Show HN: Reclaim – an adaptive calendar app that plans time for your routines - <AUTHOR> https://reclaim.ai/daily-habits/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News!

Even though I'm a semi-lurker, Hacker News and its community have been a staple in my life pretty much since launch, through 3 startups and 3 kids. So I'd love to hear what folks think of my latest creation.

Requirements to try out: Google Calendar plus ability to grant edit permissions; optional Slack integration. We are not a chrome extension or new calendar app, nothing to install.

My cofounder and I started Reclaim after working together as product management leaders at New Relic for several years. While there, we experienced what many busy middle managers feel: super impacted schedules that often resulted in working late at night just to try to stay afloat. We decided that if we could build a product to help better defend and focus time for these people, we could ultimately also help capture the oft-hidden conflicts and dependencies within organizations that are often the root cause why people, teams, and companies burn out.

Here's how it works: in addition to helping sync your personal calendar(s) to block out your work calendar (launched in January), we now also block out time for important habits/routines that you want or need to do, professionally or personally. You do this by defining a "habit" that has a title, start/end window of time, ideal time, and min/max duration. Reclaim will then find free time on your calendar and tentatively block out the time.

We say tentatively because if your schedule isn't too busy, we may mark the time as "free", making you still appear available to meet with others -- something we think is really important for managers. But as your schedule fills up, we will defend the time by marking it as busy. This is a job that is just too tedious for a human to do, but ideal for a virtual assistant like Reclaim. So for example, your 11am to 2pm could be wide open, but if you suddenly get invited to several late morning and early afternoon meetings, Reclaim would defend your lunch slot by marking it as busy and, optionally, even declining any further incoming meetings.

I use it to block out my entire day for personal and work routines meals, time with kids, bedtime for kids, exercise, morning and afternoon emails, morning and afternoon coding.

The result is that my agenda looks fairly well planned out every day, but often slightly different because of the meetings I have with people throughout the day. And because of the flexibility and throttle of the free/busy time, I can hand out Calendly links and feel good that I'm offering up my most flexible availability but also that if too much comes in at once a "circuit breaker" will flip and my day will get defended.

In terms of the tech stack, it is a React-based frontend and a Java (Micronaut) + Postgres backend, deployed on AWS Fargate. We're getting the most out of Postgres by using jsonb, hstore, and have even turned it into a fairly scalable little pub/sub + job service, utilizing the listen/notify + for update skip locked features. We deploy 10-15 times per day.

Thanks for checking it out. Feedback welcome!

<comment><USER2> This is awesome! I was just thinking that I needed to build something like this!

I would gladly pay for this if it worked with Outlook (Office365).

<comment><AUTHOR> Soon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I may not be the target demo (I'm a solo founder) but I would never give another company my schedule to analyze and optimize. My time is my most valuable asset as a human and an entrepreneur, and I believe that for anyone intent on success, time management is a function that must be internalized as a core competency, not outsourced

<comment><AUTHOR> I've had jobs ranging from solo founder (2x) to co-founder of a 4 person startup (this one!) to SVP of Product Management of a mid-sized publicly traded company. In all cases: you're absolutely right that managing my time was key to my success -- and often a cause of my failures when I didn't do it.

That said: I think your framing of our product and the intent behind it is wrong. We aren't trying to take over the job of how you strategically manage your time. We're doing jobs that are otherwise tedious so that you get better control of your time.

If you prefer doing the job by hand, then we're of course not the tool for you. But I can assure you our users don't view Reclaim as some opportunity to give up on being strategic or thoughtful with their time.

<comment><USER4> I second this (Reclaim beta user here, and they didn't ask me to post this) - Reclaim makes me think about my time more, but drag appointment boxes around less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Huge fan of Reclaim! I spend a lot of time programming my calendar and always challenge myself to be more proactive BUT my nature is to give in to reactive work first. With Reclaim I'm able to "trick" myself by having the bot add proactive things to my calendar that I want to do, but never get time for (like taking a mid-day exercise break). My brain perceives this as reactive work (i.e. I didn't schedule it, someone else did) - and as a result I'm more likely to make the time to do the proactive work.

</comment><comment><USER6> YES! I've wanted solutions related to Reclaim's concept for years! I can not make and stick to a strict schedule of tasks at specific times. I have routine tasks to do, that I want automatically suggested to me at opportune moments during the day. I hope Reclaim inspires similar innovation.

As with sleep management apps, they all seem to enforce going to sleep or waking up at specific times. I want to have it suggest when to sleep, then detect once I am asleep, count from there, and wake me in the best phase after the optimal length for me that day. Length determined depending on whether I have to get up or can sleep in (use calendar).

Is there a calendar with automated suggestions and drag-and-drop preset events? Events should have flexibility in how long they can and have to be.

Please do not require me to hand over my calendar data. Please do not silo the calendar into an app; it should use or synchronize without issues with regular calendar.

<comment><USER7> I've recently watched several talks of Matt Walker [1], a sleep scientiest. And he often states that it is not only important to sleep enough, but to do it on a regular schedule. So that the body and mind can adapt. So perhaps there is a good reason why most sleep management want to enforce a fixed schedule. Nevertheless, if that is not possible, it would certainly be helpful to have such a tool you describe.

[1]: [https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpow...](https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpower)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I started down the path of building a simple version of this at one point. One thing I discovered is the necessity of marking some time as busy within the window for an event. If I have a 2 hour block free for a 1 hour lunch, someone could still schedule a meeting which makes my lunch impossible, like a hour meeting starting 30 minutes in. That would leave two 30 minute chunks on either side, and I can no longer have my 1 hour lunch.

The solution is to preemptively block key times which guarantee you can still schedule your flexible task. In this case, you need to block 30 minutes (or whatever your smallest schedulable unit of time is) in the middle of the 2 hour window, either right before or right after the midpoint. This will leave the maximal amount of schedulable time while still guaranteeing no single event can wreck your lunch.

Just an observation in case it's useful to the founders here.

<comment><AUTHOR> TOTALLY!

Yeah, there are a lot of little tricks we do (and many more we still need to) to help defend the time. Part of the solution also involves asking the user how "aggressive" they want us to defend the time.

Sounds like you've got very relevant experience here. We're hiring btw ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I saw this a few days ago, cool product. I'm making something similar (details in my profile, don't want to shill my own product on a Show HN out of respect) which deals less with automatic suggestions but more making it much easier to schedule tasks yourself. This includes things like sub tasks and other features. I'm also making it open source for people who want to self host it.

For this, is there are reason that there are two landing pages?

[https://reclaim.ai/daily-habits/](https://reclaim.ai/daily-habits/)

[https://reclaim.ai/](https://reclaim.ai/)

They seem similar but have different parts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes what we're showing off today is the flexible Habits, but we have some other features (like calendar sync, and some upcoming stuff, including -- full disclosure -- tasks). So that's why the website is laid out the way it is.

<comment><USER9> Nice, good luck! There can never be enough todo list apps on the market haha. Hopefully it goes well, maybe we can chat and learn business tips from each other as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm very busy, and it is hard to find slot in my calendar for deep work, if I do not put it manually in advance. I was using similar concept by manually reserving 2h slot windows each day for a deep work. And it worked great! But I want more distinct habits like this, with more flexibility, like you have with "defensive" settings. Really cool stuff, can't wait to try it out!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We also have Tasks in beta if you want to check that out. You can probably guess how it works :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice concept!

A suggestion as a potential user:

I work across time zones, sometimes I'm overcommitted (eg early rise for a meeting and one at end of day).

In that example I'd think when that happens you could flag I should end the following day early (and block it out) to make up for lost personal time. Keep a balance in case I delete the entry because I need to stick around at work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like it. That's exactly the kind of thing we'd love to add down the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interested to try this! Previously I subscribed to SkedPal ([https://www.skedpal.com/](https://www.skedpal.com/)) for awhile but thought it was too expensive to stick with it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Since habits and time planning are very particular to people's personal preferences...

is there any chance that this will later have the ability to configure things with some javascript or lua or python that I've copy-pasted from StackOverflow?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll have an API available soon. We're actually doing some prototypes right now using [https://pipedream.com/](https://pipedream.com/), which I fully recommend as a nice "glue layer" for stuff like this that is simpler than Lambda but gives you a bit more control than, say, Zapier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of a more work-calendar integrated Timeful (which was purchased and killed by Google). I mourn it a lot since I never found a 1-to-1 replacement, so I'm rooting for your team!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We loved Timeful and it was definitely part of our inspiration!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd love to see todoist integration. The "find me 4 hours to do this" feature looks like a natural fit for this. Also, any plans for a public API?

