving to found the forthcoming [http://recent.io/](http://recent.io/).

My suspicion is that neither I nor other journalists I know would use this newsclip.se tool. In a single newsroom I've seen people using Word, TextEdit, Google Docs, Notepad, BBEdit, Gmail, phone-based email clients, phone dictation, and even emacs (me, a few times) to write news articles. While the CMS is newsroom-wide, the writing and editing processes tend to be very personal. Journalists also tend to be individualistic and dislike being forced to use a standardized system without clear benefits.

Where something like newsclip.se _might_ be beneficial would be as a kind of preprocessor/lint for the CMS. It could do a lot of what's being described in the linked article but without replacing the entire journalistic stack.

</comment><comment><USER19> Making a tool like this has occurred to me, but my idea had a slightly different focus.

Rather than attempt to link evidence to statements, which, if we're being honest, doesn't really bring us closer to the truth since many "sources" are merely other people's words, it was much simpler: identify weasel words, euphemisms, or use of the passive voice. Between these three features, I think that most factual writing could be improved a colossal amount.

I would certainly appreciate an easier way to keep track of claims, citations, evidence, and interplay between a story's moving parts, though. I think that the article mentions a few tools which work toward that goal admirably. Right now, to make a really bulletproof piece, you need to be extremely scrupulous with self-identifying your claims and then providing written explication of evidence or hyperlinked evidence.

Additionally, it'd be really useful to have a tool which kept track of sentence structure and also allowed you to track logical rhetoric by keeping track of "If this, then that" style statements.

This is probably asking too much, though. A final hurdle is that journalists and writers tend to be old-school when it comes to technology, so it might be a hard sell to the older segment of that market.

<comment><USER20> Some of this (the identification of words, passive voice) exists already, though results vary: [https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1094904-proofreading- so...](https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1094904-proofreading-software-i- want-to-believe#comment_83082658) (I link to this more because it's a comprehensive list of possible software even though the comparison was done by a vendor.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What do you mean for "writing tools as powerful as those used by coders"? In my experience good coders doesn't need very powerful tool. Super-complex IDE are usually a disturbance to good coders rather then an help and even the uber-geeks that use Emacs don't really use in their jobs all the macros.

A lot of good software engineer I know prefer lightweight editor like the good old Vim or SublimeText over IDE like Visual Studio, Xcode or Eclipse. That's because when you write complex code your brain is slower than your finger and the syntax and structure of the language you are using is something under your skin, you don't need to think at it.

So, no, great coder doesn't use powerful editors, if they can chose they use very simple one with the minimum level of features they need to help them think faster (syntax highlighting, autocompletion, indention) and stop. All other features of complex IDE are a disturbance rather than an help.

I don't know what a good journalist need but my guess is that they have the same problem, their brain is slower than their finger and the grammar of the language they are using should be well known. I don't know which tool they use, but in my opinion a simple text editor with a minimal spellchecking system (but not correction) well integrated with the publishing process is more than enough.

From an Innovation point of view I'm usually suspect when someone claim to have an innovative tool for an established industry. If the industry is established the actors have already optimized their tools and if there could be an improvement is very small. What usually happens is that something changes in the industry and make the actual tool obsolete (e.g: a new process or a new technology became available). But if you want to create something really innovative, you have to find this change. Simply bringing something existing in a field in a different field rarely works. And if it works is because you have a really good understanding of both fields.

<comment><USER15> > _" So, no, great coder doesn't use powerful editors, if they can chose they > use very simple one with the minimum level of features they need to help > them think faster (syntax highlighting, autocompletion, indention) and stop. > All other features of complex IDE are a disturbance rather than an help."_

Says you, and your anecdotal evidence/experience. Sounds to me that you have more prejudice against "complex" IDEs than you do actual facts. Would countering your points by telling you of the countless bad "coders" I've worked with that use text-editors instead of IDEs convince you to change your mind? (I'm going to stop using your term 'coders' here) Or the absolutely great programmers that I've seen that use powerful IDEs to supplement and augment their abilities?

Do you write in a compiled language that can provide rich intellisense, or something more like Ruby/Python/bash that is a tad lacking in that department?

<comment><USER22> Unrelated to the actual point, but I'm curious. You seem to be loathe to use the word "coder". Why is that? How is it different from programmer? Is there some sort of cultural shibboleth I'm unaware of here?

<comment><USER15> I don't think it's a broader cultural thing, or anything. And personally, I'm fine with the term. It's just there was something about the way the OP was using the word "coder" that didn't quite sit well with me. Reading back at his post, I can't quite put a finger on what it was that actually bothered me about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My distinct impression is that the limiting factor in quality journalism is gum-shoe reporting, not incredibly powerful CMS.