<comment><AUTHOR> You should request access to our Tasks beta. You'd be pleasantly surprised :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the key difference compared to using the native Goals feature of Google Calendar and making the free/busy status from those events be visible to coworkers?

<comment><USER17> Goals in Google Calendar can only be created from Android or iOS, and not from the web, for some reason. I presume Reclaim doesn't have this limitation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hi,

It didn't worked for me. I've signed up, i have the events created by Reclaim in my calendar, but if I invite myself from another account, nothing happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm... not sure what you're getting at re: "invite myself from another account nothing happens".

Do you mean the habit event isn't moving when an incoming invite comes in?

If so: right now we don't move things unless we see an RSVP of Yes/Maybe. Give that a try? You should see things shuffle after 10-15 seconds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love it. At least, the idea, without having tried it yet. The moment you support Office365 calendars, you can have all my money.

</comment><comment><USER20> In can't tell if it has Exchange support. I assume not. To get into many of the Fortune 500, you'll need O365 and Exchange.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't support Exchange or Office 365 yet, but we plan to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looking forward to having this in Outlook 365!

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been thinking about trying to build something like this! This looks so helpful!</comment>


Unofficial Apple Archive - <AUTHOR> https://www.applearchive.org/ <comment><USER3> My own random Apple-connected moment of delight. In 2005, when they announced Dashboard widgets, I was running a data-visualization site built off Google News called Buzztracker [0]. It was a really simple idea and hackneyed execution, but it worked and was quite popular: it mapped the news from 1000s of sources onto a map, allowing you to navigate via geography into the day's events.

I took an afternoon and knocked out a widget edition of the site. If I remember correctly, you submitted your widgets to Apple.com and they had a little gallery. Well, I came home a few days later and my server was melting: thousands of hits/second from apple.com. It turned out they decided to make the _entire_ homepage of apple.com a hot-link to my widget. [1] It stayed that way for about 24 hours — June 17 - 18, 2005.

I love this era of the 'net — when apple.com would just link to a dev's or designer's project. I almost fell out of my chair. Printed the screenshot out. I still remember the bar I went to that night, who I had a celebratory drink with in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, sort of marveling at the absurdity of it all.

The exposure didn't have any marked direct effect on my career or work, but it did boost my confidence in that maybe I wasn't working on such useless stuff in isolation on the other side of the world.

[0] [http://buzztracker.org](http://buzztracker.org) — the maps don't work because the SSIs are broken; but we often forget, Google News was one of the first times world-wide news was consolidated into a somewhat homogenous format (most sites weren't using RSS when it launched in 2001/2), certainly not one you could easily scrape and process global news patterns.

[1] [https://craigmod.com/images/misc/buzztracker_apple.jpg](https://craigmod.com/images/misc/buzztracker_apple.jpg)

edit: grammar

<comment><USER4> I had a very similar experience!

My "Christmas Countdown Clock" widget (hey, I was only 12 at the time...) got literally hundreds of thousands of downloads when Apple linked to my hosting space from their old widget gallery.

After this first taste of "success" I doubled-down on learning to code and, well, here we are today :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My own little moment of fame: WWDC June 8, 2009, Keynote, 21 minutes and 22 seconds in: Bertrand Serlet says (about improvements to Preview): "We have added lots of little touches. The one I like...we have added a little bit of AI to actually infer the selection"

My colleague and I (we co-developed the "little bit of AI") never saw this comment (and the applause) live: we were still lining up outside of Moscone West. As Apple employees we weren't allowed in until all the guests and paying attendees had entered. Still, we watched the video afterwards and got a huge kick out of the mention.

BTW, the AI we added did not use neural nets or deep learning.

<comment><USER6> That must be an amazing feeling! Is this a feature that's still in macOS today? Can I see it in action?

<comment><USER7> Yup, just open Preview for an image (possibly other documents as well e.g., PDF), go into "markup" mode, and begin to draw with the pen or pencil. Preview will try to "perfect" your drawn check mark, X, straight line, curved line, etc.

<comment><USER5> That's a nice feature! But it was added after we left Apple. I cannot claim any credit for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the early 2000's Apple aesthetic. I'm not sure if it was actually really good, or I just associate it with a happy time in my life.

I still have an iTunes playlist with all of the music from the dancing silhouette iPod commercials, and I get the warm and fuzzies when I listen to it.

I wish there was a high-quality archive of these commercials online to relive some of those memories. Unfortunately, every time I look for them on YouTube, they're incomplete copies of over-compressed copies of watermarked copies of cropped copies of altered copies of something someone recorded off what looks like low-grade Betamax.

<comment><USER9> >> I'm not sure if it was actually really good, or I just associate it with a happy time in my life.

I am a collector of Macs from around this time. I just picked up an orange G3 Clamshell iBook, and I absolutely adore my 'pixar lamp' iMac G4.

I'm considering internal hardware mod projects to get these two up to a reasonable speed.

<comment><USER8> The monitor on my iLamp went black last week for no reason that I can determine. The machine still works, and I can VNC into it to use it, but that's not so much fun.

I have the tools to fix it, but no longer possess the manual dexterity. Sadly, it will probably end up in the garbage because my local Apple Store won't take it back for recycling.

<comment><USER9> That's unfortunate. The LCD displays on these units are stunning. I still use mine for small Photoshop work and drawing in Flash. It's just beautiful and inviting for work.

If you were anywhere near Toronto I'd take it off your hands. I specifically want broken units for my hardware mods as I feel bad intentionally destroying a functioning unit. It's just kinda shitty to collectors.

<comment><USER8> I've love to let you have it, but I'm over 2,000 miles from Toronto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's interesting about this is how design and presentation has been a part of Apple's DNA since basically day one.

When they launched the Apple II in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire, there were dozens of other micro-computer startups there as well. But Steve had the foresight to hire a professional product designer to create the foam molded case, and professional graphic artists and marketing people to design their logo, brochures, booth, etc. In addition to the technical genius under the hood provided by Woz, the visual components clearly separated Apple from the pack and put them in the same league as multinational corporations Commodore and Tandy when Apple was still essentially two twenty somethings in a rented office in Cupertino.

Corporate DNA is an interesting phenomenon. Throughout the years, under various different leaders, Apple has somehow been able to consistently produce quality technology that people want to own because it looks good and is marketed well. One has to wonder how it becomes so ingrained in a company like that.

<comment><USER11> Steve Jobs.

It hasn't been there since he passed - they've been coasting, and it's starting to show.

<comment><USER12> People have said that since 2012. Steve died in 2011. It's now 2020. Have you really never used an Apple Watch or talked to someone who has?

<comment><USER11> Several family members and friends have Apple Watches.

As far I can tell there is nothing significant about the devices. They're a complicated way to stay distracted with a reasonably okay medical monitor built-in.

They don't seem to be a game-changer the way the iPod or iMac was.

I could, of course, be very wrong.

<comment><USER13> The cellular Apple Watch keeps me from being distracted. It keeps me off the web and other apps but I'm still easy to contact.

When I'm running or at the gym, it's really nice not to have to lug my phone with me and still have access to music, podcasts, and when I'm running GPS to track distance and speed.

The iPod was not technically a leap. They assembled it from third party hardware in less than 9 months. The only reason it wasn't copied sooner is because Apple (smartly) bought up the complete supply of 1.8 inch hard drives for months.

Competitors still haven't been able to squeeze the functionality and performance of the Apple Watch in a device as small.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Mildly ironic: The first video I went to is [https://www.applearchive.org/1990-feed/steve-jobs-on-the- lib...](https://www.applearchive.org/1990-feed/steve-jobs-on-the-library-of- congress-and-bicycles-for-the-mind) which has the caption, "We shouldn't build too many more libraries, instead we should connect towns to the internet to provide access to the Library of Congress". 30 years later and copyright has us not much closer to unlocking the Library of Congress.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love the way the thumbnails for each year change with Apple's brand typography from the era. The one thing I would change is pre-1984: Apple started using Garamond with the introduction of the Macintosh; I would use either Motter Tektura (from the old logo) or Univers condensed (used in Apple II print materials) for 1977-1983.

</comment><comment><USER16> First video I watch: "You are strictly prohibited from making a copy or modification of, or from rebroadcasting or re-encoding, this broadcast without the prior written permission from Apple Public Relations"

I'll be surprised if it's online for another week (not that I want that to be the case).

At the same time, the right-click blocker, referral link to Rogue Ameoba, and soliciting of donations just rub me the wrong way. To be honest, these all should have been uploaded directly to archive.org or something.

It's kinda disappointing, as I've gone to apple.com/pr for years and downloaded press images of the products I find cool/appealing. I always hoped there'd somehow be an archive of all the awesome presentations and stuff over the years. It's bittersweet that there's such a rad archive online, but it's approached in such an exclusionary way.

Actually it's even worse than I thought -- went to copy one of the Vimeo links (since I could see the videos are hosted on Vimeo) and they are not viewable outside of the applearchive site? [https://player.vimeo.com/video/372119562](https://player.vimeo.com/video/372119562) for example. "Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here."

<comment><USER16> I was shockingly accurate: takedowns came exactly a week after my comment: [https://twitter.com/samhenrigold/status/1220903242856640512](https://twitter.com/samhenrigold/status/1220903242856640512)

Sadly, completely expected :\ Hope he still has all the original files on hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Had to watch the iPod Nano reveal again. That was the first thing I ever live steamed on Quicktime as a teen and it blew my mind.

Edit: also it's weird but I totally had a crush on the faceless dancer in the miniskirt in this iPod Shuffle commercial. [https://www.applearchive.org/2005-feed/ipod-shuffle-tv-ad- li...](https://www.applearchive.org/2005-feed/ipod-shuffle-tv-ad-life-is- random)

<comment><USER18> Not weird at all. Fit bodies are attractive, dancing is attractive, skirts are attractive. And your mind gets to fill in the blanks with whatever it prefers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been using OS X since 2010, but in that time I never used the Dashboard. I didn't see any point.

A couple weeks ago, I watched the keynote of Steve Jobs introducing Tiger, and when he demo'd the Dashboard, I had this moment of dawning realization:

"Oh, so _that 's_ what you're supposed to use that for. That is... actually completely brilliant. Yes. I want that. Now."

I'm now using the Dashboard quite heavily. It's great.

It got even better a few days later when I watched the Leopard keynote and discovered how you're supposed to use Web Clips.

<comment><USER20> what's it for? i never used it when it was around.

<comment><USER19> So, worth noting, I'm sure I saw plenty of these explanations over the years, and it still took watching Steve Jobs's demo before I "got" it.

But: it's a workspace for quick glances that don't take you out of the flow of what you're working on. If you've ever kept a paper notepad, or a calculator, or a small tablet on your desk for reference while using your computer, Dashboard is that, but even better because it can be activated and deactivated more quickly than physically looking down at your desk.

(Make sure the Dashboard is set "As Overlay" if you're ever on a system that has it. Modern-ish macOS defaults to "As Space", which reeks of a setting created by people who didn't actually use the Dashboard.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It is surprising to see that Steve Jobs is the most-featured person on a site that says it is dedicated to "unsung heroes". It looks like it's just about Apple in general.

Going from "all about Jobs" to "look at our cutting-edge emoji designs" is a nice encapsulation of Apple history. I know that many people hope the period from Jobs' death to Ives' departure was just a phase. But it feels like we're down to the wire product-wise. The new MBP is a nice start but before long the iPhone SE will reach end-of-life and I just don't want a flat brick with three cameras and no audio port.

</comment><comment><USER22> Some more backstory and an interview with the guy who compiled it for those interested:

[https://ww.9to5mac.com/2020/01/15/the-unofficial-apple- archi...](https://ww.9to5mac.com/2020/01/15/the-unofficial-apple-archive- history-videos/#)

</comment><comment><USER23> Also notable is [https://www.folklore.org/](https://www.folklore.org/) \- thatnks for this site!

</comment><comment><USER24> My favorite

[https://www.applearchive.org/1992-feed/whats-on-your- powerbo...](https://www.applearchive.org/1992-feed/whats-on-your-powerbook-tv- ad-haiku-guy)

</comment><comment><USER25> This "easy pay" training video is quite the show [https://www.applearchive.org/2006-feed/apple-internal- easy-p...](https://www.applearchive.org/2006-feed/apple-internal-easy-pay- training-video)

</comment><comment><USER26> Check out the employee holiday bonus from 1983: [https://www.applearchive.org/1983-feed/apple-holiday- bonus](https://www.applearchive.org/1983-feed/apple-holiday-bonus)

<comment><USER8> Was this an employee holiday bonus, or a public promotion called "Apple Holiday Bonus?" I don't see anything in it making it employee-specific. I think it might just be a play on words.

<comment><USER26> It has to be for customers and this site mislabeled it as "employee holiday bonus". It's just too embarrassing... a bunch of coupons for magazines and software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> To this day these are some of my favorite coding posters. You have to hit the little arrow to find them, I missed them the first time searching, so I wanted to post it because they are awesome. [https://www.applearchive.org/2006-feed/apple-computer- scienc...](https://www.applearchive.org/2006-feed/apple-computer-sciences- posters)

</comment><comment><USER28> As best as I can tell, this is missing my favorite video, "Jaguar on the Loose". Really reminds me how things felt back then. I'm on mobile though where the experience isn't fantastic so maybe I just missed it on the site. Provided below:

[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2zfnka](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2zfnka)

<comment><USER29> wow good times, for me it was this video

[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2zfnja](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2zfnja)

the whole thing was rendered in quartz2d afaicr

<comment><USER28> That is a great one too! I love the fact that the QuickTime video at the end is actually a PDF.

<comment><USER29> > QuickTime video at the end is actually a PDF

wow, i never noticed that until now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Am I crazy or is right-clicking totally broken on this website? Is this intentional? Maybe a joke about the old iMac hockey puck mice?

<comment><USER31> It is. One of the articles mentioned that they are trying to prevent piracy (rolls eyes) so maybe that's what it is.

<comment><USER32> It always mildly amuses me when people are doing this on their websites, it's like watching someone clumsily doing something pointless but you don't say anything and just watch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> My first contribution to a feature: [https://www.applearchive.org/1999-feed/apple-special- event-o...](https://www.applearchive.org/1999-feed/apple-special-event- october-1999) at 13:24

A rather one-off thing, never ported to Mac OS X, but we had fun developing it.

<comment><USER34> Whoa, really cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> For anyone curious about the intricacy of the guidelines of the Apple logo: check this out here: [https://www.applearchive.org/1987-feed/apple-logo- standards-...](https://www.applearchive.org/1987-feed/apple-logo-standards- and-guidelines)

It goes into absolute depth into the do's and don'ts of their logo, which I find quite frankly interesting to see from a designer's perspective.

</comment><comment><USER36> Ahh, now I understand this Futurama jab: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSt04IPqFfM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSt04IPqFfM)

Compare: [https://www.applearchive.org/1984-feed/macintosh-tv- ad-1984](https://www.applearchive.org/1984-feed/macintosh-tv-ad-1984)

<comment><USER37> Futurama was written with us old folks in mind. My kids love it (as do I), but it's rich with mockery you can't appreciate without having been there when it was happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> For some reason, the first thing I clicked was 1983, which led me to an ad for the Lisa computer.

I remember seeing it at the local mall at a computer retailer, and being in awe of how cool it looked compared to other computers at the time, and shocked that it cost $10,000 (equivalent to ~ $25,000 today.)

Even though the Lisa never really went anywhere, it was an amazing achievement at the time.

</comment><comment><USER39> The amount of content here is incredible. Did Apple create this, or fans?