Buzzfeed has the most advanced CMS, but their reporting pales with respect to the NYT. When they do bother to do proper reporting (McKay Coppins, etc) they get excellent stories - the rest of the time they use filler, because it's cheap to produce.

<comment><USER24> I actually think technology can improve the quality of journalism. Not necessarily by making great stories better (though the NYT is definitely proving that's possible with some of their interactives) but by making reporting in general cheaper. If a great CMS can make it possible to produce all the economically required filler in half a day, that leaves time to do actual investigative reporting later.

Buzzfeed is definitely pushing this a little bit, though I do think they have a bit too much baggage to get far enough with it.

(PS. If anyone wants to help tackle this problem, we're hiring @ Cafe: [http://cafe.com/careers](http://cafe.com/careers))

<comment><USER23> I'm sure technology can improve things - for example, the NYT is doing a much better job now of marketing its (excellent) cooking section.

My impression though, is that what makes great journalism is reporting. Almost all the time, when I'm reading a great article, I do so using readability to strip away all the crud and just end up with the text in a decent size and no pictures/hyperlinks/movies.

<comment><USER24> > My impression though, is that what makes great journalism is reporting.

Yup. At the end of the day, I think in-depth textual reporting does rule. But what tech can do is make that great reporting slightly cheaper (and thus more plentiful/viable).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a great idea. So much so that I have "Why didn't I think of that?" syndrome.

Here are a couple of suggestions that I could use if you're looking for feature requests. Most of these things exist in one place or another, but having them integrated into a one-tool workflow would be awesome.

1\. Some kind of crowdsourced reputation system for sources (i.e. medical journal sites have high reputation, naturalnews.com has low)

2\. Auto cross-referencing between articles based on content.

3\. TODO list management

4\. License-aware relevant image suggester (please!!!) This alone would be a killer feature for me. Pick out topic words and search selected image sites, then give me thumbnails to choose from.

<comment><USER26> Yes please! Anybody needs such a thing for blogging anyway! > 4\. License- aware relevant image suggester (please!!!)

<comment><USER27> _Yes please! Anybody needs such a thing for blogging anyway!_

I wrote this in another comment, but a tool like this already exists: [http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002...](http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html) and has for about a decade. I drop all my blog posts in Devonthink Pro, and I'm often surprised by the connections that emerge.

<comment><USER25> Thank you for this. I don't use a Mac, but sometimes tools like this make me wish I did.

<comment><USER28> Similar tools for Windows:

[http://scan.sourceforge.net/](http://scan.sourceforge.net/)

[http://dtsearch.com/](http://dtsearch.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've always wondered why writers don't use things like revision control and decent diff tools. I'm not sure the existing tools are well suited to them (yet).

<comment><USER30> Microsoft Word has had revision control for at least 15 years, probably even longer. It's not like the document creation world doesn't have exposure to these ideas.

<comment><USER31> Microsoft Word has a shedload of features that journalists can't be bothered learn and/or use, and that even the author appears not to know about, judging by his reference to "replacing simple text processors like Microsoft Word".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a very cool prototype, and I especially like the idea of calling it a "journalism IDE" (as opposed to a CMS).

At work ([http://cafe.com](http://cafe.com)), I've actually been working on something similar with our CMS (Monsoon). We're trying to use technology to make telling cohesive online narratives a lot easier.

Interestingly, one of the biggest hurdles so far has been in decomposing stories. Media traditionally treats each story as a big blob of text (in most cases, HTML), but we're trying to change that so that each story is actually just an arrangement of smaller tidbits (we call them droplets). Switching to that model helps us to encode a lot more semantic information, and also to reflow stories effectively for context.

We're not yet to the point where we integrate/suggest droplets from other stories automatically, but that's definitely the goal. Maybe we could integrate something like Newsclip.se to encourage that.

(PS. If you want to help us get there, we're hiring: [http://cafe.com/careers](http://cafe.com/careers))

<comment><USER32> I agree that it's a cool idea ! It may be nitpicky, but I had the opposite reaction to calling it a journalism IDE.

It just seems as if the intended audience wouldn't have the faintest idea what an IDE is.

<comment><USER24> So, I think it's a question of who you're marketing to. I'd never call this an IDE to the journalists themselves, but calling it a "journalism IDE" is a great way to recruit developers/technologists—which is actually a big challenge (in my experience, most great developers don't want to touch anything close to content, probably due to latent association with the abomination that is WordPress).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Hi all, post author here! We're working on the code base and would love everybody's input here: [https://github.com/pudo/tmi](https://github.com/pudo/tmi)

<comment><USER34> Hi pudo,

What is the relationship btw the version of newsclipse that's running as a demo online and the repo:

[https://github.com/Canvas-Hackathon- Teams/Newsclipse](https://github.com/Canvas-Hackathon-Teams/Newsclipse)

It seems to be the same - is that where I get a copy to run locally?