<comment><USER40> It's unofficial, there was a discussion on Reddit yesterday with people asking if the author would provide access the content to archive it in case Apple DMCAs it, to which he gave some childish strop in response about how he deserves the in(fame)y. You'll find it on /r/DataHoarders if you care to look.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ep27pk/probabl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ep27pk/probably_worth_archiving_this_since_apple_will/fehyxtr/?context=8&depth=9)

<comment><USER41> The relevant comments were deleted.

^Z time: [http://removeddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ep27pk/probably...](http://removeddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ep27pk/probably_worth_archiving_this_since_apple_will/)

And just in case: [http://archive.is/bU2RM](http://archive.is/bU2RM)

(An aside: _wow_ , archive.is handles JS perfectly. It's necessary nowadays, but I'm still extremely impressed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Apple's design of 10-15 years ago looks excellent even today. Truly - <USER2> design does not lose its attractiveness as styles and standards change. Most icons, fonts, panels, colors of most of their old software and promotional materials look very pleasant, even in low resolution.

<comment><USER43> the original osx pinstripe look is pretty hideous, and the faux glossy emboss look hasn't aged well either

[https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2016/01/mac- os-x-...](https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2016/01/mac-os-x-public- beta-05-100637717-large.png)

<comment><USER44> We'll say the same about flat buttons-that-don't-look-like-buttons too.

<comment><USER8> The good thing about Material Design is that we don't have to wait for it to go out of fashion among developers. People have been saying it's butt ugly from day one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I cannot see any of the videos.

For all the videos, I get this on a black background:

        Sorry

        Because of its privacy settings,
        this video cannot be played here.

What is that? Anybody else seeing this?

<comment><USER46> I get that in Firefox, but if I open it in Safari everything plays just fine. You might just have to play the browser juggling game!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> It was a nice "time travel" for half an hour as I watched the clips. I checked what was it like when I was 8 years old, then when we moved to the big city, when I was in middle school, when I entered the college, and then graduated, when I moved to US, when I got married, and when I got my first child. I did not see these before only except the famous 1984 ad.

</comment><comment><USER48> Thank you very much for this.

</comment><comment><USER49> Tbh I don't understand what this is.

</comment><comment><USER31> Im very curious to know how they got access to _recent_ internal and unreleased material.

<comment><USER32> Even more interestingly - why this site with _this_ domain name and that much apple-related content still does exist?

[0] [https://techcrunch.com/2010/01/07/apple-domain- names/](https://techcrunch.com/2010/01/07/apple-domain-names/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I didn't see any Mac vs PC ads.

<comment><USER51> Several in 2006 at least [https://www.applearchive.org/2006](https://www.applearchive.org/2006)

<comment><USER52> They are always fun to watch :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I forgot Seybold was a thing.

</comment><comment><USER54> The design of this site is site is so good. I love the layout and how easy it is to discover content.

</comment><comment> starlig-ht Don't know why I expected granny smiths and red delicious stored in case of apocalypse.

</comment><comment><USER55> Aesthetics are pretty objective despite some people refusing to acknowledge beauty in favor of their own ugly idea.

I don't even like Apple and I can say people like stainless steel more than plastic.

That said, if you bought a product because of the color, I got bad news for you.

<comment><USER42> I wasn't even talking about the hardware, that's a separate story. Apple's old hardware also looks and feels wonderful.

<comment><USER56> It is the style and design of Apple hardware that helps people choose them more often. After all Apple targets the creative arts community.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: My CIO put our DB online, what should I do? - <AUTHOR> My CIO made a zip from our production DB and put it on our server on a public url (without password). He had a (bad) reason but it doesn't matter.
What should I do ? Warn his superior ? Shut my mouth and hope someone doesn't notice it ?
I feel like this is a terrible mistake that could cost my CIO his job (and maybe worse if the CNIL is warned or if someone steal the zip). <comment><USER2> report it. your neglegence of not doing so will cost you yours one day. that is, if he doesn't do it himself. proper would be for him to report it himself. if he's not professional about a mistake, then you might consider a career path in being the new janitor? don't feel guilty about this kind of things. people need to own their mistakes. next think you know someone hiding their mistakes will point to you , the responsible kind, to blame.

don't let your goodness for other bring you in a situation that leaves you helpless. seen happen many times some superior got found out of some derping and they shift the blame downward. even if the ppl below already knew of these things and perhaps helped them hide it out of the good of their heart or care for this person. since they were with that part of the problem, it was easy for them to point fingers downwards... and it's always easier to point a finger than man up at fear risk losing your own job so that option is what a lot of ppl take...

<comment><AUTHOR> Report it could degrade the good relationship I have with my CIO. Should I not confront him and convince him to remove the file ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please don't do the "explain it privately 1:1" thing. I know it sounds like a good idea, and I've done it so many times, but it's going to back fire and I've never seen it work. Really I've never seen it work.

Leak it to some outside source. The local media station, anyone with "security researcher" in their name on Twitter, whatever.

Please feel free to email me too. Check my profile. I can give you stories from previous situations I've been in.

</comment><comment><USER4> > worse if the CNIL is warned or if someone steal the zip

This is the reason why you should report it immediately. It is no longer about your relationship with the CIO. At this point the company itself is at risk and that takes priority.

Depending on whether you can tell for sure if anyone downloaded the ZIP the company might still be required to raise this with the CNIL.

<comment><USER5> lol this is such dumb advice and a sure way of getting fired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would say it depends on the context, is it a mistake, like a misclick or a script with a wrong URL, or is it a deliberate actions after your warned him ?

It is not quite clear either if the db is still there and it will stay there on purpose, or has it be removed ?

<comment><AUTHOR> The file is still available online and this is not a mistake like a misslick, this is a deliberate action. He refused to listen to me when I warned him.

<comment><USER7> Get that in writing. At some point there might be an investigation however small even if just internal, and any email is better than he-said-she-said scenario.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just explain to him privately that it's not a good idea and leave it at that.</comment>


What can actually be accomplished with Twitter? - <AUTHOR> http://messel.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/03/what-can-actually-be-accomplished-with-twitter.html

<comment><USER2> Driving traffic to your site. The power of social network based traffic is that you can reach people who wouldn't have searched for your keywords. Think 'publicity instead of 'retail. </IMHO></comment>


Why Hitler is not a dirty word in India - <AUTHOR> https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/why-hitler-is-not-a-dirty-word-in-india/articleshow/63955029.cms <comment><USER2> There might be another reason. Fighting Hitler essentially caused Great Britain to give up her empire. In a way, Hitler was a liberator to the Indians.</comment>


Laptops killing work life balance - 100-xyz https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/laptops-killed-work-life-balance/606334/ <comment> 100-xyz I believe smartphones may have done worse damage. Now I am on call any time all the time! Goodbye work life balance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hard agree. I can't even count the hour increase that has come from my clients having the ability to text 24/7/365 (well, I could go count my billable hours for the last 8 years, but I don't want to). The only upside is that clients seem more than willing to pay for the time, and at an increased rate for after hours communication. But having my vacation interrupted is almost not worth the revenue increase.</comment></comment>


Scary Rumors about the World Ending in 2012 Are Just Rumors - <AUTHOR> http://blog.usa.gov/post/37121041300/scary-rumors-about-the-world-ending-in-2012-are-just <comment><USER2> Translation: Responsible press delivers an oversize helping of facts to people who possess a marked dislike for facts.</comment>


Mdoc(7) – semantic markup language for formatting manual pages - <AUTHOR> http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man7/mdoc.7 <comment><USER2> mdoc is the language used for all BSD system manuals, which is certainly more consistent than writing man(7)/roff source.

At least mandoc(1) lets you convert cleaner mdoc(7) into other formats used by other systems, including man(7). But also pdf/ps/html and more recently, markdown.

[http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520)

Not directly related, but the semantic hints in mdoc(7) allows some really nifty features to be implemented, like semantic searching, w/ internal man(1) jump targets using less :t.