<comment><USER33> I've just decided to move the code base to run against a SQL backend, rather than mongo & begun to implement user permissions etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This somewhat plays into Rebecca Parsons' talk [0] at hack.summit() last week. She emphasized that we've done a great job building tools for other technical folks, but we've really dropped the ball on supporting non-technical fields. Her perspective was specifically on the potential of DSLs, but the call to developers to be more relevant is likewise compelling.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KO2YmU5RBY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KO2YmU5RBY)

</comment><comment><USER36> > _What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by > coders?_

Not much would change, except more fluff.

What journalists need is a money making, sustainable outlet.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's funny, I was thinking about that while writing my dissertation.

After a year of coding on Visual Studio, during writing I would say something like "As mentioned in previous chapters, the decision was based on..." and then just click on "previous chapters" and press F12, expecting to be taken to the original reference.

Unfortunately I found out Word does not offer such functionality just yet

<comment><USER38> Word can use "above" or "below" in cross-references, but I wouldn't count on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a standard called hNews, created by Jonathan Malek (Associated Press), Stuart Myles (Associated Press), Martin Moore (Media Standards Trust), and Todd B. Martin (Associated Press), which addresses this:

 _hNews is a microformat for news content. hNews extends hAtom, introducing a number of fields that more completely describe a journalistic work. hNews also introduces another data format, rel-principles, a format that describes the journalistic principles upheld by the journalist or news organization that has published the news item. hNews will be one of several open standards._

[http://microformats.org/wiki/hnews](http://microformats.org/wiki/hnews)

I learned of it (yesterday) re-reading Readability's Article Publishing Guidelines:

[https://readability.com/developers/guidelines](https://readability.com/developers/guidelines)

hNews is an XHTML microformat -- the tags are entity names and classes added to standard HTML entities.

Key among them are: hnews, hentry, source-org, dateline, geo, item-license, principles.

Other microformats, including hCard, can be used to identify people, companies, and organizations, similar to vCard properties. The elements will be familiar to those who've worked with address, Active Directory, or LDAP data: fn, n, nickname, org, email, tel, adr, and more.

[http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard](http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard)

An IDE that tied into these (or, possibly, other standards) could be useful.

You'd likely need some sort of natural-language processing in the copyediting or publishing process to apply this uniformly. Field reporters may work on a wide range of equipment and software (including pen-and-paper or simply voiced-in reports). And expecting reporters to incorporate tags into their copy is likely a stretch.

</comment><comment><USER39> The developer in me likes this very much. I mean, Taxonomies! Unfortunately many non-journalists tend to romanticize and over-complicate the craft. Journalists care mostly about the story telling, and it's not clear to me how this translates into a better story. I believe this to be a (beautiful and well-intentioned) example of overengineering a domain model that, at it's most basic, involves just titles, deks and content such as text, images and video. To me it does not clearly push journalism toward a more profitable and sustainable future and thus, is a distraction from more challenging problems at hand.

</comment><comment><USER40> [http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php)

Scrivener comes closer than anything else I've seen to meeting the OP's goal.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is vaguely reminiscent of some of the professional tools for scriptwriters and novelists, which do in fact start to resemble IDEs: you can shuffle around characters, outlines, plot fragments ...

<comment><USER42> So that is why tv and movies nowadays are so bad.

<comment><USER43> Let's be completely honest: there was very little good television on until 1999. The only thing that's changed is the volume of tv being produced(which naturally favors cheap reality shows). But more and more great things are being produced. Films are cheaper to make than ever before.

Most shows and film will be mediocre. But you don't have to watch the dregs - you only have to watch the best of the best! And by the measure of good things being produced, media has never been better.

<comment><USER44> _> But you don't have to watch the dregs - you only have to watch the best of the best_

This is my tactic. I have a television, but it's not actually connected to an aerial or a cable box, just my Apple TV. I only watch television shows when it's clear they're excellent and exactly to my tastes, and it's brilliant :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> We had some Github religious adherents who made a lot of noise about this. The net in our case ended up being "You can eliminate complex stuff like Word and just use markdown & Github!" (I almost spit out my coffee laughing)

I don't think that an IDE model makes sense because writing in human language is more complex and nuanced than programming languages, which are more limited in scope. At the end of the day, IDEs are shims to match human desires to the language the machine expects.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great article, and great idea.