[http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150721180312&mo...](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150721180312&mode=expanded)

<comment><USER3> > more recently, markdown

I'd rather have a markdown-like notation for the source text itself. I imagine that if it were the norm for Unix-like systems to come with online documentation that were as trivially editable as a set of flat markdown files and also aimed for the benefits of brevity you get from short man pages and the depth of coverage of GNU info (without the pain of navigating due to the info viewer's Emacs-inspired keybindings), then most projects' docs would be far more complete and wouldn't find themselves wanting for contributors to write them. __*

I'm totally flummoxed, therefore, by statements that markdown is "abominable" and more poorly designed than DocbBook, whose "syntax encumbers the source code to the point of making it unreadable".

Vanilla markdown is obviously unsuitable as a source language for man pages (unless you're willing to throw out the semantics), but mdoc would do well to take a page from the markdown philosophy. I.e., standardize a set of defacto constructs that resemble the types of formatting that people are already embedding in plain text and—crucially—resembles something that you could conceivably find yourself reading in "raw" rather than "rendered" form.

The idea that mdoc (or any similar macro-based formatting system) is human- readable is something that sounds like a joke, except that I know they're not joking. It may not be roff, but that doesn't mean it isn't still junk.

 __* I see the proliferation of sites like StackOverflow and Read the Docs as indicators of how the officially anointed docs are coming up short. (There 's the ADHD, don't-want-to-RTFM, copy-and-paste brogrammer appeal behind those sites, too, but even accounting for that will show that there's something lacking about TFM.)

<comment><USER4> It's very easy to write some plaintext and iteratively add mdoc markup. Trying to do get it all right in one shot is probably a mistake. Most of the common macros, like .Fa for function argument, are mneumonic.

<comment><USER3> That's besides the point. No one is ever going to _read_ mdoc, because it's not meant for human consumption, outside of editing an mdoc file. This is not true for markdown, where the raw form is as fit for consumption as the rendered form.

<comment><USER4> I guess I don't see the problem. It's not meant for reading, so don't read it.

<comment><USER3> Man pages' source texts are not human readable.

If they were, that would bring good things.

This is the entire motivation behind my comment.

I don't know how I can be clearer here.

<comment><USER5> > If they were, that would bring good things.

Like what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure why this has come up on HN, I think I saw talk of markdown export support being added on the mailing list. Anyway people may want to check out the following presentation.

Slides - [https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2014-mandoc- slides....](https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2014-mandoc-slides.pdf)

Video 1 - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csA7-SUtUcw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csA7-SUtUcw)

Video 2 - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntf- dNahJQc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntf-dNahJQc)

</comment><comment><USER6> At least at first glance, it looks like roff?

I use POD to write man pages, which is a widely supported, reasonably lightweight markup that generates nice looking man pages. (Example: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/libguestfs/nbdkit/master/d...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/libguestfs/nbdkit/master/docs/nbdkit.pod) )

<comment><USER7> I think that it's less about YAML, and more about the capability to offer semantic annotation. See, for example, brynet's post ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13834037](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13834037)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Original? pages concerning the format, later reimplemented in standalone mandoc processor:

[http://modman.unixdev.net/index.php?sektion=7&page=mdoc&manp...](http://modman.unixdev.net/index.php?sektion=7&page=mdoc&manpath=4.4BSD- Lite2) [http://modman.unixdev.net/index.php?page=mdoc.samples&sektio...](http://modman.unixdev.net/index.php?page=mdoc.samples&sektion=7&manpath=4.4BSD- Lite2)

</comment><comment><USER9> I use pandoc ([http://pandoc.org/](http://pandoc.org/)) to be able to write in markdown, and output to man pages.

See e.g. [https://github.com/daurnimator/lua- http/blob/master/doc/Make...](https://github.com/daurnimator/lua- http/blob/master/doc/Makefile#L45) (and the 'doc' directory in general)

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks more complicated than actualy it is. For instance .Sh is section header. Easier to remember than it looks at first sight.

Also gives hints to text formatters that dump the doc to txt, console, ps, or html.</comment>


The Internet Split (the rise of advertorial content) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/10/21/the-internet-split/

<comment><USER2> This trend is not new, although it's certainly accelerating, which is natural given the current media landscape. The marriage of content and advertising gets around a lot of issues, such as ad blocking and banner blindness. Any time I hear proprietors complaining about ad blockers, I tell them they need to reconsider their content/business relationship.

It has worked for TV, movies, and respected magazines are also on the bandwagon. Monocle magazine, for example, seems to blur the line a lot, and you end up with entire supplements written in-house promoting a _country_ on the behalf of a tourism or business board. They're well produced and the angle is clear. Lots more about this model at [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/media/24carr.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/media/24carr.html?_r=0)

All that aside (and I think it's a step in the right direction anyway), PR flacks have been achieving similar ends for decades by bribing, coercing, or even entering fully fledged business relationships with journalists and publications. At the least, most modern attempts are reasonably transparent, rather than pretending to be something they aren't.</comment>


The Story Behind "Free Public WiFi" - It's Not - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_story_behind_free_public_wifi_-_its_not.php

<comment><USER4> So this is basically a self-propagating virus started by someone indeed offering Free Public WiFi, now kept alive by hopeful XP users clicking on the network?

That is so wild. It's like the ad-hoc wifi equivalent of a chain letter.

Edit: Thinking about it, it's even crazier... Because the bug only happens when there aren't any available networks, it springs up in situations when there are a lot of people looking for wireless, but there isn't any— on buses, conferences, etc. The exact sort of situations where people are most likely to try out "Free Public WiFi", so the virus is more likely to propagate.

Furthermore, the name is important. In order for it to become a widespread phenomenon, it has to be a name a lot of people will click on. But we can imagine that a lot of people have set up ad-hoc networks with different names that wound up being temporarily duplicated by the bug. Some of those with attractive names may have caused further duplication before finally disappearing. The more attractive the name, the more likely it is to be duplicated before being overwritten. In effect, the name "Free Public WiFi" has been _selected for_.

I'm calling it: This is the first (global?) distributed wireless network that _evolved on its own_. Unfortunately, evolution doesn't require that it actually be useful to people :P

<comment><USER5> > This is the first (global?) distributed wireless network that evolved on its > own.

Not really. It's emergent behavior in a complex system. You have a lot of entities (in this case, unpatched Windows XP SP2 and below systems), and a set of very simple local rules (if (winxp and no wifi) then create last adhoc network, if (human and see "free public wifi") then click link).

The fascinating behavior that emerges from the interplay of these local rules is the global "virus" if you will. It's a fascinating area of research, and even aside from the inflated egos of some physicists in the area, I'm glad I'm studying the field.

Read Duncan Watts' book "Six degrees" for a decent popsci introduction to the field (you might have to skip some self-aggrandizing of physics as the Savior of Intellectual Thought though).

Edit: cellular automata are a more recognizable CS example of this.

<comment><USER4> That's not contradicting me? Evolution is a special case of emergent behavior in a complex system.

The rules of the buggy system mean that any ad-hoc network can be replicated if a user connects to it. That creates selective pressure on the name of ad- hoc networks in that convincing more users to click on them causes further replication.

So we have a (somewhat) self-replicating entity, with variation, and a selective process applied to that variation. Sounds like evolution to me.

(Of course the names are originally made by people; but if we assume that ad- hoc networks aren't named with the intention of creating a self-replicating pattern, they're effectively random from the perspective of the ecosystem. The success of "Free Public WiFi" is a product of selection, not human design.)

<comment><USER6> Evolution requires mutation. If the name occasionally got garbled then it would be evolution.

<comment><USER7> Evolution requires survival of the fittest. If the name got more enticing over time then it would be evolution.

<comment><USER8> Technically evolution does not require survival of the fittest or mutation. Evolution is merely the change in allelic frequency in a population over time.

Without selective pressure (i.e., "survival of the fittest") you can still have evolution via drift, the founder effect, etc. Drift is a very important source of evolution in a lot of situations (during my PhD I studied how a source of seeming drift in the coding regions of genes was actually caused by selective pressure in some cases).

Without mutation a population can still evolve, too - for example, if a disease struck and there was no mutation, an allele that protected against the disease would quickly dominate the population. This is a much more pedantic thing to point out (on my part), though, since every stretch of every organism's DNA mutates. The different mutation rates of viruses, bacteria, and humans due to replication errors (and the resulting effect on evolution) is a pretty fascinating topic, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _When a computer running an older version of XP can't find any of its "favorite" wireless networks, it will automatically create an ad hoc network with the same name as the last one it connected to -- in this case, "Free Public WiFi." Other computers within range of that new ad hoc network can see it, luring other users to connect. [...] Computers with the XP bug that try to connect to the Internet will remember the name, create their own ad hoc networks and entice other users wherever they go._

If this was the case, wouldn't we see all manner of oddly named hotspots at airport locations, and wouldn't they also propagate as people try to connect to them?

I suspect this story may have been "simplified" to the point where the interesting details have been lost.

<comment><USER10> Nope - because people very rarely create ad-hoc networks these days - <USER2> infrastrucure-mode APs are everywhere - the only time people tend to select ad-hoc without realizing it tends to be he one called "Free Public Wifi" - <USER3> just happens to show up in airports and hotels and is passed around from machine to machine because of the name. Lots of people try it out (it never actually works) - but it's enough for the netowork name to keep propagating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Strange that they say it's only been around for 4 years. I seem to remember the first time this story came through Reddit was about 4 years ago, and the phenomenon it described had been going for several years at that point.

It's actually surprising to see it here now. I was expecting to see a [2007] tacked on to it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Another HN evergreen.

Project idea: automatically extract HN evergreens :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> I still want to believe that, somewhere out there, there actually is Free Public WiFi...

<comment><USER14> Addison, TX provided city-wide WiFi for residents for awhile, but I think they're phasing it out this month. Their reasoning was that 3G was ubiquitous, so there was really no reason to provide WiFi any longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Around for "about 4 years now"? I remember seeing it at a conference 7 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER16> This was mentioned on Paul Thurrott's site in March: <http://www.winsupersite.com/paul/mailbag/100321.asp#1>, and that linked to an explanation from 2007: <http://www.wlanbook.com/free-public-wifi-ssid/>. Definitely not a new phenomena or explanation.

</comment><comment> anon-e-moose This is not a "bug" or a virus.

XP simply remembers the last ad-hoc network you connected to, to be used when there are no actual APs around. As a blindingly obvious differentiation, ad- hoc networks have a different icon and say "computer-to-computer network".

Back when Windows XP was introduced, ad-hoc was extremely useful as lots of places didn't have wireless internet access. My friends and I often used it to swap files or play network games.

If anything I would call this an unintended phenomenon of people just clicking something and hoping it worked. The network does not spread because of Windows, it spreads because people select an ad-hoc network without knowing what is.

Why we as a society think its totally great to be completely ignorant and reckless with our computers, I'll never understand.

<comment><USER10> It's an emergent behaviour of a complex system involving people and machines. What's fascinating is how this non-functional string/ad-hoc netowork beacon, whatever oyu want ot call it, with this specific name, has spread globally to every corner of the world as far as we can tell. Hit any airport or hotel lobby in the world where there are laptops around, and odds are you won't have to wait long before you see "Free Public WiFi" pop up. That, in and of itself, is fascinating. It's been going on for a decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I always used to see this when I walked around the city with my iPod touch. I thought it was just people trying to be nice. Guess I'm naive.

<comment><USER18> _I thought it was just people trying to be nice._

Maybe some of them were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So who started the first one?</comment>


The Art of Speed in Startups - <AUTHOR> http://venturehacks.com/articles/speed

<comment><USER2> Interesting to compare this to Dick Costolo's Launch Late to Launch Often: [http://www.burningdoor.com/askthewizard/2007/03/launch_late_...](http://www.burningdoor.com/askthewizard/2007/03/launch_late_to_launch_often.html)

I love the art of speed slides. They definitely made me want to be more decisive.</comment>


Seminal Work Or Sloppy Thinking? - <AUTHOR> http://editor.blogspot.com/2009/09/seminal-work-or-sloppy-thinking.html <comment><USER2> Man, these journalists are so nice compared to the Internet trolls I'm used to. I barely feel goaded into responding. But...

\- Do _Time_ and _The Economist_ actually switch lengths? It's true I only looked at one week, but I found a clear trend of constant cost per weight of paper used, not just between those two but also for heavier mags like _Foreign Policy_.

\- Laura Bush makes more by (and only by) selling more copies, just like a popular fabric pattern.

\- What I meant about the "printout of yesterday's news" was not that events they covered happened the day before, but that it was literally a printout of stories that had appeared the day before on the _Times_ 's web site.

\- His last point seems a repetition of the one about Laura Bush, but with more uppercase.

<comment><USER3> I found the original article insightful, but this journalist's rebuttals also bring up interesting points.

\- "Does content affect price?" It seems the journalist and PG define "price" differently -- is it the price to the consumer or to the publisher? Either way affects profit, so both seem valid to me.

Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command higher royalties. So, the price to the _publisher_ is increased (via higher royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content. The journalist also states that while the price to the _consumer_ is not higher, the publishers' business model is to sell more copies at a lower profit margin per copy, which seems perfectly valid.

\- "Better journalism is slightly cheaper." In some cases, yes. In others, no. Arguing over _Time_ vs. _The Economist_ seems to not answer the broader question.

<comment><USER4> > Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command > higher royalties. So, the price to the publisher is increased (via higher > royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content.

Is it really true that different authors can have wildly different royalty rates? I thought the range only spanned a few percentage points.

Advances don't really count, since they are paid out of future royalties.

<comment><USER5> Of course it's true that authors make wildly different royalty rates. Does anyone here really believe Stephen King makes the same royalty rates per book as someone like Uwem Akpan?

It's simple market economics. Stephen King will sell far more copies which means publishers will make far more money off his books. So he gets a significantly higher cut of the per book profit (aka royalties) because publishers will still end up making more money off his book than they will of a Uwem Akpan book.

Put it this way, if Mr. King's publisher didn't pay him a higher royalty fee don't you think another publisher would be willing to based on the large amount of money at stake? So again we're back to basic economics.

<comment><USER4> Got a source for Stephen King's royalty rates being significantly above the standard rates for other authors? Everything I've found says royalties range from 10-15% for hardcover, like <http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_adv_royalties.htm>: "hardback royalties on the published price of trade books usually range from 10% to 12.5%, with 15% for more important authors"

You talk about simple market economics, but the publishing industry seems to be a cartel, and authors are on the whole largely shafted. The music industry is the same way...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not entirely sold on Graham's original point nor the author's rebuttal, but the piece has got a couple pretty big hypocrisies. For instance, both from the piece:

> Calling the NYT "a printout of yesterday's news" is snotty and snarky, to be > sure, but it's also inaccurate.

> Graham needs some elementary economics and business instruction.

Like, calling out a multimillionaire technological innovator/investor on being "snotty and snarky", then quipping (snottily and snarkily) that he needs "elementary economics and business instruction" - okay... pot, meet kettle, blackness.

<comment><USER7> _okay... pot, meet kettle, blackness._

That's irrelevant. Graham could still need economics and business instruction even if the writer here was being snarky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I skimmed more and read less of the original article as I went along, but from what I got, it just seems like he's trying too hard to make a clean, academic argument regarding the publishing industry. It's been around so long that it's full of exceptions, caveats, inefficiencies, and idiosyncrasies, not to mention the countless people wrapped up in it financially and psychologically, and this, I think, makes it too difficult to reason about as generally as he tries.

My biggest beef, though, comes when he claims that publishers don't sell content. Of course they do, and if they didn't, why did he even bring up the price difference between Time and The Economist (is one printed on shinier paper? Probably, but that's not why anyone buys The Economist). Some of the price is obviously determined by the medium, too (just as in music sales), and of course countless other factors, and there's no reason to try to narrow it down to just one. When the method of conveyance disappears, everything will shift around a bit and make everyone uncomfortable (like it's doing now), but eventually settle down not far from where it started. These systems aren't static sets of rules being followed blindly by their executives, they'll adapt to fit their market.

This whole thing seems weird. When did Paul get this faultily academic?

</comment><comment><USER9> Howard: Graham's insult is correct only if he thinks only generic facts and events are "news." That's a small fraction of what the New York Times presents every day.