I'm not a journalist but I do a lot of writing, and I actually use a program called Devonthink Pro in the manner described here by Steven Berlin Johnson: [http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2005/02/devonthink_cont.h...](http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2005/02/devonthink_cont.html) . It's surprisingly close to the tools Lindenberg is describing.

</comment><comment><USER46> Interesting fact. The Django web framework was initially created by the dev team at the "Lawrence Journal", a newspaper in Kansas.

</comment><comment><USER47> This article, incidentally by one of the creators of the Django Framework, still seems relevant, even 8 years later:

[http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental- change/](http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/)

<comment><USER10> Trivia: Django was originally made for the publishing industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Newsclip.se is a great idea.

As a former journalist, I think that [http://hypothes.is](http://hypothes.is) will become another very important tools for reporters... It's an annotation layer for the Web.

</comment><comment><USER49> reading this I feel like it would totally be possible to use CRM software like Salesforce to manage investigating a story. Leads and the like, it's almost like the workflow is the same.

</comment><comment><USER50> I writing enough like coding to make this worthwhile?

</comment><comment><USER51> I want IDE logic in every possible area, i.e. browsing experience.

</comment><comment><USER52> We implemented something like this in Word 15 years ago

</comment><comment><USER53> It's called Tinderbox and it's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER54> Hmm...

* Your weekend newspaper would come out on Wednesday.

* There would be new editions many times daily... not with new stories, just corrections of the first edition, which was blatantly inaccurate and partly written in Moldovan.

* Every day, the newspaper would be in a different format which didn't fit the newspaper rack you just bought.

* Every week, the newspaper would get bigger, but contain no more content (just a new font). You would regularly be forced to buy a new newspaper rack.

* Also, once a week the paper boy would break into your house and steal your old papers. He would offer to sell them back for you in the new format, for a higher price.

* Also, the newspaper rack sellers would not let you store newspapers of which they disapproved.

* Rather than telling you about the world, the paper would track your behaviour and tell the world about you.

* Once a week, the front page would be 404 NEWS NOT FOUND.

* Reporters would be paid high six-figure salaries, but would be unable to relate or talk to anyone but other reporters.

* Many journalists would consider themselves brilliant, world-changing geniuses, with plans not just to report on government, but to replace it.

* At the same time, they would have secret deals with those governments to report people who read "subversive" news.

* et cetera...

<comment><USER55> Nitpick: I don't think Moldovan is a language. If you mean the language spoken in the Republic of Moldova, that's just Romanian.

<comment> a-priori Believe it or not, this topic has come up on Hacker News before. To paraphrase my comment from then ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7324897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7324897)): while Moldovans speak a language that's very similar to Romanian, in a 2004 census 60% self-identified their primary language as 'Moldovan', as compared to 16.5% who say they speak 'Romanian'.

As linguists say, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Whether 'Moldovan' is its own language or simply a regional dialect of 'Romanian' is entirely a question of politics.

<comment><USER56> I learned something interesting today from both you guys.

<comment> a-priori Glad to help!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


.io domains down? - <AUTHOR> http://scotch.io http://codemonkey.io http://geocod.io<p>Are all down for me.<p>$ host filepicker.io Host filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) <comment><USER2> There are some things you can do to protect yourself against these kinds of problem. About 92% of DNS resolvers honour the TTL setting for the NS records from the leaf-node child-zones (e.g. the NS records you control as the owner of a domain). If your domain is reasonably popular, then that caching can help you outlast a problem with your TLDs name-servers. 2 days is a pretty common number for a cache lifetime.

Unfortunately for the 8% of resolvers that honour the TTL in the parent domain, you have less control. In this case for .io, the parent-zone NS ttls are just one hour;

      ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
      nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	ns1.communitydns.net.
      nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	b.nic.ac.
      nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	a.nic.io.
      nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	b.nic.sh.
      nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	ns4.nic.io.
      nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	dns01.cdns.net.
      nic.io.	3600	IN	NS	b.nic.io.

which I think is relatively short by TLD standards.

Another important thing to consider is that the TLD you choose for your domain itself isn't the only TLD that your domain resolution may depend upon. Resolution also depends on all of the domains of your nameservers resolving too. Route 53 assigns every hosted zone 4 nameservers from 4 different TLDs, e.g.;

      example.info.	  172800  IN	NS      ns-1834.awsdns-37.co.uk.
      example.info.	  172800  IN	NS	ns-22.awsdns-02.com.
      example.info.	  172800  IN	NS	ns-912.awsdns-50.net.
      example.info.	  172800  IN	NS	ns-1233.awsdns-26.org.

So that if any one of those TLDs has a problem it does not cause a resolution failure for your zone. Some other providers do this too, and it's also something you could set up yourself.

Full-disclosure: Route 53 engineer here.

<comment><USER3> I apologize for bothering you with this but I was nerding out on DNS recently and I have learned just enough to get very confused. It seems that you (the royal you) are benefiting from glueless out of bailiwick entries?

Should I not have such a strict belief that _thou shall not have glueless out of bailiwick entries_?

I appreciate you indulging my curiosity/confusion.

<comment><USER2> I'd say that the advice is outdated, but I'll try my best to explain and you can decide.

"Bailiwick" is the term used for the namespace a nameserver is considered authoritative for. If example.com is delegated to ns1.example.com then all of the DNS names ending in example.com are in-bailiwick. foo.example.com, bar.example.com, foo.bar.example.com and so on. If example.org is also delegated to ns1.example.com, then names ending in example.org are also considered in-bailiwick for that name-server to return.

When example.com is delegated to ns1.example.com there's an obvious circular dependency; how can ns1.example.com be resolved without first resolving example.com? The way that this is solved is by using glue records. A glue record is when you tell the name-servers for the parent zone (.com in this case) what the IP address for ns1.example.com is. That way the com servers - when asked about www.example.com can say; "actually, you need to ask ns1.example.com, and by the way here's the IP address for ns1.example.com".

With an in-bailiwick delegation and glue record in place, a query can get all the way to the server it needs within 2 or 3 queries.

Now, if example.com is delegated to ns1.otherdomain.net, the delegation is out of bailiwick. Now when the resolver asks the com server for www.example.com it gets a response that says "you need to ask ns1.otherdomain.net". But the resolver doesn't know the IP address for ns1.otherdomain.net. So now it has to put the original query on-pause and go and resolve ns1.otherdomain.net. This is part of why resolvers are called "recursive resolvers" \- they have to recursively resolve all dependencies.

Of course ns1.otherdomain.net could itself require out-of-bailiwick recursion, and the process could get quite lengthy. That's why some guides recommend against it - especially when managing you're own DNS; you may as well make everything in-bailiwick.

So how do we manage this? A few ways;

Firstly, there's no reason that managed DNS customers can't use in-bailiwick names anyway. Route 53 customers, for example, are free to create their own names that resolve to their Route 53 name-servers and to use those names. For a real world example, if you "dig amazonaws.com" you'll see that we have four names ; r[1234].amazonaws.com that actually point to regular Route 53 IP addresses.

Secondly, the nameserver names used by large providers are usually well cached. At Route 53 we host a lot of customers domains, and many many domains refer to each name like "ns-22.awsdns-02.com.", so for that reason the names are usually very well-cached, even if your own domain is low-traffic.

Thirdly, we chose TLDs that are large, popular and well-run. .com/.net are operated under a single contract by verisign, so if you do; "dig allcosts.net @g.gtld-servers.net" , you'll see that our .com and .net customers actually get the benefit of two in-bailiwick glue records (we have two nameservers that end in .com or .net). Customers with domains ending in .org or .co.uk get one each.

Fourthly, our nameserver domains are themselves exclusively delegated to in- bailiwick names, for example if you do; "dig awsdns-50.net. @g.gtld- servers.net", you'll see that all four of its nameservers are handled as glue- records. This limits the amount of recursion a resolver must do to just one level deep.

Our goal here is to be able provide a simple easy-to-use set of names that work well and are robust regardless of the customer's own domain of choice, without having to maintain hundreds of nameserver names in every single TLD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anthony from DNSimple here. I'll pass along what I know so far: some of nic.io's name servers appear to be no longer delegating .io domains out to authoritative name servers. Some of their name servers are still delegating properly, but some are not.

This issue also affects .sh and .ac TLDs I believe since they are the same registry. If I find out anything new I'll post on Twitter in the @dnsimple account and here.

<comment><USER5> ooo, you do 301 redirects, I'll be over shortly...

To explain why that's useful, we have three domains, draw.io ( _mutter_ ), diagramly.com and diagram.ly that all map to the same thing. The actual site runs on a Google App Engine appspot domain. On GAE, you have to buy a Google Apps for Business account to map a domain to an GAE appspot domain.

We have three Apps accounts because of this. We're not happy to do the 301 on a physical server, that loses the scalability advantage of GAE. This has always needed to be done at the DNS level ( I know it's not truely a DNS feature, but I'm assuming the scaling of the redirects at someone who does it as a service is better than mine ). This is the first time I've seen this service. That's all...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> OpenDNS has cleared our cache of all .io domains in case any NXDOMAINS are being cached.