Reality: All of the "analysis", opinion, reviews, and other content is also fairly easily replaced with free alternatives available online.

Howard: Famous, popular authors make LOTS more money than others. Laura Bush got $1.7; by some reports Sarah Palin got $7 million. Graham's contention is just plainly wrong.

Reality: Graham's contention was not that all authors make equal amounts of money, but rather that all books are priced the same, based upon form rather than content. Go to a bookstore. Similarly bound and printed books cost similarly regardless of differences in content.

Howard: The decision to price all movies or CDs about the same is a marketing decision that says absolutely nothing about the relative value of the content.

Reality: The market value of a product is its price.

<comment><USER10> _"Reality: All of the "analysis", opinion, reviews, and other content is also fairly easily replaced with free alternatives available online."_

That's not "reality", that's just your opinion.

I have a subscription to the New York Times, and I can tell you that I read more -- and more diversely -- when I get it in printed format. So, yes, there's a "free" alternative to getting it delivered to my doorstep, but I find enough value in having the paper version that I'm willing pay for it.

And in any case, the author's point was to dispute the notion that a copy of the New York Times is worthless after a day, not to suggest that you couldn't obtain the content online.

<comment><USER9> I was mocking the author's format--your immediate reaction would be better addressed to him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really appreciate how the article ends by saying that the author agrees with Paul's main conclusions, but that the author disagrees with the arguments being made. That's largely how I felt after reading Paul's essay too, but I couldn't have articulated it as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> 1\. Saying "actually cheaper" is not the point of the remark, it's just a secondary remark about the specific comparison case, the point is that populist and relatively crappy journalism has a comparable cost to to the consumer as high quality journalism.

2\. Everyone knows that big book deals are edge cases. Why is he arguing the outliers.

3\. He's answering the flowery anecdotal part of the essay as if it's a serious evidential point? I presume he doesn't ever use anecdotes in his writing? I hope not because all anecdotes by definition can be denied (i.e. what is truth? i.e. incompleteness theorem)

4\. He valiantly tries to defend his position to a commentator on his blog who points out that this is about cost to the consumer and eventual failure of a model that treats the content like print on a fabric. He's pointing out the very same thing that PG is pointing out, that this is their strategic plan, and that is doomed. This is the part where the author's retort to PG's piece really crashes and burns.

</comment><comment><USER13> They're both right, they're both wrong.

It hurts so much to see a sloppy reprisal too, which is why I must now attempt to make a sloppy one too.

In my mind this is the bit we need to be conscious of: Content has value, but the distribution method sets the price.

And that is why both slightly miss the point in my mind.

If we look at music (because it's a simple model with many distribution methods which helps create clear comparisons) we have this:

* A ring tone: £4.50 (ringtones-direct.com), midi file of 10 seconds.

* A CD album: £16.49 (HMV), average 10 tracks, £1.65 per track, full CD quality.

* A CD single: £1.99 (Tesco, if you can find singles), average 2 tracks, £1 per track, full CD quality.

* iTunes: £0.79 per track (lossy).

* MP3 .torrent: £0.00 per track (lossy).

* FLAC .torrent: £0.00 per track, full CD quality.

The content has value in all formats, but the highest price is associated to the format in which the distribution is most directly controlled (phones, ring tones, and the DRM scheme on some phones which force the use of a DRM signed audio file), amusingly it's also the lowest quality representation of the content.

As the control over the distribution fades the price plummets until we reach bittorrents and the people doing the distribution where the price is zero, although clearly value is still there as it wouldn't be downloaded otherwise.

What neither argument made was the distinction that the price is set by the format and distribution and not by the content. The content has value, that is undeniable, but value != price and that is what so many find hard to resolve.

The NYT is widely distributed and tends to have a lower price than the Economist, which is still widely distributed but less so and has a higher price. Specialist journals distributed as part of memberships to societys have a very high price.

When I look at price, it's not the # of words that determines the price, it's nearly always the format and distribution method. The more control that can be exerted by the content owners, the higher they are able to set the price.

Disclaimer: I always write these things feeling agog at what I've read... I have not researched things specifically and have not published any papers to back up these assertions. Take them with a pinch of meh.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad someone said this. I, like I'm sure a lot of people here, have a tremendous amount of respect for Paul Graham. So I really couldn't bring myself to write a formal critique of this piece. But it's just a complete mis- fire and this article (along with the one linked to in the update) go a long way to showing why.

Anyway, thoughts should be up for critique no matter how respected the person is who offers them so I'm glad someone jumped to the critique when others (myself included) didn't.

</comment><comment><USER14> If the New York Times is a "printout of yesterday's news", does that make The Economist a "printout of last week's news"?

<comment><USER15> No, at it's best it makes it an analysis of last weeks news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Both principals' original and rebutting words are at once smart and sloppy. This speaks to the complexity of discussing the economics of knowledge and taste.

For example, neither writer seems to have tackled the role of advertising revenue and other intangibles in assessing the value of content.

There are comparatively few ads in an edition of The Economist, which might explain why a subscription is so much greater than that of Time. And that should be factored into any newsstand-price-per-page analysis.

And some weekly trade publications, delivered by mail at no small cost, are monetarily free to the readers because subscribers pay with other currency -- information about themselves, their companies, and their spending plans.

I would also point out that the popularity of a fabric pattern or the life story of Sarah Palin are related more to taste and fad than to the value of any elusive wisdom, such as that derived from The New York Times or The Economist.

Mr. Graham is correct in noting a demarcation between conveyance and content, but as Mr. Weaver points out, it's not all that simple to proceed from there.

In any event, I've really enjoyed reading both sides of this, and I am impressed by the overall quality of the comments.

</comment><comment><USER17> ( The following three paragraphs should be read aloud in the voice of Foghorn Leghorn).

I'm no fancy big-city journalist, just a simple country kill-floor worker in a JBS Swift slaughter house. I've developed a tolerance for organic discord.

Yet I'm annoyed by the messy thinking that dribbles helplessly throughout this supposed rebuttal.

More than that, I'm irritated by the obvious purpose behind a loud 'rebuttal' of obviously poor quality that finishes by saying _I_ _agree_ _and_ _I_ _thought_ _it_ _first_.

It was written because the author felt compelled to write something that he and others could point to as a "rebuttal," a _response_. It doesn't matter if the rebuttal is good or bad, true or untrue (bad and untrue, as it happens); what matters is, now it's "been rebutted."

Let me grab my skinning knife. Unpronounceable Journalism Wunderkind, let's you and me sit down and talk:

Graham's contention is that there aren't magazines that routinely cost significantly more _per_ _page_ than the average for their format. If that is false, then you've rebutted him. It's not sufficient to note that the length of those magazines shows some variation.

Empirically, it seems that Graham's premise is sound. Magazines all seem to have similar price per page. The next place where you can rebut him is by answering the question: _Why?_ It's either because the content of all magazines is equally valuable, or because the content is irrelevant to the price of the magazine. Does the price vary, at least, with the format? Well, of course. Large, glossy magazines cost more per page. But not more than other large, glossy magazines.

Not rebutted - and no attempt was made.

Graham says that publishers get rich by selling lots of books, not by charging more for better or more popular books. You say, "nuh-uh, Sarah Palin made lots of money."

Uh. I'm not sure your training in journalism has equipped you to realize it, but that's not a rebuttal. That's not anything.

Not rebutted - no attempt was made.

'The NYT in paper is yesterday's news.' Why, how dare he! Well, I never! It's 'snotty and snarky.' Ah, and it's "inaccurate." Because -- and this, see, is where you give your reason and perform your debunking and unbunking and generally get the bunk out -- because you're _pretty_ _sure_ that there's stuff in there someone hasn't read yet. Never mind that the NYT itself published those stories online.

Yesterday.

Finally, the question. "Why has the price mostly depended on the format, not the content? Why didn't better content _cost_ more?" (Italics mine). You say, loudly, that better content is more _profitable_ \-- because of volume.

Then you have the nerve to conclude by saying that you had all of the ideas that Graham had, and you just have no respect for _his_ sloppy thinking and reasoning.