<comment><USER7> I always love when the CEO of a biggish company is sitting in the comments

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're back online at [http://candid.io](http://candid.io). Someone on twitter posted "VCs should think twice before investing in startups without a .com" -> I think that's patently absurd. Azure, AWS, and the other 'core infrastructure' services suffer similar outages form time to time.

<comment><USER9> I hate genericized ccTLDs, but I don't think the VCs are the ones who should be avoiding them. People creating services should stick to .com, get the .net, and if they have to do something like "getdropbox.com" until they can buy dropbox.com, so be it.

Going from dropbox.io to dropbox.com is ok, but I'd probably go for getdropbox.com in preference to dropbox.io.

<comment><USER10> Well as a person hosting a service under a .io domain I must say that it's next to impossible to find a decent domain under .com these days. They are all taken by domain sharks hoarding away and running link-farms. The .io landscape is a refreshing one, it's well recognized by it's typical audience (tech people), expensive enough so that it's not attractive for the domain-sharks, and there's plenty available.

Why exactly do you hate them?

<comment><USER9> 1) Once you're successful you have to get the .com/.net/etc anyway. There's a lot of ambiguouty when you say "go to my site, de.lici.o.us" (which was probably the dumbest one ever), but even saying "referly" makes me think "referly.com" more than "refer.ly". If you're going to get the gccTLD, you absolutely must have sitenameio.com too. So, it doesn't really save you from "decent domain not available" \-- prefixing with "get" or "my" in .com isn't any worse.

2) ccTLD has a defined meaning -- it's the country. I don't hate ccTLDs; e.g. Amazon.co.uk makes a lot of sense for the UK site of Amazon. But when people

3) They expose you to additional risk. The US can largely shut down most things, but .ly means you're exposed to Libya (JFC! an internet business voluntarily deciding to be exposed to Libya?)

4) If you really want something other than .com, you could use another TLD. Generally they all tend to be scams (I'm not aware of many .info or .biz domain names which are anything but scams, although I guess a few single- purpose/serving sites are in .info)

In fairness, IO is actually the least objectionable of all the gccTLDs, since "IO" is a pretty bogus ISO code in terms of representing a country.

ccTLDs make sense when you want to "fly the flag" of that country, too -- wikileaks.is or wikileaks.ch makes sense. All the gccTLDs have policies which are strictly worse than .com though.

And 2-letter domains (which are mostly ccTLDs) _do_ make sense for link shorteners, particularly temporary/transient ones.

<comment><USER11> I like .info for personal point of presence sites.. I use tracker1.info as an example.

I also do like .io for previously stated reasons by others... It's techie/geeky (I/O), and it's expensive enough that the squatters have mostly stayed away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They have 7 name servers, 5 are broken and returning NXDOMAIN for all domains.

Working:

b.nic.io. ns1.communitydns.net.

Not working:

a.nic.io. a.ns13.net. b.nic.ac. b.ns13.net. ns3.icb.co.uk.

<comment><USER12> Some of those that were broken are starting to work again. However the NXDOMAIN responses will have been cached and take a little while to expire.

<comment><USER4> On top of that some customers will still end up on the name servers that are still failing, resulting in NXDOMAIN results still ending up cached in resolvers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow. About a year ago the the entire .st registry went down for about 8 hours:

[http://blorn.com/post/29851770158/beware-cutesy-two- letter-t...](http://blorn.com/post/29851770158/beware-cutesy-two-letter-tlds- for-your-domain-name)

I guess the title of the blog post pretty much says it all.

</comment><comment><USER14> On April 29 I received a notice from firstname.lastname@example.com concerning user-generated content that I was to remove from an IO domain "by April 2" (ie a month earlier) - otherwise they would advise the complaintant to contact law enforcement and would suspend the domain "upon receipt of a formal request to do so". When I attempted to reply, the email address was out of order ("Write error: Broken pipe") and remained so for several days.

It doesn't seem to be the most professionally run domain...

</comment><comment><USER15> Man, you think you plan for everything, and then your whole TLD just stops working. What's the best way to plan for something like this?

<comment><USER16> Have an alternate domain using completely different infrastructure.

Having a .com or .net as a backup domain, even if it isn't as sexy looking, doesn't hurt.

<comment><USER8> This may work for API endpoints but there's little re-course for your primary domain. It makes more sense to have .COM/.NET as your primary domain and have the .IO as a convenient alternative than the other way around. But my opinion is still that this is a short-term issue: the reliability of other TLDs will improve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My site [http://gitignore.io](http://gitignore.io) was down and I just pinged my CDN and my domain host to see what the problem was. Everything seems to be back up and running now. Does anyone know what happened?

</comment><comment><USER18> Check out [http://www.whatsmydns.net](http://www.whatsmydns.net) pretty useful for seeing where issues are or tracking propagation.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, that's an excellent tool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I experienced this as well at [http://quantify.io](http://quantify.io) \- New Relic reported a 2 hour outage which just ended.

</comment><comment><USER21> Yes! My site (robert.io) is down and I've been chasing my tail trying to figure out what's wrong. It's refreshing to see that I'm not the only one.

</comment><comment><USER22> For me too.. well, sometimes it resolves, sometimes it doesn't. There seems to be an issue with .io globally: [https://twitter.com/dnsimple/status/342991722365734912](https://twitter.com/dnsimple/status/342991722365734912)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad I'm not crazy.

$ host www.filepicker.io www.filepicker.io is an alias for anycast.filepicker.io. anycast.filepicker.io has address 184.108.40.206 Host anycast.filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) Host anycast.filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

$ host filepicker.io Host filepicker.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We had this happen before to our .st domain. [http://blorn.com/post/29851770158/beware-cutesy-two- letter-t...](http://blorn.com/post/29851770158/beware-cutesy-two-letter-tlds- for-your-domain-name)

</comment><comment><USER24> Pingdom reckons [https://www.photographer.io](https://www.photographer.io) is still up, but I guess I really can't be certain. It hasn't been a great week for my domain, what with the DNSimple attack and this.

</comment><comment><USER4> It looks like all of the nic.io root name servers are delegating again.

</comment><comment><USER25> Intercom.io is down as well. Particularly frustrating since its preventing me from replying to customer emails.

Technical details of permanent delivery failure: DNS Error: Domain name not found

</comment><comment><USER26> In some sort of irony, statuspage.io is down. Was looking at their offering about an hour ago and thinking of taking it for a spin, but now I'm not so sure...

<comment><USER27> Isn't that a bit unfair to judge the quality of their service based on the DNS being down for every .io service?

<comment><USER28> The service is only as strong as the weakest link.. choose those links wisely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hmm every .io domain on this page has worked for me even if I've never visited them before. Maybe my ISP (VirginMedia) has cached the records.

<comment><USER4> It's somewhat random, so it seems you had good luck today.

<comment><USER30> From what I read in this thread, the odds of it working is 2 in 7, so it's pretty likely a good portion of the commenters will say it works for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I had the same problem with notable.ac The problem appears to have been resolved. The latest DNS queries show that it is now delegating properly.

<comment><USER4> Yep, it seems the same registry runs .io, .sh and .ac.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, I was deploying to Heroku when this roots error occurred. This screwed up the deploy (as it crashed in the middle) and just 500'ed on every page load. And meant every DNS request in my deploy chain that relied on *.notable.ac resolving ended up caching negative results. Luckily it's back up now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's like a million hipsters cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I will pour out some PBR for good ol' .io.

</comment><comment><USER33> [http://pineapple.io](http://pineapple.io) has been up whole time

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately it may appear up for you and for monitoring systems yet still not resolve for others, depending on DNS cache freshness as well as which root name server you (randomly) fall on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It is currently also impossible to register .io domains (I can confirm this since yesterday afternoon)

</comment><comment><USER35> [http://anondrop.io](http://anondrop.io) is up

</comment><comment><USER36> Fine for me in the UK:-

        $ host algasm.io
        algasm.io has address 184.108.40.206

</comment><comment><USER37> you can check whatsmydns.net, how some places are working, and some not, for example: [http://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/www.works.io](http://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/www.works.io)

</comment><comment><USER38> My website, brand.io, seems to be up... I hope my email isn't down. :(

<comment><USER39> Even more self-marketing for you:

"Brandon Thomas is a triple major undergrad at Southern Polytechnic State University in the Computer Science, Biology, and Chemistry programs. Brand loves science, uses Linux and vim, and programs primarily in Python, Javascript, and C++. Computing interests include machine learning and computer graphics. After graduation Brand intends to study computational metabolomics or possibly found a startup company."

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> from Germany a.ns13.net and b.ns13.net return NXDOMAIN. Both seem to be located in JP. The other DNS are working for me.

They recently switched their backend to a new platform (May 29th) maybe this issue is related…

</comment><comment><USER41> My domain is down as well - words.io.

Good thing it's just some crappy side project.

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh my, I just announced bitnodes.io like a couple hours ago..

</comment><comment><USER43> Converser.io is up. Looks to be a subsection of the domains.