You didn't refute, or even address, a single point made in the essay. The "sloppy thinking and errors" were entirely your own. But now, you've "addressed" it. Back-pats all around, face has been saved, as long as we overlook the fact that your piece is drivel.

( Perhaps I'm wrong here. I often am. Certainly, you have domain knowledge that could have contributed greatly to this discussion; I'd read any substantive contributions with pleasure. )</comment>


Ask HN: Top SEO tips for keyword "Self Motivate" - <AUTHOR>

What are top SEO tips if you would like to rise quickly in a low competitive keyword? <comment><USER2> Blackhat, greyhat, or whitehat?

The tactics are very different if you're trying to do a quick "pump-n-dump" compared to building a long-term company reputation. (With "greyhat" I guess being "play a bit loose with the rules until you've gained enough exposure that it's time to lower the risk of penalty…)

As always, the "right" answer is "great content + inbound links". If you can create a process to scalably generate both those things, you'll be on a winner.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you spent your time reading the archive on kalzumeus.com?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Checking it out now, seems like a great site.</comment>


An Adversarial Review of "Adversarial Generation of Natural Language" - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/an-adversarial-review-of-adversarial-generation-of-natural-language-409ac3378bd7 <comment><USER2> It's worth noting this post caused a very intense twitter debate among the NLP and DL communities, especially after Yann Lecun replied to Yoav's comments. [https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10154498539442143](https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10154498539442143)

<comment><USER3> What are some twitter links? I'd be interested to see the kind of nuanced conversations that twitter can spawn. Also looking to follow some NLP people.

<comment><USER4> Twitter has a search box: [https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=An%20...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=An%20Adversarial%20Review%20of%20%E2%80%9CAdversarial%20Generation%20of%20Natural%20Language%E2%80%9D)

This newsletter looks interesting (mentioned on Twitter): [http://digest.deeplearningweekly.com/issues/deep-learning- we...](http://digest.deeplearningweekly.com/issues/deep-learning-weekly- issue-44-ai-understanding-google-mobilenet-machine-intelligence-summits- sobolev-trainings-for-nns-flag-planting-and-overselling-results-61446)

This seems like the only real discussion from the search: [https://twitter.com/kchonyc/status/873305485428088833](https://twitter.com/kchonyc/status/873305485428088833)

I guess search is broken, the author's twitter feed has a bunch more discussion ([https://twitter.com/yoavgo/with_replies](https://twitter.com/yoavgo/with_replies)):

[https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/872831207163265024](https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/872831207163265024) [https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/872968874521702400](https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/872968874521702400) [https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/872971766959718400](https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/872971766959718400) [https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/873489277157507072](https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/873489277157507072) [https://twitter.com/jacobandreas/status/873109327644573696](https://twitter.com/jacobandreas/status/873109327644573696) [https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/873175136056336386](https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/873175136056336386) [https://twitter.com/hugo_larochelle/status/87336968867543040...](https://twitter.com/hugo_larochelle/status/873369688675430400) [https://twitter.com/kchonyc/status/873306255204507648](https://twitter.com/kchonyc/status/873306255204507648) [https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/873786844315607040](https://twitter.com/yoavgo/status/873786844315607040) [https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/873565061754781697](https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/873565061754781697)

<comment><USER5> None of those tweets have the phrase you searched for, so why do you conclude that search is broken?

<comment><USER4> Several of the tweets link to the post, and the title shows up in Twitter's preview box (although not in the tweet proper). If Twitter search "worked" it should have found those, via some magic string munging or whatever.

My definition of "works" is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM), others are free to disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an instance of the general issue of conflict across, what I like to call, the salesperson-slacker spectrum.

Most researchers/academics lie somewhere on this spectrum. (Well I guess most human beings involved in any activity probably).

On the one end are salespeople who love to make a mountain out of a molehill they just discovered. On the other, slackers are like the perfectionists who never get anything done because they never resolved their analysis-paralysis.

There are very few who are exactly in the middle of the spectrum. The middle is a point of unstable equilibrium. You have to work very hard to stay there and can easily fall off to one side or the other.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't say perfectionism and sales-orientedness are on the same dimension. However, I have noticed that being given the hard-sell is more often than not associated with the product being sub par. A product or project that is doing very good work often doesn't have to sell quite as hard, because the work speaks for itself. (My experience on this issue mostly deals with internal teams. I don't know how much this applies to external teams.)

This is especially true when two products have teams of about equal size, experience, and expertise. Time spent selling is time not spent making a better product. All other things being equal, every hour spent selling is one less hour spent working on making your product better.

<comment><USER8> Thought experiment at the extremes: if you wait for your product to be literally perfect you will never sell anything.

And of course you can sell a product that doesn't even exist.

The dimension is confidence or maybe approval.

<comment><USER9> That's not a thought experiment, it's just a statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want to read more discussion on this topic (and this article), see the article "A computational linguistic farce in 3 acts" and its HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14532306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14532306)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not going to comment about that paper being published on arxiv and I don't generally care about the NLP vs DL debate, just wanted to say that those generated examples did look indeed all rubbish to me.

As do most of the Google Translate pieces, even though I get the feeling that automatic translation of texts is now seen almost as a solved problem (it's not): all that Google Translate does is change some text from some original language to a second one, which is not a real language, it's just a language that's sometimes very close (grammatically and lexical) to one which the agent/user knows.

The idea is that we should try to look harder and have fairer judgements about the actual results and not get stuck on the methodologies.

</comment><comment><USER12> > This post is also an ideological action w.r.t arxiv publishing

Anyone else thought that this was very weird? The author appears to be complaining about the fact that reputable people/labs can post a PDF on arXiv and be taken seriously. How is this avoidable? Without arXiv, they could just post the PDF on their website or anywhere else.

The "risk" associated to publishing crap on arXiv is the same as always: have people notice it's crap and get a bad reputation. I'm not sure what ideology has to do with it.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Indeed it's possible in theory to do flag planting without arxiv, for example by posting a timestamped technical report to an institutional repository, but it has never been a common thing. Probably because you don't get much of an audience, so people won't cite you unless you bug them in reviews. And if someone publishes the idea some months later in a paper, they will probably get credit as there's the reasonable assumption they just hadn't read your report.

On the other hand, arxiv has a huge audience, lately maybe even more than DL/NLP conferences, making the flag planting really effective, especially if you are from a prestigious group. So there is a real problem now with large, prestigious groups posting half-assed preliminary results in arxiv, and deterring more modest groups from working on the problem or bogging them down because they now need to compare themselves to the well-known arxiv approach, which often has serious reproducibility issues because it has not been peer- reviewed.

I'm not an arxiv hater, in fact I check arxiv every day and for the last year or so I have posted most of my papers in it. But the problem is real and something must be done. Not about arxiv which is just the messenger (and a good one), but about the flag-planting culture using it that has emerged in the field.

<comment><USER12> Thanks a lot for bothering to explain the problem. I have never seen this in my field (theoretical computer science), so I wasn't really aware of the problem. (More accurately: reviewers may ask why you do not compare yourself to arXiv preprints, often with indulgence if they are recent, but I have not seen this culture emerge of posting half-baked results to arXiv to claim priority.)

It appears that we agree that the problem is not with arXiv. Part of the problem is unsolvable: if prestigious groups can announce what they are working on and discourage other groups from working on the same problem, this may just be reasonable self-interest from the smaller groups and can hardly be avoided. As for reviewers asking for comparison to these works, I guess the problem lies with the reviewers: if an arXiv preprint has not been refereed and/or is hard to reproduce, it should be OK to say so in another paper and not be blamed for the lack of comparison.

In any case, this is an interesting problem, thanks again for making me aware of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For another point of comparison, has there been a "us vs. them" dynamic in the computer vision community when it comes to deep learning? After all, it seems like deep convolutional networks did sort of railroad there way through a ton of topics in that field. I used to do image analysis research, but moved on before much of this came into play so I lack any sort of inside scoop.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Communities will naturally recognize contributions and give credit when > credit is due. It's always happen that way.

"Let the market decide!"

<comment><USER15> The market needs signals, and the point of Goldberg was that those signals are missing with arxiv, and that just looking at the lab reputation was a poor signal. I am working on it, contact me for details.</comment></comment>