<comment><USER44> Seems even weirder than that. A domain can work for some people and not for others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> jeez .io names come in at 60GBP ~ $95 a year - why so much?

<comment><USER4> Only because the market will bear the cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Nope: Our sites (fine.io, fry.io) are up

<comment><USER44> It would appear that fry.io is actually down. That's the one hosted with nic.io. This is why I wanted to move away from them. They are really incompetent.

<comment><USER22> Is it possible to move away with them? I mean, aren't they finally responsible for delegating all .io domains to the correct nameservers?

<comment><USER4> It is not possible to move away from them. nic.io is the registry for .io domains, so you can't move to anyone else. They also act as a registrar for their own TLD, so you could move to another registrar, but ultimately they're responsible for .io delegation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Mine seems to be working fine: sawt.io

</comment><comment><USER47> My site at kun.io is working for me…

</comment><comment><USER48> no downtime for [http://read.io](http://read.io)

<comment><USER49> That you are aware of. There was outages at the io registry nameservers, read.io was most certainly affected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Our site focal.io is down as well.

</comment><comment><USER51> My farmer.io domain is down also!

</comment><comment><USER52> Works fine here in México.

</comment><comment><USER37> github.io also down for me

<comment><USER53> Works fine for me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> nature.io up and running.

</comment><comment><USER55> nitrous.io is working...

</comment><comment><USER56> git.io is UP.

</comment><comment><USER57> not mine.

</comment><comment><USER58> Our site is not down: [http://82.io](http://82.io)

</comment><comment><USER59> This story won't reach the front page. It's not mainstream enough.</comment>


Tesla's World Wide Wireless Power Tower - <AUTHOR> http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=703#more-703

<comment><USER2> I've heard so many stories of the much abused and misunderstood Tesla, usually coming from people I'd politely call "free-energy wackjobs". Even this article, which is one of the fairer versions I've heard, doesn't touch on why this has never been implemented or experimented upon further. It can't be for lack of interest or ignorance or for startup cost either (or else I'm sure YC would have funded someone to build these towers).

So HN, anyone with more electrical knowledge than I know why this doesn't work or why it wouldn't scale or any other engineering challenges that have kept this from being more than a pipe dream?

<comment><USER3> Main problem, electricity arcs to ground ASAP. This means that the system can basically only have two connections in range of each other, so 1 power plant to 1 user. The economics of this doesn't really work well.

Generally electricity only arcs once, and it requires 30kV/cm. This means to arc to two things at 10 cm you require about 600kV, but again this requires a small amount of energy to be transferred to ground.

Transferring through the ionosphere would likely resolve some of this problem, it's like dipping electrodes into salt water. It works, it's just omni- directional and subject to the environment. However, you basically have to build every antenna 50km high.

The technology I believe is credible, but the practicality of it isn't very high. Below the ionosphere this technology has the problem that the ground is usually much closer than the next persons house. This would work great above 100 ft, due to the fact that the whole ozone production would poison most people. Above 100 ft, I can only transmit power in a range of less than 100 ft, but generally only to one person. If I want to transmit to two people it has to be below 50 ft.

At 100 ft the voltage limit is 90 million volts before you're arcing directly to the ground. The safe limit would probably be 45 million volts as you'd be arcing to peoples heads at 90 million volts.

Basically how the system would end up breaking down is that you'd use hundreds of feet of cable to connect to your antenna, which we currently use less to connect to the one down the road. I believe mine is about 30 feet away. The substation would require a few thousand feet or so of cable to connect to the main transformer, again which we use considerably less to do today.

So the only practical usage I see is on the long distance scale, where you're using the ionosphere instead of arcing through the air. However, it would all have to be over 100km apart. Yet at such extremely high voltages to be practical we wouldn't have a strong enough insulator to stop the arcing anyway.

Unless we end up with like 2 power stations in North America and a super electrical insulator, I doubt this technology would ever become truly practical.

<comment><USER4> Do you have a blog about your projects?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading this when it was originally posted to DI's site a couple years ago. Pretty cool stuff, I'm sure some folks here who haven't read this will appreciate it. DI truly has some Damn Interesting articles!

<comment><USER6> Ah yes, a staple from the golden age of reddit. Anyone know why they haven't written anything since October?

<comment><USER7> I think they stopped posting while they work on their book but I could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a wonderful physics teacher who brought in a bunch of different inventions made by Tesla and I always thought they were interesting but the theory of wireless electricity is so different to people it always blows my mind that it works ,despite all the physics attributed to it, if this becomes popular soon we will have to find a phrase to replace "plugged in."

</comment><comment><USER9> Tower of Power reminds me of Frank Zappa :-)</comment>